Along with perpetual metastasizing and nauseatingly double standards, another of the State’s principles is insatiability — on everything, all the time. For example, it can neither consume enough of our wealth nor command enough of our loyalty. And despite eavesdropping on our phone calls and emails, it still yearns to discover our innermost thoughts.
And so it pursues the Holy Grail of mind-reading.
Yes, you and I know that’s impossible. We are sensible, intelligent taxpayers who respect human beings as irreplaceable and unique creations in the image of Almighty God; we understand that no machine or procedure can reduce our complexities to simple formulae bureaucrats can comprehend. This is yet another reason we will always earn our bread rather than sponging off those who do.
Unfortunately for our pocketbooks, an army of charlatans stands ready to “help” the Feds realize their absurd ambition to discern our thoughts. One of them is Paul Ekman.
A century ago, most people would have dismissed Ekman as a crank. He’s spent much of his life pursuing what believers dignify as “parapsychology.” His pastime would have remained a harmless hobby if the U.S. Government hadn’t robbed us to bankroll him. Thanks to that financing, the nationalized, so-called educational system takes him seriously enough that the University of California at San Francisco “appointed” him a professor in 1972. That provides cover for the corporate media to take him seriously, too. This goofball’s fairytales now send people to prison.
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Ekman pretends he can read your mind — though he finesses that by claiming to “read your face” via its “micro-expressions.” These supposedly flit across your features in nano-seconds, and the government that pays Ekman $1 million will learn from him how to decode them. (Actually, Ekman has cost us well over a million dollars: when he wasn’t playing magician, he was filling out applications for grants. And receiving them.)
Meanwhile, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) — which promotes silliness as “security,” the sillier the better — has not only swallowed Ekman’s mumbo-jumbo hook, line, and sinker (oh, please!), but has actually based a program on it. “Behavior Detection Officers” are glorified screeners who can’t read their monitors to find contraband but supposedly read our minds after training in “micro-expressions.”
So far they’ve failed miserably. In fact, last year, the Government Accountability Office “uncovered at least 16 individuals later accused of involvement in terrorist plots [who] flew 23 different times through U.S. airports since 2004. Yet none were [sic] stopped by TSA behavior detection officers working at those airports.”
That doesn’t mean BDO’s aren’t arresting people, however. Ekman’s folly gives them an excuse to harass and interrogate passengers who have done nothing more than look askance. From May 29, 2004 through August 31, 2008, BDO’s “referred” 1,083 victims to cops for arrest — though not once for terrorism or any other actual crime; rather, the State persecuted passengers for such transgressions as “undeclared currency” or “possession of suspected drugs.” (Pity we can’t “detain” bureaucrats for grammatical infractions. I assume these dimwits suspected a person, not the drugs themselves, of possessing contraband.)
In the same report in which it documented BDOs’ “detaining” people for non-crimes while known terrorists slipped past them, the Government Accountability Office noted that “a scientific consensus does not exist on whether behavior detection principles can be reliably used for counterterrorism purposes, according to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. According to TSA, no other large-scale security screening program based on behavioral indicators has ever been rigorously scientifically validated. …”
Duh. Do you suppose that’s because most scientists fear ridicule if they “validate” hocus-pocus?
Meanwhile, experts such as “Dimitris Metaxas, a professor of computer science in biomedical engineering at Rutgers University,” complained to Computer World in 2008 that “the theories linking microexpressions to deception are largely based on academic research. Although it has been tested in lab settings, it has not been scientifically proved in large-scale, real-world studies.”
Even the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA’s über-bureaucracy, admits that mind-reading is nonsense while pushing it on us. “’The research in this area is fairly immature,’ says Larry Willis, who manages the department’s Project Hostile Intent. ‘We’re trying to establish whether there is something to detect.’"
In other words, a quack who’s profited handsomely from a parlor trick sells it to a bureaucracy so totalitarian, brutal and dysfunctional that it sexually assaults passengers. Now it’s siccing the cops on people whose thoughts it pretends to decipher.
OK: we expect such horrors from the TSA. But what may shock those of you who still believe in government, who harbor the illusion that the State protects rather than preys on us and that it seeks our good instead of its own empowerment and enrichment, is Paul Ekman’s other customers: he “has worked [sic] with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and others to help develop both people and machines that read faces for emotions…”
It gets worse: he’s “train[ed] U.S. Army personnel to determine enemy combatant veracity or intent to kill.” Imagine entrusting your life to abracadabra, with the U.S. government ordering you to imagine you can read minds and accurately judge an adversary’s ambitions.
So there you have it. The Amerikan Empire descends from mere wickedness to patent lunacy, bankrupting us to read minds worldwide.
