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You will be assimilated

Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database, reports the New York Post.

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

So they want to push banks into making more loans to minorities who tend to lack good credit histories. What could possibly go wrong? When companies like Wonga encourage poor people to take out loans they cannot afford, it’s called loan sharking.

As with my previous post, I first learned of this story via the Drudge Report, which seems particularly good at sniffing out and really making public stories of this type in which momentous developments were previously “made public” in a purely technical sense by bland official reports. “You will be assimilated” was the catchphrase of the Borg, a “collection of species that have been turned into cybernetic organisms functioning as drones in a hive mind called the Collective”, formerly thought to be fictional.

20 comments to You will be assimilated

  • James Waterton

    Saw this too. Was amused to learn that an “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database” exists. This government initiative is so inept that it doesn’t even form an effective acronym (although AFFH is arguably a fitting representation of its objectives – makes me think of a deflating balloon. Or possibly a wildly inflating one).

  • Barry Sheridan

    I know, let’s repeat the subprime debacle. Only politicians can be so deliberately stupid within a handful of years that initiated the financial crisis we still are trying to deal with. Idiots.

  • Greytop

    If one wrote a comedy series or a satire on how staggeringly inept and stupid government is — including how little they understood how society works and the way people function — it would never be accepted by a producer or publisher. ‘Simply too unrealistic’ would be scrawled on the rejection slip.

    Happily, real stupid government doesn’t have to sell itself to producers or publishers. It just does whatever it does.

  • Jerry

    Doesn’t surprise me at all. Data mining has been practiced for decades. Only relatively recently has the Federal gov’t started to, um, ‘utilize it’, for the most nefarious of ’causes’.

    This is the same fed gov’t that pays our money ( taxes ) to store millions of reels of tape containing Lord know what information but can never be used because the hardware to use them only exists in museums and the software is long gone. Brilliant of them, just brilliant !!

    These databases will supply an almost limitless source for law suites, harassment, corporate &/or personal character assassinations,
    corporate &/or personal ruin of reputations, on and on ……..

    Strap in folks, I’d like to say it’ll be fun ride but I suspect it’s going to be anything but fun !!!

    Just goes to reinforce my theory that despite making a good living from them for several decades, computers, in general, are one of the worst plagues to ever befall mankind.

  • The Democrats are doing a mirror image of Woodrow Wilson. The race party.

  • PapayaSF

    The main reason Obama is doing this is that it’s a huge payoff to race activists and trial lawyers. Many millions of dollars can be extracted with such tools. Of course, the entire basis of “disparate impact” is suspect, because it’s based on the absurd premise that without racism, all ethnicities would be proportionately represented everywhere. Thus the under-representation of Asians in the NFL and NBA must be due to anti-Asian racism. There can be no other explanations.

  • Eric

    This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases…

    It’s more Vonnegut than Orwell.

  • John Galt III

    Vonnegut was a lefty totalitarian. Orwell was a socialist who was someone who couldn’t sleep at night as he hated that some people were better, richer, smarter and more successful than others.

    Hitler had Gleichschaltung where everyone thought and acted the same. Private schools were shut by The Nazis, both Protestant and Catholic. The churches were made to bend and were persecuted. The USSR was about the same. That is where Obama is and he would succeed without a US Constitution and a remnant of people who see what he is doing and are revolted by it. Herr Obama is not above the law and neither are the Clintons. If we are lucky, a Republican president who has guts will arrest these people, find out what they did and what laws they broke and send them to prison for a long, long time. Trust me; they have broken many laws with impunity and the silence of a press that is only a mouthpiece of the White House and the Democrat Party.

  • thefrollickingmole

    PapayaSF

    This is what its about, ensuring a never ending stream of gold for new and up-and-coming race baiter’s and community organisers.
    That those baiter’s and organisers are paying constituents of the democrat party is by design, not coincidence.

    We had an idiot lefty pollie (but I repeat myself) here in my home state paying many hundreds of thousands of dollars more for inner city housing stock in highly desirable areas because “inequality”. Never mind 5 times as much stock could have been brought in newer subdivisions.
    Also government here has developers “put aside” a certain number of blocks in new property releases for them to build stock on. A clear case of coercion.

  • mojo

    Well, they didn’t really get caught the last time, did they? Managed to push the blame off on the hapless Republicans, when the crap started with Jimmy Carter.

  • Chip

    Sub prime lending to minorities makes perfect sense if viewed through the lens of wealth redistribution.

    That it exacts an enormous cost on the country as a whole is as material as similar costs from high taxes, more regulations, nationalization, centralized decision making etc.

  • James Strong

    John Galt III writes ‘arrest these people, find out what they did and what laws they broke ..’

    I think he’s got the sequence wrong.

  • Paul Marks

    “racial and economic justice”.

    The “Social Justice” concept that all income and wealth rightly belong to the collective (“the people”) and should be “distributed” by wise rulers.

    As for the government getting out of racial matters….

    Sadly in 1964 government went from (in certain States) using its power against blacks – to using it power for blacks.

    Telling someone they MUST serve X person is as bad as telling someone they MUST NOT serve X person.

    But the “Progressive” – with their doctrine that private business is “open to the public” so it is a “public matter” – the “common carriers” and “public accommodations” of the Emperor Diocletian and Roman Law (yes it is that “modern”).

    Sadly even J.S. Mill claims (in “On Liberty”) that although he is favour of free markets this is just an economic matter – it does not come under the moral “principle of liberty”.

    Modern liberals carry this snobbery (for that is what it is) to an extreme)

    The liberty of an intellectual is important – someone who makes their living by speaking and writing.

    But the liberty of a hotel owner or a taxi driver (or whatever) is “just economics” – it is not a MORAL matter.

    It is (according to J.S. Mill and those who follow him) just an economic debate as to whether or not a regulation should be imposed on a business.

    Mill even says that regulations on what someone may buy are fundamentally different from regulations on what people may sell.

    A demented position – as demented as saying that people are morally responsible for their actions, but do not really choose their actions (that we can not do other than we do).

    Another position that many (not all) modern liberals take – that would have horrified and disgusted the Old Whigs.

    Till liberalism (and libertarianism) frees itself from the influence of Thomas Hobbes (so admired by some of the “Westminster Review” crowd of James Mill and J.S. Mill) and, yes, from the influence of David Hume also – there is little hope.

    One can not get something like the Bill of Rights (British or American) from the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (or from the philosophy of David Hume).

    And one can not say (with conviction) “the government MUST NOT interfere in economic life this way – it is EVIL to do so”.

    Such things as housing (including not lending money to people one suspects will not pay it back) and selling bread (or whatever) are just as much a matter of the “principle of liberty” as freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

    It is NOT the “harm principle” (meaninglessly vague – it can be twisted to justify statism), it is the nonaggression principle of the Old Whigs that we should support.

  • Paul Marks

    By the way “free trade in land” means no such thing – it means government land theft (“land reform”).

    It is based on an expansion of the false economics of land of David Ricardo (as false as his Labour Theory of Value) – which was refuted by Frank Fetter more than a century ago.

  • Flubber

    Re: PapayaSF

    ” Thus the under-representation of Asians in the NFL and NBA must be due to anti-Asian racism. There can be no other explanations.”

    Well its clear now that any discussion of the genetic differences between the race groups is a subject that cannot be talked about on pain of the end of your career.

    Yet given the scientific data in those analyses, the only way that Blacks will achieve “equality” will require a massively intrusive hobbling of everyone else’s life opportunities.

    At what point will everyone else tell the race baiters to fuck off?

  • Andrew Duffin

    What? Employers don’t want to employ people with known criminal records?

    The bastards.

  • Dr Evil

    I read about this today, on the Drudge Report. Matt Drudge is really good at finding these stories. Land of the Free? I am beginning to wonder.

  • Edward MJ

    “Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased. For many years this system served well and was kept meticulously up to date.”

    And then Nazis came.

    http://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide

  • George Atkisson

    Let’s see ….

    White, Christian, male, straight, veteran, gun owner, Southerner, Tea Party Member, posts favorably on conservative websites …

    I wonder how high up on that Watch List I am. Far higher tan anyone named Mohammad, I’m sure.

  • CaptDMO

    “You will be assimilated”….The (collective) Borg.
    Which is why Democrats, and Good Old Party Republicans alike, have a rational fear and hatred of Mr. Trump.
    Known liars in media fear legal retribution, and loss of “privilege” as well.
    His “motto is simply…..”You’re FIRED!”
    And no public employee union, nor “special” court can save those political “appointees” who serve “at the pleasure of The President”.