[Rutherford Institute] "As more and more data flows from your body and brain to the smart machines via the biometric sensors, it will become easy for corporations and government agencies to know you, manipulate you, and make decisions on your behalf. Even more importantly, they could decipher the deep mechanisms of all bodies and brains, and thereby gain the power to engineer life. If we want to prevent a small elite from monopolising such godlike powers, and if we want to prevent humankind from splitting into biological castes, the key question is: who owns the data? Does the data about my DNA, my brain and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?"―Professor Yuval Noah Harari
Uncle Sam wants you.
Correction: Uncle Sam wants your DNA.
Actually, if the government gets its hands on your DNA, they as good as have you in their clutches.
Get ready, folks, because the government‐ helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget)‐is embarking on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.
As the New York Times reports:
"The science-fiction future, in which police can swiftly identify robbers and murderers from discarded soda cans and cigarette butts, has arrived. In 2017, President Trump signed into law the Rapid DNA Act, which, starting this year, will enable approved police booking stations in several states to connect their Rapid DNA machines to Codis, the national DNA database. Genetic fingerprinting is set to become as routine as the old-fashioned kind."
Referred to as "magic boxes," these Rapid DNA machines‐portable, about the size of a desktop printer, highly unregulated, far from fool-proof, and so fast that they can produce DNA profiles in less than two hours‐allow police to go on fishing expeditions for any hint of possible misconduct using DNA samples.
Journalist Heather Murphy explains: "As police agencies build out their local DNA databases, they are collecting DNA not only from people who have been charged with major crimes but also, increasingly, from people who are merely deemed suspicious, permanently linking their genetic identities to criminal databases."
Suspect Society, meet the American police state.
Every dystopian sci-fi film we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science, technology and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.
#1
Personally, I believe that birth certificates shouldn't be classified as legal documents till there's a verification of the DNA for anyone listed as father.
#2
Personally, I consider the short tandem repeat test they use in legal DNA definition to be a farce, but then there's always somebody willing to testify that they're an expert, so there.
The FBI once had a guy testify that he was an expert in evaluating laundry lines that show up in jeans, and could identify a masked suspect on that basis. Got a conviction.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
01/24/2019 8:36 Comments ||
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#4
Thought-provoking. It could be argued that a DNA is similar to a BAC test; it is just collecting evidence. On the other hand it could be argued both are invasions of privacy.
Some years ago, as an accident reconstructionist, I was asked to obtain a DNA test in a double-fatality where both driver and passenger were "blind drunk." There was a question as to who was driving the car. They wanted me to try to establish that through concentrations of blood splatter using DNA. The attorney was trying to determine who to sue. I declined and said this was not in my wheelhouse and I didn't have the expertise. At the time, I didn't think too much about the ramifications beyond the capability of doing or not doing.
I worry that we might be heading towards living the reality of the Tom Cruise movie "Minority Report." That is, where probable cause, due process, rights to privacy and the right to not self-incriminate get tossed.
#7
TL;DR. Did they mention that we all leave samples of our DNA on our stool specimens, discarded paper cups, cigarette butts, used chewing gum, etc. etc. I sure wish someone would get one of Obama's old drinking cups for analysis. Might answer some questions.
Law enforcement and the judiciary being what they have become, we are all unindicted felons anyway. We are already a nation of suspects, regardless of the evidence or the "rule of law".
The argument that the ability to more easily I.D. "bad guys" (and "gals") with a (very) high level of confidence is compelling. But Scientia potentia est, and I don't believe that the government is here to help me.
Definitions have become subject to flexibility and "context" as re-Tweeted and "liked" on FB. This is much more than annoying.
#10
Imagine if Obama/Hillary had access to Trump's DNA and just decided to quietly make him sick and die before the election. It's quiet believable after what we have currently seen with deep state and the FBI.
[Townhall] Police departments across the nation have been struggling to convince communities they protect that deadly use of force is not unduly influenced by race through the Trayvon Martin "stand your ground" shooting, the days of protests in Ferguson, MO., and possibly even as far back as the LA riots that followed the arrest of Rodney King in 1991.
The latest push to scale back the ability of officers to employ deadly force comes from New Hampshire where a new bill is expected to be voted on this month that could revoke officers’ right to use deadly force during arrests.
In Washington state, Community Police Commissions have been set up for some time to police the police, as it were. They have stirred controversy by attempting to change the legal definition of "deadly use of force" to make it easier to prosecute officers who find themselves faced with circumstances where they had to use it.
Police departments have pushed back on these efforts, saying they will make it much harder for officers to do their jobs effectively and may unnecessarily put them in harm’s way. In a 2018 Pew Study of 8,000 officers, 86 percent said they believe the public "does not understand the risks and challenges of their jobs, even though 83 percent of U.S. adults rated officers’ jobs as very risky."
It’s these misunderstandings that Bryan Patterson and Bruce Thayer of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF)in Virginia hope to address with a use of force simulator program they offer to journalists and community members interested in knowing the kind of pressure and intense decision-making officers face when put into potentially life-threatening situations.
The mission of LELDF, according to their website, is to "support and defend the law enforcement profession and those law enforcement officers who have devoted their lives to upholding the Constitution and serving the United States and its citizens while enforcing its laws. We also seek to educate the public about the many risks and threats to law enforcement personnel in order to build a more informed, respectful, and appreciative society."
#2
Make every weasel politician go through 10 live simmuntion deadly force scenarios that include physical violence. Oh...you have to get all 10 right before yo can vote on this.
Posted by: Bangkok Billy ||
01/24/2019 8:36 Comments ||
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#3
It's all about 'entitlement class' exemption from the blue eyed devil's rule of law. Western culture must adapt to tribal culture. Why can we not get with the program ?
[Fortune] It’s just after 6, on a pitch-dark morning in December, and Brendan Kennedy is standing over the stove, wearing shorts and a vest, meditatively melting butter in a pancake pan. It will be nearly two hours before the sun cracks the Seattle sky, and Kennedy, toddler son in tow, already has the pensive look of a man trying hard to keep the creep of the workday ahead from encroaching on a family ritual.
See, morning is a sacred time for the 46-year-old CEO, who has two rules for starting the day: Always eat breakfast. Don’t eat with anybody but your kids. Though abiding by rule No. 2 means eating alone, if he’s on the road‐which is a lot these days, particularly since Kennedy’s company, Tilray, went public in July. In a couple of hours he’ll board his 135th flight of the year‐a stat he can tell you because his assistant, knowing how he relishes data, sends him monthly analytics on his own travel (in 2018, he flew 23% more miles than he did the year before). At the moment, though, his 4-year-old daughter, in a pink tutu, is stirring the batter skeptically from her perch atop the kitchen island. "Papa, I think you forgot the flour," she chides. Kennedy’s family moved into the new house a few weeks after Tilray went public, and he still struggles to find things in his own kitchen. He shrugs as he begins scrambling eggs and frying bacon in another pan: "My kids say pancakes are the only thing I’m good at."
[CH] While Switzerland isn't the place to go if you want tropical beaches, wide-open spaces or intense political drama, it has enough more than enough going for it to be named the 'best country' in the world, according to a new survey.
For the third year running, Switzerland has come out top in the annual Best Countries rankings which looks at people's perceptions of 80 countries around the world.
The rankings are a joint project by digital news service US News & World Report, marketing company Y&R and the Wharton School, a business school at the University of Pennsylvania.
The 2019 rankings were based on a survey of just over 20,000 people comprising business leaders, ’informed elites' and the general public in 36 countries.
According to the makers of the survey, the Best Countries project is designed to help citizens, business leaders and policymakers better understand how their nations are perceived on a world scale.
Japan came in second place in the 2019 edition (up three places from last year), while Canada came third. The top ten in the 2019 rankings was rounded out by Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, the United States, Norway and France.
Switzerland scored particularly well on metrics related to ease of doing business, quality of life and leadership in innovation.
It achieved a perfect ten out of ten for both economic stability and political stability while the public health system scored 9.7 out of ten points ‐ despite ongoing public debate over the soaring costs of compulsory health insurance premiums.
The education system was also marked highly by survey respondents, while the country got a score of 8.1 in terms of family friendliness.
In addition, Switzerland notched up full marks for access to capital and for its legal framework.
Warning...potential satire.
[The Onion] NEW YORK‐As part of its effort to provide the most comprehensive reporting possible on the freshman congresswoman, Fox News announced Wednesday the debut of a new premium television channel that will offer continuous, around-the-clock updates on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). "For an extra $8.99 per month, you’ll have an all-access pass to the AOC Zone, which features wall-to-wall coverage of every word Ocasio-Cortez utters, as well as in-depth analysis of her wardrobe and any videos we’re able to dig up from her college days," said Fox spokesperson Avery Mattison, adding that the new channel will include uninterrupted live footage of the 29-year-old representative every time she appears in public, along with nonstop commentary from a 12-person panel of experts. "We know our viewers will come to depend on this outlet for 24-hour coverage of AOC, which is why her tweets, Instagram posts, and her latest wacky policy proposals will appear in a ticker at the bottom of the screen. We’re particularly excited for the premiere of the channel’s flagship program, AOC Tonight With Tucker Carlson." Minutes after AOC Zone began broadcasting, sources confirmed its ratings had already surpassed those of Fox News.
[The Hill] Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in a new interview with Bloomberg News opened up about her past experiences with assault, alleging she experienced attacks at the hands of her ex-husband and a boyfriend in college.
Ernst during the interview addressed the allegations, publicized this week in court documents, that her husband physically assaulted her during an argument years ago.
The Iowa Republican, a prominent ally of President Trump, also during the interview said that she was raped by an abusive ex-boyfriend in college at Iowa state University.
Ernst told the outlet that her unnamed boyfriend in college was "physically and sexually abusive." She said that he raped her at his home one night, and then later threatened to kill himself if she broke up with him.
[Private Papers] Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, "It depends on the president," let us imagine the following scenario.
Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against the overseas old-hand, decorated veteran, and national icon John McCain‐a bipartisan favorite in Washington, D.C.
During the campaign, unfounded rumors had swirled about the rookie Obama that he might ease sanctions on Iran, distance the United States from Israel, and alienate the moderate Arab regimes, such as the Gulf monarchies and Egypt.
Stories also abounded that the Los Angeles Times had suppressed the release of a supposedly explosive "Khalidi tape," in which Obama purportedly thanked the radical Rashid Khalidi for schooling him on the Middle East and correcting his earlier biases and blind spots, while praising the Palestinian activist for his support for armed resistance against Israel.
#2
FBI run the country? That did not go so well when they tried. Absolutely not--unless you want a police state such as the former East German Stasi. Moreover, unelected members of bureaucratic agencies should not be allowed to abuse their power by weaponizing their agency Americans (e.g. IRS, BLM, EPA, DOJ and others).
[National Review] Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump.
Like almost all of Mueller’s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against Veselnitskaya had nothing to do with his original mandate of finding any possible Trump‐Russia collusion. No matter; within minutes, Veselnitskaya’s name was injected into the media cycle as if the fact that she was Russian and connected to the name Mueller were de facto proof that Trump was guilty of something ‐ if not collusion, something worse.
If Mueller was not a special counsel, and if he was not looking for anyone deemed useful to flip to find dirt on Donald Trump, then Veselnitskaya would have been just another daily Washington foreign influence-peddler being courted with impunity by her American influence-peddling and often equally suspect counterparts.
To date, in almost every one of his indictments of Americans, Mueller has gone after Trump staffers, often quite minor, for alleged crimes that either were committed well before Mueller began his investigations, or came as a result of plea bargaining in exchange for providing expected dirt on Trump, or were the result of government surveillance or the use of government informants, or all of that and more. And all that sensationalism, through leaks and insinuations, was packaged by the media as "bombshells" and "watersheds" and "turning points" ad nauseam for 20 months.
When Mueller indicted and obtained a confession from Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, it followed from an elaborate perjury ambush set up by the now fired, ethically conflicted, disgraced, and perhaps soon to be indicted deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McCabe sent the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced agent Peter Strzok to interview Flynn ‐ a process overseen by the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced James Comey. And even then, Mueller seemed to be the beneficiary of leaks from someone in the Department of Justice who sent to the media elements of surveillance transcripts of Flynn’s conversations.
#1
VDH Conclusion: In America, there is still an idea of equality under the law. But Mueller has taught us that whether you go to jail for perjury, illegal leaking, lying to federal investigators, destroying key evidence, obstructing a federal court, or trying, as a foreign citizen, to warp the outcome of a U.S. presidential election, all depend entirely on the particular agendas of a particular prosecutor, not the law per se.
[Live Science] Our bones may be filled with previously undiscovered networks of microscopic tunnels, a new study finds.
These tiny tunnels ‐ spotted in lab mice and traces of it in one inquisitive researcher ‐ may be vital for transporting immune cells out of bones, where they are made.
In the study, researchers found hundreds of previously unknown capillaries ‐ the tiniest blood vessels in the body ‐ in the leg bones of mice. The discovery of something in mice, however, doesn't necessarily mean it exists in humans, and there can often be a long period between an animal discovery and confirmation of the findings in humans.
Not so in this case: One of the (human) researchers decided to jump-start the human studies, so he stuck his leg in an MRI machine and spotted evidence that the tiny bone tunnels might also exist in humans.
#2
Not so long ago peptic ulcer disease was thought to be due only to excess acid production in the upper gut. Now it is treated as an infectious disease.
Satire warning
[Babylon Bee] TALLAHASSEE, FL‐Local mother Tiffany Johnson confirmed Wednesday that she immediately regretted asking for parenting advice on Facebook after her newborn baby developed a cough.
The woman requesting advice for treating a sick infant was immediately inundated with MLM sales pitches, passive-aggressive comments, and rants about "big pharma."
"What was I thinking?" she muttered to herself as a friend from church posted a lengthy rant on "gut toxicity." "I've made a huge mistake."
Johnson scrolled through the 57 comments that had been posted so far, wondering why she had ever assumed that the internet would be a good place to seek out information. From judgmental comments suggesting she wasn't a good mother for not using the exact same method that someone else said worked for them to off-topic diatribes about pesticides in our food supply, every comment confirmed that Johnson had done the exact wrong thing by going to Facebook for advice.
"You know what? Next time I'm just gonna call the doctor," she muttered, shaking her head.
At publishing time, the mother had posted that she didn't need any more input, prompting her friends and family to suggest seventeen more surefire remedies to help her daughter.
#1
Not really satire. I have read many real FB posts along these very lines. FB is the incarnation of the old joke about a billion monkeys using a billion typewriters to somehow duplicate the works of Shakespeare.
#2
I was afraid that this was going to be a real story about a woman who asked for parenting help and then had her child seized by CPS because she "couldn't cope".
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
01/24/2019 12:49 Comments ||
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A human 'heartbeat' really isn't proof of life after all ?
[Breitbart] A state judge struck down an Iowa law that banned all abortions from the time a fetal heartbeat could be detected ‐ at about six weeks of pregnancy.
Polk County District Court Judge Michael Huppert said the law was unconstitutional and would not be compliant with the Iowa Supreme Court’s earlier decisions that affirm a woman’s right to abortion.
In his opinion released Tuesday, Huppert wrote the heartbeat law’s "narrow amount of time afforded [to] women" to have an abortion was not consistent with a "fundamental right," as the state Supreme Court had ruled.
[American Thinker] Real women know how to handle toxic masculinity without feminist and radical lawyers organizing silly marches wearing pink pussy hats. Real women were laughing at these so-called well-educated females who marched with disdain against the newly elected president whom many real women voted for. Under the banner of women’s rights many young women are marching in ignorance of history. Women’s rights were secured by real women in the 20th century. The rights that today’s feminists are fighting for are sheer evil; the rights to kill innocent full term unborn babies.
Looking over the vulgar signs at the women’s marches across the nation and comparing them with the life affirming uplifting signs at the right to life march was not only illuminating but downright depressing. The women’s march had a young pre-teen girl holding a sign that read, "Pussy grabs back" while grinning as if she knew what that sign meant. At the RTL march, a young girl around the same age held a sign that read, "My cousin has Down’s syndrome. He is perfect in God’s eyes and mine."
I asked my millennial daughter what she thought of the women’s marches and she answered, "They are so dumb. You can’t call them ’the women’s march’ if they don’t allow all women to march." Everything about the women’s marches, the signs, the speeches are all fake. They espouse the pro-choice mandate but they only accept the choices that meet their agenda. God forbid a woman chooses to stay at home and raise her children, to oppose abortion or regard marriage as a sacrament between a man and woman. If a woman chooses to be Jewish and support Israel, she will not be welcomed at these left wing events.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[The Hill] Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in a new interview with Bloomberg News opened up about her past experiences with assault, alleging she experienced attacks at the hands of her ex-husband and a boyfriend in college.
