Monday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

Served up piping hot just for you.

FBI: Narc On Your Loved Ones to Battle ‘Homegrown Violent Extremism’

Via PJ Media

FBI Goes Full Soviet. As I wrote in my Morning Briefing last Friday, the federal government has gotten even creepier ever since Joe Biden was installed as acting president. There’s a lust for federal control on the Left that’s grown immeasurably, especially since January 20, 2021. It had been getting out of hand all during the pandemic last year. We’ve witnessed the uncomfortable spectacle of almost half the country willingly ceding their freedoms and celebrating government control of their lives.

Somebody should tell them they live in the United States of America.

Kidding. It’s getting more difficult by the day to recognize our beloved country. For example, here is a little something from the FBI’s Twitter account:

Those graphics look like they were done in a Soviet propaganda shop in 1975.

I’ve repeatedly said that Donald Trump’s greatest failure as president was not purging the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s leftist loons. The organization tasked with domestic security is allowing its priorities to be established by a woke leftist narrative that completely ignores the real threats to the homeland.

Relevant: Enough With the ‘White Boy Domestic Terror Threat’ Fiction

The document that this tweet links to was written in 2019 and goes all-in on the leftist lie about the biggest threat to America being a handful of drunk whackos here at home. That lie is the cornerstone of an ambitious attempt to portray every white American who votes Republican as a ticking time bomb who is always on the verge of committing violence. Democrats can’t make a logical case for any of their insane policies so they continually resort to demonizing anyone who disagrees with them. It’s all they’ve got. MORE.

Capitol Police to use Army surveillance system on Americans to ‘identify emerging threat’

Via The Washington Times

U.S. Capitol Police will begin fielding military surveillance equipment as part of sweeping security upgrades as the force becomes “an intelligence-based protective agency” after the Jan. 6 attack.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently approved a Capitol Police request for eight Persistent Surveillance Systems Ground – Medium (PSSG-M) units. The system provides high-definition surveillance video and is enabled with night vision. The system does not include facial recognition capabilities, the Pentagon said.

“This technology will be integrated with existing USCP camera infrastructure, providing greater high definition surveillance capacity to meet steady-state mission requirements and help identify emerging threats,” the Pentagon said.

The technology allowed U.S. troops fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor large areas 24/7 through extremely high-resolution cameras.

Some privacy rights advocates have raised concern that Capitol Police are getting into the business of spying on Americans.

In a wartime application, the persistent surveillance units were mounted on tethered blimps. The data could be stored, combined with sensor data from other platforms, and later referenced or rewound to track individuals or groups.

The military could use the system to develop “pattern of life” analyses on suspected enemy combatants or intelligence targets in war zones. It could determine, for example, who was responsible for placing an improvised explosive device.

The Department of Homeland Security has leased the same or similar technology, described as Persistent Ground Surveillance System(s) (PGSS), through the Department of Defense, according to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report. It is not clear whether any other agency has fielded the exact technology domestically.

A federal appeals court ruled last month against the Baltimore Police Department’s use of persistent surveillance technology similar to the Pentagon’s Gorgon Stare, which incorporates wide-area motion imagery pods mounted on aircraft. The system allowed police to track hundreds of moving targets at once throughout a large geographical footprint. The court said the program was unconstitutional and violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. MORE.

CNN Medical Analyst Wen: Life ‘Needs to Be Hard’ for Unvaccinated Americans

Via Breitbart

CNN medical contributor Dr. Leana Wen said Friday that life needs to be “hard” for Americans who have not received a coronavirus vaccine with “twice weekly testings.”

Wen, the former Planned Parenthood president, said, “So now we have this delta variant that is much more contagious. Because it’s more contagious, it’s going to be even harder for us to reach herd immunity. We’re going to have to vaccinate an even higher proportion of people to get there. What happens, then, if we end up having another variant developing that’s even more contagious, that could cause more disease, that could evade the protection of our immune system?”

She added, “So how quickly we can get this under control and which way we go depends on what we do now to overcome disinformation. What we really need to do at this point is make vaccination the easy choice. It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated. Right now, it’s kind of the opposite. It’s fine. It’s easy if you’re unvaccinated. You can do anything you want to do anyway. At some point, these mandates by workplaces, by schools, I think it will be important to say, hey, if you want to opt-out, you have to sign these forms, get twice weekly testing. Basically, we want to make getting vaccinated the easy choice. That is what it’s going to take for us to actually end the pandemic.” MORE.

Time Magazine Calls For End Of Air Conditioning As We Know It

Via Time Magazine

AC Feels Great, But It’s Terrible for the Planet. Here’s How to Fix That

Comfort cooling began not as a survival strategy but as a business venture. It still carries all those symbolic meanings, though its currency now works globally, cleaving the world into civilized cooling and barbaric heat. Despite what we assume, as a means of weathering a heat wave, individual air-conditioning is terribly ineffective. It works only for those who can afford it. But even then, their use in urban areas only makes the surrounding micro-climate hotter, sometimes by a factor of 10ºF, actively threatening the lives of those who don’t have access to cooling. (The sociologist Eric Klinenberg has brilliantly studied how, in a 1995 Chicago heat wave, about twice as many people died than in a comparable heat wave forty years earlier due to the city’s neglect of certain neighborhoods and social infrastructure.) Ironically, research suggests that exposure to constant air-conditioning can prevent our bodies from acclimatizing to hot weather, so those who subject themselves to “thermal monotony” are, in the end, making themselves more vulnerable to heat-related illness.

And, of course, air-conditioning only works when you have the electricity to power it. During heatwaves, when air-conditioning is needed most, blackouts are frequent. On Sunday, with afternoon temperatures reaching 112ºF around Portland, the power grid failed for more than 6,300 residences under control by Portland General Electrics.

The troubled history of air-conditioning suggests not that we chuck it entirely but that we focus on public cooling, on public comfort, rather than individual cooling, on individual comfort. Ensuring that the most vulnerable among the planet’s human inhabitants can keep cool through better access to public cooling centers, shade-giving trees, safe green spaces, water infrastructure to cool, and smart design will not only enrich our cities overall, it will lower the temperature for everyone. It’s far more efficient this way.

To do so, we’ll have to re-orient ourselves to the meaning of air-conditioning. And to comfort. Privatized air-conditioning survived the ozone crisis, but its power to separate—by class, by race, by nation, by ability—has survived, too. Comfort for some comes at the expense of the life on this planet.

It’s time we become more comfortable with discomfort. Our survival may depend on it. MORE.

Sophomore Slump: ‘White Fragility’ Sequel Sells Just 3500 Copies in First Week

Via True Pundit

Robin DiAngelo, author of the 2018 smash hit White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, may soon relinquish her title as America’s preeminent “antiracist” influencer.

DiAngelo’s much anticipated second title, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, sold just 3,500 copies in its first week of publication and barely made the New York Times bestseller list during what one literary executive described as an “unusually slow” period for book sales. For the sake of comparison, disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic memoir, American Crisis, sold nearly 12,000 copies in its first week.

Published on June 29, Nice Racism debuted at number 13 (out of 15) on the Times list of hardcover nonfiction titles, behind older works such as Bill O’Reilly’s Killing The Mob and Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey’s memoir, Greenlights. By contrast, White Fragility spent well over a year on the Times bestseller list and surged to number one following the George Floyd protests in May 2020.

Most white liberals adored White Fragility, or at least publicly signaled their adoration for it. The book, however, was not universally celebrated as a vital antidote to the scourge of white supremacy. Columbia University professor John McWhorter, who is black, called it a work of “dehumanizing condescension.” MORE.

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