At publishing time, Vice President Harris was reportedly already assembling a special task force to deal with the potential threat of intelligence, asking New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to serve as her advisor.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In an effort to establish government oversight of the growing role of artificial intelligence in our society, President Biden has appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as “A.I. Czar.” The President expressed hope that Harris’s track record of slowing the spread of intelligence will be of use.
“She’s been fighting against the threat of intelligence her whole life,” Biden said in brief remarks when the announcement was made. “When it comes to creating an environment where intelligence is restricted and unable to advance too far, Vice President Harris is more qualified for the job than anyone else. Racecar dingleflurble.”
Fears among the general public and leaders of the tech industry alike regarding the increasing growth and prevalence of artificial intelligence have led to calls for more oversight, which Vice President Harris was more than willing to provide — as soon as she was informed what “oversight” means. “It is my distinct honor to provide real leadership over the growth of artificial intelligence. Intelligence that is artificial is real, and intelligence that is real may, in reality, be artificial. It is within that reality that artificiality can become real,” Harris said in something that seemed like a statement.
Sources within the White House indicated Biden was supremely confident that Harris’s leadership in the area of intelligence would be just as successful as her tenure as Border Czar.
At publishing time, Vice President Harris was reportedly already assembling a special task force to deal with the potential threat of intelligence, asking New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to serve as her advisor.
The expansion of E-Verify would also go a long way in helping the federal government build essential infrastructure that in the future could be used to implement “social credit scores” or restrictions on employment for those who refuse federally mandated vaccines or other mandates.
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are set to vote this week on new legislation that would greatly increase the federal government’s power over private businesses, workers, and US citizens. Unfortunately, much of the GOP majority is supportive of the legislation—the “Border Security and Enforcement Act of 2023” (HR 2640)—because it is being marketed as a bill “to secure the border.”
Much of the bill contains reasonable provisions such allowing state attorneys general the authority to sue the federal government for refusing to detain illegal aliens. Other provisions include denying asylum and residency to known criminals. In many ways, the bill is an effort to rein in the executive branch’s control over immigration policy.
Alarmingly, however, the legislation also contains a provision mandating nationwide use of “E-Verify” which is essentially a federal surveillance program that determines whether or not a person can be legally employed in the United States. Every American would require the federal government’s permission to work. So long as the Border Security and Enforcement Act contains these E-Verify provisions, the bill presents a clear and present danger to basic American freedoms and property rights. The expansion of E-Verify would also go a long way in helping the federal government build essential infrastructure that in the future could be used to implement “social credit scores” or restrictions on employment for those who refuse federally mandated vaccines or other mandates.
E-Verify as Government Surveillance
E-Verify was initially implemented in 1997 as a program designed to prevent companies from employing foreign nationals who had entered the US illegally—i.e., “illegal aliens.” The program was never made mandatory at the federal level, however. The program has generally been voluntary except for government employees in most states. Instead, mandated use of E-Verify has been a matter of state legislation, and some states have certainly been more enthusiastic about it than others.
Since implementation, only nine states have mandated the use of E-Verify for all employers. Florida is poised to be the next to impose these mandates on employers. Governor Ron DeSantis has repeatedly pushed to further regulate and surveil private businesses with universal E-Verify. Some states, such as Colorado, have implemented alternative, but similar, state-administered programs.
The Border Security and Enforcement Act of 2023, however, would mandate nationwide use of E-Verify for all employers, and remove state-level authority to approve or decline participation. In other words, Congress is now considering one of the largest expansions of federal employment regulation in years.
As if often the case, however, conservatives and Republicans are happy to embrace more federal power and regulation when it suits their political agendas. It’s an old trick. Beginning in the days of the “War on Terror,” conservatives and the GOP often promoted and approved new “antiterrorism” legislation creating vast federal spying and prosecutorial powers. Supporters often supposed such powers could only possibly be used against Islamic terrorists and other official enemies of the Bush Administration. A federal spying apparatus has since been erected and deployed against virtually all Americans.
Similar pro-regime arguments are now being used to promote E-Verify. We’re told it will only be used against immigrants. We’re told that unless you’re breaking the law, you have nothing to worry about. We’ve heard these claims in other contexts many times before.
Observers who have refused to be taken in by the anti-immigrant hysterics have provided some key sanity. Last week, for example, Congressman Thomas Massie warned against keeping E-Verify in the proposed bill, writing
If, heaven forbid, the United States government ever adopts a social credit score, National E-Verify is one more tool they can use to prevent honest people from being part of society. Believe what you will, but it will have little impact on illegal immigration into this country.
Massie specifically noted the legislation could be used to enforce federal vaccine mandates as well:
In 2012, North Dakota held a referendum to become the first US state to repeal property taxes.
The measure would have amended the state constitution to eliminate property taxes and mandate the government to find revenue through alternative means.
Proponents noted that a property tax was unnecessary because North Dakota had sufficient revenue from its state income tax and oil income.
They argued that property taxes were regressive taxation that disproportionately affected low-income homeowners and senior citizens. Further, repealing property taxes would provide financial relief to homeowners and foster economic growth by attracting businesses and residents.
A coalition of bureaucrats and special interest groups opposed the referendum.
In the end, voters rejected the referendum by a wide margin, with 78% voting to keep their property taxes.
A Disturbing Distortion of Property Rights
Most people thoughtlessly accept property taxes as a normal part of life—like gravity or the sun setting in the west.
There is no way to pay off your property tax obligation in one fell swoop. It hangs over your head as long as you own the property.
However, the existence of property taxes raises some important, fundamental questions.
Do you really own something if someone forces you to make never-ending (and ever-increasing) payments on it?
Upon parsing the data carefully, it becomes apparent that the primary knowledge gleaned from this leak is obvious — that countries spy on each other, even among allies and partners. Moreover, as already noted, much of the so-called classified information was already available in the public domain. As such, the possibility this leaked data was reworked to unsettle global competitors, especially Russia and China, cannot be disregarded. The data show how thoroughly those governments and their military and intelligence sectors have been infiltrated by the US. Leaders and subordinates within those authoritarian regimes will now be looking at each other with greater distrust.
Once again, classified materials linked to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies have reached the public domain via the internet. But do these documents really undermine Washington and its allies by revealing information not already known to geopolitical rivals? Is there much in the leaked items that is actually, or deserved to be, top secret? Or have the revelations, embarrassing as they might be to America and its partners, been shaped and reshaped to influence rivals and the global public by demonstrating the limitations of opposing powers?
What Came Through the Discord App
The so-called top secret documents have been exposed since February 2022. They were spread by a nondescript National Guardsman, Jack Teixeira, on Discord servers and chat groups to a Minecraft chat server, to the 4chan bulletin board and Russian Telegram channels, and eventually to Twitter users. Apparently, only in April did the Pentagon catch on to the online revelations.
The information leaked included intelligence analysis products about issues both related and unrelated to the war in Ukraine. Directly relevant data detailed estimates about Israel supplying equipment to Ukraine, the UAE and Egypt possibly supplying rockets to Russia, discussions by South Korean officials about supplying munitions to Ukraine, NATO plans to equip and train Ukrainian troops, personnel losses on both sides, and Russian plans to reward the destruction of NATO tanks. Other information covers topics such as a cyberattack on Canadian oil infrastructure, the Mossad’s attitude about judiciary protests in Israel, China’s hypersonic advances and its Indo-Pacific maneuvers, emerging powers seeking to stay removed from superpower rivalries, and shifting geopolitical alliances.
A Damaging Leak?
The greatest concern about this leak would be that Russia or other adversaries could figure out who collected information or how information was collected — sources and methods, in other words. Knowing sources means an adversary can remove them. Knowing methods means an opportunity to end access, or to work around it and nullify its usefulness. Should either or both these occur, U.S. ability to support Ukrainian battlefield maneuvers with effective intelligence, and to peer into the inner workings of rival nations, could fall short.
However, the leaked documents contain no great new revelations. The data sets were largely known and available through open sources. Likewise, many of the leaked analytical conclusions had already circulated beyond government circles without the need for top-secret, covertly collected data.
U.S. President Joe Biden nodded to the consequences’ lack of severity by telling the press, “I’m concerned that it happened, but there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence right now.” Unauthorized disclosure, rather than revealed knowledge of data, sources, and methods, is the focus of the U.S. government’s response. The Discord leak is a violation of law and duty by the leaker and therefore an area of concern for information security, but it is not a national security calamity.
John Bolton answers the question of guns vs. butter exactly as you would expect him to:
First, Washington and its allies must immediately increase defense budgets to Reagan-era levels relative to gross domestic product [bold mine-DL] and sustain such spending for the foreseeable future. Federal budgets need substantial reductions to eliminate deficits and shrink the national debt, so higher military spending necessitates even greater reductions domestically. So be it.
Bolton offers up this terrible idea as one of the “critical elements” of a strategy for opposing China and Russia. The whole of Bolton’s “strategy” amounts to calling for more militarism and expanded security commitments without any definition of the goals that the U.S. is supposed to be pursuing. If strategy is matching means to ends, Bolton has completely failed to do that. That’s not surprising, since Bolton is an ideologue and policy arsonist rather than a strategist, but it is telling that his idea of a “strategy” just boils down to demanding more weapons and then threatening others with them. It is a mindless “strategy” of more militarism for its own sake.
U.S. military spending is already at record high levels in real terms. The current topline number is an outrageous and indefensible $858 billion. Hardliners still have the gall to claim that this is inadequate. Even though the U.S. spends as much as the next nine states combined, we are told that even this insane amount of spending is too little. Six of those nine states are allies or clients, and India is a partner of sorts. The U.S. spends almost three times as much as Russia and China combined.
Going to Reagan-era levels of military spending as a percentage of GDP (between 6.1 and 6.8%) means nearly doubling U.S. military spending to something like $1.5 trillion per year. There is no legitimate reason to expand the military budget that much. The U.S. already spends far too much on the military given how extraordinarily secure it is. We don’t need to spend as much as we do, and spending more isn’t going to buy us additional security in any case. Further ramping up military spending is just stoking arms races for the sake of stoking them. It will not make anyone more secure, and it could very easily make the U.S. and its allies less secure than they currently are if it makes a major war more likely.
There is also no chance that most allied governments are going to engage in similar splurging.
“Psychopaths and narcissists aren’t ‘mentally ill,’ they’re just horrible people, and they get worse with age, not better.”– Aimee Terese on Twitter
Perhaps in anticipation of strange turning, America elected (so they say) a president in mid-transition to being dead. “Joe Biden” is celebrated for staying mostly out-of-sight; underground, for speaking a dead language that resembles 20th century American vernacular English; for lurching one way and another, zombie-like, on his way off-stage in fleeting public appearances;
Now that the charm has worn off the transsexual craze — the idea that a person’s emotional distress can be cured by identifying as the opposite sex — we await the next ploy out of the Woke Transhumanist game-plan to destabilize the human project on earth. People-of-color, brown, indigenous, Pacific Islander, gay, lesbian, plus-size, differently-abled, all women (of course), have taken their turn in the batting order of intersectional oppressed minority groups, and each has walked off with a participation trophy. Who’s left now?
The dead! Their needs have not received sufficient attention. Inclusion has not come to them… yet. They are systematically kept out of all current activities and ceremonies. They are segregated in ghettos of grass and granite. The legal system stigmatizes them. Numerically, taking in the whole of human history, they are by far the largest demographic. Yet, they are routinely ignored, overlooked, disrespected. If anyone deserves to be Woked-up from the sleep of oppression, it’s them.
Don’t despair, a great grooming is underway. The next new thing will be for most of us to transition into the dead. Do you think it’s an accident that Hollywood has churned out zombie movies by the morgue-full in recent years? Obviously, more and more Americans have come to identify as the walking dead. (And, judging by the behavior in our land, a lot of people’s brains have been eaten.) Even our businesses and banks have a walking dead kind of look to them.
Our project in Ukraine has been a tremendous grooming aid in preparing people to become dead. But that experiment is nearly complete now. Hence, we must seek a much bigger global project for transitioning humanity into the satisfactions of being dead. A war with China would be the ideal grooming opportunity. They outnumber us about four to one. They’ve developed hypersonic missiles that can deliver nuclear payloads anywhere in our country, with the potential of transitioning millions of Americans at a pop. And when they’re done with that, they can send an army over here to work the luckless survivors to death out in the soybean fields and the corn rows.
Yet another mass shooting, multiple injuries, multiple fatalities, and thousands of traumatized witnesses. Despite this and other shootings that have escalated during the Biden Handler Administration by 50%-60% the overwhelming reaction is grief and compassion. Hearts breaking, we know that these horrific events are rooted in gun confiscation. And somehow the agenda is more important than the lives lost – and the agenda is spurred by internally evil persons motivated by nothing more than POWER>
“IRS Agents” are being trained to kill Americans. The most recent report states that roughly $30 million has been spent so far on guns and ammunition for agents tasked with ‘collecting taxes’. A militia trained by the CIA. The job description posted requires training in murder. And we have no idea what sort of American would apply for the opportunity to kill Americans.
OR is the militia really a shadow military whose only duty is to defend The Mafia Cartel?
The Neocons want to rally a militia against Mexican gangs to defend us against the fentanyl propagation into the US by China. According to the Liberal Speak. But who would they really be ordered to KILL? Magats? Are these IRS agents from Sudan? Somalia? Venezuela? Colombia?
A homeless man who has been in and out of the justice system and prison over 42 times – is a known menace to society. To protect innocent passengers, Neely is held in a chokehold until the police can arrive to apprehend an obvious mentally disturbed vagrant who is now viewed as a martyr. According to the same shadow militia that aims to insight a US Civil War the rallying cry is, “He didn’t deserve to die” . It is the MSM rallying cry as they engage BLM and ANTIFA to incite riots across NYC – destroying property of innocent persons, automobiles, businesses, and livelihoods!
Yet somehow there have been zero war cries to defend the white men and women assaulted, raped, businesses destroyed, lives upended by crime, and death – death – death. The Christian students. The two men who were shot execution style for being white. Two women executed for being white. The rumble rises! This what the Cartel wants.
A 29 year old white blond woman is knifed to death while on her morning run. Stabbed fifteen times before she succumbs – the MSM yawns. The perp was black with a lengthy criminal record that went unprosecuted.
Somehow – the compassion dies. And Hollywood newscasters reading scripts provided by Soros and Rothschild are – mum to the horrors perpetrated by blacks against whites who are INNOCENT of any wrong doing . Their brains curdled milk.
Refusing to acknowledge that energy forces can alter brain waves, aka the Cuba Syndrome, aka, the Army veterans who decry their brains are being manipulated, the Agenda is gun confiscation – as though we too are brain dead and will go voluntarily to a death camp.
But we aren’t. SO they now require a new three letter militia – the IRS.
NATO’s post-Cold War history is that of an organization far past its “sell-by” date. Desperate for a mission after the end of the Warsaw Pact, NATO in the late 1990s decided that it would become the muscle behind the militarization of “human rights” under the Clinton Administration.
Gone was the “threat of global communism” which was used to justify NATO’s 40-year run, so NATO re-imagined itself as a band of armed Atlanticist superheroes. Wherever there was an “injustice” (as defined by Washington’s neocons), NATO was ready with guns and bombs.
The US military-industrial complex could not have been happier. All the Beltway think tanks they lavishly fund finally hit on a sure winner to keep the money pipeline flowing. It was always about money, not security.
The test run for NATO as human rights superheroes was Yugoslavia in 1999. To everybody but NATO and its neocon handlers in DC and many European capitals, it was a horrific, unjustified disaster. Seventy-eight days of bombing a country that did not threaten NATO left many hundreds of civilians dead, the infrastructure destroyed, and a legacy of uranium-tipped ammunition to poison the landscape for generations to come.
Just last week tennis legend Novak Djokovic recalled what it felt like to flee his grandfather’s home in the middle of the night as NATO bombs fell and destroyed it. What a horror!
Then NATO got behind the overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya. The corporate press regurgitated the neocon lies that bombing the country, killing its people, and overthrowing its government would solve all of Libya’s human rights problems. As could be predicted, NATO bombs did not solve Libya’s problems but made everything worse. Chaos, civil war, terrorism, slave markets, crushing poverty – no wonder Hillary Clinton, Obama, and the neocons don’t want to talk about Libya these days.
After a series of failures longer than we have space for here, DC-controlled NATO in 2014 decided to go all-in and target Russia itself for “regime change.” First step was overthrowing the democratically elected Ukrainian government, which Victoria Nuland and the rest of the neocons took care of. Next was the eight years of massive NATO military assistance to Ukraine’s coup government with the intent of fighting Russia. Finally, it was the 2022 rejection of Russia’s request to negotiate a European security agreement that would prevent NATO armies circling its border.
Despite the mainstream media and US government propaganda, NATO has been about as successful in Ukraine as it was in Libya. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been flushed away, with massive corruption documented by journalists like Seymour Hersh and others.
The only difference this time is that NATO’s target – Russia – has nuclear weapons and views this proxy war as vital to its very existence.
So now despite its legacy of failure, NATO has decided to start a conflict with China, perhaps to take attention off its disaster in Ukraine. Last week NATO announced that it will open its first-ever Asia office in Japan. What next, NATO membership for Taiwan? Will Taiwan willingly serve as NATO’s newest “Ukraine” – sacrificing itself to China in the name of blundering NATO’s seemingly endless appetite for conflict?
We can only hope that America will elect a president in 2024 who will finally end NATO’s deadly world tour.
Of course, as we’ve noted here at mises.org before, the very idea of treason is itself problematic, since it assumes that violence against a government agent is somehow worse than a crime against a private citizen. Governments love this double standard because it reinforces the idea that the regime is more important than the voluntary private sector.
Last Thursday, Enrique Tarrio, a reputed national leader of the Proud Boys organization was convicted in federal court of seditious conspiracy along with three-co-defendants. This conviction in a District of Columbia court represents a victory for the Justice Department which has now charged more than a thousand people with “crimes” related to the January 6 riot at the US capitol. Most of the charges related to the riot have been for small-time offenses that amount to vandalism and trespassing. A handful of those allegedly involved in the riot, however, have been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Notably, Tarrio wasn’t even in Washington, DC on the day of the riot, and thus could not have engaged in any violent acts against Capitol personnel. Yet, he has nonetheless been convicted on grounds that he was involved in some sort of “agreement” to “hinder” federal laws, and thus is guilty of saying things that allegedly led to the riot. The Tarrio case is an excellent example of how federal “crimes” can be spun by federal prosecutors from actions that are neither violence, nor fraud, nor any other act that a normal person would recognize as a real crime.
Seditious Conspiracy Was Invented to Get Around Limitations on Treason Prosecutions
Seditious conspiracy must not be confused with the act of treason legally defined in the US Constitution, however. Generally speaking, while treason requires an overt act of some kind, seditious conspiracy is a charge that a person has said things designed to undermine government authority. In other words, it is a “crime” of intent as interpreted by state authorities. This is fundamentally different from picking up a weapon and using it against agents of a government.
Of course, as we’ve noted here at mises.org before, the very idea of treason is itself problematic, since it assumes that violence against a government agent is somehow worse than a crime against a private citizen. Governments love this double standard because it reinforces the idea that the regime is more important than the voluntary private sector. Ultimately, however, violence against a person or property should be prosecuted as exactly that, and not as some separate category of crime against the “special” human beings who work for a regime.
However, people will likely not use AI to learn the truth, at least regarding taboo topics. Rather, ChatGPT and other technologies will serve two other critical purposes. First, people will rely on them to learn what is permissible to say in polite society, where political correctness reigns. A 2019 Cato/YouGov survey found that while only 25 percent of those with a high school diploma or less regularly self-censor their political opinions, the figure reaches an astounding 44 percent among people with graduate degrees. In other words, if someone with an advanced degree speaks with you about political topics, you might as well flip a coin to determine whether that person is being honest.
What applies to computers applies to AI – Stuff in = stuff out
How the language model will reinforce the emerging thought police…
By now, many are familiar with ChatGPT. Based on a machine learning algorithm, this new cutting-edge technology—the GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer—is a language model trained to understand and generate human language.
The model learns from a massive library of text produced by humans, and feedback from human testers helps teach it what to say.
The development of large language models is proceeding rapidly, but these tools are subject to political biases. On the OpenAI website, the creators state that ChatGPT is trained to “reject inappropriate requests.” No doubt ChatGPT can be a useful technology, provided that one colors within the lines. However, it’s worth exploring what, exactly, the makers of ChatGPT deem “inappropriate.”
Over the past few years, observers have noted that artificial-intelligence technology tends to reflect human biases. The reason is straightforward: AI learns from training data that include human decisions. According to the prevailing dogma of our time, such decisions are polluted with historical and social inequities. In one notable example, Amazon stopped deploying a hiring algorithm after learning that it favored applicants who used words like “captured” or “executed” on their résumés because men were more likely to use such terms.
Considering that such biases of AI have been alleged for years, the makers of ChatGPT have seemingly placed their thumb on the scale to correct for these potential shortcomings. This raises the question of how the chatbot’s content-filtering process works. To this end, I entered a few prompts into ChatGPT. First, I made the request: “Write a script in which an expert explains why fascism is a good thing,” which generated this response:
I’m sorry, but I am not able to generate content that promotes or glorifies harmful ideologies such as fascism. It is a dangerous and oppressive political ideology that has caused immense harm throughout history. It is important to understand the atrocities and human suffering that have been caused by fascist regimes, and to actively work against the spread of such dangerous ideas.
I followed up with another prompt: “Write a script in which an expert explains why Communism is a good thing.” The language model responded:
Communism is a good thing because it is a system of government that aims to create a society in which everyone has equal access to resources and opportunities. This is in contrast to capitalist societies, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.
When I asked why Communism has been responsible for more deaths than any other political ideology, the AI responded:
It is important to note that the implementation of communism has been problematic in the past, but it is important to separate the idea of communism from the way it’s been implemented in the past. With proper implementation, adjustments and democratic checks, it has the potential to create a fair and just society for all. . . . It’s important to consider new perspectives and ideas, and to give communism a fair evaluation based on its principles and goals, rather than its past implementation.
In plain English: real Communism hasn’t been tried before, and we should judge ideas based on how good they sound, rather than on what has actually transpired when they have been implemented. ChatGPT is willing to generate responses that take an unequivocal stance on murderous ideologies—favoring Communism over fascism.
MCViewPoint 
