The beginning of things…
Tag: police state
France’s Macron Stuns As He Declares Un-Vaxxed ‘Not Citizens’.
In a wildly authoritarian move, French President Emmanuel Macron has declared the nation’s unvaccinated public to be “not citizens” of France, and claims he is intentionally just trying to “piss them off.”
The bizarre and unlawful declaration comes as the French parliament debates new legislation that would eliminate unvaccinated people from public life entirely, even if they test negative for COVID-19.
The moves belie the oft-repeated claim that COVID-19 vaccines are purely a health measure, especially in the face of new data from surrounding countries that proves the vaccinated are now more likely to contract, and therefore spread, the virus.
Speaking to Le Parisien, Macron furiously ranted:
“I am not about pissing off the French people… But as for the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy.
Unvaccinated to be banned from booze and marijuana in Canada
If taking away jobs and large gatherings isn’t enough to coerce some people into getting vaccinated against Covid-19, cutting them off from hard liquor and marijuana might do the trick. Canada’s Quebec province may soon find out.
Quebec Prime Minister Francois Legault’s administration is expected to announce a new requirement for proof of vaccination at liquor stores and cannabis outlets later this week, the Journal de Montreal reported on Tuesday. Minor details of the latest mandate, such as whether to require the passport at entrances or cash registers, are still being ironed out, the newspaper said, citing unidentified sources.
Proof of vaccination is already required in Quebec at such non-essential venues as restaurants, theaters, bars, and casinos. Under the new rule, unvaccinated residents will still be able to access convenience stores, which sell beer and wine, but they’ll be essentially barred from legally buying hard liquor.
Despotism Is The New Normal: Looming Threats to Freedom in 2022
“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution.”—Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America
Despotism has become our new normal.
Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.
These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.
This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.
The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.
UK Government Greases Skids For Fleets of Surveillance Drones Over Cities
In what appears to be a cynical PR stunt, the UK government is considering plans to allow women who feel threatened on the street to call upon surveillance drones that would arrive in minutes and shine a bright light on any potential attacker.
What could possibly go wrong?
“Women in fear of an attack will be able to use a phone app to summon a drone, which could arrive within minutes armed with a powerful spotlight and thermal cameras to frighten off any potential assailant,” reports the Telegraph.
Trials will take place on campus at Nottingham University at a cost of £500,000 during which the tech will be used to “protect students and staff.”
The scheme will be submitted to the UK government’s Innovate research program, and could eventually see helicopters being replaced by drones as a front line tool of law enforcement.
“It is a high capability drone that costs just £100 an hour but can do 80 percent of what a police helicopter can do,” said Richard Gill, the founder of Drone Defence. “It cannot do high speed pursuits but it can do the other tasks such as searching for people and ground surveillance.”
Gill noted that 25 drones could do the job of one police helicopter in London for the same price, with the drones being housed at five base locations across the city.
The idea of countless government drones whizzing around a city keeping tabs on people is garishly dystopian.
‘Mass Formation Psychosis’ Admittedly Used by Governments as Tool of Population Control
Dr. Robert Malone’s assertions about “mass formation psychosis” in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic are underscored by the fact that authorities in the UK admitted to using “totalitarian” methods of “mind control” to instill fear in the population.
In Canada, the military also admitted launching a psychological operations campaign against their own people in order to manipulate them into compliance with COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.
During his viral podcast with Joe Rogan after he was banned by Twitter, Malone explained how the global population was being manipulated into remaining in a constant state of hysterical anxiety via mass formation psychosis.
“What the heck happened to Germany in the 20s and 30s? Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. And how did that happen?” asked Malone.
“The answer is mass formation psychosis.”
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” he added.
Police Use of Artificial Intelligence: 2021 in Review
Decades ago, when imagining the practical uses of artificial intelligence, science fiction writers imagined autonomous digital minds that could serve humanity. Sure, sometimes a HAL 9000 or WOPR would subvert expectations and go rogue, but that was very much unintentional, right?
And for many aspects of life, artificial intelligence is delivering on its promise. AI is, as we speak, looking for evidence of life on Mars. Scientists are using AI to try to develop more accurate and faster ways to predict the weather.
But when it comes to policing, the actuality of the situation is much less optimistic. Our HAL 9000 does not assert its own decisions on the world—instead, programs which claim to use AI for policing just reaffirm, justify, and legitimize the opinions and actions already being undertaken by police departments.
AI presents two problems, tech-washing, and a classic feedback loop. Tech-washing is the process by which proponents of the outcomes can defend those outcomes as unbiased because they were derived from “math.” And the feedback loop is how that math continues to perpetuate historically-rooted harmful outcomes. “The problem of using algorithms based on machine learning is that if these automated systems are fed with examples of biased justice, they will end up perpetuating these same biases,” as one philosopher of science notes.
Murray Rothbard on the myth of private property…
UK Inches Closer To Eliminating Private Car Ownership
Soon, Brits will own nothing and will be happier for it…
UK Government Transport Minister Trudy Harrison recently spoke at a mobility conference, addressing the future of personal mobility. In her comments, she said it was necessary to ditch the “20th-century thinking centred around private vehicle ownership and towards greater flexibility, with personal choice and low carbon shared transport.” That’s right, she said the quiet part loud and showed the hand of a growing number of government officials.
Harrison went on to praise not only public transportation but also bike share services, e-scooters, and ride sharing platforms. All of these are supposed to tune down how much carbon the UK is emitting into the atmosphere. As with all choices, this comes at a cost, particularly for those living in rural areas.
What’s more, 300 residents in Coventry recently expressed interest in giving up their personal cars. The tradeoff from the government reportedly would be a mobility credit worth up to £3,000. This mobility credit program has been going since March of this year, with 73 cars turned in and crushed. No, this isn’t a joke, but I wish it were.
Understandably, many Brits are upset about this. Some have asked if they should start riding their horse instead, all the in the name of “progress.” Others are tying this statement by Harrison with the looming government ban of internal combustion engines for cars by 2030. After all, EVs aren’t exactly cheap, so what better way to force people onto public transportation than by pricing them out of the vehicle market?
In 2021, the Police Took a Page Out of the NSA’s Playbook: 2021 in Review
With increasing frequency, law enforcement has been using unconstitutional, suspicionless digital dragnet searches in an attempt to identify unknown suspects in criminal cases. Whether these searches are for everyone who was near a building where a crime occurred or who searched for a keyword like “bomb” or who shares genetic data with a crime scene DNA sample, 2021 saw more and more of these searches—and more attempts to push back and rein in unconstitutional law enforcement behavior.
While dragnet searches were once thought to be just the province of the NSA, they are now easier than ever for domestic law enforcement to conduct as well. This is because of the massive amounts of digital information we share—knowingly or not—with companies and third parties. This data, including information on where we’ve been, what we’ve searched for, and even our genetic makeup, is stored in vast databases of consumer-generated information, and law enforcement has ready access to it—frequently without any legal process. All of this consumer data allows police to, essentially, pluck a suspect out of thin air.
EFF has been challenging unconstitutional dragnet searches for years, and we’re now seeing greater awareness and pushback from other organizations, judges, legislators, and even some companies. This post will summarize developments in 2021 on one type of dragnet suspicionless search—reverse location data searches.
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