Category Archives: Eugenics

President Donald Trump says he wore a mask and goggles out of view of reporters while he was touring a Ford plant in Michigan. (May 21) AP Domestic

President Donald Trump took heat on social media for praising the "good bloodlines" of Ford Motor Co. founder Henry Ford, who had a history of promoting anti-Semitic views.

"Thecompany foundedbya man named Henry Ford good bloodlines, good bloodlines if you believe in that stuff.You got good blood," Trump said Thursday during a tour of a Ford plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

"Henry Ford was an anti-Semite and one of America's staunchest proponents of eugenics. The President should apologize," Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote on Twitterin response to a reporter's post about Trump's remarks.

Former White House ethics chief Walter Shaub denounced Trump's comments as "gaslit dog whistling" as the term bloodlines is often used in eugenics.

Ford published a set of anti-Semitic pamphlets called, "The International Jew."He alsospread conspiracy theories through his newspaper the Dearborn Independent.

The Henry Ford museum describes how Ford "saw Jews present in everything that he viewed as modern and distasteful" including the First World War, jazz, and short skirts. Ford used the network of Ford dealerships across the country to distribute the Dearborn Independent, building the newspaper to a circulation of 900,000 in 1926.

Ford apologized for the articles and closed the newspaper in 1927 after being sued for defamation byattorney Aaron Sapiro, a target of anti-Semitic attacks bythe Dearborn Independent.

Ford, however, accepted an award, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, from Nazi Germany in 1938.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

More: Ford 'encouraged' Trump to wear mask during factory tour, but it came off for the cameras

William Clay Ford Jr., executive chairman of Ford Motor Co. and the great-grandson of Henry Ford, had attended the tour and had urged Trump to wear a mask during his visit.

"Bill Ford encouraged President Trump to wear a mask when he arrived," the company said in the statement. "He wore a mask during a private viewing of three Ford GTs from over the years.The President later removed the mask for the remainder of the visit."

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Trump criticized for praising 'good bloodlines' of Henry Ford, who promoted anti-Semitism - USA TODAY

We can all agree that Joe Biden made a horrifying error probably his worst, hardly his first when he said any black voters who are undecided between himself and President Trump aint black.

The former vice president and soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee quickly apologized. Biden said he didnt mean to take black votes for granted or suggest anyones political choices should be dictated by their ethnicity.

Major figures in his own party, black and white, rallied around him. The Trump campaign turned the gaffe to its advantage, accusing Biden and the Democrats of racism.

U.S. Rep. Val Demings of Orlando, one of the black women among Bidens vice-presidential prospects, expressed surprise at the nerve and gall of Trump whipping out the ol race card on anyone. Theres a cliche in politics about being called ugly by a toad.

But as the campaign heats up in the summer, it would be good to consider what we call a gaffe as part of the political landscape. The media have to report them, although Trump will claim his two-fisted style is purposely twisted to sound offensive while the media downplay Biden blunders.

Whether in a presidential race or a little city commission contest, we ought to consider the source. Did the speaker make an unfortunate slip, an oafish attempt at humor, or to be casual and down-home with an audience? Or does an offensive remark fit well with a lifetime of insensitivity, political cynicism, or racial, sexist or religious bigotry.

When George Wallace promised segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever in 1963, it wasnt a gaffe. It was how he ran his campaign and wanted to govern. When Spiro Agnew showed his boorish insensitivity in 1968, he was showing who he really was.

But when Jimmy Carter used the term ethnic purity in 1976, he wasnt making some coded appeal to eugenics, he just made a really bad choice of words. In a debate that year, President Ford said there was no soviet domination of Eastern Europe; he meant to say the people of Poland dont accept Kremlin control, but in an instant a president put himself on the level of a former Georgia governor in foreign affairs.

Sometimes, a word choice thats not offensive that wouldnt mean anything for some other candidate might bite a candidate like Biden. During debates last year, he referred to parents honing childrens learning by, among other things, turning on the record player at home.

Record player? Harmless in itself, his word choice re-enforced questions that maybe the 77-year-old candidate is living in an episode of Happy Days.

More important for Biden, he referred to then-Sen. Barack Obama as clean and articulate in 2008. Thats not cool, but a review of Bidens 50-year record on social justice earns him some indulgence.

Thats what we should look at when candidates misspeak -- what theyve stood for throughout their careers. On the campaign trail, speaking casually or doing interviews, candidates cant gaffe things up too badly they just use a simple three-step process for deciding whether to say something flippant about race:

1.Consider how supporters will react.

2.Consider how opponents will react.

3.Then dont.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter.

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BILL COTTERELL | How to assess candidates gaffes - St. Augustine Record

WednesdayMay27,2020at8:55AM

Who among us has the divine right to decide who lives or who dies? Who has the moral authority to determine what is good, fair, or just for our nation? Who has the ultimate choice to privatize the land, the people, and the natural resources for private gain? Since 1886, corporate capitalist, our new world pirates, claim they do.

After seizing power over our Constitutional mandates, corporate capitalist established a new story and made it legal. Negative narratives, such as Darwins 1887 eugenics theory survival of the fittest and Keynesians post war economics, used legalized fiction to usurp the peoples authority. For over a century, our Constitutional rights have been ignored and suppressed while fear and hate are glorified and normalized. The colonial mind set continues to shape todays political choices with party line rhetoric and inhumane social abuses.

Consequently, Americas history is shadowed with personal prejudice, social bigotry, and corporate greed. The notion that federal and state taxes support education and programs that promote the general welfare, has proven to be false. Truth is, we are no more than economic fodder for those who unjustly declare elite status over social choices and economic decisions.

Since humanitys mythical fall from grace, our collective task has been to wake up, dispel the toxic levels of fear and dis-information, and reclaim our personal and social power. Instead of becoming mindless zombies, out of sync and mis-aligned with a free and just society, we can cultivate our divine right to live a moral humane life. Evidence shows without freedom to share our unique and authentic existence with honor, respect and responsibility, we lose our mind at the gates of hell. By choosing to live and let live, we cultivate equanimity beyond any nefarious policy or artificial inhibitors. That future is our ultimate choice.

Gloria Cooper

Mount Shasta

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Letters to the editor: The future is our choice - Taft Midway Driller

Will 2020 be the year the tin foil hats are vindicated?

A global coup is unfolding before our very eyes

Will 2020 be the year of the global communist takeover that the tin foil hats have been warning of? The blueprint for world domination is detailed in the UNs Agenda 21 and has four main objectives.

Depopulation: Greatly reduce world population to a more sustainable number and restrict human reproduction.

Globalization: Global militarized police state to enforce political, economic, environmental and medical totalitarianism.

Digitization: Eliminate cash; implement a global digital currency and Universal Basic Income using implantable microchips and a 5G-control grid.

De-carbonization: Eliminate fossil fuels, return rural land to nature by concentrating populations in smart cities. Ban travel, farming and property ownership.

The 120-ton granite monument known as the Georgia Guidestones is inscribed with guidelines for a new age of reason that echoes the same philosophies as those behind Agenda 21. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 and Guide reproduction wisely are the main principles of eugenics, which promotes selective breeding of the nobility and forced abortions and sterilization of the working class. Be not a cancer on the earth Leave room for nature is the Malthusian philosophy that inspired the eugenics movement in the late 1800s; the idea that famines, plagues, wars and birth control are necessary to prevent overpopulation from depleting global resources.

Remember Greta and the Green New Deal? Again we see the globalization, de-carbonization and depopulation themes of Agenda 21. Too bad that racist Trump with his conspiracy theories ruined all of that. But then, just in time to squash Trumps re-election, along comes Bill Gates and The New World Normal to get Agenda 21 back on track.

While the world is under military martial law with travel bans in place, 5G is rolled out, the economy collapses, small business and the middle class are decimated and many become dependent on government handouts. We must learn to work, school, shop and socialize online. Because handling cash spreads the virus, we will need digital currency and an implant to use it.

But dont worry, Bill Gates has been preparing for this pandemic for ages. He already has plans to inject the entire world population with his quantum dot digital tattoos, so he will know whos taken his vaccine. If you refuse, well, youll just be quarantined. Forever. Coincidently, the Book of Revelations warns of a time when the Antichrist forces every man, woman and child to take the mark of the beast and without it no one shall buy or sell.

Now, those of us who have done our homework have tried to warn about the globalist agenda and their deceptive modus operandi, only to be insulted and ridiculed for our efforts. But now that the globalist wolves have thrown off their sheeps clothing and its time to for us to say, we told you so, will the sheep still deny the global coup unfolding before our very eyes?

David Work

Lake Cowichan

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Will 2020 be the year the tin foil hats are vindicated? - Cowichan Valley Citizen

On Feb. 23, a 25-year-old black man named Ahmaud Arbery left his home in Brunswick, Ga., to go for a Sunday afternoon run. As he entered a nearby subdivision, he was followed and later shot dead by a father and son while their neighbor recorded the incident on his phone.

Mr. Arberys crime of running while black speaks to a history of racial surveillance and containment enforced by the American state and supported by white people with the means and opportunity to cause great harm.

Lately, the coronavirus has got me thinking a lot about the racial dynamics of containment. Under the quarantine, much has been made of Americans regulated lack of mobility. But our cities have long kept their black residents contained and at the margins. Populations trapped in place are easier to price-gouge and police. Capitalism and immobility work hand in hand.

The American state has restricted black peoples mobility at least since the time of slavery. These regulations included convict leasing, Black Codes, loitering laws, redlining, racial zoning, redistricting (legal and illegal), the prison-industrial complex and increased surveillance. This history has given us entire cities built to shepherd black labor and presence.

One might even consider the black experience as a kind of never-ending quarantine and indeed Jim Crow laws that grew partly out of concerns that black people spread contagion, like tuberculosis and malaria, affirmed as much. The eugenics movement, popular in the early 20th century, led many doctors and scientists to attribute the precarious state of black health to physiological, biological and moral inferiority, instead of structural causes like poverty and racism.

Nearly a century ago, my grandparents fled the Jim Crow South, joining the millions of black families that moved north and west as part of the Great Migration. No matter how many thousands of miles they crossed, they met the same thing: not freedom, but constraint. Even in some of Americas most progressive cities like San Francisco, where my family ended up, black people were relegated to parts of town with limited housing, overcrowded schools and low-paying jobs. The police were everywhere.

So black folks have been educated in a kind of quarantine since Day 1.

Yet mobility remains a big part of Americas narrative about freedom. The tone and complexion of the anti-quarantine protests shouldnt surprise us when white people have been accustomed to boundless freedom of movement.

Consider the glaring contrasts between the architecture and development of the large-scale public housing units and suburban bedroom communities of the 1950s. Two very different outcomes one black, one white from one ostensibly shared aim of creating affordable housing.

Black people were trapped in poorly maintained towers, like the notorious Pruitt-Igoe homes in St. Louis, that kept them far away from the citys arteries and public transportation. The 33 buildings of the complex were so uninhabitable that they had to be destroyed after only two decades.

Meanwhile, all-white suburbs like Levittown, N.Y., which also received government subsidies, were designed expansively with front lawns, public parks and wide sidewalks.

The same freeways and boulevards that made it easy for suburbanites like those from Levittown to zoom in and out of cities destroyed black neighborhoods, either by cutting them off or by bulldozing them entirely.

Now many of these roads are being retooled in the spirit of new urbanism to make way for more bike lanes and wider sidewalks. But who will these benefit the most? A wealthier and whiter population that wants better access to a walkable, gentrified city.

When black people can move freely about the city, that movement is often controlled by housing location, surveilled by the police and private security measures and allowed only in the service of providing cheap labor.

Today cities are asking, demanding and even coercing black people to shoulder the burden of work that is fundamental to their functioning, but without protecting those people in return. Whatever mobility people have is largely for executing low-wage jobs, which are now recognized as essential because they directly benefit white infrastructures.

This, in addition to the crowding in black neighborhoods, is one reason we see an overrepresentation of black people among the Covid-19 dead in places like Detroit; Chicago; St. Louis; Richmond, Va.; and Washington, D.C. Another reason is racial disparities in testing and treatment. In Illinois, just under 10 percent of those tested for the coronavirus are black. But among those who test positive, 18 percent are black. And among those who die, a stunning 32 percent are black.

Furthering the problem, some hospitals have turned black residents away, only for them to die, despite their showing the same symptoms as white people who receive testing and treatment. This suggests that bias is playing a role. If cities were to test all residents, treatment would not depend on any preconceived notions about who is deserving of care and who is not.

The historian Nikhil Pal Singh recently observed that the pandemic will not create the social transformation we need, but it will set the terms for it. The history of black quarantine provides us with our plan in reverse. Colorblind responses only make the problems worse.

Rather than corporate bailouts, we need a public bailout, one that involves an increase in public spending to support equal access to education, affordable housing and transportation. One that provides paid sick leave and health insurance for all.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures of Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgages and evictions from public housing units. Several cities have offered similar solutions for their most vulnerable residents, and more should follow. Evictions disproportionately burden black people, especially black women, who experience homelessness at alarming rates.

Cities and the federal government should also come up with a plan for comprehensive debt forgiveness. This will make it easier for essential workers to pay for the increasing costs of education, food and transportation. Measures like these would actually contribute to the growth of our economy by freeing up capital for people to lead healthy lives.

We ask our cities to be smart, but are we asking them to be just? We talk about access in symbolic ways, but dont think about the core geographies of inequality that emerge in the making of a mobile, technologically driven city. The creative, progressive city with its fine dining, bike shares and crowded parks relies on the same workers of color that it relegates to the margins.

We can even take a lesson from the protesters demanding, wrongly, an end to the quarantine. We can fight for opening our cities politically, economically and racially with the same energy they are putting toward opening our streets. We must create solutions that benefit the masses, not a select few. A true end to quarantine demands ending the quarantining city. It may not be the best we can do, but its the least we can ask.

Brandi T. Summers, an assistant professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City.

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Ahmaud Arbery, Race and the Quarantined City - The New York Times

I am perplexed by the behavior of recent political figures. These figures are, in many instances, so rabidly pro-life that they try to confer upon fetuses the same rights to life that every American citizen enjoys. Yet these are the same people who are now so cavalier about American citizens dying from the coronavirus in order to restart the economy. Some have gone as far as to say there are more important things than living.

At first I found this to be contradictory. How can individuals who wail about the unborn be so callous about the safety of those who have made it to adulthood? The same people who resist including natural selection in school curriculums are now preaching the dark gospel of social Darwinism and eugenics.

A clue was offered by a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice when she made the comment that COVID-19 wasnt affecting regular folks. It seems that the people that are most vulnerable to the virus, older and poorer Americans are not regular folk and therefore not entitled to a rabid defense of their right to life.

It really makes sense when you consider that these individuals support a political party that has made it their mission to weaken Social Security and Medicaid. I guess if you cant limit the use of social programs through democratic means, it is acceptable to allow a disease to cull the numbers of people that use them. In order to avoid confusion, I would suggest that those defenders of life change their mantra to, we are pro-life unless the GDP drops 4%.

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Letter: We are pro-life, unless ... - The Salt Lake Tribune - Salt Lake Tribune

From the Emmy and Peabody award-winningdirector of The Judge and In Football We Trust comes a powerful new expose of human rights abuses of women in the criminal justice system

When an unlikely duo discovers a pattern of illegal sterilizations in womens prisons, they wage a near impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. Filmed over seven years with extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, BELLY OF THE BEAST exposes modern-day eugenics and reproductive injustice in California prisons.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival Presents an Outstanding Slate of Cinematic Works in First Digital Edition, June 11-20, 2020

The pastoral farmlands surrounding the Central California Womens Facility, the worlds largest womens prison, help conceal the reproductive and human rights violations transpiring inside its walls. A courageous woman who was involuntarily sterilized at the facility, teams up with a radical lawyer to stop these violations. They spearhead investigations that uncover a series of statewide crimes, primarily targeting women of color, from inadequate access to healthcare to sexual assault to illegal sterilization. Together, with a team of tenacious heroines, both in and out of prison, they take to the courtroom to fight for reparations. But no one believes them.

As additional damning evidence is uncovered by the Center for Investigative Reporting, a media frenzy and series of hearings provide hope for some semblance of justice. Yet, doctors and prison officials contend that the procedures were in each persons best interest and of an overall social benefit. Invoking the weight of the historic stain and legacy of eugenics, BELLY OF THE BEAST presents a decade long, infuriating contemporary legal drama.

Filmmaker Bios

Director Erika Cohn

Erika Cohn is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning director/producer who Variety recognized as one of 2017s top documentary filmmakers to watch and was featured in DOC NYCs 2019 40 Under 40. Most recently, Erika completed THE JUDGE, a Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated film about the first woman judge appointed to the Middle Easts Sharia courts, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS 2018 Independent Lens series. Erika co-directed/produced, IN FOOTBALL WE TRUST, an Emmy award-winning, feature documentary about young Pacific Islander men pursuing their dreams of playing professional football, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS 2016 Independent Lens series. She has received numerous accolades for her work, including a Directors Guild of America award for her fiction short, WHEN THE VOICES FADE, and has been a featured panelist/speaker at various film festivals and university conferences across the globe.

In 2013, Erika founded Idle Wild Films, Inc., which has released three feature documentaries and produced numerous branded content and commercial spots, including Gatorades Win from Within series, for which she received a 2016 Webby award nomination. Her work has been supported by IFP, the Sundance Institute, Chicken & Egg, Tribeca Institute, ITVS, Women in Film, Fork Films, BAVC and the CPB Producers Academy among others.

Producer Angela Tucker

Angela Tucker is a writer, director and Emmy nominated producer who works in narrative and documentary genres. Her directorial work includes All Skinfolk, Aint Kinfolk, a documentary short which aired PBS Reel South about a mayoral election in New Orleans; All Styles, a narrative feature currently available on Amazon; Black Folk Dont, a documentary web series that was featured in Time Magazines 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life; and (A)sexual, a feature length documentary about people who experience no sexual attraction that streamed on Netflix and Hulu. She is in her ninth year on the PBS strand, AfroPoP, now as a Co-Executive Producer and is currently producing Belly of the Beast (dir. Erika Cohn) which will broadcast on PBS Independent Lens this fall. Her production company, TuckerGurl, is passionate about stories that highlight underrepresented communities in unconventional ways. A Visiting Professor at Tulane University, Tucker was a Sundance Institute Women Filmmakers Initiative Fellow. She received her MFA in Film from Columbia University.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival Presents an Outstanding Slate of Cinematic Works in First Digital Edition, June 11-20, 2020

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ERIKA COHN'S 'BELLY OF THE BEAST' TO HAVE WORLD PREMIERE OPENING NIGHT FILM OF 2020 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL NEW YORK DIGITAL EDITION -...

The first part of Nafeez Ahmeds major investigation into the money, men and motivation behind a massive move into medical data.

The COVID-19 public health crisis is enriching a murky nexus of technology surveillance firms linked to senior Government officials at the expense of peoples lives. The financial adventures of a former MI5 spymaster and the medical fantasies of Boris Johnsons top advisor point toward an unnerving endgame: an artificially intelligent (AI) corporate super-state, with a special focus on NHS genetic research inspired by eugenics.

The tale begins with Britains security services and ends with Dominic Cummings. It uncovers the extent to which democracy and public health are now under threat from a series of Government failures rooted in a bankrupt ideology, influenced by the modern relics of scientific racism.

On Sunday 12 April, the Government announced that the NHS would be launching a new COVID-19 contact tracing app. Since then, there has been a flurry of analysis and commentary on the urgent privacy questions posed by this development. But, missing from these questions, is a much wider context which throws light on why the Government failed so dramatically to avert an unprecedented public health catastrophe which has left the UK with the second-highest COVID-19 death toll in the world.

On the same day that the contact tracing app was announced, former MI5 Director-General Lord Jonathan Evans argued that existing technology used in counter-terrorism and organised crime probes could be used to augment the app being developed by NHSX, the NHS subsidiary focused on digital innovation.

Lord Evans, who headed up Britains domestic security service from 2007 to 2013, currently leads the Governments public standards watchdog and is thus a top advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson on ethical standards in the public sector.

Tough surveillance powers are acceptable where there is equally tough oversight and accountability that ensures the powers are applied lawfully, proportionately and only where necessary, he wrote in the Sunday Times. This is now the case for anti-terrorism and the same must apply to health.

More than a week earlier, Health Secretary Matt Hancock had already granted GCHQ access to NHS data, specifically on the grounds of cybersecurity.

What the former spymaster didnt say is that, just last year, the Investigatory Powers Commissioners Office (IPCO) found that MI5 had broken the law in relation to surveillance safeguards designed to limit the sharing and storage of intercepted data. The private data of millions of ordinary citizens could have been shared with foreign governments under opaque and unaccountable national security protocols.

Lord Evans is also connected to a burgeoning private cybersecurity industry which has long aimed to exploit the creeping privatisation of the NHS for profits. In fact, he is connected to three giant corporations which are presently profiting from major contracts with the NHS.

Lord Evans journey from MI5 Director-General to senior corporate advisor is not particularly unique when compared to the trajectories of his predecessors and successors in the same role. But it provides a window into how the UKs national security industry is profiting from the piecemeal privatisation of Britains public health infrastructure.

According to DeclassifiedUK, an investigative journalism platform focused on British national security issues, Britains former spy chiefs have regularly gone on to lobby government for the private sector. This has resulted in the Government investing millions of pounds of taxpayers money in national security private contractors which have weakened the states pandemic preparedness while prioritising far lesser threats.

The COVID-19 pandemic is now accelerating this process as the Government grants unprecedented power to private technology firms with little transparency.

During his 33 years in Britains domestic security service, Lord Evans played a key role in the agencys counter-espionage and counter-terrorism policies, heading up its counter-terrorism division for the duration of the post-9/11 War on Terror. In 2009, as deputy head of MI5, he distinguished himself by justifying the agencys ties to foreign regimes torturing terrorism suspects to provide intelligence to MI5 and MI6.

The same year that Lord Evans retired from MI5 in 2013, the UK Cabinet Offices National Risk Register warned that a pandemic was the most significant civil emergency risk a higher priority even than catastrophic terrorism or coastal flooding.

Following his MI5 career, Lord Evans became a lobbyist for a private national security industry that largely failed to protect Britain from this risk. He moved rapidly to take up lucrative positions in the financial services industry, including remunerated positions at Accenture, Deloitte and HSBC.

By September 2013, he went on to join the advisory board of Darktrace, a $1.65 billion AI-based cybersecurity firm which was founded by UK intelligence officials earlier that year, and the core technology of which was originally conceived by Britains version of the NSA the electronic surveillance agency GCHQ, which has just obtained unprecedented access to NHS information systems.

According to detailed analysis by DeclassifiedUK, Darktrace has an almost symbiotic relationship with the UK and US intelligence communities, with staff members coming from GCHQ, MI5, MI6, the UK Ministry of Defence, the UK military and special forces.

Documents from the Governments Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) which is supposed to regulate conflicts of interest for outgoing government officials confirm that, at the time of his departure in 2013, Lord Evans was granted approval by then Prime Minister David Cameron to become personally involved in lobbying the UK Government on behalf of his new employer namely Darktrace after two years of his last day of service.

Matt Hancock is a long-time fan of the GCHQ-seeded company advised by Lord Evans. In 2017, Darktrace was a lead member of a UK trade delegation to Singapore led by Hancock in his capacity as then Digital Minister. That year, it emerged that one of Darktraces new clients was an NHS agency, which was reportedly protected from the WannaCry malware attack by its Enterprise Immune System technology.

In July 2018, Hancock became Health and Social Care Secretary and Darktrace continued to follow him into the NHS. That month, the firm announced that it had signed a multi-million dollar contract with a Government department to deploy its technology to protect public services and citizens data, without identifying the department. A month later, the company confirmed that the NHS was scaling up its adoption of Darktrace technology to safeguard systems and patient information, including prescription and blood type data.

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, Darktrace has attempted to consolidate this work, declaring that it would offer its services to the NHS for free.

In the meantime, Lord Evans also acquired a new role as non-executive director to Ark Data Centers, a UK data storage company, in 2015. He replaced his predecessor, the former MI5 chief Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller. That same year, Ark won a 700 million four-year contract with the Cabinet Office to supply the Governments entire data centre estate, via its Crown Hosting contract.

By 2018 the same year that Darktrace began expanding its reach into the NHS Ark secured a 500 million four-year extension to the Crown Hosting framework, apparently bypassing the usual competitive tender process in the name of avoiding disruption from Brexit. Later that year, NHS trusts began taking up the Ark-backed data storage solution.

All the while, Lord Evans kept himself busy. Just the preceding year, he had taken up another non-executive directorship at the UK-based financial services firm KPMG, to sit on its Public Interest Committee. The latter is responsible for overseeing the public interest aspects of the decision-making for KPMG LLP (UK) and its related entities taking into account the legitimate interests of clients and government, among others.

Yet, KPMG has spearheaded the charge to privatise the NHS an endeavour in which Lord Evans board role implies significant oversight.

Back in October 2010, KPMGs global head of health Mark Britnell at the time a health advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron told the Apex Partners Global Healthcare Conference: In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer. The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.

An Apex Partners brochure further explained the gist of Britnells comments: In future any willing provider from the private sector will be able to sell goods and services to the system The monolithic arm of state control will be relaxed which will provide a huge opportunity for efficient private sector suppliers.

By 2015, KPMG was among several other financial services firms designated as approved suppliers to some two-thirds of the consortia bidding for the planning and supplying of care to GP commissioners in effect determining where and how the NHS budget would be spent.

During the COVID-19 crisis, KPMG secured a Government contract to oversee the management of the NHS Nightingale hospitals. The firm is also advising the Department for Work and Pensions on its response to the Coronavirus.

Many of the Nightingale hospitals have not been used and this has been hailed by some as a success in freeing up existing capacity. But, staffers at the new hospitals have said that the real bottlenecks have been the lack of appropriately-trained staff, a nationwide shortage of critical care nurses, and lack of kidney dialysis and cardiac support equipment at the hospitals for dealing with multiple organ failures meaning that they could not be used to treat the sickest patients.

Simultaneously with its influential role as a Government contractor, KPMG appears to be a key voice calling for a need to balance the economy with public health priorities.

In an April message to the firms 16,000 staff, KPMGs chairman Bill Michael wrote that at some point, we run the risk that the economic disaster will transcend the human one. But he reassured his staff that KPMG is well-placed to advise the Government on the difficult judgement to strike a balance between the health of our people and our economy.

Alongside these multiple business roles, the Government appointed Lord Evans as Chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life in October 2018, which advises the Prime Minister on ethical standards across the public sector. He had been approached for the post by No. 10 veteran Jonathan Hellewell, currently a special advisor to Boris Johnson on faith communities.

It would seem that Lord Evans was to be the Governments point-man in sanitising its plans for an AI revolution that would, in effect, privatise the public sector by stealth.

Earlier in 2018, Lord Evans had addressed his colleagues in the House of Lords. Noting that he was an advisor to the UK facial recognition start-up Facewatch, he extolled the benefits of scaling-up the technology comprehensively across society in transport, shops, entertainment, in public spaces, by police, Government and the private sector to enable pre-emptive action to be taken for intelligence purposes and even, eventually, evidential purposes with the right standards in place. It is also important that this should not become a bonanza for the lawyers, he added, alluding to the problem posed by privacy laws.

During his Facewatch stint, which started in 2014, the company had rapidly expanded its product, building up a database of alleged wrongdoers, whose images have been submitted by businesses who sign up to its service. Although, in theory, anyone who suspects that they have been incorrectly added to this database can appeal, as technology journalist Geoff White observes, to do that, you have to know or suspect that youre on the database, and since the company doesnt make it public, that creates a catch-22 situation your face is now being used to access stores of data about you, whos controlling those stores? How accurate are they? And how will you ever find out?

Facewatch runs a crime reporting and intelligence-sharing online platform endorsed by Secured by Design, an official UK police security initiative. It would appear that the system operates as an unaccountable, crowd-sourced blacklist which lacks any due process.

Lord Evans recused himself from his Facewatch position as he took up his new appointment at the UKs public standards watchdog. In that capacity, he oversaw a landmark report essentially urging the Government to speed ahead with a grand plan to roll-out artificial intelligence (AI) across British society, including in the NHS. While acknowledging that the Government was failing on the goal of openness in how AI is being used, the report did not advocate any major change in governance models for the public sector.

Our evidence showed that healthcare and policing currently have the most developed AI programmes, with technology being used, for example, to identify eye disease and to predict reoffending rates, though levels of system maturity differ across NHS trusts and police forces, the report stated.

The main obstacle to adoption, the report concluded, is data access: Public policy experts frequently told this review that access to the right quantity of clean, good-quality data is limited, and that trial systems are not yet ready to be put into operation. It is our impression that many public bodies are still focusing on early-stage digitalisation of services, rather than more ambitious AI projects.

Amidst some welcome recommendations for better regulatory guidance and ethics codes, the reports overall import was to clear the way for the gradual destruction of democratic process.

It dismissed the idea of an AI regulator and carefully avoided Lord Evans bugbear: new AI laws. The approach flew in the face of the recognition by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) architect Paul Nemitz, that not regulating these all pervasive and often decisive technologies by law would effectively amount to the end of democracy.

Lord Evans report was published in February 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic was rapidly picking up steam. It received minimal scrutiny despite having just given the green light to a new AI era that will weaken Britains democratic checks and balances.

Though Lord Evans report acknowledged that some of the UKs most developed AI programmes are being activated in the NHS, it overlooked their wide-ranging ramifications.

In fact, the NHS has quietly been at the forefront of the Governments most ambitious AI drive yet. This is because the privatisation and transformation of the NHS is seen by the Governments top officials as the linchpin of a national biological strategy to out-compete rival economies. Sound bizarre? It is.

Two years before the public standards watchdog released its report, Matt Hancock set out his vision of preventative, predictive and personalised care, premised on a comprehensive digital transformation of the NHS in which patient data would be funnelled into the creation of new healthtech apps and services. One of the services he promoted was a smartphone app to facilitate video consultations with GPs created by start-up Babylon Health, which now sells the service to the NHS. Former Vote Leave architect Dominic Cummings was also previously a paid consultant to Babylon until July 2018, and continued to advise the company until September that year.

On 4 September 2019, No. 10 hosted a ministerial roundtable with Health Secretary Matt Hancock on life sciences and technology, inviting key private sector leaders. Attendees at the meeting included Babylon, Lord Evans Darktrace, NHS England and other firms such as Googles Deepmind, and Faculty.

Like Babylon, Faculty is intimately connected to Cummings, having serviced the Vote Leave campaigns electoral modelling work. The firms CEO, Mark Warner, is the brother of one of Cummings top technology aides in No. 10, Ben Warner. All three have sat in on meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE), which is set up to provide the Government with independent scientific advice during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instead of responding as rapidly as possible based on public health best-practice to the novel Coronavirus, the Government has sped ahead with its ambitions for digital privatisation of the NHS.However, there is an extraordinarily dark vision behind these ambitions, which has not been fully understood.

On 13 March, the day after the Government abandoned contact tracing and as a spate of Government science advisors publicly confirmed that it was adopting a policy of herd immunity Faculty announced that it had partnered with NHSX to build its new AI lab to help drive digital transformation and the use of AI in the NHS Faculty will be helping NHSX to use and deploy cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques.

This was just a month after Lord Evans issued his committees report that largely rubber-stamped the ubiquitous spread of AI across British society.

Last year, both Faculty and Darktrace senior executives were part of a wider cohort of British AI luminaries feeding into Applied AI 1.0, a nationwide growth programme for start-ups supported by the Governments Office for Artificial Intelligence.

Faculty is the same firm which helped to configure the parameters for an Oxford University model that would form the basis for the NHSX contact tracing app. Faculty and Oxford University have denied that Faculty is working directly on the development of the app and would access the apps data. But, Faculty is simultaneously working with US big data giant Palantir on a massivedata-mining exerciseto process large volumes of confidential UK patient information in a centralised Government database.

According to a damning analysis by Dr Michael Veale, a data protection expert at University College London, under UK law, the NHSX app currently being trialled in the Isle of Wight does not preserve anonymity, can enable users to be personally identified, and is designed to systematically monitor publicly accessible spaces despite the Governments denials. Users can neither erase nor access their own data in the system.

Which all begs the question: what is this new push for mass health surveillance actually for?

Lord Jonathan Evans and Dominic Cummings were contacted for this article, but are yet to reply.

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WHITEHALL ANALYTICA THE AI SUPERSTATE: Part 1 The Corporate Money Behind Health Surveillance - Byline Times

For many years, the eugenics mentality has been gaining ground all over the world. Currently, there are debates concerning medically assisted procreation, as well as all kinds of medical practices made possible by technical progress and technological innovation. FSSPX.News is offering a series of articles to take stock of eugenics.

What is hiding behind the eugenics term is often not well understood. Generally it has been used regarding a limited period of history, as if to imply that there is no reason to tackle this problem today. However, eugenic practices, in the most derogatory sense of the word, are very much present today and are spreading insidiously, under the pretexts of human development and freedom. To such a point that some personalities, however far removed from morality, or even foreign to all morality, are worried and are raising the alarm.

There are even men of the church, in different ways and to different degrees, to develop arguments in favor of eugenics or to justify it in certain cases. This is one of the painful chapters of the crisis that the Church has experienced for more than half a century.

The word eugenics is a recent one. According to the Etymology Dictionary it is a doctrine of progress in evolution of the human race, race-culture, from 1883, coined (along with adjectiveeugenic) by English scientist Francis Galton (1822-1911) on analogy ofethics,physics, etc. from Greekeugeneswell-born, of good stock, of noble race, fromeu-good and genosbirth (from PIE root*gene-give birth, beget).

The word indicates the discipline which studies the methods likely to improve the characteristic characters of the human populations, and the adjective which concerns or applies this discipline. () Similarly, EUGENIE n. (1930) is dated. EUGENISM n. (1887), is didactic, like EUGENIST n. (1935) and adj. (1941), borrowed from the English eugenist (n., 1908; adj., 1921); these terms are marked by their time and by their subsequent use relating to the politics of racist and dictatorial regimes. [Historical Dictionary of the French Language, Le Robert]

Larousse gives this definition: the theoretical and practical study of all the means capable ofprotecting, increasing and perfecting the most robust and best endowed elements of the human races, i.e., to safeguard the genetic quality of future generations.

The word therefore covers all the sciences and methods which seek the progress of the human race, and it is sometimes used in this very general sense. But in a more limited sense, it is above all about dealing with population problems:

1) problems concerning the quantity of the population (positive measures favorable to the increase in the number, from the prohibition of abortion and neo-Malthusian propaganda, to the institution of family benefits, tax-free family allowances, etc.; negative measures tending, on the contrary, to limit this number: contraceptive propaganda, legal abortions, sterilization, etc.);

2) problems concerning the quality of the population (measures relating to normal or pathological inheritance: positive and negative measures; and measures relating to the environment: positive prophylactic measures; or negative measures: fight against social ills, alcoholism, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases). [S. de Lestapis, Eugenique et Eugnisme in Catholicism.]

Note that these measures refer to a distinction that has become commonplace between positive eugenics which seeks to promote the reproduction of the fittest, and negative eugenics which seeks, on the contrary, to prevent the multiplication of the unfit.

Some eugenicists go so far as to promote, through appropriate methods, an artificial selection leading to the appearance of a superior race, under the guise of improving the human race. This concern, which might seem anachronistic at the start of the 21st century, when we know the repulsion it provoked as a result of its use by the Hitler regime, is present explicitly in many circles. Robert Edwards, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2010, who carried out the first in vitro fertilization, nicknamed father of the first test-tube baby wrote: We have to improve the human race.

In order to distinguish among the different types of eugenics that exist, it is necessary to construct a historical panorama.

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Eugenics Yesterday and Today (1): Introduction and Definitions - FSSPX.News

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s coronavirus continues to rampage across the globe, it has become apparent that, while biologically the virus may not discriminate, it is having a much worse effect on people from ethnic minorities. As the researcher Omar Khan has noted, BAME Covid-19 deaths track existing social determinants of health such as overcrowding in homes, insecure work and lack of access to green spaces. In other words, the virus is hitting people harder not because it can see their race but because racialised people those who are categorised by societies as, say, black or brown are more vulnerable.

And this is not the only way that race is playing a role in the crisis. All around the world, minority communities are disproportionately targeted by ramped-up policing that has accompanied the enforcement of lockdown measures. Data from New South Wales in Australia reveals that, although the richer, whiter Sydney beach suburbs have the majority of Covid-19 infections, it is in the neighbourhoods with larger numbers of people of migrant origin and indigenous Australians that people have received the most fines for breaching social distancing directives. The US has seen a business-as-usual approach to police brutality targeting black people while, at the same time, groups of overwhelmingly white people in New Yorks West Village freely breached social distancing.

Some voices are uninterested in this connection between race and the virus or treat it with derision. Campaigners are twisting BAME Covid data to further their victimhood agenda, reads a commentator in the Daily Telegraph. An article in Quillette the online magazine of the so-called intellectual dark web asks the question Do Covid-19 racial disparities matter? before concluding: The fact is our culture is obsessed with race. These responses are the product of a discourse in the west that for decades has claimed that making it about race unnecessarily sensationalises an issue. But as BAME people die and suffer disproportionately from a virus, it is clear that race is about power which is very much contrary to the way that it is usually discussed.

The usual discussion of race in Britain is exemplified by conservative academics and political commentators who argue against what they see as an unhelpful leftwing moralism around issues of race and migration, which silences the concerns of a working class that they portray as uniquely white. In 2018, the online publication UnHerd organised a panel discussion originally titled Is rising ethnic diversity a threat to the west?, before this was changed following a backlash. In response to an open letter against the event signed by more than 230 academics, two of the organisers, Eric Kaufmann and Matthew Goodwin, wrote that large numbers of people across western democracies do feel under threat from immigration and rising ethnic diversity. There is no point shying away from it.

Through books, media appearances and social media, these commentators have created a climate where the conversation around race is defined by free-speech rationalists pitted against irrational antiracists. These antiracists see race everywhere, supposedly demonising and silencing everyone with concerns about migrants, Muslims or black people the same people who are now dying disproportionately of Covid-19. But race is not a category that antiracists impose on the world, or a debating point about individual morality: it is a factor that shapes the lives of the people who are racialised.

At its most extreme, this discourse has enabled a return of eugenics treating the pseudoscience as just another part of the marketplace of ideas. The seemingly benign term race realism is defended by a growing circle of pundits who argue for the spurious claims of behavioural genetics and differential IQ dividing the middle class from the poor; white and Asian from black people.

The British associate editor of Quillette magazine, Toby Young, epitomises the worrying nexus between free speech advocacy, eugenics cheerleading and now coronavirus scepticism. Young has advocated for genetically engineered intelligence to be offered to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs. He has now started Lockdown Sceptics, a website opposing measures to stem the spread of Covid-19 by staying home. It publishes links to articles by other sceptics whose past output has the common thread of opposing antiracism in the name of free speech.

Racial inequality is expressed in all dimensions of life. But given that it takes the form during the coronavirus pandemic of disproportionate deaths, the growing calls to relax social distancing measures across the global north further signal societies disregard for the lives of racialised people. This disregard was made possible in societies that declare themselves post-race by the treatment of racism as a matter of mere opinion, with commentators and activists given carte blanche to vilify migrants and Muslims, double down on anti-blackness and anti-Roma racism, and ramp up antisemitism in the interests of media balance.

The pandemic shows us that race is not a biological fact, as the race realists believe, since there is no meaningful biological explanation for the BAME experience of Covid-19. Instead it is a technology of governance that shapes the life chances of many racialised people and maintains white supremacy.

Alana Lentin is an associate professor in cultural and social analysis at Western Sydney University and author of Why Race Still Matters

Link:

Coronavirus is the ultimate demonstration of the real-world impact of racism - The Guardian