RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-social-media-censorship-a-crime-section-241-us-code-government-private-conspiracy-civil-rights-speech-11670934266?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship. The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users. So it’s time to ask about accountability.

Will there be legal consequences for government officials, for the companies, or for their personnel who cooperate in the gov-tech censorship of dissent on Covid-19, election irregularities or other matters? Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.

Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code provides: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/14/the-democrats-slow-motion-insurrection/

The Jan. 6 Capitol ruckus is not one of our country’s greatest moments. But if the objective of a few of the protesters was to overthrow the federal government, they planned and executed poorly. The same can’t be said of the Democrats. Their mostly bloodless coup to suspend constitutional limits and seize unchallenged power has been thoroughly calculated and expertly executed.

For decades Democrats at all levels have been moving the U.S. from the civil society it was designed to be to the political (that is, coercive) society they want to be in control of. They have waged outright war on the first, second and 10th amendments to the Constitution; robbed us of our economic liberty through punitive taxation and strangling regulation; created environmental policies that have made innocent men criminals for making use of their own property and taken that property whenever possible; and destroyed independence by fostering more dependence on the state. They spend other people’s money as if it were, well, other people’s money and there is therefore no governor on their actions.

“​​The Democrat Party has a long history of ignoring the Constitution when it impedes their government-expansionist objectives. Which is nigh constantly – as the Constitution is a government-limiting document,” says Seton Motley, president of Less Government, who cites some of the more egregious examples in a Heartland Institute essay.

Two years ago, before she became a pawn in the Democrats’ effort to exploit Jan. 6 to further fuel their dreams of empire, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney said the American people were sick of Democrats acting “as though they are willing to burn the whole place down,” disregarding the Constitution, and making threats “about court packing or trying to somehow abolish the Electoral College.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/beware-do-gooders

Gone are the days when villains dressed the part and Wall Street vampires suited up like Gordon Gekko. These days, an American who wants to avoid being swindled needs to watch out for the T-shirt-clad do-gooders spouting the proper politics and pieties while claiming that they only want to save the world. The recent collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire, FTX, fit the larger pattern: it was a massive financial scam marketed as a moral cause that got away with it by flattering the high priests of the press and offering elected officials promises of gifts and donations.

Before FTX, it worked wonders for Theranos, WeWork, and the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Millions and then billions of dollars were poured into corporate vessels promising change, their founders cozy with a media that long ago abandoned its role as a check on the nakedly self-promotional claims of the rich and powerful.

With the financial and philanthropic worlds now firmly wedded, there are even bigger bubbles yet to burst, like the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds that consulting powerhouse McKinsey estimated had a total global value of $2.5 trillion midway through 2022. The conditions that allowed for a $10 billion crypto empire to vanish into thin air have only become more conducive to the do-good grift, like a virus replicating itself inside a host’s body.

As a public face for the effective altruism movement, Bankman-Fried’s particular brand of swindle was different in detail but not in kind from the snake oil sold by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes was sentenced last month to 11 years for charges related to misleading investors about the fact that her $9 billion genetic testing startup was a fraud with no ability to do the things it promised. A similar pattern of financial swindling, albeit on a smaller scale, has taken place at the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. In a new lawsuit filed in September, more than 25 local BLM chapters sued the foundation’s current leader, Shalomyah Bowers, for allegedly “devising a scheme of fraud and misrepresentation” to siphon out more than $10 million from donor coffers. Bowers was brought into the organization by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors before Cullors stepped away amid her controversial spending of $3.2 million on four luxury residential properties. Clapping back at the local BLM chapters, Bowers accused them of perpetuating the “carceral logic and social violence that fuels the legal system,” for reporting his alleged grift.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/legalizing-pot-not-good-new-york-us

New York stinks of weed. Everywhere you go – theater lobbies, parking lots, construction sites, delis, public parks – you can smell the bitter aroma of pot. Does anyone actually think this is good for our troubled city? Or for our country?

Can you imagine China encouraging drug usage that can permanently impair the intelligence of young people and that saps the productivity of workers? It is absurd, and yet (mainly) Democrats in financially wounded cities and states have rushed to legalize pot, grounding their campaigns on three questionable arguments:

1. That the war on drugs and prohibition against smoking pot led to racial inequities, which could only be corrected through legalization;

2. That selling weed and levying hefty taxes on those sales would plug the budget gaps of profligate cities and states; and

3. That marijuana was no more harmful than alcohol and therefore should be legal.

Are these assumptions true?

The widely disseminated claim that millions of Black Americans are unjustly in prison for simple pot possession is a myth. A 2015 study showed that in the federal prison system, which in 2020 housed 226,000 people, more than 99 percent of those sentenced for drug possession had originally been accused of trafficking or other crimes, but had been allowed to plead down to lesser charges.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“The principle that the end justifies the means is in individual ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.”

The Road to Serfdom, 1944  Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992)

In a 1928 dissenting opinion, in Olmstead v. the United States, Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites everyman to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retributions.”

In 1928, Roy Olmstead was a suspected bootlegger. Without judicial approval, federal agents wiretapped his home. He was convicted based on those wiretaps. In 2016, Donald Trump was a successful real estate investor and entertainer. Politically, he was a novice. He was disruptive to establishment politicians, and to federal bureaucrats whose careers depend upon an ever-expanding government. Following his election, but before his inauguration, Senator Chuck Schumer spoke about Mr. Trump’s taunting the intelligence agencies: “He’s being really dumb…Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community and they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” A truth Mr. Trump was to discover. Those who used unlawful means to marginalize Mr. Trump did so because they felt that the end – the destruction of his political career – justified any means employed. However, as Theodore Roosevelt said in a speech in Chicago on April 10, 1899: “No man is justified in doing evil on the grounds of expediency.”

Over six years have elapsed since Mr. Trump won the Presidency. And we now know that senior executives in the FBI and the Justice Department were culpable in the “Russian collusion” story, as well as four years later being responsible for suppressing the authenticity of what was found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Ten years ago, Lois Lerner, then IRS Director, Exempt Organizations, singled out conservative organizations. These federal bureaucrats used illicit means to achieve a preferred political end. What they did was despicable. Will they be punished? Probably not, as long as mainstream media sees their role as propagandizers, rather than seekers of truth and disseminators of news.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2022/12/13/4-mind-boggling-technology-advances-in-store-for-2023/?sh=3bbc4431a40c

2022 was a transformative year for technological innovation and digital transformation. The trend will continue as the pace of innovation and development of potentially disruptive emerging technologies exponentially increases every year. The question arises, what lies ahead for tech for us to learn and experience in 2023?
While there are many impactful tech topics such as the Internet of Things, 5G, Space, Genomics, Synthetic Biology, Automation, Augmented Reality, and others, there are four tech areas to keep a keen watch on this coming year as they have promising and near-term capabilities to transform lives. They include: 1) artificial intelligence, 2) computing technologies, 3) robotics, and 4) materials science.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Since the HAL2000 computer and producer Stanley Kubrick provided a glimpse of AI’s independent (although nefarious) capability to independently think in the epic movie, 2001 A Space Odessey, we have been eagerly waiting for the emergence of artificial intelligence. We are now on the cusp of AI emergence and AI is no longer just found in science fiction movies. Elements that compose AI consist of machine learning, and natural language processing and are now a daily part of our lives. Today, AI can understand, diagnose, and solve problems — in some cases without being specifically programmed.
The focus and challenges of artificial intelligence are clear cut. AI systems seek to replicate human traits and computational capabilities in a machine, and surpass human limitations and speed. It is already happening. Artificial synapses that mimic the human brain will likely direct the next generation of computing. The components may differ, it may be analog or digital, and it may be based on transistors, chemicals, biological, photonics, or possibly quantum components.
Computers with AI have been predominantly designed for automation activities that include memory emulation, speech recognition, learning, planning, and problem solving.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/12/now-what/

The release of the Twitter Files, for the most part, confirms what Donald Trump and his supporters knew in 2020. Big Tech drastically suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden—his son’s overseas financial dealings and the Democratic Party’s plans to ensure Biden’s victory with an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots—before Election Day.

The series of posts by independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss reveal internal communications between top executives as they contorted company policy on the fly to accommodate the Democrats’ political motives. Taibbi kicked off the party on December 2 with a series of tweets detailing how Twitter banned the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and continued to defend the move even after some company honchos admitted it was indefensible. “By this point ‘everyone knew this was fucked,’ said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of . . . continuing to err,” Taibbi wrote while posting screenshots of chat messages between decision-makers.

Weiss followed up by outlining Twitter’s shadow banning—a practice that former CEO Jack Dorsey repeatedly denied—aimed at conservative influencers such as Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk in 2020. This built up to a fever pitch that climaxed on January 6, 2021, when a four-hour disturbance finally gave Twitter and other social media behemoths the excuse they had been hoping for to fulfill Big Tech’s dream of permanently deplatforming the president. “The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days,” Taibbi explained, referring to January 6, 7, and 8, the day Trump was banned. “However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.” The pressure campaign to boot Trump, Shellenberger further disclosed, came from both internal and external forces including “Former First Lady @michelleobama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca.”