Alexandra Bruce – For the first time that I can remember, several states decided to simply suspend counting for the night in a national election.
As I write this at 4AM, Joe Biden has 238 electoral votes, with Nevada not called but leaning Left, along with its 6 electoral votes and Biden’s path to a total of 244, which is short of the 270 needed to win.
Donald Trump currently has 213 electoral votes, with Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia not called but leaning Right, with their 81 electoral votes and Trump’s path to 294 total. Continue reading →
Bloomberg Made Last Minute Contract With Discredited Obamacare Company
I previously ran a columnon how it seems that no waste or loss of government money seems enough to force accountability in some areas. That column came to mind with the recent disclosure that, in the waning hours of the Administration of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, Montreal-based CGI was awarded a $10-million-plus contract to update the city’s non-emergency call system. That is the same company that was partially responsible for the massive failure of the Obamacare rollout and later denied renewal of its multimillion dollar contract.The company was paid roughly $100 million for the failed contract. That was just part of the $678 million spent on the Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov which is now the subject of additional contracts to fix the earlier contracts.
If you think that 24/7 tracking of citizens by biometric recognition systems is paranoid fantasy, just read the industry newsletter.
Tom Cruise as John Anderton in the futuristic film Minority Report, where the advertisements use recognition technology to call out to the shoppers. Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox
A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.
Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant. Except that it turned out to be true. News21, supported by the Carnegie and Knight foundations, reports that Disney sites are indeed controlled by face-recognition technology, that the military is interested in the technology, and that the face-recognition contractor, Identix, has contracts with the US government – for technology that identifies individuals in a crowd.
Fast forward: after the Occupy crackdowns, I noted that odd-looking CCTVs had started to appear, attached to lampposts, in public venues in Manhattan where the small but unbowed remnants of Occupy congregated: there was one in Union Square, right in front of their encampment. I reported here on my experience of witnessing a white van marked “Indiana Energy” that was lifting workers up to the lampposts all around Union Square, and installing a type of camera. When I asked the workers what was happening – and why an Indiana company was dealing with New York City civic infrastructure, which would certainly raise questions – I was told: “I’m a contractor. Talk to ConEd.”
Alexandra Bruce – For the first time that I can remember, several states decided to simply suspend counting for the night in a national election.
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