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The Dangers of Going Back to School After a Year of COVID-19 Lockdowns

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

Once upon a time in America, parents breathed a sigh of relief when their kids went back to school after a summer’s hiatus, content in the knowledge that for a good portion of the day their kids would be gainfully occupied, out of harm’s way and out of trouble.

Those were the good old days, before the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a whole new level of Nanny State authoritarianism to our daily lives, locking down communities, forcing kids out of the schoolroom and into virtual classrooms, leaving vast swaths of the work force dependent on government welfare, while pushing other segments into a work-from-home model, and generally subjecting us to an increasingly obnoxious level of intrusion by the government into our private lives.

Now, after almost 18 months away from a physical classroom, students are heading back to school.

Here’s what they can expect.

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:

• draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,
• overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,
• school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,
• standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,
• politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,
• and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

Young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.

Nowadays, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot water, in some cases getting them expelled from school or charged with a crime. MORE.

The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy

By Edward Snowden

By now you’ve probably heard that Apple plans to push a new and uniquely intrusive surveillance system out to many of the more than one billion iPhones it has sold, which all run the behemoth’s proprietary, take-it-or-leave-it software. This new offensive is tentatively slated to begin with the launch of iOS 15⁠—almost certainly in mid-September⁠—with the devices of its US user-base designated as the initial targets. We’re told that other countries will be spared, but not for long.

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned which problem it is that Apple is purporting to solve. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

Having read thousands upon thousands of remarks on this growing scandal, it has become clear to me that many understand it doesn’t matter, but few if any have been willing to actually say it. Speaking candidly, if that’s still allowed, that’s the way it always goes when someone of institutional significance launches a campaign to defend an indefensible intrusion into our private spaces. They make a mad dash to the supposed high ground, from which they speak in low, solemn tones about their moral mission before fervently invoking the dread spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse, warning that only a dubious amulet—or suspicious software update—can save us from the most threatening members of our species.

Suddenly, everybody with a principled objection is forced to preface their concern with apologetic throat-clearing and the establishment of bonafides: I lost a friend when the towers came down, however… As a parent, I understand this is a real problem, but…

As a parent, I’m here to tell you that sometimes it doesn’t matter why the man in the handsome suit is doing something. What matters are the consequences.

Apple’s new system, regardless of how anyone tries to justify it, will permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to them.

How?

The task Apple intends its new surveillance system to perform—preventing their cloud systems from being used to store digital contraband, in this case unlawful images uploaded by their customers—is traditionally performed by searching their systems. While it’s still problematic for anybody to search through a billion people’s private files, the fact that they can only see the files you gave them is a crucial limitation.

Now, however, that’s all set to change. Under the new design, your phone will now perform these searches on Apple’s behalf before your photos have even reached their iCloud servers, and—yada, yada, yada—if enough “forbidden content” is discovered, law-enforcement will be notified.

I intentionally wave away the technical and procedural details of Apple’s system here, some of which are quite clever, because they, like our man in the handsome suit, merely distract from the most pressing fact—the fact that, in just a few weeks, Apple plans to erase the boundary dividing which devices work for you, and which devices work for them.

Why is this so important? Once the precedent has been set that it is fit and proper for even a “pro-privacy” company like Apple to make products that betray their users and owners, Apple itself will lose all control over how that precedent is applied. ​​​​​​As soon as the public first came to learn of the “spyPhone” plan, experts began investigating its technical weaknesses, and the many ways it could be abused, primarily within the parameters of Apple’s design. Although these valiant vulnerability-research efforts have produced compelling evidence that the system is seriously flawed, they also seriously miss the point: Apple gets to decide whether or not their phones will monitor their owners’ infractions for the government, but it’s the government that gets to decide what constitutes an infraction… and how to handle it. MORE.

Shortages Are Making The United States Look More Like The USSR

Via The Federalist

A famous true story from the Cold War relays how Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin’s unscheduled visit to a Houston-area grocery store helped lead to the downfall of Communism.

Yeltsin happened to stop by the grocery store after a tour of the Johnson Space Center. Yet “it wasn’t all the screens, dials, and wonder at NASA that blew up his skirt, it was the unscheduled trip inside a nearby Randall’s” store, reported the Houston Chronicle’s Stefanie Asin in September 1989.

Yeltsin, then 58, ‘roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,’ wrote Asin. …’Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,’ he said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn’t believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him. Little did he know there countless stores just like it all over the country, some with even more things than the Randall’s he visited.

Two months later, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed, and the fall of Soviet Communism became a cascade. Later, in his autobiography, Yeltsin wrote that trip to an American grocery store was what ultimately destroyed his belief in communism.

—

I learned about the Communist grocery store phenomenon a couple of years ago, and it popped into my head recently as I took a round of shopping trips out here in the American heartland. In the United States, I am seeing things that remind me of those stories from the USSR: empty shelves, shorthanded staff, frazzled managers, shortages.

At one store, the manager checking me out kept apologizing profusely for the lack of staff, saying she couldn’t hire anyone. While checking me out, she took a call from a customer asking about items that were out of stock, telling the caller she didn’t know when they could get any in.

From people across the country, I’m hearing similar tales.

“The lady who helped load my couch into the back of my van was telling us she hired 39 people at once,” writes a colleague in a Western state on buying some new furniture. “Some of them showed up to orientation, and most of the ones who showed up to orientation never came back. They have signs like every 12 feet in the store saying they are hiring.”

“I spent 10 minutes in a CVS looking for someone to unlock the soap case before I gave up and left,” writes another person on the East Coast.

“I was at the hardware store last night, and they were completely out of a ton of basic plumbing fittings,” writes a correspondent in the South. “The restaurants are all short staffed. Nobody can get a well dug because they can’t find people to run the rigs. It’s a mess. In the rural areas around us, businesses are advertising job openings by calling them twice-a-month economic stimulus payments.”

Employers and other producers attribute the shortages to aftereffects of lockdowns, government subsidies paying people not to work, and now vaccine mandates causing working people to quit or be fired. CNN reports on shortages of new cars due to a lack of computer chips; coffee; jet fuel due to lockdowns and lack of tanker drivers; and school supplies.

Forbes notes that this is due to lockdowns and unemployment benefits FUBARing global supply chains: “The problem is all about shipping containers. They are stuck in the wrong places with empty containers sitting in ports where they can’t be filled and returned to ports where they can. This container shortage is causing a doubling or tripling in the cost to ship product.”

Hospitals everywhere are starving for employees. So are emergency services. High gas prices caused by the Biden administration’s anti-energy policies affect everything because everything must be transported. And this is going to continue well into 2022 at least, with prices likely to continue rising as a result.

“Making matters worse, the costs of shipping containers are drastically rising — three to 10 times higher than pre-COVID — due to demand. Small importers and retailers face limited availability as some larger retailers are pre-buying space on the containers in anticipation of the holidays,” reports Newsday. “…For retailers, the bad news is they have to buy more product so they don’t run out, but the ‘good news is they can charge more.’ ”

In other words, people and businesses need to keep stockpiling, and it’s helpful to know a guy who can hook you up with some supplies. Just like people did in the USSR.

Another eerie echo of the USSR is the attempts to enact vaccination blockades that will certainly not stop at being entrance papers linked only to a COVID-19 injection. The goal is for vaccine passports to become a comprehensive social credit system. That one’s acceptance of socially demanded behaviors can determine one’s access to employment or schooling is another dynamic endemic to communist countries like the USSR and today’s China.

We don’t want those social or economic systems here. Americans are discarding the lessons of communism’s atrocities at our peril. MORE.

Washington Jail Offers Free Ramen Noodles If Inmates Get “The Jab”

Via The News Tribune

Benton County jail staff have come up with an inexpensive, but effective, way to encourage inmates to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

Since the first of the month the jail has been giving away one of its most popular commissary items to inmates who sign up for their first COVID shot — ramen noodles.

By Monday, the jail will have given out 900 packets of noodle soup to 90 inmates, said Scott Souza, chief of corrections for the Benton County Corrections Department.

The jail currently houses about 360 inmates.

Corrections employees who came up with the program call it “Soups for Shots.”

It’s advertised to inmates around the jail with fliers featuring a larger-than-life photo of the seasoned, wavy noodles.

“To encourage and support COVID vaccination efforts, the Benton County Department of Corrections will be providing each inmate that starts their vaccination series with 10 FREE RAMEN NOODLE SOUPS!!!” say posters around the jail in Kennewick, Wash.

The jail has been offering COVID-19 vaccinations to inmates for some time, with the noodle incentive offered now for about three weeks.

“We’re doing everything we can do to incentivize vaccination and we are getting outstanding response,” Souza said.

MORE.

Americans At Mercy Of Taliban Just Glad We Don’t Have A President Who Posts Mean Tweets Anymore

Via The Babylon Bee

KABUL—American soldiers, civilians, and contractors still stranded in Afghanistan said Thursday that while they’re a little upset that they’re 100% at the mercy of the Taliban, they are at least happy that the president doesn’t tweet mean things anymore.

The thousands of Americans still stranded said they are taking consolation in the fact that we got rid of the guy who posted “covfefe” and called people “losers” and “haters” on Twitter.

“I’m just glad we have a real leader in the White House now, who doesn’t say mean things on Twitter,” said one man sheltering in a house in hopes that the Taliban doesn’t murder him. “It was really embarrassing for me living here abroad whenever Trump would make a typo on Twitter. But now, our president doesn’t post anything mean on Twitter. Or anything, really, since he probably doesn’t know what Twitter is. In fact, he doesn’t say anything because he barely ever gives press conferences and just turns his back on the press whenever they ask a question. So he doesn’t say anything mean.”

“Finally — America is back, baby!”

At publishing time, Americans currently under attack by terrorists in Kabul said they are just glad that our military leaders are focusing on critical race theory and gender equality as well.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on a world gone mad HERE.

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