Can You Have Human Dignity without Christianity?

From Nathaniel Peters on The Public Discourse.com (Jan. 20):

When Christianity enters a society, it provides an understanding of inherent and equal human dignity that lifts up those whom that society has considered unworthy. But what happens when Christianity recedes? Christian human dignity is not founded on maximizing fairness or autonomy, but on the fact that all human beings are made free and in the image of God. If it becomes detached from that principle, then human dignity no longer makes sense.

Friedreich Nietzsche shows us that the real, intellectually consistent alternative to the Christian view of ethics and anthropology is not warm and comfortable secular liberalism, but something much more terrible and dangerous. In his essay “The Greek State,” Nietzsche writes: “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labor, are the needy products of slavedom hiding from itself. . . . ‘Man in himself,’ the absolute man possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties.” Last summer, a few days before my son was born, The Philosophers Magazine tweeted a similar if less dramatically phrased quotation from the Australian philosopher Peter Singer: “The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.” This is correct—albeit a poor use of the adjective medieval to mean archaic, backward, and obviously wrong to enlightened people. But Singer could have been more historically precise had he said, “The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is patristic.”

This is effectively Nietzsche’s point as well: the concept of human dignity is a relic of Christianity, a fragment of that revolt of slave morality that toppled pagan religion and dramatically changed our view of humanity. Nietzsche and Singer are right: Christianity introduced for the first time the idea of human dignity, which I define as the idea that all human beings are in some way special or worthy of respect simply because they are human beings and irrespective of their particular merits or abilities. Human dignity comes out of the teachings of Jesus and the encounter between Christians and the pagan world.

Of course, the concept of human dignity develops extensively in Kant and Enlightenment philosophy, and human dignity as we most fully understand the concept today was not present in the patristic era. But it behooves us to examine some of the important early Christian texts about human dignity, especially as interpreted by the classicist Kyle Harper and the New Testament scholar C. Kavin Rowe, before considering lessons for living in a time that many describe as being newly pagan or post-Christian. If human dignity is a Christian concept, what happens to it after Christianity?

Christianity and the Classical World

That question gains an edge when we remember that, as Harper has noted, “none of the classical political regimes, nor any of the classical philosophical schools, regarded human beings as universally free and incomparably worthy creatures. Classical civilization, in short, lacked the concept of human dignity.” Aristotle famously believed that some human beings were destined to slavery by nature and lacked the moral reason necessary for flourishing as free agents. Some have pointed to Cicero’s De officiis, where he writes that “if we consider what dignitas and excellence there is in nature, we will realize that it is disgraceful to revel in luxury and to live a soft and dissolute life.” But, Harper argues, this is more a statement of moral egalitarianism that all human beings have reason and therefore moral personhood than an imputation of dignitas or worthiness to every human being. It is an exhortation to live a moral life, not a statement that all human lives have equal inherent worth.

Christianity’s teaching about human nature emerged in the classical world without precedent. As Rowe puts it, it was one of the “surprises” that this new movement brought into the world. This teaching grew out of the Jewish understanding that the Jewish people reflected the God of Israel and the life he desired for and with human beings. The New Testament revealed that it is the person of Jesus of Nazareth himself who is the Imago Dei, in two senses. Jesus is called “Lord,” just as God is, and the Son of God, the refulgence of the Father’s glory visible to us. He is also the New Adam, the one who in his person shows us what it truly means to be human.

The early Christians and the New Testament took the logic one step further: If Christ reveals what it means to be human being, then when you encounter another human being, no matter his status or background or creed, you are encountering Christ. We see this in Jesus’s words about the judgment of the nations in Matthew 25, which we tend to hear as an exhortation to love Christ through the corporal works of mercy: “Whenever you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” Rowe notes, however, that the parable turns on a contradiction. The Son of Man comes to judge the world as a king, and we know that kings are majestic, not lowly. The image of a king in majesty is one that is seen throughout the kingdom, on its coinage and in public proclamations and monuments. In an important sense, you treat the image as you would the king, with reverence and respect. Yet this king, Jesus, says that the poor and destitute are representations of him. When you see them, you see the king and should treat them as one would treat him. In other words, all people have dignity because they are made in the image of God, which is the image of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus. The Christian roots of human dignity are therefore both broad and Christological. In Rowe’s words, “because Jesus Christ is the human, every human is Jesus Christ.”

As this understanding of human dignity encountered the pagan world, it called for radical reforms of familiar social institutions and the creation of new and unprecedented ones. Harper argues that three of the most important points of encounter were slavery, sexual coercion, and care for the poor and the sick. [read more]

You Have a Social Credit Score, and You Don't Even Know It

From Red State.com (Feb. 10):

Have you heard of China’s “social credit” system? Of course, you have, and most people react with revulsion. Only totalitarian states would rank their citizens based on “social credit” – right?

Since 2014, the CCP has been building a system that keeps track of everyone under its umbrella and ranks people like cattle at an auction. You are good or you are bad.

Toe the party line and be rewarded. Step over the line, and you will be punished.

The CCP says:

“Keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful” 

Citizens who have had their social rating downgraded will be punished.

China’s “National Development and Reform Commission” (NDRC) and Chinese financial institutions like the People’s Bank of China are largely to blame. They monitor you with cameras, spyware, where you go – what you buy and when.

Yeah, that’s Communist China, that’s not going to happen here. Well, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and a dozen other financial institutions say “Hold my copy of 1984.”

A system called ESG is a darling of banks like Citigroup, TD Bank Financial Group, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America to name but a few. ESG is the acronym for Environmental, Social, and Governance.

Banks have been applying ESG scoring to evaluate investments and to determine risk. One would assume that applying ESG scoring would eliminate investing in totalitarian states like China but alas, banks generally leave their social consciousness at home when it comes to China.

If banks want to “judge” investments based on environmental, social, or governance, who are we to complain, but ESG isn’t just used by banks — you have an “ESG” score.

Have a bank account? Chances are you can find your “ESG” score somewhere on your account.

This isn’t new it’s just been hovering under the radar. According to “Impact Investor” whatever you do, including who you vote for affects your ESG score and soon, that score might make the difference if your bank grants you a loan.

Here’s what Impact Investor says about ESG

“ESG scores take a lot of information into account when it comes to commercial and industrial entities. On a personal level, just as much information is used to create a picture of who you are and how your personal actions influence the world around you.

Buying a gun, alcohol, or even clothing will all affect your overall ESG score. Not only will your purchases matter, but who you purchase from and how they do business.

Your political affiliations also factor into your personal ESG score. Aside from the politics in governance, the party you support and even the person you vote for will make your score go up or down based on that person’s actions, policies, and voting habits.

The type of car you drive, how often, and even how many people are in the car when you drive will also come into play when deciding your score.”

Bank Guy:

“Gosh Mr. Average Guy, I wish I could give you the loan, but your ESG score is really low. You bought a lot of meat and booze for a Super Bowl party and you’re a registered Republican? Geez, guy. Oh and, I see – last week you bought a gas-powered leaf blower? Woof. Suuuuper bad. Look eat some kale and yogurt for a couple of months and register as a ‘Green Party” member. Come back in 6 months… K?”

Worried? [source]

More info on ESG:

• ESG Hurts
• ESG and Corporate Totalitarianism
• High ESG Scores Foreshadow Economic Decline
• How does ESG stack up against biblically responsible investing?
• Is Following ESG Criteria Breaking the Law?

A Color Map of the Fronts of World War III

From American Thinker.com (Feb. 10):

Almost forty years ago, KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov warned of an assault on the West via leftist ideological subversion.  Borrowing from a classic Sesame Street routine, he asked American leaders to unplug the bananas from their ears.  Few heard him.  So, our enemies have been able to erode respect for the sacred ideals of the West -- individual rights, free enterprise, law and order, national sovereignty, and limited government. They have enmeshed us in a non-kinetic World War III.  Most citizens of democratic societies don’t even realize it’s taking place.

Over the decades, the fronts in this invisible war have multiplied.  This is in keeping with Unrestricted Warfare, a 1999 book on strategy by two Chinese air force colonels that updated Sun Tzu’s maxims on overwhelming the enemy with a profusion of strategies and fronts.  Among those identifying with Americans is Kenneth Abramowitz, founder of a remarkable organization called Save The West and author of The Multifront War: Defending America from Political Islam, China, Russia, Pandemics and Racial Strife.  America is up against a protean enemy of criminal intent and is unprepared to fight in any meaningful, unified way, he says.  By color-coding the enemies, he has illuminated the multitudinous perils we face.

According to Abramowitz, the chief enemies within are the Reds, the Greens, and the Blues.  Together, they fight against the Yellows, representing the sunlight of Western civilization, founded on the 3,800-year-old Judeo-Christian traditions and the 250-year-old tradition of secular, constitutional law.  The Reds are the communists -- China, Russia, North Korea, and the American Left.  The Greens are the Islamists -- Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and hundreds of Islamist groups around the world.  The Blues, named for the color of the United Nations, are the globalists -- the WHO, the International Criminal Court, NGOs, and multinational corporations like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.  Sacrificing American values, they have adopted Chinese morality to pursue profit in the huge market that is communist China.

Abramowitz identifies a fourth, passive enemy -- the Whites (named for the flag of surrender).  He also calls them the isolationists, average citizens who live their lives and do their jobs but do not engage with the issues du jour, believing they are immune to political winds and potential threats.  They unwittingly aid and abet the Reds, Greens, and Blues.

The Reds, the Greens, and the Blues have infiltrated Western societies and gained substantial influence and control over politicians, institutions, the media, and Big Tech.  Abramowitz says they operate in six arenas -- physical, cultural, economic, demographic, legal, and cyber.

Physical warfare, although kinetic, does not always involve combat.  It includes the stealthy use of biological and chemical weapons – for example, pathogens such as anthrax and the coronavirus, and addictive substances like the opioid fentanyl, whose trafficking into the U.S. from Mexico resulted in 100,000 American deaths last year. 

Cultural warfare constitutes the framing of narratives that engender fear and doubt and destroy societal norms.  Some of these narratives aim to suppress certain kinds of speech while redefining, neutralizing, and weaponizing other kinds -- like in ‘newspeak’ from Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.  Such narratives are propagated by a growing army of operatives in academia, the media, the educational system, and organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. 

Academia -- chiefly leftist humanities departments in universities -- has been most effective in recruiting and training that army by indoctrinating impressionable young students with Critical Race Theory (CRT), the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) paradigm, and fallacious theories of gender fluidity.  Hypnotized by vague but thrilling theories, their youthful idealism hijacked by specious arguments, they begin to nurse messianic notions.  On graduating, they eagerly join in the revision of national history and the calumniation of religious and ethical principles. [read more]

Think you have schizophrenia? A simple blood test can answer

From J Post.com (July 18):

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center have discovered that brain cells die in a psychotic attack and a simple blood test could make it possible to predict such an event and treat it.

Groundbreaking biological marker for psychosis

The groundbreaking discovery allowed researchers to identify significant brain damage during a psychotic attack, such as in a schizophrenic episode, when they compared the patients to healthy subjects. This is the first time a biological marker for psychosis has ever been found. The test could lead to early detection, diagnosis, early intervention and appropriate treatment for schizophrenia.

This first brain research of its kind was led by Dr. Asael Lubotzky, a senior pediatrician in Shaare Zedek’s Neuropediatric Unit, as part of a doctoral dissertation supervised by two researchers from Hebrew University’s Faculty of Medicine – Prof. Yuval Dor and Prof. Ruth Shemer – and in collaboration with psychiatrists from the Eitanim Mental Health Center – Dr. Ilana Pelov and Prof. Yoav Cohen.

The article has just been published in the journal eLife under the title “Elevated brain-derived cell-free DNA among patients with first psychotic episode – a proof-of-concept study.”

Helping schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a common, severe and debilitating psychiatric disorder. Despite extensive research, no biological markers have ever been discovered that can aid in its diagnosis and prediction of its course. This makes early detection and intervention impossible, they wrote.

Psychosis is the first presentation of schizophrenia that usually leads to the diagnosis. Although psychosis typically begins during adolescence and young adulthood, there is a growing amount of data that show underlying biological changes beginning years before symptoms of psychosis. Thus, identifying biomarkers that will allow early diagnosis and therapeutic interventions is of the highest importance.

“Imaging studies suggest brain volume loss around the onset and over the first few years of schizophrenia, and apoptosis [cell death] has been proposed as the underlying mechanism. Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) fragments are released into the bloodstream following cell death. Tissue-specific methylation patterns allow the identification of the tissue origins of cfDNA,” the study’s authors wrote.

“We developed a cocktail of brain-specific DNA methylation markers biochemical process where a DNA base, usually cytosine, is enzymatically methylated at the 5-carbon position. An epigenetic modification associated with gene regulation, DNA methylation is of paramount importance to biological health and disease.”

In the course of life, aging processes, environmental influences and lifestyle factors such as smoking or poor diet induce biochemical changes in the DNA. Frequently, these lead to DNA methylation, a process in which methyl groups are added to particular DNA segments, without changing the DNA sequence. Potential interpretations of these findings include increased brain cell death, disruption of the blood-brain barrier or a defect in clearance of material from dying brain cells. Brain-specific cfDNA methylation markers can potentially assist early detection and monitoring of schizophrenia and thus allow early intervention and adequate therapy. [read more]

Paper: Plants Create Their Own Pain Medicine When Stressed

From Daily Wire.com (July 18):

New research from a California university shows that plants create salicylic acid, also known as aspirin, when faced with environmental stress.

Scientists at the University of California Riverside have published a paper that studied the effects of excessive heat and other factors on the model plant Arabidopsis. The paper found that environmental stress triggers the creation of a molecule called MEcPP, which in turn signals the plant to start creating aspirin when a certain level of MEcPP is reached.

“It’s like plants use a painkiller for aches and pains, just like we do,” Wilhelmina van de Ven, a UCR plant biologist who worked on the paper, said of thing findings.

Researchers added that the process could protect plants against a changing climate.

“Because salicylic acid helps plants withstand stresses becoming more prevalent with climate change, being able to increase plants’ ability to produce it represents a step forward in challenging the impacts of climate change on everyday life,” Katayoon Dehesh, senior paper author and UCR distinguished professor of molecular biochemistry remarked.

“Those impacts go beyond our food. Plants clean our air by sequestering carbon dioxide, offer us shade, and provide habitat for numerous animals. The benefits of boosting their survival are exponential,” she explained.

The findings could potentially be used to modify plants for a better harvest, researchers claim.

“We’d like to be able to use the gained knowledge to improve crop resistance,” Jin-Zheng Wang, UCR plant geneticist and co-first author of the paper said. “That will be crucial for the food supply in our increasingly hot, bright world.”

The UCR research is not the first data to indicate that plants create their own aspirin.

In 2008, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research released a paper showing similar findings.

“Unlike humans, who are advised to take aspirin as a fever suppressant, plants have the ability to produce their own mix of aspirin-like chemicals, triggering the formation of proteins that boost their biochemical defenses and reduce injury,” NCAR scientist Thomas Karl in charge of the study said at the time.

“Our measurements show that significant amounts of the chemical can be detected in the atmosphere as plants respond to drought, unseasonable temperatures, or other stresses,” he added. [source]

Truth and Discernment for This Cultural Moment

From John Stonestreet on Breakpoint.org (Jan. 14):

An old Chinese proverb says that if you want to know what water is, don’t ask the fish. Why shouldn’t we ask the fish about water? I asked that question to a group of high schoolers years ago, and they replied, “because fish can’t talk?” 

No, you don’t ask fish about water because fish don’t even know they’re wet. Fish don’t know anything other than the water.

Culture is to humans what water is to fish. It is the air we breathe, the environment we think is normal. Because of this, we often forget that culture could be different than it is unless we travel to another culture or take note of a cultural change. That means we tend to accept culture as it is, rather than asking whether culture is good or bad.

That’s why it’s so important that Christians find ways to step out of culture from time to time, to intentionally look at and evaluate our cultural moment. So often we get distracted by the noisier stuff in our culture and lose sight of what’s important. But, as Brett Kunkle and I discuss in our book A Practical Guide to Culture, the louder parts of our culture are rarely the most important parts of our culture.

In recent years, our cultural moment has become more and more relentless. We are pounded by issue after issue, such as addiction, the rise in suicidal ideation, the ever-growing list of identities and acronyms, and the onslaught of social media dominating every moment of every day. The issues are like pounding waves. They seem endless, and we feel them.

However, there are also aspects of culture that we don’t feel. Like the ocean, in addition to the waves we see and feel, there are undercurrents we barely notice until they sweep us out to sea. These currents lurk beneath the surface, dramatically altering the landscape of our culture.

One of the most significant cultural undercurrents is what historians and scholars call “the age of information.” We live in a noisy world that is saturated with content. Today, you will likely encounter more information than someone who lived hundreds of years ago would have seen in their entire lifetime. The sheer amount of information available to us is stunning and historically unprecedented.

Information is not neutral. Information carries and communicates ideas. These ideas may be true or false, but they are not neutral. Ideas matter. Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.

In other words, the age of information is also the age of ideas. Ideas have a source. This means we also live in an age of competing authorities.

Certain existential questions become more important in certain cultural moments. One of the most significant questions that has emerged in our moment is, “who can I trust?” This is no small question. How can we glean the good when there are so many bad ideas floating around?

The obvious reaction to the age of information is to think that what we need is truth. And, of course, we need truth. But, if true information is added to a sea of information, it can easily get lost, part of the white noise we experience on a daily basis.

The Apostle Paul’s prayer for the church at Philippi is one we need to claim as our own in this cultural moment. Paul prayed for this church that “their love would abound more and more in truth and in all discernment.” We need truth, and we need the skills to navigate all of the ideas, the competing authorities, and the information of this moment. The word for that is discernment, the ability to distinguish between what is true and false, what is genuine and counterfeit, what is good and what is evil. [read more]

Dr. Zelenko: 'We could have ended pandemic long ago'

From WND.com (Feb. 8):

When Upstate New York physician Dr. Vladimir "Zev" Zelenko drew the attention of President Trump back in the spring of 2020 with a simple protocol of cheap, proven, widely available drugs for COVID-19 that included hydroxychloroquine, he had successfully treated more more than 350 patients, with only one needing hospitalization.

Nearly two years later, amid continued government and media suppression of early treatments, Zelenko told WND in a video interview that he and his team have administered what is now know as the Zelenko Protocol to more than 7,000 COVID patients, with only three deaths.

Moreover, his cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, the popular antibiotic azithromycin and zinc sulfate – along with other combinations of drugs, such as ivermectin – has been adopted by more than 1,000 physicians around the world, along with America's Frontline Doctors.

Among them are Dr. George Fareed, a former professor of virology at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Brian Tyson. Since April 2020, they collectively have treated more than 7,000 COVID-19 patients in California's Imperial Valley, with only a few deaths. And no patient died who was treated within the first seven days.

Zelenko has explained that the key virus killer is zinc, which has a known antiviral effect, and it's drugs like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and quercetin that  "open the door to the cell and let the zinc in."

Since the spring of 2020, he also has been using blood thinners, steroids, monoclonal antibodies and other treatments, but he said he has never changed his messaging since making his appeal to President Trump.

And now he has developed an over-the-counter formulation to treat COVID-19 called Z-Stack that contains zinc, quercetin, vitamin D and vitamin C.

The objective, he said, always has been to prevent a COVID-19 infection from progressing to the catastrophic lung injury called acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, which requires hospitalization and often a ventilator. He found early on that more than 80% of the people with COVID who were put on a respirator were dying. His protocols don't treat ARDS, but they can keep people from ever developing it.

His approach has been to identify high-risk COVID patients, start treatment immediately with an antiviral and anti-inflammatory combination and tailor the treatment to each patient.

In the video interview with WND, Zelenko tells the story of how he appealed to President Trump in a video and 16 hours later received a phone call from Mark Meadows, who was preparing to become the White House chief of staff.

"You can't make this stuff up. I wouldn't believe it, but it happened to me," he said.

Zelenko then did a podcast interview with Rudy Giuliani, then the president's personal lawyer, that went viral.

"And my life has never been the same since," he said.

Zelenko since has published a peer-reviewed paper of his data showing an 84% reduction in hospitalization of high-risk patients with his out-patient treatment. Teaming with Prof. Martin Scholz of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany and Dr. Roland Derwand of Munich, Germany, the paper was published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.

In the early spring of 2020, in contrast to his current stance, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci was amenable to treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine before it became known as "the Trump drug."

Fauci was asked in a March 2020 interview with Philadelphia talk-host Chris Stigall whether or not he would prescribe hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

"Yeah, of course, particularly if people have no other option. You want to give them hope," said Fauci, the director the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "In fact, for physicians in this country, these drugs are approved drugs for other reasons. They're anti-malaria drugs and they're drugs against certain autoimmune diseases, like lupus."

WND asked Zelenko what he thinks has happened in the meantime.

"Well, in the meantime 850,000 Americans are dead, and we could have prevented probably 730,000 of them from even going to the hospital and ended this pandemic globally," he replied, alluding to the finding of his paper. "That's what happened."

Prominent medical scientists such as epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch of the Yale School of Medicine also have concluded that many lives could have been saved with early treatment.

Eventually, Fauci was regularly contradicting the president regarding hydroxychloroquine. And the FDA, in June 2020, removed emergency use authorization for the distribution of hydroxychloroquine from Strategic National Stockpile, based on "new information." But the decision largely relied on a study published by The Lancet that was embarrassingly retracted by its authors because of faulty data, as WND reported at the time. Later that year, Risch, Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Peter McCullough testified to the U.S. Senate that hydroxychloroquine was being misrepresented in studies and used as a political weapon.

Zelenko pointed to a published paper posted on the National Institutes of Health website in 2005 showing the antiviral properties of chloroquine against SARS is on the level of a vaccine. Hydroxychloroquine is a less toxic analogue of chloroquine. An October 2020 paper posted on the NIH website that reviewed published studies found hydroxychloroquine "is effective, and consistently so when provided early, for COVID-19." A real-time analysis, which to date has assessed 283 peer-reviewed studies, has come to the same conclusion.

"[But] the NIH today recommends not treating COVID unless you're in the hospital with lung damage," Zelenko said. "Really?"

A 'foot and a half in the grave'
A once-irreligious Jew who was born in Kiev, Ukraine, Zelenko became an observant member of the 30,000-strong Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel in Monroe, New York, in the Hudson Valley, about 50 miles north of New York City.

In 2018, Zelenko was diagnosed with pulmonary artery sarcoma, which has a 100% mortality rate. He had open heart surgery and lost his right lung then had very difficult chemotherapy treatment. Since 2020, he's had another surgery and more chemotherapy.

He noted there are only about 10 cases in the world a year of that disease, and they all end with an autopsy.

Zelenko believes that after having a "foot and a half in the grave,"  God spared him for a purpose.

In a March 2020 interview with WND, he summed it up: "My purpose in life has really become to try to relieve pain and suffering. Not to think about myself."

But Zelenko didn’t stop. He kept researching and working – and discovered a way to help people with an over-the-counter solution he calls Z-Stack.

“Z-Stack was a gift from God in response to tyranny,” says Zelenko. “The ghoul Cuomo, who killed 20,000 nursing home residents in the state of New York, blocked access for my patients to hydroxychloroquine. He took away my ability to deliver zinc inside the cells … to inhibit viral replication. So I was forced to innovate. … I learned about quercetin, which is available over the counter. I realized, ‘Oh my God, I just found the cure, not for COVID, but for tyranny.’

“So, Z-Stack was in response to oppression. It was in response to government overreach and getting in the middle of the sacred relationship between the doctor and the patient.

Z-Stack contains Dr. Zelenko’s special formulation of zinc, quercetin, vitamin D and vitamin C, is GMP-certified, and is proudly made in the USA. [source]

Capitol Police Caught Spying in Republican Congressional Office, Investigation Launched

From Red State.com (Feb. 8):

In late January, news broke of multiple instances of the Capitol Police appearing to spy on Republican congressional members. Those actions followed the rank politicization of the force that took place after January 6th, including the expansion of its intelligence-gathering mission in areas that are, at best, questionable.

One example involved Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who expressed public outrage, via Politico.

Analysts also were tasked with sifting through tax and real estate records to find out who owned the properties that lawmakers visited. For example, the unit scrutinized a meeting that Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) held with donors in a private home. Analysts eyed the homeowner’s and attendees’ social media accounts, and looked for any foreign contacts they had.

“These reports are incredibly disturbing,” Scott spokesperson McKinley Lewis said in a statement. “It is unthinkable that any government entity would conduct secret investigations to build political dossiers on private Americans. The American people deserve to know what Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi knew and directed, and when. Senator Scott believes the Senate Rules Committee should immediately investigate.”

While vetting of contacts is not necessarily nefarious, it is supposed to be done out in the open and in conjunction with lawmakers. Instead, the Capitol Police have instituted a system that remains in shadows, conveniently only seeming to target Republicans.

Another disturbing example of that has emerged via The Federalist, this time involving Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX). According to a police report filed by a USCP officer, Nehls’ office was entered without permission and his work materials were photographed because they appeared “suspicious.”

In November 2021, a USCP officer entered the congressional office of Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Tex., and took a photo of a whiteboard in Nehls’ legislative office detailing various legislative plans being considered by Nehls and his staff. In a formal police report filed several days after the incident, the officer wrote that he had been conducting a routine security patrol on Saturday, November 21, and discovered that one of the doors to Nehls’ office was open.

The report claimed that the officer entered Nehls’ office and found a whiteboard that contained “suspicious writings mentioning body armor[.]” The officer reportedly took a photo of the whiteboard, which was then passed around to analysts within USCP. The following Monday, USCP dispatched three plain-clothed intelligence officers to Nehls’ office and questioned a staffer who was there about the whiteboard and the legislative proposals it contained.

In reality, the mention of “body armor” on the whiteboard was in relation to a federal contractor in Texas who had committed fraud by supplying Chinese-made body armor instead of U.S.-made body armor.

Further, the police report was purposely filed out of context. The whiteboard contained other legislative issues on it, but they weren’t mentioned by the trespassing officer, making it seem as if Nehls was planning something with body armor. In reality, Nehls, as the former Sheriff of Fort Bend County, was actually drafting legislation to ban the procurement of Chinese-made body armor.

Regardless, the reason behind the intrusion into Nehls’ office is irrelevant. The USCP entered a private area without permission, stole information about what was inside, and then sent officers to hassle staffers afterward about it. That is so far over the line that you can look over your shoulder and still see it.

Nehls responded with the proper amount of indignation at what had occurred.

“If Capitol Police leadership had spent as much time preparing for January 6 as they spent investigating my white board, the January 6 riot never would have happened,” Nehls, a former law enforcement officer, told The Federalist. “When I was a patrol officer responding to a call, I didn’t have the time or authority to go rifling through someone’s personal papers. There are serious 4th Amendment, constitutional issues at play here.”

Now, the USCP Inspector General has opened an investigation into these recent events. Unfortunately, the review is likely being done as a ploy to reinforce the USCP’s actions, given it was requested by Chief J. Thomas Manger. You can imagine that wouldn’t be happening if he didn’t feel the verdict was already predetermined.

When asked about what happened to Nehls, a USCP spokesperson simply pronounced that the sky is green.

“We do not conduct surveillance on Members, their staff, or their offices,” a spokesman for the Capitol Police told The Federalist. “The USCP does not conduct any ‘insider threats’ related surveillance of intelligence gathering on Members, staff, or visitors to the Capitol Complex.”

Yet, that’s exactly what happened. The USCP not only conducted surveillance on Nehls, but they went so far as to enter his office and photograph his private communications. The USCP saying after the fact that they were actually concerned about an outside threat does not add up, nor does it excuse such overreach.

There are a lot of issues riding on the November election, and while this may not be the most important one, it’s one Republicans must take seriously nonetheless. If the USCP can operate this way toward elected officials, imagine how federal law enforcement agencies are treating regular, U.S. citizens?

When GOP retakes the House, one of the first orders of business should be reining in Manger and his “intelligence gathering” operation. [source]

The Capitol Police should not only asked about their spying activities but about their activities during Jan. 6 (like encouraging protestors to go into the Capitol and not stopping them from trespassing, etc.)

More articles on the capitol police:

• The Capitol Police have been fully weaponized against Republicans
• Pelosi says she’s not involved in Capitol Police spying on Republican lawmakers
• Capitol Police Deny Claim That Officers Spy on GOP
• Capitol Police Issue an Unbelievable Statement After Accusations of Spying on Congress

Donald Trump Unveils Free Speech Policy Plan to ‘Shatter Left-Wing Censorship Regime’

From Breitbart.com (Dec. 15):

Former President Donald J. Trump unveiled a free-speech policy platform on Thursday to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime and reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans.”

These plans include revising Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, establishing a cooling-off period requiring former employees of the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies to wait seven years before joining tech companies that have “vast quantities of U.S. user data,” and establishing a “digital bill of rights,” among several other actions.

Trump laid out five steps he plans to take to secure free speech:

First, within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “disinformation.” And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship, directly or indirectly, whether they are the Department of Homeland security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ — no matter who they are.

Second, I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is absolutely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified. These include possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law and anti-trust laws, the Hatch Act and a host of other potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses. To assist in these efforts, I am urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters, and we have to do this right now, to the Biden Administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant, ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship.

Third, upon my inauguration as president I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230, to get big online platforms out of censorship business. From now on, digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and nondiscrimination. We should require these platforms to increase their efforts to take down unlawful content such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism, while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech.

Fourth, we need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so called “mis-” and “disinformation.” The federal government should immediately stop funding all nonprofits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project. If any U.S. university is discovered to have engaged in censorship activities or election interference in the past, such as flagging social media content for removal or blacklisting, those universities should lose federal research dollars and federal student loan support for a period of five years and maybe more.

We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end-run around the constitution and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights — in other words, deprive them of them of their vote. And once you lose those elections, and once you lose your borders like we have, you no longer have a country. Furthermore, to confront the problems of major platforms being infiltrated by legions of former deep staters and intelligence officials, there should be a seven-year cooling off period before any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DOD is allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast quantities of U.S. user data.

Fifth, the time has finally come for Congress to pass a digital bill of rights. This should include a right to digital due process. In other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter. Furthermore, when users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadowbanned, or otherwise restricted no matter what name they use, they should have the right to be informed that it’s happening, the right to a specific explanation of the reason why, and the right to a timely appeal. In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt out of content moderation and curation entirely and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose.

He concluded by calling the “fight for free speech” a “matter of victory or death for America and the survival of Western Civilization itself.”

“When I’m president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large,” he added. “There won’t be anything left.” [source]

Not bad.

FBI and DHS confirm they are buying Chinese drones despite security concerns

From Washington Examiner.com (July 14):

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are purchasing and using Chinese-made drones from a company with close links to the Chinese government, according to testimony from Biden administration officials.

The confirmation about the purchases came the same day that the House approved the National Defense Authorization Act, which did not include a ban on U.S. government agencies from using Chinese drones. The United States considers Chinese government-backed Shenzhen DJI Sciences and Technologies, which commonly goes by DJI, to be a “Chinese Military Industrial Complex” company.

Brad Wiegmann, the deputy assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday that the FBI is buying and making use of drones from DJI. Samantha Vinograd, DHS’s acting assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention and law enforcement policy, was cagier in her responses before the Senate but also confirmed her department was buying and using foreign drones in limited circumstances.

A ban on the purchase and use of Chinese drones by federal agencies was unsuccessfully pushed for by Republicans such as Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the top Republican on House Foreign Affairs Committee. Gallagher’s office said, however, that the version of the NDAA that passed does include “a ban on the use of DJI drones by federal contractors,” such as those working for the Pentagon.

DJI hired two lobbying firms, according to the Financial Times, Squire Patton Boggs and the Vogel Group, to persuade Congress not to back the American Security Drone Act, which would have banned the government from purchasing Chinese drones.

“This is just the latest example of how the CCP uses the swamp against us,” Gallagher told the Washington Examiner. “There is a bipartisan recognition that Congress needs to mitigate threats posed by DJI drones, but these efforts have been undermined by lobbyists who would rather sell out the country than lose a lucrative contract. The threats posed by DJI drones are clear and well-documented, no matter how much the CCP spends on the swamp, and we will continue to work to make sure these devices get nowhere near the federal government.”

The leaders of the Law Enforcement Drone Association, the Drone Service Providers Alliance, and the Airborne Public Safety Association also sent a letter to Congress in June claiming to be worried that bans on Chinese drones “could undermine the use of drones for essential public safety by state, local and federal agencies” and contending that “public safety agencies across the country successfully, safely, and securely use drones manufactured in China.”

At the Senate hearing Thursday, Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) noted that the American Security Drone Act, which was not included in the House’s NDAA, is part of the Senate’s United States Innovation and Competition Act, which he hopes gets adopted by the House.

“I’m very concerned about reports of the purchase by DHS and DOJ law enforcement of Chinese drones and the national security risks that this poses,” Portman said, adding, “DJI has servers in China. They have support from the Chinese government. The Chinese state security services is one of their customers.”

In September 2021, Axios reported that, according to records obtained by IPVM, the Secret Service, which falls under DHS, purchased eight DJI drones in July 2021 and that records on the USA Spending website showed the FBI bought 19 DJI drones the same month.

"Claims that somehow DJI products are transmitting customer data back to China, or to DJI, or anywhere they're not supposed to be ... are just false,” a DJI spokesperson told the outlet. “No one has ever found a deliberate attempt to steal data, or any of the other fantasies promoted by some of our critics. It simply isn't true.”

The FBI procurement records said the bureau’s Evidence Response Team Unit wanted the DJI drones because it “is the only commercially available consumer small unmanned aerial systems to combine all these capabilities at an acceptable cost.”

The Commerce Department added DJI to its blacklist in December 2020, and the Treasury Department designated it as a “Chinese Military-Industrial Complex” company in December 2021, in part because it “has provided drones to the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, which are used to surveil Uyghurs in Xinjiang.” The Xinjiang Public Security Bureau was designated in July 2020 for being responsible for “serious human rights abuse.”

The Pentagon had determined in July 2021 that DJI systems “pose potential threats to national security.”

A DHS intelligence memo in 2017 stated that the Special Agent in Charge Intelligence Program in Los Angeles “assesses with moderate confidence” that DJI is “providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government” and with “high confidence” that it “is selectively targeting government and privately owned entities within these sectors to expand its ability to collect and exploit sensitive U.S. data.” [source]

Not a smart move. So, these agencies couldn’t find American companies (or at least non-ChiCom companies) to make the drones?

Miscellaneous Thoughts Part 46

• The Biden-Harris regime is like morons advising the demented.
• Humor: I like my fried chicken caged and oppressed because it has white privilege.
• For those who don’t believe in truth, try jumping off a cliff. I think gravity would disagree with you.
• Left newspeak: Alternative facts = second opinion.
• Humor: Nancy Pelosi has a high gate around her home so the illegal help can’t escape.
• Biologically, speaking since Jesus is fully human and fully device, that means one-half of his DNA is human (from his mother) and the other half is God’s. Think about it. God had to create his own DNA since God wouldn’t have DNA of his own since He is ethereal.
• President Reagan said trust but verify when it came to dealing with the USSR.  That advice should be applied to the Left, especially to those in power and in the press.
• Abortion used to be safe, legal and rare. Now it’s just safe and legal. The Left doesn’t want the procedure to be rare anymore.
• Instead of saving democracy maybe America should save the Constitution because without the Constitution there will be no democracy.
• So, genetically modified organisms for food is bad, but genetically modified viruses (like the Phizer shot) is good? Does this make any kind of sense?

Biden To Set Free Would-Be 9/11 Hijacker

From Free Beacon.com (Feb. 7):

The Biden administration is slated to set free a would-be 9/11 hijacker who has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for his role in the deadly strike on Americans at the World Trade Center, generating outrage from top Republican lawmakers.

Mohammed al-Qahtani, who planned to hijack planes on Sept. 11, 2001, for al Qaeda but was denied entry into the United States, will be transferred to Saudi Arabia following the Biden administration's decision late last week to set him free. He is scheduled to be flown to Saudi Arabia and placed in a "custodial rehabilitation and mental health care program for extremists," according to the New York Times.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), lead Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, called the Biden administration's decision "an appalling capitulation to the far-left."

"Letting a 9/11 hijacker walk free is an appalling capitulation to the far-left," Rogers said. "On Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people—Mohammed al-Qahtani was supposed to be one of the hijackers that day. He flew to America to participate in the attack and would have succeeded but for sharp-eyed INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] agents. The leader of the 9/11 attacks, Mohamed Atta, was waiting in the airport parking lot to pick up al-Qahtani when he was denied entry to the United States."

Al-Qahtani is one of 39 accused terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Most were freed and transferred to other countries during the Obama administration. Now the Biden administration is following suit as part of a bid by Democrats to shut down the facility. Al-Qahtani is reportedly mentally ill, and the U.S. government admitted in 2008 that he was tortured, complicating efforts to try him at the Cuba-based war court.

While the Biden administration claims al-Qahtani no longer poses a threat, reports from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have shown that terrorists freed by the United States often make their way back to the battlefield. [source]

Dumb. Then again this regime traded a pot smoking basketball player for a Russian arms dealer that killed many Americans. If the Biden regime wants to help Ukraine why make this trade? At least get a two for one trade. That arms dealer is going to help Putin in his war against Ukraine. Why else would Putin want him?

The Inconvenient Truth About Electric Vehicles

From American Thinker.com (Feb. 8):

America may be headed for a new type of energy crisis. While fracking technology still gives us relative energy independence, there is a distinct possibility that an electricity energy crisis awaits us. What if the demand for electricity significantly exceeds the supply over the next decade? We’d have soaring prices and rolling brownouts. That crisis could easily be triggered by the electric vehicles (EVs) Biden’s administration is pushing.

By his Executive Order and an associated Action Plan, Biden’s administration calls for 50% of all new vehicles sold in America by 2030 to be EVs. That means an additional 50 million new EVs on the road in the next nine years, all in an effort to lower Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, namely CO2.

On December 13, 2021, the administration announced its plan to spend $7.5 billion to construct 500,000 EV charging stations throughout the US. The plan’s funding comes from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure & Jobs Act Biden signed on November 15, 2021.

Then, on January 20, President Biden signed Executive Order 13990—Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis. This EO includes a wide range of environmental policies including vehicle fuel economy standards. The scariest of those policies is a set of new regulations from the EPA called SAFE, which stands for The Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Final Rule for Model Years 2021-2026:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalize updated Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and greenhouse gas emissions standards for passenger cars and light trucks and establish new standards, covering model years 2021 through 2026.

Fun Fact: These standards, imposed on car manufacturers, set the minimum average fuel economy limit (i.e., 40 miles per gallon) for their entire fleet of vehicles. A gas-powered fleet alone cannot meet these standards. Instead, car companies must sell more EVs to increase their fleet-wide average fuel economy. One way is to hawk EVs as more fuel-efficient.

On the EPA-mandated sticker on new EVs, you’ll see a fuel economy designation called MPGe (Miles Per Gallon equivalent). It’s usually greater than 100, making unwary consumers believe the vehicle is several times more fuel-efficient than a comparable gas guzzler. However, EVs are not really several times more fuel-efficient (but that’s a topic for another day).

Americans bought or leased about 15 million new cars and light trucks in 2021 and that number is forecasted to grow to 17 million by 2030. Assuming a ramp-up in EV sales from 2.3 million in 2021 to 8.5 million in 2030 (50% of 17 million), there would be 50 million more new EVs plugged into our electrical grid. The big question, then, is where vast amounts of so-called “clean energy” come from to charge all those EVs and what will it cost consumers.

Fun Fact: The current average price of electricity that residential consumers pay is $.14 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), although it varies from $.09 to $.23 per kWh based upon local supply and demand. Imagine if the price of electricity in your area increased by 50%. Or worse, imagine there is no electricity to heat and cool your home or…charge your brand-new EV.

Most major auto manufacturers (and a few trendy new ones) are rushing to market with all-electric vehicles. However, they are not spending billions on EV development because of consumer demand. Instead, onerous CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) and EPA imposed GHG emission standards force them into the EV market.

The NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration) latest proposed CAFE standards directly respond to Biden’s Executive Order 13990 and call for a whopping 8% per year increase (up from the current 1.5% per year) in average fleet fuel economy from 2024 to 2026. That’s an average increase of 12 miles per gallon above the 2021 standard. Eventually, gas-powered vehicles alone won’t be able to meet these standards, making EV’s the only real alternative.

In the next few years, Biden’s administration will allocate $5.0 billion to individual states and award another $2.5 billion to selected contractors to facilitate installing 500,000 new charging stations. Simultaneously, the administration will use various regulatory means—e.g., CAFE standards, GHG standards, and EV tax credits—to put 50 million new EVs onto the road by 2030. Unfortunately, America won’t have the electricity needed to charge those EVs unless new and expanded fossil fuel-based power plants are built now.

The average EV consumes over 25 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electrical power to go 100 miles or 3,000 kWh to go 12,000 miles per year. That means an additional 150 billion kWh of electricity to charge 50 million new EVs. In 2020, total U.S. retail electricity sales to end-use customers were about 3.7 trillion kWh (3,700 billion kWh). An additional 150 billion kWh would be a 4% increase in total demand over the next nine years—just to charge new EVs!

America Electric Power Grid is already strained in many parts of the country. In 2020, our electric power generation makeup was 40% natural gas, 19% coal, 20% nuclear, 8% wind, 7% hydro, 2% solar, and 4% other fuel sources, meaning roughly 60% of our electricity comes from fossil fuels and another 27% comes from nuclear and hydroelectric power plants. The administration doesn’t plan to build new nuclear or hydroelectric plants.

Fun Fact: America imports 47 billion kWh each year from Canada to meet peak demand. America’s largest natural gas-powered plants, like those in Gila Bend, Arizona, can generate 2.2 GW, and the largest coal-powered plants, like the Robert Sherer power plant in Georgia, can generate 3.5 GW of continuous electric power, at full capacity. But because electricity can’t be stored and, because the demand fluctuates dramatically with the weather and the time of day, power plants operate at only about 40% of their maximum output capacity, on average. Thus, a 2.2 GW plant operating at 40% capacity generates about 7.7 billion kWh of useable electricity in one year (2.2 GW x 40% x 8760 hours/year).

Wind and solar power will continue to grow but such power plants are not nearly large enough to provide the continuous power needed to meet the demand of 50 million additional EVs. For perspective, the capacity of America’s largest wind farm, Alta Wind Energy of California, is 1.5 gigawatts (GW) and the capacity of America’s largest solar farm, Solar Star of California, is .6 GW. Worse, they only generate electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines. Therefore, wind farms typically operate at less than 50% capacity and solar farms typically operate at only 25% of capacity A huge 1.5 GW wind farm (32,000 acres) operating at 50% capacity will generate about 6.6 billion kWh of useable electricity per year (1.5 GW x 50% x 8760 hrs./yr) and a huge .6 GW solar farm will only generate about 1.3 billion kWh per year (.6 GW x 25% x 8760).

Here’s the bottom line: There isn’t nearly enough electrical power available or in the pipeline to fuel 50 million new EVs by 2030. That would require an additional 150 billion kWh’s per year of deliverable electricity. Even the largest power plants only deliver about 8 billion kWh’s per year.

To achieve the administration’s climate change policy goals for EVs, America must build and commission about 20 large new fossil fuel-powered plants or several dozen large new wind and solar farms. That’s impossible by 2030 because large power plants take years to plan, build and bring online. Which means 2030 will either collapse the energy grid or result in a lot of cars that won’t go. [source]

More articles on electric vehicles:

• The Environmental Downside of Electric Vehicles
• ‘Zero Emissions’ From Electric Vehicles? Here’s Why That Claim Has Zero Basis

The UK Moves Closer to 1984

From The Gateway Pundit.com (July 18):

An amendment to the UK’s  ‘Online Safety Bill ‘ has been proposed, moving the country closer to the solidification of their very own ‘Ministry of Truth.’ This amendment would provide the framework to censor “legal but harmful” content posted on social media and pre-determine the accuracy of posts.

The Gateway Pundit’s has reported extensively on the danger to free speech facilitated by so-called  ‘fact checkers’ and publishes TGP Fact Check  exposing on how the government anointed arbiters of truth consistently get it wrong.

The proposed amendment is yet another step towards solidifying a ‘social credit score’ system which would silence opinions deemed ‘unacceptable’ by mandating that all social media users be given a ‘truth score’ pre-determining the accuracy of their posts.

Summit News reported:

The amendment states that any users who have “produced user-generated content,” published news or merely posted “comments” or “reviews” should be ranked by the platform in question, with a score given denoting their “historic factual accuracy.”

The rules would apply to anyone who receives a certain threshold of online views, with that figure to be determined by the UK communications regulator OFCOM.

The user’s posts would then be “displayed in a way which allows any user easily to reach an informed view of the likely factual accuracy of the content at the same time as they encounter it.”

In other words, the new law would empower far-left social media platforms, under threat of government fines, to apply ‘misinformation’ scores to the profiles of right-leaning users, with the potential that such negative labels would then impact algorithmic performance.

This would basically represent a dramatic expansion of ‘misinformation’ labels and partisan ‘fact checks’ that are already applied to individual posts, extending them to people.

The amendment was proposed by British Conservative Party lawmaker John Penrose.   Read the full bill here. [source]

That’s too bad. Then again the UK doesn’t have a freedom of speech amendment like America.

Human-Like Robots Perceived as Having Mental States

From Unite.ai (July 13):

New research from the American Psychological Association suggests that when robots appear to engage with people and display human-like emotions, people might perceive them as capable of “thinking.” In other words, they are believed to be acting on their own beliefs and desires instead of just their programs.

The research was published in the journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior.

AI and Human-Robot Interaction

Agnieszka Wykowska, PhD, is the study author and a principal investigator at the Italian Institute of Technology.

“As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a part of our lives, it is important to understand how interacting with a robot that displays human-like behaviors might induce higher likelihood of attribution of international agency to the robot,” Wykowska says.

The team carried out three experiments involving 119 patients, with the individuals being examined on how they would perceive a human-like robot called iCub after socializing and watching videos with it. Participants completed a questionnaire before and after interacting with the robot. The questionnaire displayed pictures of the robot in different situations and asked the participants to choose whether the robot’s motivation in each was mechanical or intentional.

The first two experiments involved the researchers remotely controlling iCub’s actions so it would behave gregariously. It greeted each individual, introduced itself, and asked for the participants’ names. The robot’s eyes had cameras that could recognize the participants’ faces and maintain eye contact. The individuals were then asked to watch three short documentary videos with the robot, which was programmed to respond with sounds and facial expressions of sadness, happiness, or awe.

Moving on to the third experiment, the team programmed iCub to behave more like a machine while it watched videos with the participants. The cameras were deactivated so it could not maintain eye contact, and it only spoke recorded sentences about the calibration process it was undergoing. Instead of emotional responses to the videos, the robot only responded with a “beep” and repetitive movements of its torso, head, and neck.

Importance of Human-Like Behavior

The research demonstrated that participants who watched videos with the human-like robot were more likely to rate the robot’s actions as intentional, not programmed. But for those who only interacted with the machine-like robot, they were more likely to rate the actions as programmed. These results suggest that exposure to a human-like robot is not enough to make people believe it is capable of thought and emotion, but instead, it is human-like behavior that helps the robot be perceived as an intentional agent.

Wykowska says that the findings show that people might be more likely to believe artificial intelligence is capable of independent thought if it demonstrates human-like behavior.

“Social bonding with robots might be beneficial in some contexts, like with socially assistive robots. For example, in elderly care, social bonding with robots might induce a higher degree of compliance with respect to following recommendations regarding taking medication,” Wykowska said. “Determining contexts in which social bonding and attribution of intentionality is beneficial for the well-being of humans is the next step of research in this area.” [source]

The Abuse of Science

From James Dale Davidson on The Epoch Times.com (Jan. 12):

“In ordinary logic, almost all effort is concentrated on the syllogism. The logicians seem scarcely to have thought about induction. They pass it by with barely a mention and hurry on their formulas for disputation. But we reject proof by syllogism because it operates in confusion and lets nature slip out of our hands…” — Sir Francis Bacon, London, 1620

Where is Sir Francis Bacon when we really need him?

As a pioneer of the scientific method, Bacon recognized that reliance on syllogisms led medieval thinkers astray. That same deficient approach to understanding nature is embedded in the “global warming” hysteria.

You are told that “science” only endorses one theory on “global warming” caused by human emissions of CO2. But how good it the science? The case developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is no more than a computer-powered syllogism. Thomas Aquinas would have been comfortable with its conclusions. It takes us right back to medieval thinking.

One of the more annoying themes of the sourpusses in today’s establishment is that ignorant bozos like you and I have deserted the principles of “science,” threatening to let the COVID-19 pandemic run wild—as well as “destroy the planet.”

If you don’t believe me, ask Greta Thunberg; you remember her. She is the Swedish school girl acclaimed as an authority on climate and invited to address the United Nations after holding a sign saying” School Strike for Climate” outside the Swedish parliament at the age of 15.

As a thinking citizen, you should be cautious when the mainstream news media anoints someone as a moral authority on science whose only credential seems to be a strangely precocious and humorless fanaticism.

Greta Thunberg’s devotion to “saving the planet” would be forgivable as a harmless adolescent fantasy—if it were not incorporated as a headline-selling point in the multi-trillion hustle.

As you consider the catalog of the awful consequences attributed to “climate change,” it is well to consider my late father’s dictum: “Never ask the barber whether you need a haircut.”

In the case of “climate change,” we have not one barber licking his chops over our shaggy heads but a whole industry dedicated to confusing Swedish school girls about the perils of life on Earth while piling on the gravy train.

Peter J. Taylor shrewdly noted in “The Way the Modern World Works: World Hegemony to World Impasse” that the invention of “ecocatastrophe” can be understood as a way for the rich to maintain their dominant status in society. He described the selfish interest of those wishing to reserve the good life for themselves as requiring a justification that would be seen as a logical, sensible reaction to a world in crisis.

Hence, the invention of the global warming hoax. It may be bad science, riddled with evident shortcomings. Still, it offered a path forward for those among the rich and powerful who want to “conserve their acquired capital while denying capital accumulation to others.”

The far-fetched proposition that driving your automobile threatens to destroy the planet provides a rationalization for retracting the promise of American-style middle-class prosperity for billions of people in emerging economies.

There are still “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but not only has the Statue of Liberty’s welcome mat been retracted; the climate bullies now say the huddled masses can’t be allowed to drive. Anywhere. All their billions of little cars would get in the way of the limousine traffic and pump up CO2 levels.

What is more, global warming alarmism threatens to retract the promise of American middle-class prosperity for most of the American middle class. By mandating the use of costly low-density alternative energy sources, the global warming vigilantes could achieve a no-growth economy through the back door, pricing the bottom 90 percent of the American income distribution out of access to the good life.

This amounts to what Taylor describes as “ecofascism.” It is a policy that augurs ill for independent capital accumulation, but it perfectly suits Al Gore’s world of crony capitalism. It also seems set to trigger a big reduction in consumption, possibly even famine, on a large scale.

Don’t make the mistake of supposing that the global warming hoax is an innocent misunderstanding, merely a matter of misprogrammed computer models or a failed excursion into thin air of theoretical physics. It is really a matter of life and death.

While we have been living longer, adding an average of three months to life expectancy every year in Western countries, the agenda of ecofascism is not survival for all. On the contrary, it means death to the many with the promise of comfortable survival for the few—Al Gore and his privileged pals.

Taylor foresees the ecofascist world system as involving two zones: a rich zone, in which capital accumulation will essentially cease, conserving the good life for the powers that be, and a poor zone in which capital accumulation will be prevented through coercion. Add the end of an interstate system to this lack of capital accumulation, and capitalism will be replaced by a “postmodern global apartheid” or “neo-fascist world system” ostensibly dedicated to saving the Earth.

The Earth really doesn’t need saving, especially from CO2. Past increases in CO2 emissions due to volcanic eruptions dwarf those now attributable to human activity. Contrary to the IPCC’s claims that high atmospheric CO2 persists, carbon dioxide is naturally recycled by the Earth. In fact, concentrations of atmospheric CO2 have decreased dramatically over the past 545 million years as the Earth has efficiently sequestered CO2, mainly by growing forests.

Remember that there is compelling evidence that CO2 is not a pollutant but an essential life-giving atmospheric element, crucial to growing food, as any greenhouse operator can confirm. CO2 is an important contributor to the organic capture of solar energy through photosynthesis. That is why an efficient greenhouse operation will triple ambient CO2 of about 400 ppm to 1,300 ppm during the day by pumping in extra CO2. They would not do that if CO2 were really a pollutant.

Indisputable Natural Solar Cycles

As a matter of logic, there is a glaring deficiency to the theory of anthropogenic global warming: it disregards a well-documented historical record showing that climate on Earth repeatedly warmed and cooled for millennia before humans built industrial factories or drove automobiles. For example, anthropogenic global warming could not have caused the Roman Warm Period.

For more details on climate history, review the Blytt-Sernander sequence, a series of climate phases identified from the study of peat bogs in Northern Europe. These divisions, determined by radiocarbon dating, show that the warmest phase of the current Holocene interglacial period, the Atlantic, happened long ago, occurring between 5,000 and 8,000 years after the end of the last ice age.

If the warmest period in history was thousands of years ago, long before the Industrial Revolution, in that case, that ancient episode of global warming must have been driven by something other than human emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2.

Planetary Alignments and Climate Variability

Solar-planetary theorist Ken McCracken claims that the paleoclimatic record over the last 9,400 years reveals 26 Grand Minima similar to the Maunder Minimum. He shows that the Grand Minima in the Holocene, including the Maunder Minimum, all occurred during disordered phases of the Sun’s motions.

Barycenter Anomalies and Solar Inertial Motion

Notably, solar physicists have correlated proxy climate records (dendrochronology: Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10 solar activity proxies from the Arctic and Antarctic) with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s tabulation of the barycenter coordinates of the Sun, the eight major planets, and Pluto.

These records show that the Solar System is indeed a “system” that involves complex planetary synchronization. The plot of planetary alignments coincides with repeating, sometimes almost identical, patterns of climate change as reflected in the solar activity proxies. It has little or nothing to do with atmospheric CO2.

Data from the Little Ice Age (LIA) that followed the Medieval Warm Period offer a powerful “tell,” if you wish, to understand climate. The LIA—one of the colder Grand Minima of the Holocene climate epoch that began 11,700 years ago—had a “twin.” Proxy records, centered around 3,500 BC, show almost identical solar radiation patterns. When the two series are overlaid, the difference in the curves is practically imperceptible.

As the planets move in their counterclockwise orbits around the Sun, the barycenter oscillates in a range of repeating trefoil patterns. It seems evident that specific planetary alignments coincide with barycentric anomalies that disrupt normal solar radiation.

Astronomer Geoff Sharp has identified a planetary configuration with Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus within fifteen degrees of alignment on one side of the Sun, and Saturn opposite associated with solar cycle slow down or shutdown that occurs in every case.

Obviously, no one was correlating climate with the planetary alignments of Neptune and Uranus 4,267.25 years ago. Neptune was only discovered 175 years ago. Further to that, due to orbital drift, the return of the four outer planets to the same position every 4,267.25 years is not identical.

$100 Billion for Climate Change Propaganda

The ongoing quest to understand the natural causes of solar cycles exposes the dubious nature of the $100 billion or more invested by the world’s governments, purportedly for IPCC-approved climate research but actually for propaganda to justify establishing an ecofascist world system—implemented through climate accords such as the recently concluded Glasgow Climate Summit.

If governments were interested in cultivating a better understanding of the drivers of climate, an allocation of even 20 percent of the resources squandered on global warming propaganda could have gone a long way toward illuminating the natural basis of solar cycles. But the IPCC explicitly limits its inquiries to consideration of only human-caused global warming—incredible intellectual dishonesty.

It would kill the whole bogus enterprise of controlling anthropogenic global warming by clarifying that climate change is determined by the rhythms of nature, not by your commute.

“For well, you know that it’s a fool,
Who plays it cool,
By making his world a little colder.” — Hey Jude, The Beatles, 1968

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Postal Service hacking into hundreds of seized mobile devices, tracking users' social media posts

From Just the News.com (Feb. 2):

Watchdog groups are sounding the alarm on the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service, which they say is violating the privacy and civil liberties of the American people by using sophisticated tools to break into hundreds of citizens' cellphones and collect their social media posts.

Until now, it's gone largely unpublicized that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) admitted in its 2020 annual report that it not only employed top-of-the-line technology hundreds of times to hack into mobile phones but also planned to expand its use of the hacking tools in the future.

"The Cellebrite Premium and GrayKey tools acquired in [fiscal year] 2019 and 2018 allow the Digital Evidence Unit to extract previously unattainable information from seized mobile devices," the 2020 report states. "During FY 2020, 331 devices were processed, and 242 were unlocked and/or extracted by these services. The success of the program and ever-increasing demand for services required the purchase this year of a second GrayKey device for use on the East Coast."

The USPIS's figures indicate a surge in such hackings compared to 2019, when the agency disclosed it accessed 34 devices using Cellebrite and 143 with GrayKey.

Last week, the Epoch Times first reported on the agency's use of hacking tools to access encrypted mobile devices.

The new technology used by USPIS has found workarounds to break into phones, unscramble otherwise unreadable encrypted data, and copy it for law enforcement to go through.

This technology is dangerous and prone to abuse, according to Jake Wiener, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who argued these tools violate one's privacy and are often unnecessary.

"Cellphones contain multitudes of intimate information about all aspects of our lives, messages with family, private pictures, records of our movements, and much more," Wiener told Just the News. "Phone hacking tools are a direct threat to privacy because they can expose information that everyone wants to keep private, and would be irrelevant to a criminal investigation."

Forensic tools like Cellebrite and GrayKey "give investigators the ability to access and analyze far more information than ever before," said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the American Civil Liberty Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "This includes information people do not know is on their devices, such as deleted and temporarily stored data. Forensic tools can unlock and extract private information that is irrelevant to an investigation, and there are inadequate safeguards in place to make sure this information will not be misused."

Wiener, Granick, and other critics of the USPIS program note it's unclear for which crimes and investigations the agency uses hacking tools to access locked phones, raising concerns that the criteria are arbitrary and could lead to the government agency abusing its power.

The bar for using this hacking technology should be quite high, if it's used at all, and governed by strict oversight, privacy advocates say. Others counter that, in cases where national security and the lives of Americans are at risk, authorities should have greater ability to obtain potentially critical information quickly.

USPIS declined to comment on how it determines when to use Cellebrite Premium and GrayKey tools to extract data from seized mobile devices. However, the agency suggested it follows federal law in all cases, including by obtaining a warrant.

"Only a limited number of individuals have access to these tools, and they are used in accordance with legal requirements," a USPIS spokesperson told Just the News. "A search warrant, court order, or other constitutionally permissible situation must exist prior to any digital evidence examination of cell phones."

If a federal agency wants to use new technologies like Cellebrite's phone hacking tool, the E-Government Act of 2002 requires the agency to first go through a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), which should disclose the risks to individual privacy created when the agency uses the technology, ways to mitigate the risk, and ask whether using the technology is justified.

USPIS didn't answer an inquiry asking whether it produced a PIA.

"If the Postal Inspection Service hasn't done a PIA for Cellebrite and GrayKey, that suggests the agency is not considering the harmful effects of using this technology or putting sufficient safeguards in place to prevent abuse," said Wiener. "If they have, it is not published on their website."

Accessing cell phones hasn't been the only source of controversy for USPIS. Yahoo News revealed last year that the agency has been "quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans' social media posts, including those about planned protests."

The surveillance effort, known as the Internet Covert Operations Program, iCOP, involves analysts going through social media sites to flag "inflammatory" posts and share that information across the federal government.

iCOP's official mandate is the "identification, disruption, and dismantling of individuals and organizations that use the mail or USPS online tools to facilitate black market trade or other illegal activities."

The program has used facial recognition technology and social media monitoring services to surveil individuals, including protesters demonstrating against everything from police brutality to COVID-19 lockdown measures.

"Government monitoring and retention of information about First Amendment-protected speech increases the likelihood that agencies will investigate or otherwise monitor people based on that speech," said Granick. "It also risks chilling expressive activity ... These risks and consequences are even more severe when the government uses powerful tools to compile digital dossiers and track online speech, networks, and associations."

Last year, EPIC filed a lawsuit under the E-Government Act of 2002 to stop USPIS from continuing the program, noting the agency has yet to publish a PIA.

Judicial Watch also sued the Postal Service last year, launching a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information about the surveillance effort.

"The questionable surveillance schemes appear to indicate that the government is weaponizing the nation's postal service to improperly spy on the citizens who fund it," said Judicial Watch. "Why would the government depend on the Postal Service to examine the internet for security reasons?"

The organization is also filing a FOIA request with the Postal Service for information on the devices used by the agency to hack cell phones.

Critics argue USPIS is pushing outside the scope of its mission and needs to be held accountable.

"In recent years, the Inspection Service has gone outside its mission to monitor protesters across the country using facial recognition and social media monitoring tools, without even implementing basic privacy protections required by federal law," according to Wiener. "The USPIS believes it's not subject to the baseline rules that govern other agencies."

The Postal Service is exempt from several rules that govern other agencies under the Postal Reorganization Act, leading some to question the proper role of USPIS.

"There's something very weird about having a law enforcement agency built into a postal service," Wiener told Just the News. "It's not a format you see anywhere else."

Several civil liberties experts expressed similar concerns to Yahoo News last year, questioning how the USPIS mandate can include some of its activities.

"If the individuals they're monitoring are carrying out or planning criminal activity, that should be the purview of the FBI," said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice's liberty and national security program. "If they're simply engaging in lawfully protected speech, even if it's odious or objectionable, then monitoring them on that basis raises serious constitutional concerns."

Just the News asked USPIS to respond to critics alleging the agency is violating Americans' privacy and civil liberties and going outside the scope of its mission. The agency declined to comment. [source]