90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Girls With Guns

Barack Obama, who was instrumental in fueling the media’s “misinformation” narrative before he left office, has a new buzzword — “digital fingerprints.”

The former Democrat president wants the origin of digital information such as photos and videos to be clearly traced, to fight the spread of deepfakes.

“That technology’s here now,” said Obama in a discussion with his former advisor David Axelrod on the latter’s CNN podcast. “So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”

“”And the need for us, for the general public, I think to be more discriminating consumers of news and information, the need for us to over time develop technologies to create watermarks or digital fingerprints so we know what is true and what is not true.”

The idea of fighting “misinformation” by tracing the origin of digital info is not new. A coalition of tech and media companies led by Microsoft is already trying to make this technology the industry standard, as is a coalition with similar goals led by Adobe.

Before he left office, President Obama helped spark the media panic over “fake news” — later rebranded as “misinformation” — that was adopted by the media, NGOs, and tech companies as a pretext to suppress conservative content.

Hours before election day 2016, the Democrat president was giving interviews to the media about the dangers of “fake news,” and in the weeks following the election of Donald Trump, used public appearances to talk about the problem of “misinformation.”

Prior to this, the topic was not discussed widely in the media. Afterwards, it was everywhere. And by 2020, it was a key part of the media and tech industry’s efforts to interfere in...

Visage à trois #1511

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #1167

Visage à trois #1510

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Tucker #5:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #1165

New Zealand ‘Equity Adjustor Score’ Asks Surgeons to Prioritize Non-White Patients

Surgeons in Auckland, New Zealand, are expressing discomfort with a new policy that requires them to consider the ethnicity of their patients as a factor when scheduling surgeries.

Specifically, Maori and Pacific Islander patients are given priority consideration to compensate for historic inequality in access to health care.

Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand, a national public health agency established in July 2022 to consolidate numerous regional health boards, introduced an “Equity Adjustor Score” that sets five factors to be considered in surgery priority lists.

The five factors are clinical priority, time already spent on wait lists, if the patient lives in a geographically isolated area, economic deprivation, and ethnicity. The highest scores for ethnicity are given to Maori and Pacific Island (or “Pasifika”) peoples.

A similar concept was introduced in the Wellington region in May 2020. Capital & Coast District Health Board medical officer John Tait insisted it was “unlikely that any other patients will be significantly affected as a result” of the rules prioritizing Maori and Pasifika candidates for surgery.

The NZ Herald said on Monday that several regional boards saw the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic as a “Big Bang opportunity to reset” the unequal healthcare system, as former Auckland board chair Pat Snedden said in May 2020. Various attempts to adjust medical access for ethnicity were introduced without much public fanfare during the pandemic.

After explaining that the ethnic score would be employed to assign slots “within a given clinical priority band” – in other words, with all other considerations of severity being equal, Maori and Pasifika patients would go first – Tait clarified that his health board would “increase planned surgery overall” to “offset” any inconvenience to other ethnicities.

The Equity Adjustor Score for Auckland was devised in February but was not implemented until this week.

Te Whatu Ora’s interim leader for Auckland, Dr. Mike Shepherd, said that Maori and Pasifika patients have a “longer pathway to get on a waiting list in our current system,” so the ethnic scoring is an effort to correct for that delay and put them on a...