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New York Governor [Saint] Andrew Cuomo is seeking the right kind of billionaires to help put the “new normal” in place.
I read an excellent article in the Intercept, entitled SCREEN NEW DEAL Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia by a fine writer and thinker, Naomi Klein.
I am going to summarize, paraphrase, and plagiarize a little, and add my own thoughts, and concepts from other sources, but read the whole, excellent article for a nice grim view of a potential “coming soon” future.
At New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus briefing last Tuesday [May 5th], the good and [formerly corrupt] but recently corona-canonized governor announced a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system.”
Cuomo reimagines a state without school buildings and children gathered in classrooms. He calls Gates a “visionary”, [not one of the world’s most greedy and mercenary characters. With a $107 billion net worth, he is the second richest private citizen in the world.]
To get an idea of the kind of visionary Gates is, a 2020 patent filed by Microsoft Technology outlines a technology where human activity is used to mine cryptocurrency using a device that transfers human action data to a master server.
Once a human accomplishes an activity sent by the server, the human is rewarded with cryptocurrency for completing the computer-mandated task. If this were to be widely employed, people could be under the wise direction of artificial intelligence, controlled by Microsoft.
Here is link to the patent info. The patent number, by the way, is WO2020060606. Some might note the three 6’s in the number. That could be purely coincidental.
Who Needs Schools?
Saint Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he asked.
Why indeed?
I think visionary Gates can envision a massive tech buy to fulfill this vision. His computers, his software, will be in every home where children need education. Artificial Intelligence may soon be able to replace teachers.
Bill Gates, a visionary?
I am reminded of the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, when a bully, played by Michael Rannie, came from another planet and threatened to destroy the earth if all nations did not accept law enforcement by Artificial Intelligence.
Cuomo is also partnering with Michael Bloomberg for testing and contact tracing.
Now there’s a fascist in sheep’s clothing if ever one was born. His net worth is estimated at $57 billion.
If you want to get an idea of what his methodology might look like, consider that Bloomberg was the man who got a law passed in NYC that limited the size of soft drinks people were allowed to buy – ostensibly for their own health and safety.
A visionary like that has no conception of freedom principles. He will do anything for our safety.
Contact tracing may include mandatory quarantining and/or isolation. It could entail forced removal from home if authorities determine one cannot safely isolate at home.
Obviously, society needs to do more than merely trace contacts. They have to effect no contact with others in order for it to be effective.
Suppose you are contacted by tracers and told you have to quarantine because you came in contact with someone who has Covid 19, and you don’t want to quarantine – perhaps because you are not sick. What then?
Will Bloomberg or Cuomo let you go about your business?
To get a hint, let’s look at the Democrats’ House Resolution 6666. [I don’t know why there are so many sixes]. It is a bill that seems to grant the federal government and their designated “entities” the authority to enter your home to conduct coronavirus testing, and if necessary, it seems, transfer [remove] you or members of your household from home.
It was introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and authorizes the “Secretary of Health and Human Services to award grants to eligible entities to conduct diagnostic testing for COVID–19, and related activities such as contact tracing, through mobile health units and, as necessary, at individuals’ residences, and for other purposes.”
The bill defines an “emergency period.” It appears to authorize the HHS secretary to remove family members from their homes if it’s “necessitated by the circumstances of the declared emergency.”
“A transfer of an individual who has not been stabilized in violation of subsection (c) of such section if the transfer is necessitated by the circumstances of the declared emergency in the emergency area during the emergency period.”
A transfer of an individual means the removal of an individual from the individual’s home. Period.
One hundred billion dollars is proposed for this for 2021, which will provide for a lot of enforcement of transfers if necessary.
Of course, the bill has to pass in the house and the senate – and then be signed by the president, something that may be unlikely with a Republican Senate and Trump.
Meantime, what is likely to happen with Bloomberg-run contact tracing may go like this:
The first step is contacting COVID-positive patients, asking them to isolate at home and quizzing them on recent activities and the identity of recent close contacts. One person could have 30 or 40 contacts that tracers will contact.
Once they have a list of recent contacts who may have been exposed to the disease, tracers contact each person to request/demand/require that they go into quarantine for 14 days.
What if they don’t agree? This is something for which we need clarity. This is rarely discussed by mainstream media. Is it being assumed that everyone will voluntarily comply? But that certainly is not going to happen.
Tracers are supposed to be in regular contact with quarantined people, asking questions about their health and potentially helping with their needs such as help with groceries and, of course, ensuring they are quarantined.
If a quarantined person starts to develop symptoms, tracers launch a new round of investigation to identify anyone they may have infected within their social circle.
Electronic monitors are being discussed to ensure people stay at home. Regional isolation facilities are being planned in New York and elsewhere since not everyone can quarantine at home. Who gets to decide who stays home and who goes to the isolation facility?
Who do you think?
Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the [WHO] World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, on March 3th had something piquant to say about this.
He was asked by a reporter; “Do you think that home quarantine will be as effective anywhere for people who are positive, or would central quarantine be needed in order to have the same success that China has had?”
Dr. Ryan answered, “In some senses, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units [home quarantine]. Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner.”
This means, for the extremely dense, that if you are contact traced and deemed to be in need of isolation, authorities will remove you from your house, take your children to a place that they choose, and isolate them too, “in a safe and dignified manner.”
This has been done in Wuhan, China where people were physically removed from their homes by police. Others were locked in their houses with external locks so they could not get out in a safe and dignified manner [except reportedly some of them died locked safely in their homes].
It’s not surprising that CNN and other pro-China, pro Big Tech, Pro Strong Government media do not report on these potentially thorny issues of contact tracing. They are “flattening the truth” for us.
You’ve heard of “flattening the curve,” where government imposes measures [sometimes unconstitutionally] to slow down the spread of coronavirus. “Flattening the truth” is where government [and media] gives us truth incrementally to slow down the alarm people will feel as they lose their liberties.
It remains to be seen if these liberties will return after the pandemic ends. It also remains to be seen if the pandemic will end, or if there will be another pandemic or crisis on the heels of this one.
Getting back to Saint Andrew Cuomo, the day after he announced his partnership with the visionary Gates, he invited former Google CEO Eric Emerson Schmidt [currently chair of the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Advisory Board and former executive chair of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company] to join in his briefing [via teleconferencing].
The altruistic Schmidt, who is ranked as the 119th richest private citizen in the world, with an estimated net worth of $14.2 billion [and expected to increase exponentially, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic] announced he will be heading up a commission to reimagine New York state’s new normal.
“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband.”
The reimagined New Yorkers’ home is one where artificial intelligence [AI] will replace, wherever possible, doctors [telehealth], shut down schools [remote learning] and surveillance [5G].
Schmidt says, “We should ….accelerate the trend toward remote learning… Online, there is no requirement of proximity, which allows students to get instruction from the best teachers, no matter what school district they reside in.”
If need be, we will accelerate, for our safety, any time, our home becoming also our place of quarantine, isolation, or confinement, as we become used to home arrest at the whim of the new visionary authoritarians and their Big Tech billionaire partners.
The future will employ fewer teachers, fewer doctors, and perhaps no drivers. It will feature driverless cars and drones delivering packages.
No cash, no credit cards. It can run on “artificial intelligence”.
We will, in Orwellian terms, create “smart cities,” filled with sensors everywhere. Our movements will be traced. Our locations tracked. Our conversations recorded. We may be required to carry 5G cell phones with us at all times. But that may be cumbersome.
Implants, said to be part of the visionary Gate’s golden ideal, are easier. And cash-free commerce. We can perhaps in time mimic China’s system of social credit scoring system.
China’s social credit scoring system relies on facial recognition software designed to store a citizen profile while tracking individuals’ movements. Chinese citizens are, for instance, allowed to take the high-speed trains [or not take them] based on the system forecasting whether they might be able to pay [based in part on their behavior]. There are other ‘pre-crime’ risks that may prevent some from going places on a train.
China’s vast network of facial recognition surveillance cameras is being linked to citizen ID cards. Under its social credit score system, China punishes people who criticize the government, as well as other bad behaviors, including;
– Bad driving.
– Smoking on trains.
– Buying too many video games.
– Buying too much junk food. [Bloomberg loves this one.]
– Buying too much alcohol.
– Calling a friend who has a low credit score.
– Having a friend online who has a low credit score.
– Posting “fake news” online. [YouTube and Facebook loves this one]
– Visiting unauthorized websites. [Google loves this]
– Walking your dog without a leash.
– Letting your dog bark too much.
In August, the Chinese Communist state announced that it prevented 2.5 million “discredited entities” [i.e. people] from purchasing plane tickets and 90,000 people from buying high-speed train tickets in the month of July.
Chinese citizens will also be required to pass a facial recognition test to use the Internet.
And, in the USA, if Cuomo’s visionaries have their way, we may see some or all of this. And we will see power centralized into a handful of tech companies and government, with men like Cuomo and billionaire friends setting up the new normal for us.
We will accept it too as the only way to pandemic-proof our lives.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” said Benjamin Franklin, more than 20 years before the Declaration of Independence, at the Pennsylvania Assembly in its “Reply to the Governor” (11 Nov. 1755).
Thanks to Cuomo and his billionaire partners, New York is set to lead the future with schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police, and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) core functions to private tech companies.
It will include increases in government spending on research into artificial intelligence and 5G — investments that will benefit companies in which Schmidt and Gates have holdings.
Billionaire Eric Emerson Schmidt, genuinely distressed by the coronavirus, is living entirely to help us in our time of need with the pandemic. I hear his hair has turned quite gold from grief.
It is also only fair to advise the gullible, that Schmidt seems to believe that the US needs to be more like China, with mass surveillance, data collection and facial recognition deployment. This is our best hope for protecting ourselves against coronavirus, he says.
Overall, Big Tech has been saying for some time that it needs the same broad power as their Chinese competitors, who are unhampered by democracy or public engagement in the designing of critical institutions and public spaces, to compete in the world of artificial intelligence.
Now, the pandemic has given a new impetus to accomplishing this visionary goal. Technology, to make its advances to fight the gruesome pandemic, cannot be subject to onerous and delay-ridden public oversight.
That’s the old normal.
No more schools, universities, fewer hospitals, less public transit and home is where you kind of permanently shelter in place, with Big Tech providing you everything you need. That is the vision.
And the good and saintly Governor Cuomo is seeking to make outsourcing decisions about how to “reimagine” his state based on what billionaires Gates, Schmidt and Bloomberg want.
China Does New Normal Better
And when we do leave home and return to work, there may be some big changes.
According to the Wall Street Journal, here are some examples:
“In Midtown Manhattan, thermal cameras will measure body temperatures as employees file into a 32-story office tower at Rockefeller Center. The building’s owner, RXR Realty, said it is also developing a mobile app for tenants to monitor — and score — how closely their workers are complying with social distancing…
“PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said it is preparing to launch this month a phone app for employers that traces contacts by analyzing workers’ interactions in the office. More than 50 clients have expressed interest, including some of the nation’s biggest banks, manufacturers and energy companies.
“Advertising giant Interpublic Group of Cos . is exploring dividing its 22,000 U.S. employees into three separate groups, according to perceived health risks, which could include age. Workers could be asked to disclose medical and other personal information about themselves and, in some cases, family members…
“’It is a reasonable approach if you can get through the operational and some of the privacy and regulatory issues,’ Dr. Ossmann said….
“RXR, the real-estate company, is testing new systems on its own employees. ‘We are using ourselves as the guinea pigs,’ RXR’s Chief Executive Scott Rechler said.
“The company aims to have its social-distancing app ready at the end of May. Workers’ movements are tracked through their smartphones — you get a higher score the more time in the office you are farther than 6 feet from another person. An individual would see his or her own score, and the employer would see aggregate data on how employees are complying with social distancing as a whole.
“A worker that tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, indicating they had the infection in the past, would be considered a ‘Level 1’ employee — the lowest risk— and could return to work when states and cities lift work-from-home orders.
“Those without antibodies but who are considered a low to moderate risk would count as ‘Level 2.’ This group would include employees who are under 65 years old, don’t live with high-risk people, and don’t have chronic diseases including diabetes or hypertension. This group could potentially return to work in a second wave.
“Employees over 65, or those who are pregnant, smoke, have chronic diseases or health issues would be considered ‘Level 3.’ These at-risk employees would have to wait the longest to return, Dr. Ossmann said.
And Saint Andrew Cuomo wants to reimagine our new normal with Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and Eric Schmidt.
Sounds legit.
