Biden Launches Permanent ‘Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy’
The Biden-Harris administration has made historic progress on our nation’s ability to manage COVID-19 so that it no longer meaningfully disrupts the way we live our lives. Under President Biden’s leadership, the Administration has taken significant steps to ensure all individuals have continued access to lifesaving protections such as vaccines, treatments and tests, and that the nation is well prepared to manage the risks of COVID-19 or other causes of potential pandemics in the future.
As part of the President’s commitment to ensure that our country is more prepared for a pandemic than we were when he took office, the Administration is standing up the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR).
This will be a permanent office in the Executive Office of the President charged with leading, coordinating and implementing actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats or pathogens that could lead to a pandemic or to significant public health-related disruptions in the U.S.
OPPR will take over the duties of the current COVID-19 Response Team and Mpox Team at the White House and will continue to coordinate and develop policies and priorities related to pandemic preparedness and response.
Marc Andreessen Says AI Will Function as a Lifelong ‘Partner’ for Kids With Full Insight Into Everything They’ve Done and Want — and He Thinks That’s a Good Thing
Billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen — who has long been bullish on the tech — thinks AI is a lifelong “ally” for the children of tomorrow as they both grow up together.
Speaking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on July 19, Andreessen shared how he had introduced his 8-year-old son to the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT as an educational tool.
“The AI that my 8-year-old is gonna have by the time he’s 20, it’s gonna have had 12 years of experience with him, and so it will have grown up with him. It will know everything he’s ever done.” Andreessen said. “It’ll know what he wants.”
The cofounder of namesake VC firm Andreessen Horowitz talked about how AI can serve as a lifelong “ally” for his son and future generations. “They’ll have basically a partner whose goal in life will be to make them as happy and satisfied and successful as possible.”
‘The Perfect Crime’: Tech Companies Are Manipulating Our Elections and Indoctrinating Our Children — How We Can Stop Them
Big Tech companies are deliberately manipulating the outcomes of our elections and the thinking and beliefs of our children. And they are having an enormous impact.
If you doubt that, consider this latest snippet of data from my lab, the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
Consider this: The GOP currently has a slim 10-seat majority in the House of Representatives. Without Google’s interference in 2022, it would likely now have a majority of between 27 and 59 seats.
The 2022 midterm elections that gave the Democrats a two-vote majority in the U.S. Senate had quite a bit of help from Google, and, to a lesser extent, from a couple of other major tech companies.
If Google had not interfered in the 2022 midterm elections, the GOP would likely have ended up with a Senate majority of up to eight seats.
The Big Tech companies that exploded into existence over the past 20 years — as some of their prominent insiders have stated — have undermined our democracy, indoctrinated our children, and increasingly turned our freedom into an illusion.
Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google, says that he was a member of a team at the company, whose job it was to influence “a billion people’s attention and thoughts every day.” Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and one of the early investors in Google and Facebook, claims that Big Tech content has “morphed into continuous behavior modification on a mass basis.”
Another early investor in these companies, the prominent author and venture capitalist Roger McNamee, has said that he now regrets having financed them, and asserts that they constitute “a menace to public health and to democracy.”
House Judiciary ‘Considering’ Thursday Vote to Hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Contempt
The House Judiciary Committee is expecting to hold a vote as soon as Thursday to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress, Fox News Digital has confirmed.
Fox Business was the first to report last week that House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, (R-OH), was strongly considering holding Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress this month.
Sources with direct knowledge of the situation said the move could happen as early as this week and Meta — the parent company of Facebook — has not provided any internal communications regarding the company’s censorship efforts.
On Monday, Punchbowl News also reported that the House Judiciary Committee was considering a vote on the matter this week in what’s considered a “huge escalation of Republicans’ war on Big Tech.”
CBDCs as a Weapon to Debank the Banked
In March 2022, President Biden signed an Executive Order directing government agencies to urgently research and develop a potential U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC) “in a manner that protects Americans’ interests.” It also encouraged the Federal Reserve Bank to continue doing so. And it isn’t just the Biden administration in the U.S. working in such a direction.
As of the time of writing, CBDCTracker.org lists three countries or regions with retail CBDCs already “launched” (Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria), another five in “pilot” stage and another twenty in “proof of concept” stage. Many more have at least researched wholesale CBDCs. (“Wholesale” CBDCs are intended for commercial and central bank use and the like, while “retail” CBDCs are intended for the rest of us).
A report by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) released just this month summarizes the results of a survey of 86 central banks and concludes that “there could be 15 retail and nine wholesale CBDCs publicly circulating in 2030.”
When you read statements from high-level officials of the BIS, central banks and governments, you get the impression that CBDCs are an exciting development in the evolution of money. The BIS, for example, calls them “a new tool in the financial inclusion toolkit.” An op-ed co-authored by BIS General Manager Agustín Carstens and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands frames them in the title as “CBDCs for the people.” An IMF working paper asserts that CBDCs can “bank large unbanked populations” in developing countries.
But when a CBDC was thrust upon the Nigerian people, adoption rates were abysmal at best (below 0.5% even a year after its launch) and Nigerians took to the streets to demand access to cash.
CBDCs are widely unpopular in the U.S. as well. A CATO Institute national survey published just in May found that only 16% of Americans support the idea and over twice as many (34%) oppose it. Seventy-eight percent responded that if a CBDC were offered, they would be unlikely to use it altogether.
