SAUDIS ATTACKED: “U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday the United States was ‘locked and loaded’ for a potential response to the attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, after a senior U.S. administration official said Iran was to blame. Trump also authorized the use of the U.S. emergency oil stockpile to ensure stable supplies after the attack, which shut 5% of world production and sent crude prices soaring more than 19% in early trade on Monday, before moderating to show a 10% gain.” (Reuters)
FAKE NEWS: “The New York Times suddenly made a major revision to a supposed bombshell piece late Sunday concerning a resurfaced allegation of sexual assault by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — hours after virtually all 2020 Democratic presidential candidates had cited the original article as a reason to impeach Kavanaugh. The update included the significant detail that several friends of the alleged victim said she did not recall the purported sexual assault in question at all. The Times also stated for the first time that the alleged victim refused to be interviewed, and has made no comment about the episode.” (Fox News)
Business & Economy
AUW STRIKE: “More than 49,000 members of the United Auto Workers walked off General Motors factory floors or set up picket lines early Monday as contract talks with the company deteriorated into a strike. Workers shut down 33 manufacturing plants in nine states across the U.S., as well as 22 parts distribution warehouses. It wasn’t clear how long the walkout would last, with the union saying GM has budged little in months of talks while GM said it made substantial offers including higher wages and factory investments.” (Associated Press)
PURDUE PHARMA BANKRUPTCY: “Purdue Pharma, the drug manufacturer accused of triggering the nation’s epidemic of opioid addiction through its sale of the profitable but highly addictive painkiller OxyContin, filed for bankruptcy Sunday. The Chapter 11 filing is expected to lead to the ultimate demise of a company that sold a fraction of the opioid prescriptions in the United States but nonetheless is most closely identified with the epidemic because of its pioneering role in the sale of narcotic pain pills.” (The Washington Post)
Government & Politics
GUN-CONTROL TALKS: “President Donald Trump talked on the phone with House Speaker liar-Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck scumbag-Schumer Sunday morning as pressure mounted for Congress to act on gun control. In a statement released Sunday afternoon, scumbag-Schumer and liar-Pelosi said they told Trump that any gun control package that did not include the background check legislation passed earlier this year by the House would ‘not get the job done.’ … They promised Trump a ‘historic signing ceremony at the Rose Garden’ if he endorsed the legislation and had Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell act on the legislation.” (USA Today)
EMOLUMENTS-CLAUSE LAWSUIT REVIVED: “A federal appeals court on Friday breathed new life into a lawsuit that claims the financial relationship between President Trump’s properties and foreign officials violates the Constitution, ruling that a lower court had erred in dismissing the suit. By a two-to-one vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the lower court’s 2017 ruling, which had dismissed the case brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). CREW’s suit alleges that foreign governments’ patronage of Trump’s businesses violates the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits federal officials from receiving benefits from foreign governments without Congress’s consent.” (National Review)
Culture & Heartland
ANOTHER JUSSIE SMOLLETT: “Former NFL star Edawn Coughman was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of vandalizing his own restaurants. … Police alleged that Coughman scrawled ‘MAGA’ and racial epithets on the walls of his businesses, alleging that he was trying to collect on an insurance scam by staging a hate crime.” (Washington Examiner)
STOMACH-CHURNING “Family members discovered 2,246 medically preserved fetal remains on the property of an abortion doctor who passed away on Sept. 3, authorities said Friday. … Klopfer, who died at 75, reportedly performed 30,000 abortions since 1974, according to Heavy. The Indiana Medical Licensing Board indefinitely suspended Klopfer’s medical license in August 2016, NBC affiliate WNDU reported.” (The Daily Caller)
Closing Arguments
POLICY: Trillion-dollar deficits don’t make America great (The Daily Signal)
POLICY: The myth that the polar bear population is declining (Foundation for Economic Education)
SATIRE: In surprise 5-4 ruling, Supreme Court holds that Second Amendment requires mandatory gun ownership (IMAO)
~The Patriot Posthttps://patriotpost.us/articles/65492?mailing_id=4532&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4532&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
“When there is no longer a free market or competition, this increases prices, even when something is marketed as free, and harms consumers,” declared Republican AG Ashley Moody of Florida. “Is something really free if we are increasingly giving over our privacy information?”
Increasingly giving over our privacy information? How about having it taken — without any choice? And what about the fact this unconscionable data heist involves children?
More than a year ago, columnist Michelle Malkin sounded the alarm, noting “the tech-industry-supported Common Core ‘standards,’ tests, and aligned texts and curricula” promulgated in America’s classrooms was ripe for exploitation. She explained, “The recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act further enshrined government collection of personally identifiable information — including data collected on attitudes, values, beliefs, and dispositions — and allows release of the data to third-party contractors thanks to Obama-era loopholes carved into the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.”
Google is one of the principal perpetrators. “With little public oversight, Google has infiltrated schools through its ‘free’ Google Apps for Education suite,” Malkin adds. “As I’ve reported previously, Google is building brand loyalty through its questionable certification program that essentially turns teachers into tax-subsidized lobbyists for the company.”
How intrusive is the tech behemoth? The education category at the Google apps website is a cornucopia of programs designed to work in conjunction with an Android phone. That’s the same Android phone already supplying Google with reams of personal data about one’s location and habits.
Moreover, the notion that such data remains within the boundaries of education is a pipe dream. “Over the past four years,” Malkin notes, “Google has admitted ‘scanning and indexing’ student email messages sent using GAFE and data mining student users for commercial gain when they use their accounts for noneducational purposes.”
In other words, privacy is dead. Unfortunately, the elimination of privacy is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The Trump administration is reportedly looking into creating an alliance with the tech behemoths under the guise of preventing gun violence. “The proposal is part of a larger initiative to establish a new agency called the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency or HARPA, which would sit inside the Health and Human Services Department,” The Washington Post reports.
The effort is being advanced by the Suzanne Wright Foundation. It was founded by Bob Wright, former NBC head and personal friend of the president, following his wife’s death from pancreatic cancer. Wright has proposed that HARPA embrace a project called “Safe Home” — “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes.” It would ostensibly identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act” stated Geoffrey Ling, HARPA’s lead scientific adviser.
And who will abet the four-year project costing an estimated $40 million to $60 million of taxpayer funding? “The document goes on to list a number of widely used technologies it suggests could be employed to help collect data, including Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home,” the Post adds.
What about privacy? “Those familiar with the project stressed it would not collect sensitive health data about individuals without their permission,” the Post states.
Once again, Malkin reminds us such assertions are bald-faced lies, noting the Federal Trade Commission just approved a settlement with Google/YouTube, which was caught data mining users — under the age of 13. It follows a similar settlement made earlier this summer regarding Google’s Street View program, where cars roaming around more than 30 countries secretly collected emails, passwords, and other personal data from Wi-Fi networks.
The YouTube settlement cost Google between $150 million to $200 million, and the Street View effort, which the company insisted was a “mistake” — until investigators revealed that “Google engineers built software and embedded it into Street View vehicles to intentionally intercept the data from 2007 to 2010” — cost them $13 million. For a company that earned more than $100 billion in 2018, both settlements amount to nothing more than a minor business cost.
Toward what end? “Under the cloak of ‘science,’ Big Tech and Big Government are on the cusp of instituting a mental-health social-credit-score system incorporating dubious predictive analytics,” Malkin warns.
The government of Communist China, which has already set up such a system — one that prevents “bad” people from getting well-paid jobs, home mortgages, and car loans, and bans one’s children from attending private schools, even as one’s profile is put on a public blacklist — would undoubtedly approve.
As for the Trump administration, it apparently aims to embrace an approach to law enforcement detailed by the 2002 sci-fi movie “Minority Report.” It is about a dystopian future where a specialized police department apprehends criminals before they commit their crimes.
Unfortunately, the future is already here. Malkin reveals, “The Pioneer Institute reported that federal, state, and local governments spent more than $30 billion in 2018 to implement social-emotional-learning monitoring in K–12 public schools.”
Searching for “neurobehavioral signs” that might reveal “someone headed toward a violent explosive act” no doubt.
Where is the national outcry? In a better nation, Google and other tech entities that data-mine children — data-mining that will attach itself to that child’s entire life — would be ushered out of America’s classrooms with extreme prejudice. In this one, it is likely nothing at all will happen, because most American adults are completely enmeshed in their own obsession with tech.
Educators? Malkin rightly refers to them as “tech-crazed, fad-addled school districts oblivious to privacy concerns.” Politicians? Google alone spent nearly $22 million in 2018 on federal lobbying. Moreover, as Tufts University political science professor Eitan Hersh explains, politicians take their cues from the public: “The firms have sway in Washington because huge numbers of consumers rely on these companies and like their products and because most politicians do not care about antitrust probably because the voters don’t care about antitrust.”
In truth, anti-trust is a diversion. Breaking up “Big Tech” isn’t going to address the assault on privacy. In the unlikely event it actually succeeds, it will merely “democratize” that assault. Far too many powerful players have a vested interest keeping the American public’s personal information as accessible as possible for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the possibility of manipulating elections.
According to Dr. Robert Epstein, who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, manipulation by Google, and other Big Tech companies could sway as many as 15 million votes in 2020. And, as he stated to a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, that could happen “without people’s knowledge and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.”
So who’s really running the country? Don’t expect a Google search to provide an answer. As for privacy, Big Brother — times a million — is watching you. ~The Patriot Post
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