Category: Uncategorized

The combination of “warp speed” advances in neurotechnology, such as brain implants or scans that can increasingly peek inside minds, and artificial intelligence poses a threat to mental privacy, UNESCO warned on Thursday.

The UN’s agency for science and culture has started developing a global “ethical framework” to address human rights concerns posed by neurotechnology, it said at a conference in Paris.

Neurotechnology is a growing field seeking to connect electronic devices to the nervous system, mostly so far to treat neurological disorders and restore movement, communication, vision or hearing.

Recently neurotechnology has been supercharged by artificial intelligence algorithms which can process and learn from data in ways never before possible, said Mariagrazia Squicciarini, a UNESCO economist specialising in AI.

“It’s like putting neurotech on steroids,” she told AFP.

Gabriela Ramos, UNESCO’s assistant director-general for social and human sciences, said that this convergence of neurotechnology and AI was “far-reaching and potentially harmful”.

“We are on a path to a world in which algorithms will enable us to decode people’s mental processes and directly manipulate the brain mechanisms underlying their intentions, emotions and decisions,” she told the conference.

In May, scientists in the United States revealed they had used brain scans and AI to turn “the gist” of what people were thinking into written words — as long as they had spent long hours inside a large fMRI machine.

Later that month, billionaire Elon Musk’s firm Neuralink received approval to test its coin-sized brain implants on humans in the United States.

Read more at: www.barrons.com

With child marriage still legal in California, advocates are mounting a campaign to push the state to enact a ban, but their effort is facing surprising opposition from progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

Dozens of survivors of forced or child marriages traveled to California’s state Capitol in Sacramento last month to protest the state’s existing laws. Dressed in wedding dresses with their wrists tied and mouths taped shut, they called on state lawmakers to finally outlaw the practice.

California, a solidly Democratic state, was on track to be the first to pass an absolute ban on marriages for children under 18. But the legislative proposal was met with opposition from liberal organizations like Planned Parenthood, the Children’s Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The pushback comes out of concerns that imposing an age requirement could set the stage for a slippery slope when it comes to constitutional rights or reproductive choices, specifically that an age requirement could impede a minor’s ability to seek an abortion.

California and Mississippi are the only two states where there is no minimum age requirement to get married. Most states have a minimum marriage age of 16 with parental consent, although it can range from as low as 14 to as high as 18, according to voting rights organization Wisevoter.

Newsweek reached out to Planned Parenthood via email for comment.

Minors seeking to wed in California need approval from a guardian and a court order. But those calling for a ban on child marriages point out that when it comes to issues like statutory rape, California’s definition of unlawful sexual activity between a child and an adult does not apply if the two parties are married.

Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California spokesperson Jennifer Wonnacott told the Los Angeles Times that it “strongly supports protecting youth from abuse of all kinds” but said those protections should “not impede on the reproductive rights of minors and their ability to decide what is best for them, their health and their lives.”

An analysis from Unchained At Last, a nonprofit dedicated to ending forced and child marriages in the U.S., found that between 2000 and 2018, 23,588 minors were married in California, making it the state with the second-highest number of child marriages behind Texas.

Read more at: www.msn.com

By Ben Shapiro

There’s a group of people who control what you are allowed to see — the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with.

You haven’t heard of them. You don’t know their names, but they determine, through methods both direct and indirect, whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages. Their decisions can bankrupt companies, silence voices and fundamentally shift cultural norms. Who are these people and how do they do this?

Well, at the top level you have a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce “approved” narratives and punish disapproved ones. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it isn’t a secret and we’re not guessing.

First, you have the World Economic Forum, the WEF, and their platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. Second, you have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega-corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars. WFA members are a who’s who of global business and include some of our recent wokeified favorites like Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev, Hershey, Procter & Gamble, Lego and Disney.

There is barely a billionaire Fortune 500 CEO, heavyweight philanthropist, government or woke nonprofit that isn’t associated with the WEF or the WFA.

In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. Within months, the WEF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega-corporations — the advertisers — together with Big Tech companies like Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram; Google-owned YouTube; the CCP’s TikTok; and even Snapchat and Pinterest.

This unholy alliance created something they call the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework. Think of Brand Safety as a dog whistle for censorship. They say it themselves: The Brand Safety Floor means, “Content not appropriate for any advertising support.” In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace.

So, what have these global elites decided to put in their censorship framework? They started with things we can all universally agree on, like preventing the distribution of child pornography or the advocacy of graphic terrorist activity. But they don’t draw the line at what is objectively criminal, abusive or dangerous. They continue expanding the guidelines to include far more subjective parameters.

For example, the framework lists subjective terms like “hate speech” as a problem. It says that anything surrounding transgenderism that they decide is dehumanizing or discussing what they deem to be a debated social issue in an insensitive way is off limits.

The framework is deliberately vague, allowing those in control to pick and choose how they enforce it and against whom.

So, how exactly do the approved narratives set by these global entities get enforced all the way down to the daily content you consume?

Well, here’s how. We’ll start with NewsGuard. NewsGuard is an organization that formulates ratings for American media. They rank news sites on a 0-to-100 scale based on nine supposedly apolitical criteria. These criteria are anything but apolitical. They often align with left-wing positions.

During the height of COVID-19, NewsGuard falsely labeled and downgraded 21 news sites, only well after the fact admitting that they either “mischaracterized the site’s claims” about the lab leak theory — referring to the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory” — or “wrongly grouped together unproven claims” about the lab leak with the “separate, false claim” that the “COVID-19 virus was man-made” without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated and the other was false.

“NewsGuard apologizes for these errors,” they said. “We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”

And when you compare their ratings of Left-leaning news organizations to Right-leaning news organizations, you see the same bias appear.

The Media Research Center, a free-speech nonprofit, studied NewsGuards’ ratings. The study found glaring examples of bias by NewsGuard.

The Left’s BuzzFeed managed a 100 out of 100 perfect score, despite its reporting on the Steele dossier and alleging collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia.

The study found that The Global Times, a Chinese propaganda government outlet, scored a 39.5 — that is 27 points higher than the U.S.-based conservative outlet The Federalist. Despite a scandal at USA Today revealing the publication of multiple fabricated sources in their stories and their own fact-checking operation misleading readers on the history of the Democratic Party and the KKK, USA Today maintained the 100 out of 100 rating by NewsGuard.

NewsGuard is also working with others to use AI technology to enforce Brand Safety standards at scale, by identifying scalable hoaxes and misinformation in order to streamline blanket removal. This means that the news that you read, news that is supposed to be fair and objective or at least diverse, must adhere to GARM, the WEF, the WFA and their subjective and biased standards in order to be deemed monetizable.

Read more at: pjmedia.com

“Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” — Luke 21:28.

Sam Altman, CEO of the company behind the world-altering ChatGPT artificial intelligence system, along with a partner announced yesterday the launch of Worldcoin, a global currency for those who “prove their humanity” through an iris scan. It has been tested in a couple dozen countries, and now they’re ready and hoping to take it global.

The Worldcoin website says, “If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI [universal basic income].”

Obviously this raises concerns with respect to globalism, privacy, freedom, the economy, and even biblical prophecy.

Human Intent?

Worldcoin’s stated purpose is to create a fully private and trustworthy means to prevent artificial intelligence from masquerading as humans and to keep individuals from claiming to be more than one person. At face value it sounds great: The 2020 election sure could have benefited from security like that.

Its primary application, however, would be economic, especially to keep AI out of fraudulent participation in the human business of buying and selling. That is, to solve a problem created by — guess who? — the creators of Worldcoin, among others.

Humanitarian Intent?

The company behind Worldcoin names itself “Tools for Humanity.” Its logos feature the mottoes “For every human,” and “The future is bright, and it belongs to the people of the world.”

Another part of Worldcoin’s stated purpose is to provide a universal basic income globally. Sounds great again, right? Sure, if you like socialism, and if can find it in you to believe a tech giant corporation has nothing but altruism in its heart.

That, plus you’d also have to agree with them in denying that the future belongs in any way to the God who created time and space. Humanism in our day is virtually always atheistic, or in another sense polytheistic, treating humans as gods themselves.

“We’re From a Massive Tech Corporation and We’re Here to Help”

The saying used to be “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” Usually that’s taken to mean, “Don’t trust a word of that.” I’d rather have the government than this, though: At least we can vote, and retain some semblance of checks and balances. We can at least pay lip service to the rule of law. Tools for Humanity, in contrast, is out to create a global economic kingdom with a self-appointed emperor ruling by right of economic might.

Still, you can’t deny they’ve been helpful. Tools for Humanity went to a number of developing countries, testing their iris-scanner “Orb” with promises of “free money.” How free was it? MIT Technology Review published a scathing report on it:

We found that the company’s representatives used deceptive marketing practices, collected more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent. These practices may violate the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) — a likelihood that the company’s own data consent policy acknowledged and asked users to accept — as well as local laws.

Helpful, yes. Helping themselves. Because they had the money and the power.

Read more at: stream.org

More millennials think referring to a transgender person by the wrong pronouns should be a criminal offense than think it should be legal, according to new polling conducted exclusively for Newsweek.

According to the survey by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, 44 percent of those aged 25-34 think “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense,” versus just 31 percent who disagree. The remainder “neither agree nor disagree” or “don’t know.”

This view remains popular for those aged 35-44, among whom 38 percent think misgendering should be illegal, whilst 35 percent disagree and 26 percent either don’t know or didn’t express an opinion.

The rights of transgender people, whose gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were given at birth, and the corresponding impact on women’s rights, has developed into a hot political issue across the United States. Republican-controlled states have passed a string of laws impacting transgender people, such as banning sex change operations and hormone treatments for minors.

According to Pew Research Center, a millennial is someone born between 1981 and 1996, making them between 27 and 42 years old today. The organization defines Generation Z as being born between 1997 and 2012, meaning they would now be between 11 and 26 years in age. Thus among both survey age categories that contain millennials, more people think misgendering should be illegal than legal.

The poll of 1,500 eligible voters in the United States was conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, for Newsweek, on July 6.

However the figure for millennials contrasts starkly with that for Americans as a whole, among whom just 19 percent want misgendering to be a criminal offense, whilst 65 percent disagree, 12 percent “neither agree nor disagree” and four percent answered “don’t know.”

Notably Generation Z Americans aged 18-24, who can vote, are notably less keen on making misgendering a crime than the older millennials. Among this group, 33 percent think calling someone by the wrong pronoun should be a criminal offense, while 48 percent disagree and the remainder answer either “neither” or “don’t know.”

Read more at: www.newsweek.com

Certain powerful people worldwide have been advocating for a global government. Such governance would allow for only a small group of individuals to control the entire planet. World domination has long been the goal of despots and dictators throughout human history. Today we are seeing a global government being ushered in — right before our very eyes!

To help us understand this shifting political landscape, I sought out a very special guest who has just returned from a meeting of the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann served for a number of years in the U.S. House of Representatives before running for President of the United States. She continues to serve as the dean of the Robertson School of Government and remains a strong voice for conservative and Christian principles here in America and around the world.

Congresswoman Bachmann, please tell us what you experienced when you traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to join the audience listening in to all of the plans being presented by the World Health Organization (W.H.O.).

Whole Foods Markets in the greater Denver area is now taking cashless palm payments through Amazon One at 11 of their store locations. Remind you of anything?

My daughter Megan, who is expecting and on our prayer list, sent me a text message with some crazy photos late last night about her incredible experience at their local Whole Foods store in Colorado. She went to check out and noticed, for the first time, that her Whole Foods was now using Amazon One for payments, and one of the options offered to her was to make a palm payment. Today it’s a payment through the front of your hand, and very soon it will be a payment through the back of your right hand or forehead. Guaranteed. We first reported that this was coming back on September 6, 2019. It’s here.

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:16,17 (KJB)

If you’re lost and reading this, you chuckle and wonder what all the fuss is about. To you, technology is a good thing, and the faster it gets here the easier and more comfortable your life will be. But to the born again Bible believer, we are watching the ongoing fulfilling of Bible prophecy in real-time, like the scene from ‘The Matrix’ where Neo is so in tune he’s watching the flurry of bullets coming at him as if in slow-motion. That’s you if you’re saved and believing The Book. You’ve been waiting for it, watching for it, and now that it’s arriving none of this is any surprise at all. Did you know that the word ‘amazon’ refers to the daughters of Ares, the god of war in Greek mythology? They lived in the region of modern-day Ukraine, and no, I’m not making this up. So you have Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, their new payment system is called ‘One’, as in One World, and you pay with the palm of your hand. Got it.

Yep, I see it. Do you?

Read more at: www.nowtheendbegins.com

The government is releasing thousands of illegal immigrant children with latent tuberculosis infections into American communities without assurances of treatment.

Nearly 2,500 children with latent infections were released into 44 states over the past year, according to a court-ordered report on how the Health and Human Services Department is treating the children.

About 126,000 total were released, indicating an infection rate of 1 in 50 migrant children.

The government says it can’t treat the children because they are in custody for a short time and treatment requires three to nine months. HHS releases infected children to sponsors and notifies local health authorities in the hope that they can arrange for treatment before the latent infection becomes active.

Those hopes are often dashed.

Local health officials say the notifications are infrequent and the child has often already arrived when they are told about a case in their jurisdiction.

“We do not know how often the sponsors follow through on treatment,” the Virginia Department of Health told The Washington Times in a statement. “By the time outreach takes place, the child has sometimes moved to another area or state.”

Read more at: www.washingtontimes.com

The National Education Association (NEA) on Monday recommended that teachers include the controversial book “Gender Queer” on their summer reading lists.

The book was featured in the NEA’s “Great Summer Reads for Educators!” list that showcased 11 books.

Among those books are “White Fragility,” a book that insists that White Americans use anger, shame and guilt to avoid taking responsibility for racial inequality.

Other sections included “books to help you forget about work” and “books to celebrate or help you understand Junetheenth.”

Under the “banned books” section, Gender Queer is recommended as a reading.

“Gender Queer” has as courted major controversy among America parents for being in public school libraries throughout the US and has been challenged for its depictions and descriptions of oral sex as well as discussions on masturbation.

Fox News Digital previously reported on Gender Queer’s author, Maia Kobabe, defending the sexually explicit graphic images in the memoir during an interview with NPR in January.

“And I honestly think the book is a lot less explicit than it could be,” Kobabe told NPR.

“The topic of gender touches on identity… and it touches on sexuality,” Kobabe continued.

“And it’s hard to fully explain I think what like how a gender identity can impact every facet of life as an adult without touching at least a little bit of sexuality. And I wanted to at least not to like shy away from that.”

The book also discusses Kobabe’s journey of self-discovery towards identifying outside the “gender binary.”

This list of books comes after the president of the National Education Association declared that racial and social justice is a “Pillar of the NEA’s efforts.”

Read more at: nypost.com