RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
January 17 to January 23, 2021

Featured Investigation: 
Will the Tech 'Wokeforce'
Be With Us If We Go to War?

If tech titans can pull the plug on Americans’ public communications -- from the President of the United States on down -- might they do the same to the Pentagon, over military action deemed unacceptable by San Franciscans? Writing in RealClearInvestigations, Eric Felten says that’s hardly an academic question now. Recent developments suggest a new wag-the-dog scenario for the woke era, with digital serfs as a very powerful tail:

• Google has stepped back from high-profile military projects after employees objected to a major Pentagon initiative using the company’s algorithms to identify drone targets.
• Alphabet, Google’s parent, now has a union less interested in winning workers’ pay and benefits than in projecting ideological might.
• Microsoft workers protested their company’s pursuit of the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud-computing contract. “Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war,” their letter protested. 
• Amazon has backed off “unwavering” support for police, military, and intelligence customers -- a stance unpopular with employees. After the death of George Floyd last year, it announced “a one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology.”
• The issue is taking on urgency because the Pentagon is increasingly focused on bespoke war-fighting code rather than less objectionable generic software.
• And the software isn’t housed in customers’ computers anymore, but in the cloud, which tech companies control.
• Defense expert: Such developments are triggering “security of supply considerations” that “the Department of Defense thinks about a lot.”

Featured Investigation
Vaccine Ad Void:
What We Have Is a Failure to Communicate

The failure of states across the country to launch vaccine advertising campaigns – informing people how and where they can receive the medicine – is creating potentially life-threatening confusion, Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations. With his reporting informed by road trips through numerous states, Miller found:

• 31 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been distributed nationwide as of Friday, while states have administered 12 million, around 38 percent.
• Alabama reports receiving 444,000 doses of the vaccine as of Friday, and has vaccinated 100,000 people -- using around 23 percent of its doses.
• Alabama widely promotes vaccines for the flu and pneumonia -- but not COVID-19.
• In Michigan, under some of the most onerous shutdowns in the U.S. ordered by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, “no one here even knows that there is a vaccine available,” says a Detroiter. 
• New York has used less than half the vaccine it has been given, as people seek information on how and where to sign up to receive a dose. 
• Oddity: Governments routinely spend big on public health campaigns, but not much now on publicizing vaccine availability.
• The unprecedented speed with which vaccines were developed may have caught authorities unprepared as they focused on other aspects of the pandemic, like masking.
• President-elect Joe Biden pledges $400 billion for a vaccination plan that will include a public awareness campaign. 

Biden, Trump and the Capitol Siege

Antifa Rioters in Multiple Cities on Biden Inaugural Day Daily Mail, AP
Kamala Harris' $8 Million Portfolio of Homes New York Post
The Ugly Transition at the Pentagon Politico
The Last Days of the Trump Presidency Politico
How the Capitol Assault Was Planned on Facebook BuzzFeed
From Obama Fan to Dead U.S. Capitol Rebel AL.com
Tagged as 'Q': Trump Aide's Two-Year QAnon Nightmare Politico

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

FBI Man: I Quit Probe After Effort to Verify Steele Was Quashed
Daily Caller
This article reports that a senior FBI agent requested a transfer from the team investigating the Trump campaign’s possible links to Russia after his request to validate Christopher Steele as a confidential source was shut down. Joseph Pientka, an FBI supervisory special agent, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Aug. 27 that Bill Priestap, who was chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, ordered the “enhanced validation review” to be terminated due to concerns about leaks. Pientka explained that the review he sought was separate from analysis that was continually conducted by intelligence analysts in the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Pientka said he initiated the review of Steele in November 2016, after the FBI cut ties with the former British spy because of his contacts with journalists. By that point, the FBI had used information from a dossier compiled by Steele to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide who is accused in the dossier of being the Trump campaign’s conduit to the Kremlin. In a separate article in The Nation, Aaron Maté provides a history of the Steele dossier, the falsehoods it peddled, and the influence it had.

Google and Facebook's Secret Deal
New York Times
An antitrust lawsuit contends that Google offered Facebook a sweetheart deal to derail its competitor’s plan to pursue a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google’s control of the digital ad market. Instead of its launching its own effort, Facebook joined an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google. The leaders of several of those other companies said that their agreements with Google did not include many of the same generous terms that Facebook received and that the search giant had handed Facebook a significant advantage over the rest of them. The disclosure of the deal between the tech giants has renewed concerns about how the biggest technology companies band together to close off competition. 

Child Rape and Problem of the False Memory Foundation
The Cut
This long, richly detailed article details how a couple – Peter Freyd, a man accused of molesting his daughter, and his wife, Pam – help usher the concept of false memories into the mainstream through the foundation they founded. It reports that “on the heels of the national panic over satanic-ritual child abuse in the 1980s, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation helped shift cultural sympathies from alleged victims to the accused, portraying survivors as casualties of radical-feminist therapists who ‘implanted’ memories of child abuse in gullible patients. The theory the Freyds promoted made its way into college textbooks, syndicated talk shows, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings.” This article, which includes quotes from their accusing daughter, Jennifer, provides a crisp overview of the academic literature on recovered memory while raising questions about the reliability of the thesis the Freyds and others have advanced.  

Psychedelic ‘Shaman’ Schools Sprout Like Mushrooms
Bloomberg
Even before Oregon and the District of Columbia in November decriminalized medical psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” a market was emerging for schools that teach mental and medical health professionals how to use psychedelics in treatment. The vanguard industry is booming – educating thousands of people in dozens of schools – despite a host of regulatory unknowns, this article reports. Because no legal opportunities now exist for U.S. health-care workers to administer psychedelics beyond cannabis and ketamine, most programs focus on teaching professionals how to support their patients before and after their trips, a practice known as psychedelic integration.

Coronavirus Investigations

How Many Covid Vaccine Shots Go to Waste?
ProPublica
We know that health facilities around the country have thrown out unused and spoiled COVID-19 vaccines, but this article reports it may be hard to determine how much medicine has been lost because some state governments are failing to track the waste as required by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This leaves officials coordinating immunization efforts blind to exactly how many of the precious, limited doses are going into the trash and why. Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, says that clinics and hospitals have “gotten slammed” when the media has learned of them wasting even a few doses. “And the signal to everybody else is, if you have waste, don't report it,” he said. “Because if you do, you're gonna get into a lot of trouble. That combination means, at least in my assessment, there's a lot of waste and a lot of underreporting of that waste." 

The Crash Landing of 'Operation Warp Speed'
Politico
Operation Warp Speed is one the great triumphs of modern government and business, producing COVID-19 vaccines in record time. This article is about the effort to get the initiative up and running last spring – and how media were used to attack officials working on it. While acknowledging that the rollout of the vaccine has been slower than hoped, the article suggests that Joe Biden’s claim that it has been a disaster are overblown. It notes that America is doing a better job at vaccinating people than Western Europe. 

This Is How the Super Rich Are Beating You to the Vaccine
Vice
Members of England’s Knightsbridge Circle pay $34,000 a year to be looked after by personal managers (each manager has five clients) who take care of their every need. Before the pandemic, this article reports, members were more likely to be looking for a table at a fully booked restaurant, a personal trainer or a top-of-the-line holiday. With the rollout of covid vaccines, the global elite is looking to find ways of cutting the line. Members of Knightsbridge Circle can fly to Dubai or Abu Dhabi in the UAE or to India, where they will be given the AstraZeneca vaccine, spending time in Delhi before taking sightseeing trips to Agra and Udaipur, and then hitting the beach in Goa or Kerala. All that may seem grossly unfair and something members wouldn’t want to talk about. But, perhaps in a sign of how clueless the global elite are, or how bulletproof they feel, Knightsbridge’s CEO fully participated in the article. 

Other Coronavirus Investigations

Emerging Corona Variants May Challenge Vaccines New York Times
Future of Coronavirus? An Annoying Childhood Infection New York Times
Pandemic's Overlooked Toll: A Childhood Obesity Surge The Counter
DC's Unscientific, Lax Vaccine Criteria Imperil Elderly Washington Post