by Bob Barr | Jun 27, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIn 1959, a young screenwriter named Rod Serling created what would become one of the 20th Century’s most iconic television series. “The Twilight Zone” has become so much a part of our culture that contemporary dictionaries include the term “twilight zone” as a defined noun, meaning “an area just beyond ordinary legal and ethical limits.” Considering recent cultural changes, America’s political system quite easily can fit within that very definition, insofar as “ordinary legal and ethical limits” seem no longer to apply.In one of the most recent examples of this phenomenon, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy, declared something that historically, ethically, and legally would in the past have been considered laughable — erasing official actions taken previously by the Congress of the United States.More specifically, McCarthy last week publicly endorsed legislation that purports to remove from the official record of the House of Representatives the 2019 and 2021 impeachments of former President Donald Trump; expunging the record of those proceedings as if they never took place. A move such as McCarthy now supports would be in keeping with actions by Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s prescient 1984. Smith’s job in that dystopian world was to cleanse history by erasing news accounts of disfavored past events or people. As an institution, the House of Representatives was deemed so important by the drafters of our Constitution, that its description in that document precedes that of all the other components of the federal government. To now have members of that body acting as modern-day Winston Smiths is disconcerting in the extreme, even if the measures fail to win majority votes.The first bill, introduced...
by Bob Barr | Jun 22, 2023 | Townhall Article |
TownhallThe ubiquitous term “smart device” often is employed without seriously considering the implications of devices that are, in the context of the Internet of Things, “a wired or wireless context-aware electronic device capable of performing autonomous computing and connecting to other devices for data exchange,” with the key phrases being “autonomous” and “connecting.”Writing his dystopian novel, 1984 nearly 75 years ago, George Orwell could only dream of such technology. Today, however, governments and companies that make and use “smart” devices, fully understand the power of such technology and eagerly embrace its use by individuals in the real world.First, there are companies that develop, manufacture, sell, and maintain “smart” devices – everything from “smart” phones to “smart” homes and numerous “linked” devices inside the dwellings. There is now a market for wearable, “smart” clothes.There are the tech companies that develop the software that enables the “smart” devices to communicate with the owners and users, with other “smart” devices, and most importantly, with the really “smart” people associated with companies that monitor the myriad devices.Then there are the government entities with wide-ranging interests in “smart” devices. This universe includes federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, from the FBI and 50 state bureaus of investigation to thousands of county and municipal police and sheriffs offices across the country.Beyond all those law enforcement agencies keenly interested in having access to such “smart” information to assist in preventing and solving crimes, there are agencies with interests in the devices for reasons other than law enforcement; interests that relate to such goals as reducing energy or water usage or changing consumer habits.All these entities –...
by Bob Barr | Jun 20, 2023 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerBy this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles.—“Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley (1932)“’Isn’t it amazing?’ she said. ‘It’s what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love.’”— Harriet de Wit, quoted in “How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist,” by Rachel Nuwer, BBC (June 14, 2023)Some things don’t change, as they say. So it is with attempts to alter human behavior. For millennia, people of various cultures and for various reasons — some good, some evil — have experimented with ways to alter human perception and behavior as a way to improve society. This was the premise of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, published in 1932 and which described a society uniformly and purposefully addicted to and controlled by the drug “soma.” Now, almost a century later, there still are those trying to accomplish what Huxley wrote about as fiction.A recent study conducted by Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science Harriet de Wit at the University of Chicago used not the fictitious soma but a real drug — MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) – in a study to determine its usefulness for increasing the “pleasantness of social touch.”MDMA has been around for quite some time, having been discovered early in the 20th Century by German chemists for possible pharmaceutical purposes. Decades later, the CIA conducted experiments with the drug, known commonly as “Molly” or “Ecstasy” rather than its lengthy scientific name. The experiments were part of the Agency’s notorious, top secret “MK-Ultra” program to discover the limits of humans to...
