Appeals Court says When Police Confiscated a Man's 'Cops Up Ahead' Warning Sign to the Public They Violated His First Amendment Rights
/From [HERE] A police officer’s confiscation of two signs reading “Cops Ahead” violated the First Amendment rights of the man who was holding them, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at New York revived Michael Friend’s claims that the Stamford, Connecticut, police officer violated his First Amendment right to free speech and his Fourth Amendment right against malicious prosecution. But the appeals court ruled against Friend on his 14th Amendment claims regarding his $25,000 bail.
Friend was alerting drivers to an enforcement operation ahead that targeted cellphone use while driving.
“There was no basis for suggesting that Friend’s speech does not receive the protection of the First Amendment,” the 2nd Circuit said in a Feb. 27 decision.
In addition, the appeals court said, the officer’s actions were not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. Although the government has an interest in saving lives and enforcing distracted driving laws, the officer has not explained how issuing citations is a compelling interest, the 2nd Circuit said.
The case returns to a federal district court for a determination whether the officer was protected by qualified immunity and whether Friend had satisfied all the elements of his malicious prosecution claim. The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Connecticut represented Friend, according to a Feb. 28 press release.
The decision was written by Judge Steven Menashi, an appointee of former President Donald Trump.
Friend had been arrested on a misdemeanor charge of interference with an officer during the April 2018 incident.
A police officer confiscated Friend’s first sign, told him to leave the spot on the sidewalk where he was standing, and said he would be arrested if he returned with a sign.
Friend walked a block further away and held up a second sign with the same message. The police officer arrested Friend and confiscated his two cellphones. He was held on a $25,000 bail until a commissioner reduced it to zero dollars at 1:30 a.m. the next day.
Prosecutors dropped the charge and said Friend had actually helped police because drivers got off their cellphones when they saw the signs.
A federal district judge had said Friend’s speech wasn’t protected because it didn’t rise to the level of an opinion related to a matter of public significance.
“But that is not correct,” Menashi wrote. “The First Amendment does not ‘permit the government to imprison any speaker so long as his speech is deemed valueless or unnecessary.’”
The case is Friend v. Gasparino.
Despite the Fact that Lawsuits or Funding for Police Budgets Have No Impact on Police Brutality, Gullible Reformers Celebrate Record Settlement for Protesters Violently Censored by NYPD in Liberal NYC
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Rather than reducing tax dollars budgeted to cops as a remedy to somehow stop police brutality, “Defund cops” could simply mean community hired and fired trained security workers who have a contractual duty to aid people in peril and a natural right to come to the defense of others but who have no right to initiate unprovoked acts of violence on people. Therefore, there would be no need for a police department.
THE IMPLIED RIGHT TO FORCIBLY CONTROL AND RULE OVER OTHERS CANNOT BE REFORMED, “AUTHORITY” HAS NO LEGITIMATE BASIS FOR ITS EXISTENCE - IT IS LIKE REFORMING SANTA CLAUS. [MORE]
According to FUNKTIONARY
Freedomination – the liberty to choose the commitments, ideologies, covenants, contracts, judgments, and relationships that bind or restrain you within the Matrix. (See: The Matrix, Negative Hallucination, Phfreedom, Freedom & Liberty)
reformers – naïve politicians. They came to do good and stayed to do well. Reformers themselves get reformed into the structure, consciousness and content of the dominant exploitative system—and thus become the system. (See: Revolution)
COPS RETAIN THE RIGHT TO REMAIN VIOLENT. From [HERE] A federal judge signed off Friday on New York City’s highest per-person settlement in a mass arrest class action, awarding $21,500 each to at least 200 protesters who say the police brutalized them during a 2020 demonstration in the Bronx over the murder of George Floyd.
The New York City Police Department was criticized for surrounding protesters and forcing their arrests in a neighborhood called Mott Haven on June 4, 2020, using a technique known as “kettling,” essentially corralling them and giving them no choice but to break a curfew that the city had implemented to stifle fiery public unrest in the wake of Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police department.
Members of the class who were given tickets to appear in court are eligible for $21,500 each plus an extra $2,500, meaning total payout from the lawsuit could cost New York taxpayers up to $10 million or more.
The 25-page stipulation approved by Senior U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon resolves just one of six related NYPD lawsuits consolidated before the Clinton appointee. New York Attorney General Letitia James brought another of the cases, which alleges that the NYPD violated the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments in its handling of protests and demonstrations across the city beginning on May 28, 2020, three days after Floyd’s death.
Friday's settlement resolves a class action filed in December 2020 by attorneys Joshua S. Moskovitz, Lance A. Clarke and Michael L. Spiegel.
During a discovery conference in February 2021, Judge McMahon promised that the parties of the half-dozen consolidated cases were “going to be on a rocket docket moving toward a trial."
Brooklyn-based civil rights attorney Gideon Oliver, who represents protesters in one of the pending putative class action suits — Sow, et al. v. City of New York, et al. — invoked McMahon’s rhyming metaphor in response to the announcement of the judge’s approval of the settlement.
“Despite the City’s boilerplate denials of fault, the hard-fought and historic settlement goes to show how violent and abusive the NYPD’s June 4, 2020 attack on the Mott Haven was,” he told Courthouse News on Friday afternoon. “Those of us on the remaining consolidated actions will continue litigating on the rocket docket the Court has set, seeking both compensation for the many others abused by the NYPD during the summer 2020 protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as well as substantial changes to NYPD protest policing moving forward.”
Human Rights Watch released a report in October 2020 citing evidence that police planned an aggressive crackdown on the Mott Haven protesters. Police used bicycles to form a wall around protesters while officers, including some in riot gear, attacked demonstrators — beating them with batons, kicking and punching them, and spraying them with pepper spray, according to the report from the civil rights organization.
At least 61 people were hurt, with injuries including a broken nose, lost tooth, sprained shoulder, broken finger, split lip, black eyes and bruises.
The New York City Department of Investigation issued a scathing report in December 2020, concluding that standardized, agencywide, in-service training related to policing protests was lacking.
In 115 pages, the report details “a number of key errors or omissions that likely escalated tensions, and certainly contributed to both the perception and the reality that the Department was suppressing rather than facilitating lawful First Amendment assembly and expression.”
Attorney General James brought her civil complaint a month later in the Southern District of New York.
In 2014, the city spent $18 million to settle lawsuits related to protests during the 2004 Republican National Convention.
Organizers Push Back on Police Microphones in so-called "High-Crime Neighborhoods" in (White, Liberal) Portland
/From [HERE] More than 100 people tuned in Wednesday for the Town Hall on Gunshot Detection Systems hosted by the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing.
For three hours, nearly all speakers pushed back against the city’s proposal to pilot a gunshot detection system that would place microphones or sensors in high crime areas, alerting police to potential gunshots.
Aje Amaechi, a community organizer with Freedom to Thrive, said that “these alerts could cause a significant backlog, especially since the team is already behind.”
The city’s request for proposal says that where the pilot technology is implemented will be determined in part by PPB data on areas with the most gunshots reported and “community engagement and input gathered from outreach conducted prior to deployment.”
But community members claim there has been little-to-no engagement, and their input is being ignored.
“We all know while we’re sitting here that it is a done deal when y’all even bring it to a table,” one activist said.
Celeste Carey of PCCEP added, “We don’t want gunshot detection technology, that’s what the public is saying.”
Amanda Lamb, a law enforcement resource council with Oregon Justice Resource Center, said that community input is “just a box that the city wants to check.”
“They don’t want to meaningfully engage the community to get their opinions on whether or not to move forward with gunshot detection technology, because they’re already so far in the process,” Lamb said.
And while City Rep. Stephanie Howard, the director of community safety, said the concerns are being heard, but did not comment whether the city is willing to abort the problem.
“The question is, will Council just abort this?” Carey asked Howard. “What is the point of saying you will have further input opportunities, when we’ve already indicated we don’t want the technology?”
“I am not in the position to make that statement on behalf of council. No. I am absolutely in the position to report back to council, report to my boss, report to all my colleagues and other council offices and to continue this discussion,” Howard said.
Despite the frustration voiced by community members, Lamb encourages people to continue to engage by testifying before council and making sure their voices are heard.
“If the city does implement gunshot detection technology, continue to hold city leaders accountable for the outcomes of doing that,” Lamb said. “Continue to monitor how this technology is being used by police, whether it is being used to target community members, whether it is being abused, whether it works. This is their tax money. These are their elected leaders, and they do have a voice in this process.”
Contrary to Claims that ‘your privacy is protected’ and ‘your browsing or location data is Anonymous,’ an Internet User’s Real World Identity Can be Very Easily Identified According to Researchers
/From [HERE] We’ve noted for a very long while how most of the explanations that corporations use to insist that your privacy is protected are effectively worthless.
For example, corporations will routinely inform you that it’s no big deal that they’re over-collecting and selling access to your browsing or location data to any idiot with a nickel because that data is “anonymized,” protecting your identity. In reality, that term means nothing, and study after study have shown it’s easy to identify you with only a few snippets of additional information.
With that in mind, a new study about user privacy in the virtual reality and augmented reality era (full study here) tracked 50,000 users in VR and found some interesting data. Most notably, that it takes incredibly little actual data collected from device microphones, cameras, and other tech to accurately identify a user’s real-world identity.
Like, very little:
The research analyzed more than 2.5 million VR data recordings (fully anonymized) from more than 50,000 players of the popular Beat Saber app and found that individual users could be uniquely identified with more than 94% accuracy using only 100 seconds of motion data.
Even more surprising was that half of all users could be uniquely identified with only 2 seconds of motion data. Achieving this level of accuracy required innovative AI techniques, but again, the data used was extremely sparse — just three spatial points for each user tracked over time.
Researchers found that the data they leave behind in virtual reality is more useful than a fingerprint to identify individuals. It also provides significantly more data to monetize, including a user’s height, handedness, gender, potential disability, strength, personal tics, etc.
Combine this data with the profiles already commonly being built at major companies and ad brokers, and you could see how this might be a bit of an issue in a country that’s literally too corrupt to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era (there was just too much money to be made, sorry).
There have been so many studies at this point (including other previous studies of user VR data) showcasing how “anonymization” is a gibberish term. Yet the next time there’s a hack, breach, or huge batch of public data left unsecured in an Amazon cloud bucket, notice how quickly the term is immediately utilized as a catch all defense for sloppy privacy and security practices.
Oakland Fires Black Borg Police Chief for Alleged Misconduct Cover-up
/From [HERE] The Oakland Police Department lost its seventh head of police in as many years Wednesday over the alleged cover-up of an officer’s misconduct in a scandal that threatens to extend two decades of federal oversight — the longest of any police department in the country.
Democratic Mayor Sheng Thao said at a news conference she was firing Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong after a probe concluded the chief and the department failed to properly investigate and discipline a sergeant who was involved in a hit-and-run with his patrol car and, in a separate incident, fired his service weapon inside an elevator at police headquarters. [MORE]
LA County Settles with Vanessa Bryant for $29M after Racist Suspect Cops and Firefighters Shared Gruesome Photos of Kobe Bryant and his Daughter's Severed Bodies and Remains for Their Amusement
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From [HERE] Los Angeles County agreed to settle all remaining claims with Vanessa Bryant over graphic photographs shared by first responders to the helicopter crash that killed her husband, Kobe Bryant, their daughter Gianna, and seven others. The nearly $29 million settlement includes the $15 million awarded to Bryant by a federal jury in August 2022, Los Angeles County attorney Mira Hashmall said in a statement.
Throughout the 11-day trial in federal court in Los Angeles, lawyers for Bryant and Chester documented how the photos spread: They were flashed from a sheriff’s deputy’s phone screen to a bartender in Norwalk. They were shown to firefighters and their spouses during an awards gala at a hotel in Universal City in what amounted, one witness said, to a “party trick.” They were passed from one deputy to another as the pair played video games.
Attorneys for Bryant and Chester argued that it is unknown how far the imagesspread because the county did not thoroughly investigate. It wasn’t until most of the involved deputies had received new phones that officials hired a firm to conduct a forensic examination of employee devices.
“The truth is, the county has no idea, no idea who had the photos and who they sent them to,” Lavoie said.
The laptop of one fire captain who took photos, Lavoie said, was missing its hard drive when it was examined. The captain, Brian Jordan, who has since retired, claimed under oath that he did not remember being at the crash site at all.
The phone of Joey Cruz, a deputy who showed graphic photos to a bartender in Norwalk, had been reset before it was turned over to the firm, Lavoie said. When it was turned on, it was as if it was new, with no photos saved. County attorneys argued that Cruz had transferred his data to his new phone, which also had no crash photos saved on it.
And the identity of at least one firefighter who received the photos remains unknown.
Memphis Cops Caught on Video Beating Gershun Freeman to Death in Jail. At Least 10 Cops Repeatedly Punch, Kick and Stomp on Naked Black Man. Beating So Brutal it Looks Like the Video was Sped Up
/From [HERE] A Black man having a psychotic episode died in custody last fall after Memphis jailors punched, kicked and kneeled on his back during a confrontation, according to a video released this week by a Tennessee prosecutor.
The Nashville District Attorney’s Office released video Thursday of Gershun Freeman, 33, at the Shelby County Jail in Memphis, news outlets reported.
The video shows Freeman was beaten by at least 10 corrections officers on Oct. 5 after he ran naked from his cell.
Freeman had “psychosis and cardiovascular disease and died of a heart attack while being restrained,” Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner said in a statement Thursday, citing the medical examiner’s report.
Prominent civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who is representing Freeman's family, said in a statement “he was naked and clearly suffering from a mental health crisis.” He called the death “another shocking example of police brutality” in Memphis.
Freeman’s manner of death is listed as a homicide in the autopsy report from the West Tennessee Regional Forensic Center, although the report says this “is not meant to definitively indicate criminal intent.”
In his statement, the Shelby County sheriff said it was unfortunate the video does not show the whole episode. The video has been edited and includes multiple camera angles in different parts of the jail.
The district attorney's office for Shelby County has brought in the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to look into the death. It has asked the Nashville District Attorney General's Office to act as an independent prosecutor in the case.
Freeman was booked in jail on Oct. 1 on charges of attacking and kidnapping his girlfriend, according to court records. [MORE]
War on People: Police Killed 1,096 in 2022 (only 49 Cops were Killed). While more Whites were killed by Cops, Black People were Killed at a Rate 2.5X Higher Based on their Percentage of the Population
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From [HERE] The number of fatal police shootings across the country rose again last year, with officers killing 1,096 people, including a 2-year-old girl caught in a standoff.
Last year saw the most incidents since The Washington Post started tracking the deaths in its Fatal Force database in 2015, after a police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.
There were only 15 days without such a shooting in 2022.
Since 2017, the number has increased every year, and is now up about 10 percent compared with just three years ago. But criminologists caution that more data is needed to understand what is driving the rise.
“It’s hard to know if the increase is meaningful or random,” said Justin Nix, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “We really need a better understanding of when police shoot and injure people, but more so when police avoid shooting someone.”
The pace stayed consistently high in 2022 compared with prior years. Last year, officers killed about 90 people nearly every month, a tally reached only a handful of times in each of the past seven years.
With more than 18,000 police departments nationwide, it’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason for the increase, experts said. The rate of violent crime dropped steadily after 2016 but has climbed higher since 2020. Last year, only 49 police officers were shot and killed in the line of duty, compared with 61 the year before, according to FBI data.
The demographics of those killed have remained largely the same: While more White people were shot and killed by police overall last year, Black people were killed at a rate 2.5 times higher based on their percentage of the population.
Data on fatal police shootings remains sparse. The Federal Bureau of Investigation asks state and local departments to contribute voluntarily to its collection efforts. But in the past eight years, the bureau has recorded fewer police shootings each year even as The Post’s count has increased.
In 2019, the FBI started a new use-of-force data collection, which is not yet publicly available. So far, the bureau said that 10,000 law enforcement departments have contributed. But The Post found that more than 200 departments whose officers had fatally shot someone were not on the FBI’s list.
In a statement, the FBI said that it “makes every effort through its editing procedures, training practices, and agency outreach” to ensure its data is accurate, but that local departments are responsible for what they report. [MORE]
1 in 20 Homicides in US are Committed by Police and the Numbers are Increasing [Authority, the Implied Right to forcibly control citizens, is Immoral and Has No Rational Basis for its Existence]
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From [HERE] In the US, an estimated one in 20 gun homicides are committed by police, as law enforcement killings have failed to decrease despite years of nationwide protests.
There were more than 25,000 total homicides in the US in 2020 and 26,000 in 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). National data for 2022 is not yet available.
Police shooting deaths represented 5% of all gun homicides in 2020 and 2021, and total police killings represented nearly 5% of all homicides, according to the best available public data.
Because only a small number of deadly incidents each year receive wide media attention, many Americans may not realize that “a meaningful fraction of homicides in the US are police killings”, said Justin Feldman, a researcher at the Center for Policing Equity.
There is fear, with mass shootings and gun violence in general, but police contribute a large part to those numbers
The number of US homicide victims who die in mass shootings each year, for instance, is smaller than the number killed by police. While definitions of “mass shooting” vary, the estimated number of people killed in these incidents have ranged from a few dozen to 700 people a year in recent years.
“There is a lot of fear, with mass shootings and gun violence in general, that some stranger will show up wherever you are and kill you,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, the founder of Mapping Police Violence. “But police contribute a large part to those numbers.”
The circumstances for many murders are listed as unknown in the FBI’s incomplete national crime statistics database, but in 2020 nearly 4,000 people were listed as being killed by a friend or an acquaintance, and about 1,800 were known to be killed by a stranger.
Some police departments have much higher rates of police killings than others. In Vallejo, California, which is known for police violence, the police department was responsible for 30% of the city’s homicides in 2012. Police killed six people that year; a single officer killed three people in three different incidents, and was later promoted.
More than 32,000 Americans have been killed by police since 1980, but official public health statistics have undercounted the number of killings for decades, according to a 2021 study from University of Washington researchers published in the Lancet, a prominent medical journal. Over the past four decades, US police have killed Black people at a rate 3.5 times higher than white people, and have also killed Hispanic and Indigenous people at higher rates, the study estimated.
The rate of fatalities from police violence rose even when the nation’s overall homicide rate sharply declined, with the rate of deaths from police violence rising 38% from the 1980s to the 2010s, the study found.
The US has much higher rates of both police killings and overall homicides than other wealthy countries. In Europe, the combined number of police killings and state executions remains in the single digits each year in many countries, according to data from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). The US’s annual rate of police killings and state executions, with more than 1,000 deaths a year, is more comparable to Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Cameroon, Libya and Sudan, according to IHME data.
At least one international study has found the rate of police killings “strongly correlates” with overall homicide rates across multiple countries, but also noted that data on police violence is likely to be less reliable in countries where police kill more frequently.
A 2018 paper published in the American Journal of Public Health found that “police were responsible for about 8% of all homicides with adult male victims between 2012 and 2018”, or about one in 12. Frank Edwards, a Rutgers University sociologist and the lead author of that study, said it was not surprising that the current percentage of police homicides would be somewhat lower than 8% when factoring in the killings of women and well as men, and as the national total number of homicides had also increased sharply since 2020.
Public databases from news outlets and non-profits still offer more complete and reliable data on police killings than the US government, more than seven years after the nation’s FBI director called it “embarrassing and ridiculous” that newspapers produced a more accurate national count of US police shootings than the Department of Justice. Mapping Police Violence, for instance, tracks police killings using a combination of state law enforcement data and incident data drawn from media reports and public records requests.
It’s not only national crime data that’s flawed when it comes to homicides by police. For decades, more than half of police killings have been mislabeled as generic homicides or suicides in the CDC’s official death statistics database, said Eve Wool and Mohsen Naghavi, two of the authors of the Lancet paper on police killings.
The undercounting of police killings in public health data is a result of coding failures by coroners, medical examiners and other public health officials, many of whom “work for or are embedded within police departments”, the researchers found.
Because of the lack of official statistics, Feldman and Edwards said, comparing the count of police killings in non-profit databases like Mapping Police Violence with the CDC’s total homicide numbers is the most accurate way to estimate the percentage of homicides committed by police.
“Sitizens” on Panel to Determine Whether a Miami Cop Used 'Too Much Force' When He Grabbed a Black Man by His Throat and Dragged Him [Any Level of Force Used Offensively is Evil No Matter Who Does It]
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From [HERE] The actions of three Miami police officers during a 2021 arrest are under scrutiny by the department and the city’s Civilian Investigative Panel, which says excessive force was committed and captured on police body camera footage.
The December 2021 video shows a Miami police officer, Sgt. Gary Sampson, in a heated exchange with a man named Georges Auguste.
Amid a verbal squabble, Auguste tells the officer: “You’re on my property, b----!”
Sampson then grabs Auguste by the throat.
That video and and another taken after Auguste’s arrest, showing the man being dragged by Officer Bens Mocombe at a local hospital, are now at the center of a Civilian Investigative Panel probe.
“So the police department believed the officer engaged in excessive force. We believe the same and our panel will hear that info and create their own recommendations and findings,” Rodney Jacobs, who leads the Civilian Investigative Panel, said.
Jacobs said it was MPD’s internal affairs department that brought the case to the panel’s attention during a routine audit.
The CIP’s report states: “Sergeant Sampson failed to document the fact he grabbed the male in the neck/throat area.”
Three officers in total are part of the excessive force and improper procedure investigation involving Auguste.
“(Investigators) found in their review of one of (the officers’) reports, it did not match what they saw in the body camera footage,” Jacobs said.
The case was presented to the panel to review the findings and offer recommendations Tuesday night.
Ultimately, Miami police will decide whether to impose discipline.
Even restricting immunity won’t remedy the source of the problem, which is authority; the police officer’s power to use force offensively against citizens. Contrary to legal truths, in actual reality the police officer’s entitlement to initiate unprovoked acts of violence on citizens is immoral and there is no legitimate or rational way to account for our belief in its existence. Acts that would be considered unjust or morally unacceptable when performed by people are just as unjust or morally unacceptable when performed by government agents. Putting your hands on another human being, not in self-defense but offensively, without their consent and ‘manipulating their body in disregard of their volition is evil’, whether its done by citizens or representatives of “authority” wearing blue costumes. Larken Rose explains, “authority is permission to commit evil – to do things that would be recognized as immoral and unjustified if anyone else did them,” - subconsciously we know and understand the right to rule over other people is irrational and barbaric. [MORE]
According to FUNKTIONARY:
sitizen – a spot-sitting strip-mined, split-mind captive-subject-vassal-member of a so-called “government.” (See: Onlooker, citizen, Sheople, Human Resources, Moron-majority, Psheep, SIT & Tick-Tock)
Force – the source or sources of all possible actions of the particles or materials of the universe(s). 2) the manipulation of a man or woman in disregard of its own volition or nature. 3) the use of an outside physical coercion of any kind by one or more humanoids against another or others in order to make him/her or them obedient and compliant to his/her or their will. 4) the basis of all social evils and can only be used in the sense of attack not defense. 5) You must! In the way I say! 6) the social disease. “Force (coercion) and fraud are the foundation of all social systems and the source of the aroma which they exhale.” ~Max Nomad. “Force” operates to remove personal volition from opportunity to act or not act. Someone “makes” you behave in a certain way by threatening to injure or enslave you, someone you love, or something you prize, if you do not behave in that way. Force operates to obtain an intended behavior when the forced party would otherwise have exhibited a different behavior. Punishment, pain, suffering, and discomfort characterize force. Unfortunately, governments only function by misuse of force—mistreatment, duress and coercion. Once established, they put laws into effect by threatening persecution, imprisonment, fine, or death against all who don’t comply with those laws—including the use of the force continuum. “That which is imposed by force is sooner or later deposed by force.” ~ Mikhail Naimy. In reality, force is neutral, it is how it is applied that colors its action. The greatest and highest force in the universe is love unfolding in each moment. (See: Government, Autonomy, Justice, Fiction, Fraud, Corporate State, Freedom, Forgery, Racism White Supremacy, Religion, Authority, Violence, Coercion, Deception, Language, Force Continuum, Capital Punishment & Gerp)
Google Hides Patent Data Showing Rothschild was Involved in COVID-19 Testing Since 2015
/From [HERE] Compare the two following screenshots. The first screenshot shows the Google Patents publication of a system and method for testing for covid-19, dated 18 August 2022, which is also mentioned in our book Hope Amidst a Tsunami of Evil.
The second screenshot (from 21 February 2023) shows the same entry with some changes which have been made after September 2022.
Same link—two different versions.
Spot the differences: Image 1) shows the year 2015. Rothschild is stated as the applicant in 2020.
Image 2) begins with the application made in 2020 after the pandemic began. The name Rothschild is left out.
Accessed 18 August 2022:
[MORE]
Chinese Government Censoring AI Chatbots that Contradict Any Government Narratives (“disinformation”) with Their "Free Speech" in said More Restrictive Free Range Prison
/From [HERE] At this point it should be common knowledge that if it has to do with any kind of speech, there is nothing that China won’t try to control and/or censor. It’s something of an amazing self-contradiction: in order to be large and powerful, the Beijing government believes it has to behave as though it is weak and cowardly. Wherever there might be real or potential speech or action against the government, there is the Chinese Communist Party trying to proactively make sure such speech can never reach a wider audience. Beijing, it would seem, has long desired for its people to be simple, programmable robots.
Or not? See, it turns out that some of our newer “robots” also engage in speech that the Chinese government is afraid of. Beijing officials have recently demanded the country’s tech companies disallow access to robot-poem-generator ChatGPT and its ilk for the populace, and added that any internally developed chat AI go through some form of digital re-education camp before being released to the Chinese people.
Chinese regulators have reportedly told the country’s tech giants not to offer access to AI chatbot ChatGPT over fears the tool will give “uncensored replies” to politically sensitive questions.
That’s according to a report from Nikkei Asia citing “people with direct knowledge of the matter.” Nikkei says Chinese regulators told tech firms Tencent and Ant Group (a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba) to not only restrict access to the US-developed ChatGPT, but to also report to officials before launching their own rival chatbots.
This is par for the course. Whenever some new avenue for potential unsanctioned speech comes about, Beijing is quick to regulate it. After all, the survival of the current regime appears to rely on that regime’s ability to keep its people from knowing anything that hasn’t gone through the government’s information cheesecloth. At least, that certainly is how the government behaves.
Which is ultimately kind of dumb anyway. Like many other attempts to strictly control its people’s use of technology, the Chinese public has already been able to access ChatGPT through VPNs and all kinds of other proxy platforms. While Chinese tech companies are happily playing whac-a-mole with those platforms, it isn’t working all that well.
“ChatGPT has gone viral in China, but there is growing concern that the artificial intelligence could provide a helping hand to the US government in its spread of disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests,” said ChinaDaily reporter Meng Zhe.
Here again China faces the same question it always faces in these situations: will it hamper its ability to strictly control its populace in order to advance technologically, or will it hamper its advancement in technology in order to maintain strict control over its populace. The government has and will continue to try to thread the needle in order to get the best of both worlds… and it will continue to fail.
Whatever happens next, Chinese tech giants will find it tricky to navigate such limitations. Restricting the training data for chatbots will hobble their abilities in comparison to Western rivals, and even if their input is tightly controlled, users may still be able to solicit unwanted responses for which the companies will likely be held accountable.
Which will temper any interest Chinese companies have in developing this technology in the first place. So, if AI systems like ChatGPT are to be an important part of the globe’s future, the China is setting itself up to be left behind.
And if the quality of the poem I had ChatGPT write me about how awesome sausages are, this might not be a train the Chinese government want to miss.
Discover Card Now Tracking Gun Purchases Made by Law Abiding People to "Solve Crimes" where a Criminal Legally Buys a Gun and a Criminal Leaves a Gun @ a Crime Scene; 2 Situations that Rarely Occur
/From [HERE] Discover Financial Services will start tracking gun purchases at retailers nationwide this coming April.
Discover is the fourth largest credit card provider after American Express, Visa, and Mastercard and is the first provider to publicly state that it will start tracking gun purchases. The credit card company claims it will begin monitoring gun purchases to help law enforcement agencies investigate gun-related crimes. The announcement comes five months after the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved a dedicated merchant code for gun stores.
Credit card companies have been under pressure from Democratic members of Congress to track gun purchases better. These members claim that assigning a different code to firearms sales will somehow help police solve crimes involving guns. They also claim that the data can and should be used for research into firearms-related crimes.
Although the codes will not show what exact guns the patron purchased from a federal firearms licensee (FFL), many in the Second Amendment community worry that these codes can be used to block the lawful purchase of firearms. Others fear that credit card companies will use the data to raise the transaction rates of gun stores, making it more cost prohibited to buy a firearm. Also, many others worry the data recovered will be used to create an anti-gun narrative by cherry-picking data.
These fears might not be unfounded. During the Obama administration, the Justice Department launched “Operation Chokepoint.” The operation designated gun stores as a risk for money laundering even though most, if not all, customers must fill out an ATF Form 4473 and complete a federal background check when buying an item from a gun shop.
Republican members of Congress worry that the data will violate the privacy rights of Americans who purchase lawful goods. Discover was quick to claim to Reuters that those fears were unfounded.
“We remain focused on continuing to protect and support lawful purchases on our network while protecting the privacy of cardholders,” Discover said in its statement to Reuters.
According to Discover, other credit card companies also plan to implement the new codes in April. The company refused to identify which other card companies would start using the “5723 – Gun and ammunition shops” codes. Master Card, Visa, and American Express are mum on the issue and have not responded to media inquiries.
ISO, which is based in Europe, said the merchant codes would be available to card companies by the end of this month. Although available for credit card companies use, they are not required to use the codes. Each company is free to choose whether to adopt the codes or not.
Discover only has 2% of the credit card market in the United States, but the U.S. credit card market is so large that the company processes $191.2 million worth of transactions each year. Gun owners can significantly dent Discover’s market cap by canceling or simply not using their Discover cards. Boycotts have been a successful tool of the left for many years. Using the same methods as the left, gun owners can send a strong message to these companies that Americans do not want their gun purchases tracked.
Discover did not respond to AmmoLand’s request for comment.
Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide
/From [HERE] Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide! This includes 92 released by the National Weather Service in the US and its territories. The balloon flights last for around 2 hours, can drift as far as 125 miles away, and rise up to over 100,000 ft. (about 20 miles) in the atmosphere!
Weather balloons, which are made of latex or synthetic rubber (neoprene), are filled with either hydrogen or helium. The sides are about 0.051 mm thick before release and will be only 0.0025 mm thick at typical bursting altitudes! The balloons, which start out measuring about 6 ft. wide before release, expand as they rise to about 20 ft. in diameter! An instrument called a radiosonde is attached to the balloon to measure pressure, temperature and relative humidity as it ascends up into the atmosphere. These instruments will often endure temperatures as cold as -139°F (-95°C), relative humidities from 0% to 100%, air pressures only a few thousandths of what is found on the Earth's surface, ice, rain, thunderstorms, and wind speeds of almost 200 mph! A transmitter on the radiosonde sends the data back to tracking equipment on the ground every one to two seconds. By tracking the position of the radiosonde, we can also calculate wind speed and wind direction. The radiosonde is powered by a small battery. [MORE]
Burned Out from McJobs, More Americans are Turning to Part-Time Jobs. The Number of People Working Part Time Rose by 1.2 Million in December and January
/From [HERE] Part-time work is exploding. The number of Americans working part time rose by 1.2 million in December and January compared with the preceding months, according to the Labor Department. Most of that increase—857,000 workers—was driven by people who worked part time by choice, not because they were unable to find full-time work or their hours were cut.
The total number of people working part time voluntarily—22.1 million in January—is now almost six times the 4.1 million who are working part time but would prefer full-time hours. That is the highest ratio in two decades. In the first months of the pandemic, when millions of Americans were laid off and couldn’t find full-time jobs, or saw their hours cut, those numbers were about even. In the 20 years before the Covid-19 pandemic, the ratio typically stayed between three to one and five to one.
In total, 16.3% of the 160 million Americans who were employed in January worked part time hours, which the Labor Department defines as anything less than 35 hours in a week.
The increase in part-time workers reflects changes in the U.S. economy and the historically tight labor market, according to economists, employers and workers. As the pandemic led to burnout among some workers and drove many to reconsider their careers, some have downshifted to part-time roles. [MORE]
“I Would Never Take the Vaccine." Decorated Military Virologist Dr Lane Rolling says 'Since Day 1 MRNA Vaccines Have Had No Effect on COVID or Its Mutations. Boosters Don't Prevent Illness or Death'
/FUCK YOU TUBE. FUCK THE GOVERNMENT.
see video below
“Drinking Kool Aid w/o Any Sugar."
Why did YouTube remove this video? According to FUNKTIONARY
censor – a type of strainer that passes everything but the facts, appropriate context, and reality. “A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to know.” ~Granville Hicks. (See: Oughtism & Transparent)
censorship – the rape of the human mind. Take away the word “fuck” and you take away the right to say, “fuck the government.” ~Lenny Bruce. Feel free to say nothing. (See: Iron Rule, Patriot Act, Nine-Eleven, Justice & MEDIA)
