Every System Of Power Manufactures And Polices Its Own "Reality"...,

consentfactory  |  So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council, I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a “serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of “criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension” and cause “offline harm.”

Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read, whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the very least, you’ll be issued this warning:

Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content” watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.

Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).

First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.

What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially deemed me a “dangerous individual.” Instead, they punished anyone who tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.

Wokeness Is A Colorful, Gendered Figleaf For Disguising Naked Western Imperialism

strategic-culture  |  In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, contends that western élites are experiencing a collapse of authority deriving from a failure to distinguish between legitimate criticism and – what he terms – illegitimate rebellion. Once control over the justifying myth of America was lost, the mask was off. And the disparity between the myth and public experience of it became only too evident.

Writing in 2014, Gurri foresaw that the Establishment would respond by denouncing all evidence of public discontent, as lies and disinformation. The Establishment would, in Gurri’s telling, be so constrained within their ‘bubble’ that they would be unable to assimilate their loss of monopoly over their own confected ‘reality’. This Establishment denial would be made manifest, he argued, in a delusional, ham-fisted authoritarian manner. His predictions have been vindicated with Trumpist dissidence denounced as a threat to ‘our democracy’ – amidst a media and social platform crackdown. Such a response would only confirm the suspicions of the public, thus setting off a vicious circle of yet more “distrust and loss of legitimacy”, Gurri concluded.

This was Gurri’s main thrust. The book’s striking feature however, was how it seemed so completely to nail the coming Trump and Brexit era – and the ‘anti-system’ impulse behind them. In America, this impulse found Trump – not the other way around. The point here essentially being that America no longer saw Red and Blue as the two extended wings belonging to the bird of liberal democracy. For something around half of America, the ‘system’ was rigged towards a profiteering 0.1%, and against them.

The key point here surely is whether the élites’ Great Re-set – to reinvent themselves as leaders of the ‘re-vamped’ values of liberalism, overlayered by a newly up-dated, AI and robot-led, post-modernity – is destined to succeed, or not.

Continued ‘westification’ of the globe – the principal component to ‘old’ liberal globalism – though tarnished and largely discredited, remains mandatory, as made clear in the cogent reasoning recently advanced by Robert Kagan: Absent the justifying myth of ‘seeding democracy across the world’ around which to organise the empire, the moral logic of the entire enterprise begins to fall apart, Kagan argued (with surprising frankness). He thus asserts that the U.S. empire abroad is required – precisely in order to preserve the myth of ‘democracy’ at home. An America that retreats from global hegemony, he argues, would no longer possess the cohesive binding to preserve America as liberal democracy, at home either.

Gurri is ambivalent on the élite’s ability to stick fast. He both asserts that “the centre cannot hold”, but then adds that the periphery had “no clue what to do about it”. The public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities, and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust”, where outsiders can “neutralize, but not replace the centre” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern”.

There may indeed be some truth in this latter observation, yet what is happening today in the U.S. is but one ‘battle’ (albeit a key one) in a longer strategic war, reaching far back. The notion of a New World Order is nothing new. Imagined by globalists today, as before, it remains a teleological process of the ‘westification’ of the globe (western ‘universal values’), pursued under the rubric of (scientific) modernism.

The First Amendment Was From A Time When Speech Was Expensive And Rare...,

taibbi  |  When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”

“Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”

Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. 

Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”

If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

 

Internet Porn A MUCH BIGGER Cause Of Sex Addiction Than Evangelical Christianity Or Racism

nbcnews  |   While authorities said Atlanta-area spa shooting suspect Robert Aaron Long, 21, told investigators he was motivated by "sexual addiction" and claimed he had no racial motivation, health specialists say the explanation falls short.

Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesman for the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office, said Long — who is accused of killing eight people, six of them Asian women — indicated that the spas were "a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate." However, experts say such rationale has been used before in attempts to exonerate white men. The explanation also discounts racial dynamics and can “cause harm” in the way the public understands these issues.

White men have traditionally been given a pass when they say it — and have the privilege of overlooking how race is a factor, experts say.

“Historically, the term ‘sex addiction’ has been used by white males to absolve themselves from personal and legal responsibility for their behaviors,” Apryl Alexander, associate professor in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of Denver, told NBC Asian America. “It is often used as an excuse to pathologize misogyny.”

The defense of sex addiction itself, Alexander said, is a highly controversial one as those in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and sex research continue to debate whether to formally recognize it. Currently, the idea that sex addiction is a disorder is not supported by research, nor is it accepted as a clinical diagnosis, she said.

“A lot of individuals who are doing this kind of self-reports of sexual addiction are having normative sexual behaviors and urges, but they might be excessive. Or for a lot of people, it's rooted in shame that ‘I'm having these attractions and emotional desires that are normal, but I don't recognize them as normal,’” Alexander said.

Though the American Psychiatric Association added the concept of sexual addiction to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987, it later retracted the term and has since rejected the addition of the idea to its later editions including the DSM–5, which is widely seen as the definitive resource on mental disorders, on the basis of a lack of supporting evidence.

Alexander said this sexual behavior doesn’t affect the brain in the same ways other addictions, including substance use and gambling behavior, do, either, calling the characterization of Long’s behavior “concerning.”

The self-identification of sex addiction, she said, is often seen in individuals who are raised in conservative and religious environments, “where there's a high level of moral disapproval of their natural kind of sexual urges and desires.” Many of these populations are overwhelmingly white.

 

 

 

White Christian Nationalist Sexuality?

twitter |   I keep seeing "sex addiction" used as a term of agreed-on meaning, whether the speaker believes it explains the murders or not. But nearly all of what the conservative evangelicalism of the murderer describes as "sex addiction" is what the rest of the world calls sexuality...

In my book THE FAMILY I wrote about how fundamentalist ideas about sex have changed in the last decades, & in many ways gotten even more dangerous. The murderer's "sex addiction" may well refer to sexuality twisted by a hateful theology...

American fundamentalism has mostly moved beyond the "puritan" mores caricatured in 80s movies like Footloose. Before, it tried not to talk about sex. Now, it talks about sex--a lot. Sex manuals are fundamentalist best sellers. Pastors preach about it...

Today's fundamentalists claim to promote "healthy" sex. Part of that is pathologizing not just queer sex but hetero sexuality that isn't married & monogamous; hence "sex addiction." Many, many churches see resisting such "addiction" as a form of "spiritual warfare" ...

That idea of "spiritual warfare" has LOTS of implicit & often explicit racist currents. Non-Christians--and many white evangelicals see non-white people, especially Asians, as non-Christian unless otherwise informed--are seen as loci of "demonic" activity, endangering Christians.

Some megachurches and parachurch ministries practice "spiritual mapping" as part of "warfare"--marching through a city to "fight" "demonic activity" at strip clubs, porn shops, &, yes, massage parlors.

It's worth noting that many or most fundamentalists view what they think of as Asian religions as "demonic strongholds." When I visited The Family's C St house for congressman they had planned a day of prayer against the "demonic stronghold" of Buddhism.

So take "spiritual warfare," add a history of missionary orientalism (per Edward Said) steeped in US wars, & then update with contemporary fundamentalism's obsession with "healthy" sex vs. "sexual addiction." It's a recipe for this kind of racist, misogynist violence.

Contemporary fundamentalism's obsession w/ sex isn't in addition to its implicit & sometimes explicit racism; it IS its racism. Its ideal is "purity"--historically rooted in anti-Blackness, fear of "miscegenation," the "temptation" of the theological (racial) "other."

Defenders of fundamentalism will note that it's anything but all-white, & that many white fundamentalists & evangelical families adopt non-white children. But the "purity" narratives aren't about exclusive whiteness; they're about the supremacy of Christian "whiteness."

The sexuality of Christian nationalism is particularly concerned w/ the "purity" of its capitalist economic worldview; hence its obsession w/ rooting out commodified sexuality, "the idea that anything can be bought and sold." It's a contradiction, I know.

Christian nationalist sexuality both fetishizes sex & wants to "purify" it. Fundamentalist sex manuals say sex shld be frequent & fun--hetero married--& imply if its' not there's something wrong w/ you. But if all that "fun" sex leads you to see the world erotically--it's demons!

Remember, too, that Christian nationalism, in the pulpit & in Congress, has dedicated itself to the idea that there literally is no safe sex outside of hetero marriage. Disease, "contagion," physical & spiritual, is always a threat. Resisting it is "Every Man's Battle."

"Every Man's Battle" is the title of a series of megaselling evangelical sex guides. The battle is--I kid you not--against masturbation. What they mean is temptation, as embodied by shameless women. Who's most shameless? Godless women, especially those racially coded as such.

"You're sexually pure," declares Every Man's Battle, "when sexual gratification comes only from your wife." It advises men to "bounce" their eyes away from any woman or media they see as attractive--& to recognize (read: hate) that which they believe is designed to attract them.

Of course, such an approach doesn't de-eroticize the world; it profoundly sexualizes it, making every time you step out the door or sit down & yr computer a "spiritual war" adventure in which men imagine themselves heroes for looking away. The world becomes a fetish.

Did the Atlanta murderer read those bestselling books? We don't know. But he invoked "sexual addiction" in the context of a Christian nationalism that has made explicitly misogynist & implicitly racist purity narratives...

...and the murderer acted w/in an American fundamentalist tradition that has long seen Asia--& Asian bodies--as a site of "spiritual warfare" (alongside actual US wars). This doesn't make every fundamentalist a murderer! But purity narratives are always, in the end, murderous.

America's Sexualized Racism?

nbcnews  |  The only time I was ever in Atlanta, where six Asian women were shot dead on Tuesday, a young white man shouted "Me so horny" to me at the airport. And as the only Asian woman in the space, I knew he was talking to me. I locked eyes with him for a second and then rushed off to catch my flight back to Los Angeles. I was in Atlanta to attend the annual meeting of the Association of Asian American Studies, presenting a paper there for the first time. It was a big deal for me professionally. But what I remember most about that trip were a white man's racist, sexist words.

Tuesday's killings occurred at three spas in the Atlanta area. Two other victims, a white man and a white woman, were also killed. Investigators said the white male suspect told them that he has a "sex addiction" and targeted the spas to "take out that temptation."

"He was fed up, at the end of his rope," Cherokee County sheriff's Capt. Jay Baker said. "He had a bad day, and this is what he did."

Based on the reported statement, investigators have so far concluded that the attacks did not appear to have been motivated by race. As an Asian American woman who has endured sexualized racism all of my life, such ignorance enrages me.

Asian women, along with Black and Indigenous women and other women of color, endure racism and sexism in intersectional ways constantly, and they have throughout history. As lawyer Jaemin Kim argued in 2009, prosecutors and police may be even less likely to add "hate crime" charges in cases of rapes and sexual assaults targeting Asian women.

In 1875, Chinese women were targeted by a federal immigration law called the Page Act. This law effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States based on a morals clause that considered all of them prostitutes at the time. There were apparently specific racist and sexist concerns that Chinese "prostitutes" would bring in "especially virulent strains of venereal diseases ... and entice young white boys to a life of sin." Sound familiar?

 

American Public School Districts Are Simply Economic Pinatas. Period.

jonathanturley |  We previously discussed the controversial position of Alison Collins, Vice President of the San Francisco school board, in her campaign against meritocracy and effort to shut down the gifted programs at Lowell High School.  The Asian community was particularly opposed to Collins’ efforts since Asian students composed 29 percent of the students but 51 percent of the Lowell student body. Now Collins is under fire for prior tweets attacking Asians as promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS” and of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”

These do not appear recent tweets but their content is obviously insulting for any Asian American. The Yahoo News story included such tweets as accusing “many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps” — teachers, students, and parents — of promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS” and of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” It also include a demand to know “[w]here are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump?” and statements on how Asians are deluding themselves by not speaking out against former president Donald Trump: “Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?” Collins continued. “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You’re still considered “the help.”

While the use of the censored version of the “n word” has led to calls to terminate academics, I do not believe that such objections are fair in this or the prior cases. Indeed, this controversy should not take away from the campaign against meritocracy and the effort to eliminate programs for advanced or gifted students in the public school system. As I have previously discussed, I long been a supporter of public schools.  These advanced programs are needed to maintain broad, diverse, and vibrant school systems for cities like San Francisco.

Race politics seems a focus on every level in the school system, even in the regulation of student elections. Likewise, the controversy in San Francisco follows another controversy in Los Angeles where United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Cecily Myart-Cruz has also criticized “Middle Eastern” parents in joining “white parents” in seeking school re-openings.  The UTLA was criticized after Maryam Qudrat, a mother of Middle Eastern descent, was asked by the UTLA to identify her race after criticizing the union’s opposition to reopening schools despite overwhelming science that it is safe. This effort to racially classify critics of the teachers followed Myart-Cruz attacking critics by referring to their race

What Has Marian Croak Changed At Google Or Ursula Burns At Xerox?

WEF  |  Global companies are increasingly taking up their role as responsible trustees of society and investing in actions for racial and ethnic equity in the workplace – not as an option but as a business imperative.

The World Economic Forum has convened a coalition of global corporations and their C-suite leaders committed to building equitable and just workplaces for professionals with underrepresented racial and ethnic identities.

Partnering for Racial Justice in Business as a global initiative, launched today Monday 25 January, during The Davos Agenda 2021, is focused on eradicating all strands of racism in the workplace against professionals with underrepresented racial and ethnic identities.

Professionals of colour and minority ethnic backgrounds continue to face racial injustice and inequity in the workplace, and they have been severely underrepresented in leadership. There have only been 15 Black CEOs over the course of the 62 years of the Fortune 500’s existence, and currently only 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Black. Below the top level, Black employees form approximately only 4.7% of executive team members in the Fortune 100 and 6.7% of the 16.2 million managerial level jobs.

To drive systemic and sustainable change towards racial justice, this initiative has been designed to operationalize and coordinate commitments to eradicate racism in the workplace and set new global standards for racial equity in business. It also provides a platform for businesses to collectively advocate for inclusive policy change.

The Forum unveiled the Partnering for Racial Justice in Business initiative with 56 founding partner organizations representing 13 industries, with more than 6.5 million employees worldwide.

 

 

 

 

 

Soldiers Understand "Our" Political Elites And Their Masters Aren't Good Stewards Of Society

military  |  Those conducting the sessions wanted "to make sure that military members understand the difference between Seattle and [the Jan. 6 riot in] Washington, D.C.," Colón-López said. "But some of our younger members are confused about this, so that's what we need to go ahead and talk to them about and educate them on, to make sure that they know exactly what they can and cannot do."

Colón-López also noted the military was called to respond after the Capitol attacks, but was not called up to support law enforcement during the Seattle protests.

And he drew a distinction between those who lawfully exercised their First Amendment rights to protest during last summer's protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, and those who "latched on" to the protests to loot, destroy property and commit other crimes.

But sometimes, he said, younger troops see messages on TV that blur the lines between the two, and "we needed to educate them" on the difference.

"No, that's not what that meant," Colón-López said. "There were people advocating [against] social injustice, racial injustice and everything else, and it is the right of citizens."

When asked about networks or television personalities popular among service members who have drawn those equivalencies, Colón-López said, "Those are very, very tough conversations to have with people, because sometimes they're emotional about the subject."

While those TV personalities are exercising the right to free speech troops have fought for, he said, "make sure that you're well-educated and don't be an automatic mouthpiece for something unless you understand the issue."

Colón-López acknowledged that the "information overload" troops today face -- not just traditional media and memos from service leaders, but also a panoply of social media amplifying different messages -- can leave troops feeling confused and uncertain where to go to get reliable information.

"What I am committed to is to make sure that our people understand right from wrong," he said. "That our people ... are well-educated to be able to carry on, in an honorable fashion. And if they hear somebody saying the wrong things, that they're quick to go ahead and correct them ... without being confrontational."

Colón-López stressed the refrain commonly heard from top military leaders that the vast majority of troops do not share extremist views.

And the military isn't interested in monitoring troops' online activities at home, he said. A service member who Googles QAnon, for example, may just want to become educated on the online conspiracy theory movement, he explained. That wouldn't mean someone necessarily believes in that ideology.

But, he noted, the military needs to be watchful of how service members carry themselves while on duty, and what troops' friends say they are doing.

Vindictive "Morality" Is The Unenforceable Quintessence Of Woke-ism

theapeiron  |  Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Robert Aaron Long was trying to purge himself of his sex addiction by murdering women at spas and massage parlors. According to police, these spas were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Apparently, it never occurred to Long to see a therapist, or pick up a self-help book. Nope, his first thought was to go out and buy a handgun, and then go on a shooting spree. That’s what our dominant culture still teaches men, to solve their problems by punishing women. Long is just an extreme example of the violence we witness every day.

Maybe you don’t see much in common between a deadbeat dad and a mass shooter. I assure you, they have everything in common. They both practice vindictive morality. It’s a problem, especially for women — or anyone who can be turned into a scapegoat.

I’ll explain.

Genuine morality involves a deep, sincere sense of personal responsibility for your own actions. You follow the core western monotheistic principle of judging yourself before judging everyone else. You hold yourself to a higher standard. You focus on staying consistent with your own beliefs. You practice self-awareness and reflection, and you always try to understand how your actions affect those around you.

Sounds great, right?

In other words, you try to mind your own business. You don’t concern yourself with what other people might be doing, unless it presents an immediate threat to you or someone you care about.

Vindictive morality goes against all of that. You see it a lot in the Westboro Baptist types. They assume they’re inherently right, and morally superior to everyone else. They’re pure.

The only way they could possibly do something wrong is if an outside influence corrupts their immortal soul. Of course, this is always happening in their mind. They’re in an endless war against sin.

Vindictive morality is a way of not taking responsibility for your own actions. It’s a way of attributing any bad thoughts you might have to some external source, thus maintaining the illusion that you’re truly an innocent little kid at heart, incapable of malice. If they wind up hurting someone, then it’s always someone else’s fault.

It’s one of the oldest stories in the book. And that book is the bible.

Not Even The FBI Director Can Play Along With The Atlanta Anti-Asian Racism Trope...,

npr  |  So obviously, it's a heartbreaking incident, and it hits particularly close to home for me since I consider Atlanta home. And so I certainly grieve for the victims and their families. The FBI is supporting state and local law enforcement, specifically APD, the Atlanta Police Department, and the [Cherokee County] Sheriff's Office. So we're actively involved but in a support role.

And while the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated. But I really would defer to the state and local investigation on that for now.

I elevated racially motivated violent extremism to our top threat priority level about a year and a half ago or so. And I've been trying to call out this threat for a number of years now since I've been in this job.

We have doubled the number of domestic violent extremist investigations we've had since where they were when I started as director, and we were up to about 2,000. And that was before the Jan. 6 siege. So I expect the numbers to be even higher this year. And arrests likewise went up dramatically from 2019 to '20.

And so at the same time, the international terrorism threat — especially international terrorist organizations that inspire homegrown violent extremists here in the U.S. — hasn't gone away by any stretch of the imagination. So we clearly are making do right now with what we have. But we need and will need more resources to tackle that problem.

The sprawling investigation into Jan. 6

You know, I was appalled that something like that could happen in this country and determined to make sure that it doesn't happen ever again. ...

We intend to see this to its conclusion, no matter how many people it takes us to devote to it, no matter how long it takes us to do it, we're going to see it to the end. ... If we have the evidence to charge somebody and they committed a crime on that day, I expect them to be charged. ...

We've arrested people all over the country. I think we have ... open investigations specifically related to the Jan. 6 siege in all but one of our 56 field offices, which gives you a sense of the national sprawl of the investigation. And in some of those instances, there have already been conspiracy charges — small, I would call them — sort of small cells of individuals working together, coordinating their travel, etc. I don't think we've seen some national conspiracy, but we're going to keep digging.

 

Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock's Ex-Wife Paid To Keep Quiet By The American Baptist Home Mission?

dailymail | 'I'm going to stay focused': Georgia Dem Senate candidate Raphael Warnock dodges questions about police bodycam showing ex-wife accuse him of running over her foot with his car

• Rev. Raphael Warnock, 51, declined to address police video of domestic dispute
• Warnock and his ex-wife Ouleye Ndoye, 35, divorced in May
• In March she called police to their Atlanta home after an incident in the drive
• She accused him of deliberately driving over her foot during an argument
• Warnock said he did not believe he ran over her and medics found no injuries 
• No charges were filed following the incident 
• Ndoye told officers that he was 'a very good actor' and obsessed with reputation
• She said she had 'tried to keep the way that he acts under wraps' for the election

ouleye |  Ouleye Ndoye is a global leader in human rights with over a decade of experience in government, non-profits, and academia. She advocates for the health, education, gender equality, and religious freedoms of people around the world and has dedicated her academic pursuits to these issues. Ndoye earned her bachelor's degree in international studies from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude with honors; master of science in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, UK; and master of arts in History with a concentration on African and Global history from Columbia University in the City of New York. Ndoye currently serves as the National Coordinator for Scholarships and Emerging Leaders at the American Baptist Home Mission Societies. 

- The Baptists Paid this woman to keep quiet about Warnock after the Dailymail Domestic Violence story broke in December - It is an OH TOO SWEET Irony That She is a specialist in Human Trafficking in light of the human trafficking massage parlor murders last week.

pathwaystofreedom |  Spelman College graduate Ouleye Ndoinye Warnock brings a wealth of local knowledge to her new role as Atlanta’s human trafficking senior fellow. With more than a decade of experience working to address human trafficking and other human rights-related issues around the world, Ouleye is well-positioned to lead efforts to tackle labor and sex trafficking in a city with a rich history of civil rights leadership.

 

Getting Close To The Secrets Of Superconductivity

quantamagazine  |  For the last three years, electrons have been toying with physicists.

The game started in 2018 when the lab of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero announced the find of the decade: When the researchers stacked one flat sheet of carbon atoms on top of another, applied a “magic” 1.1-degree twist between them, then cooled the atomic wafers to nearly absolute zero, the sample became a perfect conduit of electrons.

How were the particles conspiring to slip flawlessly through the graphene sheets? The kaleidoscopic “moiré” pattern created by the skew angle seemed significant, but no one knew for sure. To find out, researchers started twisting and stacking every material they could get their hands on.

At first, the electrons played along. Experiment after experiment found that, in an array of flat materials, frigid temperatures brought plummeting electric resistance. A more profound understanding of the conditions necessary for ideal conduction felt close, and with it, a tantalizing step toward an electronics revolution.

“It seemed like superconductivity was everywhere,” said Matthew Yankowitz, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Washington, “no matter what system you looked at.”

But the electrons proved coy. As researchers inspected their samples more carefully, the instances of superconductivity vanished. In some materials, resistance wasn’t actually getting down to zero. In others, different tests offered conflicting results. Only in the original double-layered graphene did electrons regularly achieve a frictionless flow.

“We had this zoo of different twisted materials, and twisted bilayer graphene was the only one that was clearly a superconductor,” Yankowitz said.

Then in the past month, two papers published in the journals Nature and Science described a second related superconductor, a three-layer graphene sandwich with the “bread” sheets aligned and the filling sheet skewed by 1.56 degrees. The unmistakable electron-carrying prowess of twisted trilayer graphene confirms that the two-wafer system was not a fluke. “It was the first of a family of moiré superconductors,” said Jarillo-Herrero, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also led one of the new experiments, “and this one is the second member of the family.”

Importantly, this second sibling has helped to illuminate an underlying mechanism that could be what powers the superconductivity of these materials.

In the months after the 2018 discovery, one group of theorists began to puzzle over the mechanism that made bilayer graphene superconduct. They suspected that one particular geometric trait might allow electrons to swirl into exotic maelstroms that behave in an entirely novel manner. This mechanism, which is unlike any of the (few) known schemes responsible for superconductivity, would explain the superconductive success of bilayer graphene, as well as the failure of other materials. It also predicted that graphene’s trilayer sibling would superconduct as well.

 

The SMART Healthcards Framework

unlimitedhangout |  The SMART Health Cards framework was developed by a team led by the chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare, Josh Mandel, who was previously the Health IT Ecosystem lead for Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. Verily is currently heavily involved in COVID-19 testing throughout the United States, particularly in California, and links test recipients’ results to their Google accounts. Their other COVID-19 initiatives have been criticized due to still-unresolved privacy concerns, something that has also plagued several of Verily’s other efforts pre-COVID-19, including those involving Mandel.

Of particular concern is that Verily, and by extension Google, created Project Baseline, which has been collecting “actionable genetic information” with a focus on “population health” from participants since 2017. Yet, during the COVID-19 process, Project Baseline has become an important component of Verily’s COVID-19 testing efforts, raising the unsettling possibility that Verily has been obtaining Americans’ DNA data through its COVID-19 testing activities. While Verily has not addressed this possibility directly, it is worth noting that Google has been heavily involved in amassing genomic data for several years. For instance, in 2013, Google Genomics was founded with the goal of storing and analyzing DNA data on Google Cloud servers. Now known as Cloud Life Sciences, the Google subsidiary has since developed AI algorithms that can “build your genome sequence” and “identify all the mutations that an individual inherits from their parents.”

Google also has close ties with the best-known DNA testing companies in the United States, such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry, recently purchased by private-equity behemoth Blackstone, shares data with a secretive Google subsidiary that uses genomic data to develop lifespan-extending therapies. In addition, the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Wojcicki is also the sister of the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.

Google and the majority of VCI’s backers—Microsoft, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic, the Mayo Clinic, and MITRE Corporation, Change Healthcare—are also prominent members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition. Other members of that coalition include the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA-linked data-mining firm Palantir, as well as a myriad of health-care and health-record companies. The coalition fits well with the ambitions of Google and like-minded companies that have sought to gain access to troves of American health data under the guise of combatting COVID-19.

The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition describes itself as a public-private partnership that has enabled “the critical infrastructure to enable collaboration and shared analytics” on COVID-19 through the sharing of health-care and COVID-19 data among members. That this coalition and VCI are intimately involved with MITRE Corporation is significant, given that MITRE is a well-known, yet secretive, contractor for the US government, specifically the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which has developed Orwellian surveillance and biometric technologies, including several now focused on COVID-19.

Just three days before the public announcement of VCI’s establishment, Microsoft Healthcare and Google’s Verily announced a partnership along with MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute to share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records. Google, through its partnership with the Pentagon, which was announced last September, has moved to utilize the analysis of such data in order to “predictively diagnose” diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. US military contractors, such as Advanced Technology International, have been developing wearables that would apply that AI-driven predictive diagnosis technology to COVID-19 diagnoses.

The Vaccine Credential Initiative

Forbes  |  At a concert you usually come with your ticket, either electronic or physical, and stand ready to have it scanned. Now imagine going to that same show and, while someone is scanning your ticket, they also ask for your vaccine ID. So you pull it up on your phone and let them scan it, too, allowing the venue to verify you’re up to date on your Covid-19 vaccine. It’s only then that you are allowed to see the show.

This isn’t a far-fetched scenario. A group of businesses from the healthcare sector are banding together to create digital vaccine ID cards that verify Covid-19 vaccination status. In the future these cards, which can be stored on smartphones and other digital devices, may be required to gain entry into restaurants, bars, schools and airplanes. It’s a step that might be necessary in order to reopen the economy as quickly as possible. 

“Hopefully, we can quickly bring people who are vaccinated back into the workplace,” says Joan Harvey, president of care solutions at Evernorth. Evernorth is one of the groups working to develop these ID cards, along with Mitre, Cerner, Epic, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, The Commons Project and other major companies. Together they’re forming the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which plans to create an accessible, secure way to prove Covid-19 vaccination status. These SMART health cards will be an encrypted vaccine record that can be stored in any digital wallet. For those that don’t have smartphones, says Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at Mitre, the vaccine records can “easily be stored on a paper QR code.” 

Though some of the companies that have joined the coalition have never worked together before, representatives say that they’ve been united by a desire to end the pandemic as soon as possible. For example, Cerner and Epic, two of the largest competing electronic medical records companies in the country, have both joined the coalition and are working together to create an ID card that will easily integrate with both of the company’s platforms.  “A pandemic has an incredible catalytic power to bring together nontraditional partners,” Anderson says, “partners that might otherwise be competitors.” And while the coalition is made up of companies from the private sector, they’re also working closely with the government, he adds.

Vaccine ID cards aren’t a new idea. Several countries already require proof of vaccination against diseases like yellow fever before travelers are allowed to enter. Even right now, healthcare workers who have gotten the Covid-19 vaccine have a white piece of paper that lists the date of vaccination. But vaccine ID cards like this “would be on a completely different scale,” says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician. It could be the first time that proof of vaccination is required to do things that were previously mundane, like eat at a restaurant or go to work. Of course, Kuppalli says, “I think there are a lot of ethical issues that we have to think about before we go down this path.” 

R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, agrees that there are several ethical hurdles that could arise. While public and private entities could make proof of vaccination a condition of entry, she says, there will always be exceptions. “Private employers could make vaccination a general requirement for employees in at-will states,” she says, “but there would have to be exceptions for employees who are medically contraindicated, those who are disabled and unable to take the vaccine, and possibly for those with a religious objection.”

Variants Require Restrictions And Vaccinations And More Restrictions Mein Führer!!!

WaPo |  If you live in the northeastern part of our country, you don’t put your winter jackets into storage at the first sign of spring because you know a cold snap is likely lurking around the corner. The same must be true of the pandemic.

No matter where you live, it is too early to relax restrictions that continue to have a critical role in controlling this pandemic. From California to Maine, Florida to Seattle, the covid-19 winter is not yet done, and highly infectious variants are threatening new storms.

Vaccination numbers are climbing steadily, and coronavirus cases have been declining. The end of the pandemic is in sight. But the latest national data, which show case rates have plateaued, indicate that we are not there yet. Over the past week, we have seen about 50,000 new cases reported daily. That’s not far from the height of the surge last summer.

National data also miss disturbing state and local trends: About 15 states have more cases than they did two weeks ago, and about 19 states have higher test positivity rates than two weeks ago, indicating higher rates of infection. Hospitalizations, which typically lag infections by two to three weeks, have begun to inch up in some places. Deaths from covid-19, which typically lag another two weeks behind hospitalizations, may rise again in April — all while states begin to loosen restrictions. That’s a problem.

Blame it on the variants of this virus. The B.1.1.7 variant, the most widespread of the variants identified to date, is between 43 and 90 percent more infectious than the version of the virus we have been living with for most of the past year. And this variant was estimated to make up 30 to 40 percent of U.S. infections earlier this month, meaning about 20,000 new cases each day are likely B.1.1.7 and are way more infectious. Vaccinations are in a footrace against these variants, and the variants are giving us a run for our money.

Consider what’s happening in Florida, where thousands are celebrating spring break without masks or social distancing. Right now, the rate of cases and deaths in Florida are about the same as nationally, and the number of daily infections is holding steady. But the B.1.1.7 variant now represents more than half of Florida’s cases. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is right to warn about a new surge of illness, hospitalization and death as a result.

B.1.1.7 is on a trajectory to become the dominant variant in the United States in the next couple of weeks. To understand why this matters, look to Europe, where the rise of the variant saw large increases in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Data suggest that B.1.1.7 is so much more infectious that it can shift outbreaks into overdrive, turning small upswings in cases into lethal, prolonged spikes. And there’s some data that it is more deadly, too.

So are we destined for a fourth surge? Not necessarily. The vaccines in use in the United States are effective against B.1.1.7, and we are much further along in our vaccine rollout than Europe, which had barely begun doling out shots when the variants were picking up steam. But we must keep vaccinating, and fast. By the end of April, every high-risk American should have at least one dose in their arms, massively reducing the risk of death from infection. Until that happens, we should keep restrictions in place. We are doing a great job on vaccinations. But on keeping public health measures in place until high-risk people are vaccinated? Not so much.

 

Cornpop Struggles....,

Blue-Anon Infinitely More Dangerous And Destructive Than Q-Anon...,

greenwald |  Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

This was a topic I discussed extensively in October when I announced my resignation from The Intercept after senior editors — for the first time in seven years — violated the contractual prohibition on editorial interference in my journalism by demanding I significantly alter my reporting about these documents by removing the sections that reflected negatively on Biden. What I found particularly galling about their pretense that they have such high-level and rigorous editorial standards — standards they claimed, for the first time ever, that my article failed to meet — was that a mere week prior to their censorship of my article, they published an article by a different journalist which, at a media outlet we created with the explicit purpose of treating government claims with skepticism, instead treated the CIA’s claims of “Russian disinformation” as fact. Even worse, when they quoted the CIA’s letter, they omitted the part where even those intelligence agents acknowledged that they had no evidence for their assertion.

 

If A Representation Is "A Bid For Power" Then Google Already Rules The World

doxa.substack |  The other point that’s always stressed in the AI Ethics literature, is that in the hands of large, powerful, status-quo-defining entities like Google, there's a feedback loop: the models are released back into the real world, where they tend to reinforce in some way the very status quo that produced them.

This circularity of status quo => model => status quo is well covered in Cathy O'Neil's 2016 book, Weapons of Math Destruction. O'Neill is mostly concerned with the models used by Big Finance, but the principle is exactly the same — models don't just reflect the status quo, they're increasingly critical to perpetuating it. Or, to borrow words from the title of an even earlier book on financial models by Donald MacKenzie, these models are "an engine, not a camera."

Unless I've missed something major, a very big chunk of the AI Ethics work amounts to stating and restating the age-old truth that big, costly, public representations of the regnant social hierarchy are powerful perpetuators of that very hierarchy. That's it. That's the tweet... and the paper... and the conference... and the discipline.

In the formulation of Gebru's paper, large language models (“large” because they’re trained on a massive, unsanitized corpus of texts from the wilds of the internet) re-present, or "parrot," the roblematic linguistic status quo. And in parroting it, they can perpetuate it.

As people in positions of privilege with respect to a society’s racism, misogyny, ableism, etc., tend to be overrepresented in training data for LMs (as discussed in §4 above), this training data thus includes encoded biases, many already recognized as harmful...

In this section, we have discussed how the human tendency to attribute meaning to text, in combination with large LMs’ ability to learn patterns of forms that humans associate with various biases and other harmful attitudes, leads to risks of real-world harm, should LM-generated text be disseminated.1

As someone who trained as an historian, it's not at all surprising to me that what was true of the Roman Colosseum — in everything from the class-stratified seating arrangement to the central spectacle — is also true of a the massively complex and expensive public display of cultural power that is Google's language model.

Control Of The Most Powerful Politicians And Their Regulators Ensures Control By The Regulated

opendemocracy | From France to Australia to the US state of Maryland, the free press is waging a battle for survival against Facebook and Google. Besides being gushing firehoses of COVID-19 and election disinformation and QAnon conspiracies, another of Google and Facebook’s dangerous impacts is undermining the financial stability of media outlets all over the world. Where is the European Commission and the Biden administration in this fight? A lot is at stake, yet so far they have been quiet as church mice.

How do Google and Facebook threaten free press? These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60% of all online advertising in the US. With Amazon taking another 9%, that leaves a mere 30% of digital ad revenue to be split among thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising over half of all ad spending (and projected to grow further), this has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country, including in Europe and the US.

Australia and Maryland

Australia’s situation is typical. Its competition commission found that, for every $100 spent by online advertisers in Australia, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook,

even as traditional advertising has declined. Various studies have found that the majority of people who access their news online don’t go to the original news source, instead they access it via Facebook’s and Google’s platforms which are cleverly designed to hold users’ attention. Many users rarely click through the links, instead they absorb the gist of the news from the platforms’ headlines and preview blurbs.

Consequently, Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources receiving it. Note that Facebook and Google could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites. But they don’t.

So Australia decided to fight this duopoly with some rules of its own. A new law will require large digital media companies to fairly compensate Australian media companies for re-packaging and monetizing their proprietary news content. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers, beginning with media magnet Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to pay them some compensation. But Facebook flexed its digital muscles by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days, preventing Aussie news publishers as well as everyday users, including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services, from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial ‘shot heard ‘round the world’. Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of ‘big tech authoritarianism’. Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the message of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.