RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week September 27 to October 3, 2020 Colleges across the country are alarming civil libertarians by using new surveillance tools and following movements of students to blunt the spread of COVID-19, Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations. Critics fear the measures may last far beyond the pandemic. At Albion College in Michigan, students are tracked by an app they are required to download and must ask permission to leave town. Oklahoma State University is using its wireless network to track students. Students at Oakland University in suburban Detroit are asked to wear the BioButton, a quarter-sized disk attached to the body that provides real-time health status to the developer. "This is something straight out of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984," one student commented on a Change.org petition that successfully opposed making the BioButton mandatory. Universities have millions of dollars at stake in keeping students on campus as they grapple with the financial losses from shutting down last spring. Most have now opened dorms - whose fees are crucial to school budgets. Unlike other paying customers out in the "real world" who can take their business elsewhere, students typically don't get a choice with regard to being tracked. Privacy advocate: "It's not something you can say ‘no' to if you want to go to school." Trump-Russia/2020 Election News Covid-Stricken Trump Checks Into Walter Reed, Gets Remdesivir Hill How Covid Spread Through the White House Washington Post Chart With Covid Status of Officials Interacting With Trump Business Insider Intel Boss: Obama Alerted to Russian Intel of Clinton Collusion Smear DNI FBI Agent: ‘Get Trump' Bias on Mueller Team Wall Street Journal 10 Revelations on Russiagate From FBI Whistleblower Breitbart Burisma Pressured Biden. Ukraine Prosecutor Gone. Just the News Boston Marathon Wife: Biden Got Handsy Washington Examiner Russian Operation Masqueraded as Right-Wing News Reuters Pa.: Lax Security at Philly Election Warehouse billypenn.com Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Finally Obtained, Trump Taxes Show Years of Losses New York Times This long article reports that President Trump was telling the truth in 2016 when he said he paid little in taxes because he knew how to take advantage of the laws written by politicians. The article's money shot was that "Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750." If true - Trump disputes this while raising questions about how the newspaper got his confidential tax records - it is still misleading: Like every other American, Trump "paid" what he "owed." In a single line buried within the article, the Times goes a long way toward debunking Democrats' latest argument that the real Trump-Russia collusion is still yet to be found, in his financial ties to the Kremlin. The Times reports, "Nor do they [Trump's tax records] reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia." One would think, given years of collusion hype, such a finding would deserve a bit more elaboration - maybe even a paragraph or two, or seven - in a roughly 10,000-word report. See more of the Times' coverage of Trump's taxes here. Ilhan Omar-Connected Cash-for-Ballots Fraud Project Veritas (with video) The latest undercover video from Project Veritas claims to reveal a Minnesota ballot-harvesting scheme - including theft of ballots and paying for votes - involving political allies and associates of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar. In one interview, a ballot harvester said Omar operatives request ballots and fill them out for voters. "They come to us. They came to our homes. They said: ‘This year, you will vote for Ilhan,'" he said. "They said: ‘We will make the absentee ballots. We will fill out the forms for you and when you get them back, we will again fill it out and send it." He said harvesters are paid for each signed and documented ballot they deliver. Armed Women at the Center of the Louisville Protests Politico Most articles tend to take a dim view of armed citizens prowling the streets of America. Not this one. It lionizes a group of mostly female Black Lives Matter supporters in Louisville, Kentucky who pack heat as they claim to keep a strange sort of peace. While claiming to maintain order, they don't believe it's their "job to stop anyone from vandalizing property or being aggressive with cops." That doesn't mean they won't lay down the law. One woman carrying a Taurus G3 handgun said: "If we think someone is suspicious, we ask them to leave. Our only goal is to protect everyone out here." Well, maybe not everyone. "Security officers marching on Friday said they didn't know the man who'd been arrested for shooting the two officers two nights earlier. But they didn't express outrage over it, either. " The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning ProPublica Remote learning appears to be a disaster for many students, especially those who were already struggling. This article details the problems by focusing on an impoverished 12-year-old boy from East Baltimore named Shemar who has an unstable home life and limited access to the internet. The article reports that "he had a wireless connection at his grandmother's house, but he spent some of his days [with no Internet] at a row house, a mile to the southwest, that his mother [a recovering addict] had moved into, in one of her repeated efforts to establish a home for them. … The biggest challenge was not technological. No one made sure that Shemar logged on to his daily class or completed the assignments that were piling up in his Google Classroom account. … Shemar's teachers worried about him but had a hard time reaching him, given his mother's frequent changes of phone number." Air Force 'Area 51' Facility Points to a Drone Swarm Future The Drive Forget about killer bees - the future belongs to drone swarms. That's the gist of this article using satellite images and grainy photos to document the latest mysterious doings at Area 51 - the Air Force's clandestine flight test center deep inside the Nevada desert, which conspiracy theorists say is a sort of embassy for diplomatic exchanges with space aliens. It reports that in addition to "a massive and still mysterious hangar built at the base's remote southern end … an even larger extension to an existing hangar facility that is quite peculiar" is being constructed. How come? It points to "the very real possibility that the age of large swarms of unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) has finally arrived. … ones that are designed to fly together in a collective swarm on missions." Can an automated White House press corps be far behind? Coronavirus Investigations Unseen Virus Hot Zone: The American Farm Washington Post U.S. Essential Workers Burned Out Amid Pandemic Guardian Covid-Stoked Prices Are High, So Why Isn't Inflation? Wall Street Journal Pandemic Can Make You Lose Your Hair New York Times |