Posts for Tag: Entertainment
Crime prediction software is here and it's a very bad idea
There are no naked pre-cogs inside glowing jacuzzis yet, but the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!
They will use this software on juvenile delinquents, using a series of variables to determine the potential for these people to commit another crime. Depending on this probability, they will put them under specific re-education programs. Deepak Advani—vice president of predictive analytics at IBM—says the system gives “reliable projections” so governments can take “action in real time” to “prevent criminal activities?”
Really? “Reliable projections”? “Action in real time”? “Preventing criminal activities”? I don’t know about how reliable your system is, IBM, but have you ever heard of the 5th, the 6th, and the 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution? What about article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? No? Let’s make this easy then: Didn’t you watch that scientology nutcase in Minority Report?
Sure. Some will argue that these juvenile delinquents were already convicted for other crimes, so hey, there’s no harm. This software will help prevent further crimes. It will make all of us safer? But would it? Where’s the guarantee of that? Why does the state have to assume that criminal behavior is a given? And why should the government decide who goes to an specific prevention program or who doesn’t based on what a computer says? The fact is that, even if the software was 99.99% accurate, there will be always an innocent person who will be fucked. And that is exactly why we have something called due process and the presumption of innocence. That’s why those things are not only in the United States Constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights too.
Other people will say that government officials already makes these decisions based on reports and their own judgement. True. It seems that a computer program may be fairer than a human, right? Maybe. But at the end the interpretation of the data is always in the hands of humans (and the program itself is written by humans).
But what really worries me is that this is a first big step towards something larger and darker. Actually, it’s the second: IBM says that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom—which has an impeccable record on not pre-judging its citizens—already uses this system to prevent criminal activities. Actually, it may be the third big step, because there’s already software in place to blacklist people as potential terrorist, although most probably not as sophisticated as this.
IBM clearly wants this to go big. They have spent a whooping $12 billion beefing up its analytics division. Again, here’s the full quote from Deepak Advani:
Predictive analytics gives government organizations worldwide a highly-sophisticated and intelligent source to create safer communities by identifying, predicting, responding to and preventing criminal activities. It gives the criminal justice system the ability to draw upon the wealth of data available to detect patterns, make reliable projections and then take the appropriate action in real time to combat crime and protect citizens.
If that sounds scary to you, that’s because it is. First it’s the convicted-but-potentially-recidivistic criminals. Then it’s the potential terrorists. Then it’s everyone of us, in a big database, getting flagged because some combination of factors—travel patterns, credit card activity, relationships, messaging, social activity and everything else—indicate that we may be thinking about doing something against the law. Potentially, a crime prediction system can avoid murder, robbery, or a terrorist act.
It actually sounds like a good idea. For example, there are certain patterns that can identify psychopaths and potential killers or child abusers or wife beaters. It only makes sense to put a future system in place that can prevent identify potential criminals, then put them under surveillance.
The reality is that it’s not such a good idea: While everything may seem driven by the desire to achieve better security, one single false positive would make the whole system unfair. And that’s not even getting into the potential abuse of such a system. Like the last time IBM got into a vaguely similar business for a good cause, during the 1930s. They shipped a lot of cataloging machines to certain government in Europe, to put together an advanced census. That was good. Census can improve societies by identifying needs and problems that the government can solve. At the end, however, that didn’t end well for more than 11 million people.
And yes, this comparison is an extreme exaggeration. But one thing is clear: No matter how you look at it, cataloging people—any kind of people—based on statistical predictive software, and then taking pre-empetive actions against them based on the results, is the wrong way to improve our society. Agreeing with this course of action will inevitably take us into a potentially fatal path.
Selling sickness
Why are so many people on drugs? How come people are so much sicker today than they were 50-60 years ago? Or are they really?
These are just a couple of important questions that are answered in the following video documentary, “Selling Sickness”. Never before have so many Americans been on anti-depressants and pharmaceutical drugs in general, and the Pharmaceutical Industry is booming from all the enormous quantities of pills they are selling. Are we really that sick, or are illnesses invented to sell more drugs?
One big market is anti-depressants. This documentary starts with exposing the drug Paxil and its horrible side effects. The drug is often prescribed for anxiety, inability to perform in groups, and for people who isolate themselves because they get nervous together with other people. The drug works for many, while they create even more severe depressions in others, and quite a few suicides have been reported. The drug company defends itself by saying that it was not the drug, but the disorder that called for the drug that caused the suicide or severe depression. Nevertheless, it has been proven that most of the victims were not typical “mental patients”, but people with minor problems who had been put on the drug. In addition, when patients have tried to stop taking the drug, the withdrawals are so severe that they haven’t been able to quit the drug, and instead are forced to continue taking it for life. If the drug is working, taking it for life may not sound too bad, but if the drug is causing considerable negative effects and the patient can’t stop taking it, there can be severe consequences where suicide may seem to be the only way out of the misery. Tapering down from the drug hasn’t helped in many cases, and the doctors don’t know how to handle the withdrawals. Nowhere is the drug company informing the doctors and patients that this drug is addictive! Same thing with a whole lot of other drugs, anti-depressants in particular. The drug company producing Paxil was recently sued by a number of victims and family members of those who committed suicide while being on the drug.
Big Pharma are the biggest lobbyists on Capitol Hill, even bigger than the Oil Industry and other giants. They are also spending huge amount of dollars on advertising and ways to indoctrinate physicians to promote and prescribe their drugs. Drug reps are constantly visiting doctor’s offices trying to ‘sell’ their particular samples to the physicians. How do they do that? By bribing the doctors with fancy meals, fishing trips, vacations to expensive places etc., all paid for by the drug companies. Every single prescription the doctors are writing, every shot they are giving, every single pill prescribed to the patients are registered by the drug companies and statistics are made out of the information they get. Thus they can also monitor each and every doctor to see exactly how he/she works and what his/her preferences are. They also create a profile of each provider, so that they know what he/she likes and dislikes. This way they know how to bribe him/her. An example would be a doctor who loves fishing and the drug company simply buys him a wonderful fishing trip to some nice place. It is then very hard for that physician to say no to prescribing their particular drug(s).
Drug reps are the foot people of the drug companies, and one drug rep is telling us in this video that if she comes in to a doctor’s office and is told that her specific drug samples have not been used, or poorly used in favor of a competitor’s drug, she gets the chills, because her employer then knows she did not do a good job with promoting the drug.
The moral of this (or the lack thereof) is that to sell more drugs, the pharmaceutical industry is forced to invent new illnesses to promote and distribute new drugs on the market - illnesses that are not illnesses but normal human reactions and emotions and then classify them as deceases that can be cured with their new drug. People then of course recognize this condition in themselves (because the majority of the population may have it as it is a normal condition in every-day life) and think this drug can help them to deal with it instead of processing it themselves, like they should. In the long run there will be a drug for each and every human emotion and reaction, so that individuals don’t have to think and process their daily challenges and problems anymore; they just take a drug to suppress them. It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is leading…
Fortunately, there are doctors who are tired of being indoctrinated by drug companies, tired of being biased and interrupted in their work by insistent drug reps. Some people may object and say that the drug reps have an important role to play, because samples are essential and crucial for people who don’t have insurance. This is true to an extent, but physicians and people in general should know that these samples are the most expensive brands and many times with severe side effects never spoken of. The drug companies’ thought behind sampling these drugs in the doctor’s offices is to have the providers continue prescribing their expensive drug to the patient who received the sample. After all, if the patient says the drug works, why would the physician want to change to another drug and prescribe that one instead? The usual procedure is to continue prescribing the same drugs they have in their sample closets.
However, here is one example how to go around this problem. In one small community, a doctor’s office consisting of 9 physicians decided to pay $100.00 each a year from their own pockets ($900.00 a year all together) and give it to the local pharmacy in exchange for drug samples. Instead of buying expensive, new drug samples of the kind that the drug reps promote, they instead asked for cheap and vital samples like aspirin, nitroglycerin, cheap diuretics etc., and got quite a collection for that amount. In addition, the pharmacy agreed to come once a month to the doctor’s office and talk about a drug of the doctors’ choice, so that the physicians could be informed from a source that does not have a financial interest in the particular drug. By doing this, they could show the drug reps the door, and as a positive consequence, they were no longer interrupted in their job.
It is very important that this information gets out to the physicians and the public, or we will have a society where every individual is considered sick from the cradle to the grave; everybody will be on pills and perfectly healthy people will be made ill by a sick “health” industry.
Have you ever heard of the Prometheus Project?
Will Hunting had it right 14 years ago
The CIA doctors - psychiatry and mind control
Psychiatrist Colin Ross, author of “The CIA Doctors” and “Military Mind Control” describes the longstanding relationship between intelligence agencies, the military, psychiatry and psychology in Mind Control experiments on unwitting subjects, including use of LSD, psychiatric drugs, radiation, brain electrode implants, hypnosis, verified through government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
