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Jen Psaki is the sneering avatar of an aristocracy that regards working Americans as less than dirt https://t.co/joaN40GBMo
— Jack Posobiec
(@JackPosobiec) October 21, 2021
Jen Psaki Hates You
Via The American Mind
The White House press secretary is a perfect representative of our spiteful ruling class.
Let us now praise Jennifer Rene Psaki—English major, sorority girl, mother of two. Let us praise her seemingly endless supply of monochrome crew-neck blouses and pencil skirts, the way she peels her mask off after striding to the lectern. Jen Psaki has been briefed by her 11 staffers; she has had her coffee (and her bagel, if it’s Wednesday); she is freshly armed with the latest talking points and she is not going to take any of your guff today.
Jen communicates just how on top of things she is by nodding ceaselessly throughout every question, interjecting an “uh-huh” or a “yep” to show she has not been caught off guard since the last clause of the reporter’s sentence. This is a patented bobblehead technique she perfected as a commentator at CNN in between the Obama and Biden Administrations. What she is saying or listening to is less important than what she is communicating with her demeanor at all times: that she is serious, that she is informed, that she is the adult in the room.
We have all met someone who behaves like this: someone who has done the homework and wants you to know it. Someone whose politeness is so aggressive that it can only be read as a kind of challenge. Jen Psaki dares you to find her off-putting. Why would you? She is smiling. She even had a joke written down that she made at the appropriate juncture. See? It says “laughing time” right here in the schedule from 5:01 to 5:03 PM.
Then laughing time is over, and it is time for the lies and the jabs and the polite little smirks. Jen Psaki is frankly disappointed that you would stoop so low as to question Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s right to paternity leave during a supply chain “crisis.” It’s not really a crisis, anyway: “people have more money, expendable resources, more people are working than they were a year ago.” The economy is getting built back better, says Jen, and our ports runneth over. What are you, some kind of Peloton slut who can’t wait five extra months for your new treadmill?
This is what Trump’s critics meant when they said we needed to restore “civility” to the White House: they meant we need the right kind of disdain for the right kinds of people, expressed in the right kinds of ways. Gone are the mean tweets, the off-color jokes, the rough pugilism. Now instead we have Jen Psaki, sneering avatar of an aristocracy that regards working Americans as less than dirt. People are straining to put food on the table and gas in their cars; they increasingly fail to see the point in going to work at all. Psaki’s response is that of the anointed class she represents: shut up and take it.
We are ruled over by a cabal of solipsists who feel outraged that the regressive pigs in flyover country express any opinions at all—about the fruits of their labor, about the security of their nation, about the health of their bodies. Their response is that we should “lower expectations” for affordable food, “welcome competition” from a rapidly arming China, and “follow the advice of health experts” on pain of unemployment.
Who can forget the treacly grin with which Psaki invited us to “stay tuned” for Biden’s forthcoming vaccine decree? She delights in her role, which is to act out the revenge fantasies of all who felt wounded in 2016 by the mere suggestion that their virtue is less than immaculate. We have to reckon with the fact that Psaki, loathsome though she may be, is doing her job exactly as intended. Her affronts are outrageous only to the people who already hate her: from her target audience they elicit shouts of “YAS Kween” and “drag him!” She is not slipping up when she insults your intelligence and riles up your countrymen against you, when she lies unblinkingly out in the open and defies you to do anything about it. That is her job, and she is good at it. She is doing exactly what she was put there to do.
No one with a spine should take instruction on “civility” from such a feckless cretin or anyone who enjoys her act. If we are to re-learn civic excellence, it will not be from a movement whose moral framework consists of slander and self-satisfaction. Remember that in 2022 and 2024 when they call you a fascist or a bigot or a domestic terrorist or whatever: these are people who think Jen Psaki is a good person. Their opinion about your morals literally doesn’t matter at all. MORE.
Re-education camps on the way: CDC's Walensky: Biden Administration Planning 'Education and Counseling' for Unvaccinated https://t.co/u3QrViz280
— WindTalker (@nmlinguaphile) October 24, 2021
CDC’s Walensky: Biden Administration Planning ‘Education and Counseling’ for Unvaccinated
Via Breitbart News
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said on this week’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday” that the Biden administration has a plan for the “education and counseling” of essential workers so they are comfortable getting vaccinated.
Anchor Chris Wallace said, “Let’s talk about mandates for adults. President Biden was asked about the controversial mandates for essential workers at his town hall this week. Take a look at his answer.”
In a video, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked, “Should police officers, emergency responders be mandated to get vaccines, and if not, should they stay at home or that go?”
President Joe Biden replied, “Yes and yes.”
Wallace continued, “Are you still full speed ahead on mandates for essential workers to get vaccinated?”
Walensky said, “We have seen that these mandates are getting more and more people vaccinated. Here’s what we know, the most disruptive thing that you can do to a workforce is to have a COVID outbreak in that workforce. That was definitely not only send people home but send people to the hospital, and some may pass. What we know from the police workforce is there have been more deaths from the coronavirus over the last year and a half than all other causes of death for that workforce combined. So we believe it is very important to get these people vaccinated. There is a plan, should these people not want to be vaccinated, towards education and counseling to get people the information they need so that they are feeling comfortable in getting vaccinated.” MORE.
The Military Origins of Facebook
By Whitney Webb
Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and “pre-crime” apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.
In mid-February, Daniel Baker, a US veteran described by the media as “anti-Trump, anti-government, anti-white supremacists, and anti-police,” was charged by a Florida grand jury with two counts of “transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure.”
The communication in question had been posted by Baker on Facebook, where he had created an event page to organize an armed counter-rally to one planned by Donald Trump supporters at the Florida capital of Tallahassee on January 6. “If you are afraid to die fighting the enemy, then stay in bed and live. Call all of your friends and Rise Up!,” Baker had written on his Facebook event page.
Baker’s case is notable as it is one of the first “precrime” arrests based entirely on social media posts—the logical conclusion of the Trump administration’s, and now Biden administration’s, push to normalize arresting individuals for online posts to prevent violent acts before they can happen. From the increasing sophistication of US intelligence/military contractor Palantir’s predictive policing programs to the formal announcement of the Justice Department’s Disruption and Early Engagement Program in 2019 to Biden’s first budget, which contains $111 million for pursuing and managing “increasing domestic terrorism caseloads,” the steady advance toward a precrime-centered “war on domestic terror” has been notable under every post-9/11 presidential administration.
This new so-called war on domestic terror has actually resulted in many of these types of posts on Facebook. And, while Facebook has long sought to portray itself as a “town square” that allows people from across the world to connect, a deeper look into its apparently military origins and continual military connections reveals that the world’s largest social network was always intended to act as a surveillance tool to identify and target domestic dissent.
Part 1 of this two-part series on Facebook and the US national-security state explores the social media network’s origins and the timing and nature of its rise as it relates to a controversial military program that was shut down the same day that Facebook launched. The program, known as LifeLog, was one of several controversial post-9/11 surveillance programs pursued by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that threatened to destroy privacy and civil liberties in the United States while also seeking to harvest data for producing “humanized” artificial intelligence (AI).
As this report will show, Facebook is not the only Silicon Valley giant whose origins coincide closely with this same series of DARPA initiatives and whose current activities are providing both the engine and the fuel for a hi-tech war on domestic dissent.
DARPA’s Data Mining for “National Security” and to “Humanize” AI
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, DARPA, in close collaboration with the US intelligence community (specifically the CIA), began developing a “precrime” approach to combatting terrorism known as Total Information Awareness or TIA. The purpose of TIA was to develop an “all-seeing” military-surveillance apparatus. The official logic behind TIA was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks.
The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor during the Iran-Contra affair and for being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. A less well-known activity of Iran-Contra figures like Poindexter and Oliver North was their development of the Main Core database to be used in “continuity of government” protocols. Main Core was used to compile a list of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be dealt with if the COG protocols were ever invoked. These protocols could be invoked for a variety of reasons, including widespread public opposition to a US military intervention abroad, widespread internal dissent, or a vaguely defined moment of “national crisis” or “time of panic.” Americans were not informed if their name was placed on the list, and a person could be added to the list for merely having attended a protest in the past, for failing to pay taxes, or for other, “often trivial,” behaviors deemed “unfriendly” by its architects in the Reagan administration.
In light of this, it was no exaggeration when New York Times columnist William Safire remarked that, with TIA, “Poindexter is now realizing his twenty-year dream: getting the ‘data-mining’ power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.”
The TIA program met with considerable citizen outrage after it was revealed to the public in early 2003. TIA’s critics included the American Civil Liberties Union, which claimed that the surveillance effort would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our lives would be catalogued,” while several mainstream media outlets warned that TIA was “fighting terror by terrifying US citizens.” As a result of the pressure, DARPA changed the program’s name to Terrorist Information Awareness to make it sound less like a national-security panopticon and more like a program aiming specifically at terrorists in the post-9/11 era.
The TIA projects were not actually closed down, however, with most moved to the classified portfolios of the Pentagon and US intelligence community. Some became intelligence funded and guided private-sector endeavors, such as Peter Thiel’s Palantir, while others resurfaced years later under the guise of combatting the COVID-19 crisis.
Soon after TIA was initiated, a similar DARPA program was taking shape under the direction of a close friend of Poindexter’s, DARPA program manager Douglas Gage. Gage’s project, LifeLog, sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”
LifeLog, per Gage and supporters of the program, would create a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life, which DARPA argued could be used to create next-generation “digital assistants” and offer users a “near-perfect digital memory.” Gage insisted, even after the program was shut down, that individuals would have had “complete control of their own data-collection efforts” as they could “decide when to turn the sensors on or off and decide who will share the data.” In the years since then, analogous promises of user control have been made by the tech giants of Silicon Valley, only to be broken repeatedly for profit and to feed the government’s domestic-surveillance apparatus. MORE.
Apple takes down Bible app in China to appease communist regime https://t.co/2AhHwf9bc1 pic.twitter.com/jaqtvz1dhY
— The Christian Post (@ChristianPost) October 23, 2021
Apple takes down Bible app in China to appease communist regime
Vie The Christian Post.
Apple has removed a popular Bible app and a Quran app in China after the communist country’s regime deemed that the apps violated local laws on hosting religious texts.
Bible App by Olive Tree, which has over 1 million downloads, and Quran Majeed, used by millions of Muslims, have been taken down due to compliance issues, the tech company told the BBC.
Apple refused to comment but directed the BBC to its Human Rights Policy: “We’re required to comply with local laws, and at times there are complex issues about which we may disagree with governments.”
Apple also told the BBC that the apps had been removed because Chinese officials had stated they violated laws on hosting illegal religious texts.
“Apple chief executive Tim Cook has been accused of hypocrisy from politicians in the U.S. for speaking out about American politics, but staying quiet about China,” the BBC noted.
Chinese authorities are also removing Bible apps and Christian WeChat public accounts as new highly restrictive administrative measures on religious staff went into effect earlier this year.
Open Doors estimates that China has more than 97 million Christians, many of whom worship in unregistered or so-called “illegal” underground churches.
The U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern documented more than 100 incidents of Christian persecution in China between July 2020 and June 2021 as the country’s communist regime seeks to forcefully convert independent religious groups into mechanisms of the Chinese Communist Party.
ICC tracked 23 incidents of authorities demolishing religious structures and symbols during its reporting period, the group said in its report.
“The CCP has torn down, destroyed, and removed numerous churches in China, especially those that refused to submit to its control,” the report said. MORE.
Experts Warn That If Children Between The Ages Of 5-11 Aren’t Vaccinated Then Pfizer Executives Won’t Get Their Sales Bonuses https://t.co/oYCSMREW7v
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 24, 2021
Experts Warn That If Children Between The Ages Of 5-11 Aren’t Vaccinated Then Pfizer Executives Won’t Get Their Sales Bonuses
Via The Babylon Bee
NEW YORK, NY—Experts are encouraging everyone to get their kids vaccinated, and are predicting dire consequences if this is not done. According to several top scientists, Pfizer executives won’t meet their sales goals if you don’t vaccinate your 5 to 11-year-old.
“This would be absolutely catastrophic for struggling Pfizer execs,” said Dr. Wexner, an expert. “Not vaccinating your kindergartener could jeopardize their ability to make their Porsche payments, pay off their mistresses, or remain platinum members at their golf clubs. We just can’t let that happen.”
Experts say that while COVID poses almost zero risk to children, and the vaccine poses a small chance of making children die, the consequences of not vaccinating kids would be far worse, as drug company execs may have to dip into savings to buy a hooker. Even worse, economists warn that not vaccinating kids could cause drug company stock to dip one or two points, affecting millions of portfolios slightly.
“The science has spoken,” said Wexner. “We can’t afford for you to not do this. Please, do it for our Q4 sales numbers, er… I mean, do it for the kids.”
Check out all of the Bee’s takes on a world gone mad HERE.
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