WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Yemen Government Warns of Houthi Threat to ‘World’s Digital Infrastructure’ What happens if a large chunk of the world’s internet goes down? by Christine Williams

Posted By on February 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/yemen-government-warns-of-houthi-threat-to-worlds-digital-infrastructure/

According to the World Bank, “Yemen has long been one of the poorest countries in the Middle East and North Africa.” The Shia Houthis have been living in the “rugged mountains” since the 9th century and have been battling ever since for control of Yemen and beyond. In 2003, after the American invasion of Iraq, the Houthis adopted a slogan: “Allahu akbar, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.” The group now threatens the globe. Its siege of the Red Sea due to its support for Hamas against Israel is being felt beyond the region as reported in the Daily Mail:

The Houthis, who control swathes of Yemen, began attacking international shipping in the Red Sea on November 19 in support of Hamas in its war with Israel in Gaza.

Since then several dozen ships causing major disruptions to global trade, some 12 percent of which passes through the Red Sea.

The U.S. and U.K. have launched a massive airstrike campaign against them.

Now there are concerns the Houthis could respond by targeting the internet and transmission of financial data.

It is estimated that 17 percent of global internet traffic travels via underwater fiber optic cables in the Red Sea.”

A little history about the Houthis sheds light on their religious zeal, determination and threat. Houthis adhere to the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam, taking their name from Zayd bin Ali, the great-grandson of Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. In 740, Zayd rose up against the Umayyad caliphate. He died in the revolt and thus was enshrined as a martyr. His “head is believed to be buried in a shrine to him in Kerak, Jordan.” Zaydis believe that Zayd bin Ali was “a model of a pure caliph who should have ruled instead of the Umayyads.” Followers of Zayd, the Houthis established themselves in north Yemen’s rugged mountains in the ninth century, and have never wavered from their mission of conquest, though they have seldom had the chance they have now to perform actions that reverberate worldwide.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DEI Overpromised, Under Delivered, Ran Amok Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

Posted By on February 15th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/14/dei-overpromised-under-delivered-ran-amok/

The concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been in the ascendancy for nearly a decade. The movement is an outgrowth and expansion of affirmative action, whose intention was to proactively promote opportunity for racial and ethnic minorities that were perceived to be historically disadvantaged. But as awareness that Affirmative Action had evolved into applying “good” discrimination to cure past “bad” discrimination, support for it waned, culminating in its virtual elimination by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

For many reasons, despite its noble aspirations, DEI should follow affirmative action into the dustbin of discarded feel-good but perverse social causes. In practice, DEI is irretrievably flawed. It has devolved into toxic authoritarianism on the part of those who control and promote it, while undermining basic tenets of American values, societal cohesiveness, and free expression.

The recent turmoil at Harvard concerning the discriminatory treatment of certain groups according to their identities or ideologies has helped to bring some of these failings to light. Writing in the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 4, Douglas Belkin quotes professor Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist in the Department of Astronomy on how the DEI bureaucracy functions on campus:

Under Gay’s leadership [as Dean of the Faculty] … the mandate of the administrative state of the university continued to expand and shift from serving faculty to monitoring them. The message was, ‘Don’t deviate from what they find to be appropriate’ … [DEI] became more of a police organization.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Put A ‘Kill Switch’ On Gov’t Bureaucrats, Not Our Cars

Posted By on February 15th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/15/put-a-kill-switch-on-govt-bureaucrats-not-our-cars/

Remember that “kill switch” mandate for new cars that media fact-checkers years ago assured the public was just a crazy right-wing conspiracy? Well, the federal government recently took the first step toward a rule that would …. require all new cars sold to come with a kill switch.

A provision in the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed in 2021 directed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to come up with a rule by this year requiring new cars to have “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.”

The law describes this tech as being able to “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle” and “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected.”

Critics immediately raised privacy, cost, and reliability concerns any such “monitoring” system would raise, only to be reassured by the mainstream press that this was much ado about nothing. The provision was meant only to keep drunk drivers off the road.

The fact checkers also said that law enforcement and government agencies wouldn’t be notified of an impaired driver or ever be able to remotely disable your car.

Phew.

But the law doesn’t specifically forbid such systems from communicating with third parties or allowing them to shut down cars remotely. And you can bet that cops, government agencies, insurance companies, and who knows who else will all want access to it.

EDUCATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

MASSIVE Academic Fraud, Scientific Exposed Ben Bartee

Posted By on February 14th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/benbartee/2024/02/14/massive-academic-fraud-scientific-exposed-n4926447

It turns out that the High Priests of The Science™ are just as susceptible to the earthly temptation to engage in corruption as the lowly peasants they rule over.

Via Stat News (emphasis added):

There was a time when an allegation of data mishandling, scientific misconduct, or just a technical error felt like a crisis to Barrett Rollins, an oncologist and research integrity officer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Now, it’s just another Tuesday.

The renowned cancer treatment and research center is in the midst of a lengthy review of possible discrepancies involving around 60 papers co-authored by four of its top researchers over a period of over 15 years, including CEO Laurie Glimcher and COO William Hahn. And it’s hardly alone. Over the past decade, the number of research misconduct allegations reported to the National Institutes of Health has more than doubled, climbing from 74 in 2013 to 169 in 2022. And scientific sleuths are finding plenty of other problems that don’t always qualify as outright misconduct.

Via American Council on Science and Health (emphasis added):

According to a 2022 study in the Netherlands, over the last three years, one in two researchers had engaged frequently in at least one “questionable research practice,” with “not submitting or resubmitting valid negative studies for publication” being the most common practice. The fields of life and medical sciences had the highest prevalence (55.3%) of engaging in questionable practices compared to other disciplines.

Never publishing studies that show unfavorable results — or else not conducting studies in the first place likely to show unfavorable results even when doing the research would be a valuable addition to the general body of scientific knowledge — is likely a far more common corrupt practice than actively rigging of studies themselves, although that happens often as well, as seen in the case of the Pfizer COVID shots, among numerous other forms of data-rigging activity to push them through the regulatory process, for which no Pfizer scientist or executive has yet been punished.

                

(Maybe if Congress holds a few more sharp-tongued hearings on COVID malfeasance, we can finally get some action on the prosecution front. But that’s a story for another day.)

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg Ignoring the Science Why does the CDC still recommend Covid shots for kids?

Posted By on February 14th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ignoring-the-science

A new CDC study reports that the first updated Covid-19 vaccine—the bivalent vaccine approved in fall 2022—was about 50 percent effective in blocking infection over a two-month post-vaccination period in children and adolescents aged five to 17. But this limited and transitory benefit does not justify the agency’s official recommendation that everyone in this low-risk age group be vaccinated against Covid-19.

The CDC recommended the bivalent mRNA Covid-19 vaccine—containing the original virus and a later Omicron strain—for persons aged 12 or older on September 1, 2022, and for children aged five to 11 on October 12, 2022. The bivalent vaccine was superseded last fall by a univalent vaccine against a subsequent Omicron variant. Yet limited data are available on the bivalent vaccine and subsequent univalent vaccine’s protection against infection for children and adolescents.

The new study prospectively followed and administered weekly tests to 2,959 participants between the ages of five and 17. It found that the bivalent vaccine was 54.0 percent effective against infection and 49.4 percent effective against symptomatic Covid-19 when comparing those who received it with those who were unvaccinated or received only the original Covid-19 vaccine. The proctors didn’t monitor the participants for long; among participants who received a bivalent Covid-19 vaccine dose, the median post-vaccination observation time was only 50 days.

There is little reason to believe, however, that the bivalent vaccine’s limited protection against disease transmission was durable or that the newer univalent vaccine will be any better. Early last year, Anthony Fauci acknowledged in a coauthored medical article that good scientific basis existed to believe that vaccines against respiratory viruses like the one that causes Covid-19 would provide only “incomplete and short-lived” protection against infection. As time passed and new viral variants emerged, it became clear that while Covid vaccines continued to protect against severe illness and death, their incomplete ability to stop viral transmission quickly faded over a few months.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Obama Poised to Pull the Plug on Biden?John Ullyot

Posted By on February 14th, 2024

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnullyot/2024/02/13/obama-poised-to-pull-the-plug-on-biden-n2635143

Special counsel Robert Hur did a great service to America last week in two ways that fundamentally and irreversibly transform the Presidential race. As a result, just like in Hillary Clinton’s ‘3 a.m. phone call’ television ad in the 2008 contest, the iPhone is buzzing in Barack Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard compound, and he had better answer it.

Number one, by declining to charge President Biden for “willfully retain[ing]” classified materials, Hur blew up any pretense of fairness when it comes to how Biden’s Department of Justice treats its own boss, while it throws the book at President Trump.

 Not only did Hur decline to prosecute Biden, he made clear that the facts surrounding Biden’s retention of documents were far worse – not even in the same solar system – compared with President Trump’s case.

To review the bidding:

– As a former President, Trump was covered by the Presidential Records Act that allows the chief executive to retain some personal records from his time in office, as it did with former President Bill Clinton in the infamous “socks case,” as well as “broad authority to formally declassify most documents that are not statutorily protected, while they are in office,” according to the American Bar Association. As a former senator and vice president, Biden was not covered by the Presidential Records Act, and has no case whatsoever for retaining classified personal materials from his time in either office.

– Biden had no protection whatsoever over his custody of the classified documents he possessed illegally, many of which he squirreled away in his unlocked garage next to a non-electric Corvette. President Trump’s documents were kept under lock and key at his Mar-a-Lago estate that even some in the media acknowledge is “built like a fortress,” and guarded around-the-clock by Secret Service officers.

– Hur’s report noted that Biden’s documents were recovered by FBI agents “from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home,” and at the Penn Biden Center, Biden’s lucrative Washington perch after leaving office in 2017. (This latter facility is otherwise known as the “Penn China Center,” because the University of Pennsylvania mysteriously received at least $30 million from anonymous Chinese donors within weeks of establishing the center for Biden and his former aides the year he left office, including future Secretary of State Antony Blinken.)

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

There’s nothing funny about Jew-baiting When did it become acceptable to hound Jewish audience members out of a comedy show? Simon Evans

Posted By on February 14th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/14/theres-nothing-funny-about-jew-baiting/

On Saturday night, at London’s fashionable Soho Theatre, Northern Irish comedian Paul Currie performed a largely non-verbal hour involving mime, slapstick, prop work and audience participation. Towards the end, he produced two final props – two flags, one Ukrainian, one Palestinian. He encouraged support for their respective causes. He then gestured to the audience to get on their feet for a comically contrived standing ovation.

Most of the audience played along. But a few did not. When Currie asked them if they didn’t enjoy the show, one of them said that he was enjoying it, until the flags emerged. He was Israeli.

Accounts vary as to exactly what happened next. According to a report on Chortle, Currie then ordered the man out of the theatre. ‘Leave my fucking show now’, he reportedly shouted. ‘Get out… get the fuck out of my show!’, he repeated. The Israeli audience members did indeed leave. And as they did, the crowd chanted ‘Get out’, ‘Ceasefire now’ and ‘Free Palestine’ at them. In a complaint to the theatre, the Israelis said they felt physically unsafe after crossing the stage under a barrage of abuse.

Soho Theatre put out an initial apology of sorts on Monday, saying that it was ‘sorry and saddened’ by the incident. Last night, it put out a considerably stronger statement, denouncing Currie’s ‘intimidation of audience members’ as ‘appalling’ and ‘unacceptable’. Soho Theatre says he will not be invited back to perform.

This is a delicate issue for a comedian to write on. It concerns one of the things I find it hardest to be funny about – namely, comedy. And also, you know, Jew-baiting.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Shadow Iran Nuclear Deal It can be summarized as follows: bribe and baby the mullahs, and bludgeon Israel for ‘peace’ Benjamin Weingarten

Posted By on February 14th, 2024

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-biden-admins-shadow-iran-nuclear-deal-5581437?utm_medium=app&c=share_pos2&pid=iOS_app_share&utm_source=iOS_app_share

Commentary

The Biden administration is allegedly executing a shadow “nuclear deal” with Iran.The administration never bothered to tell us about the deal.

It clinched the deal without Congress’s approval.

And it may well have purposefully never committed the deal to paper.

But make no mistake, every indicator suggests we are party to an arguably illegally consummated pact that’s getting Americans killed.

The proof is in the pudding not only of the jihadist violence raging across the Middle East—leaving nearly 40 Americans dead and dozens more injured—but the Biden administration’s unwillingness to strike the leading state sponsor of that violence, Iran, with anything remotely resembling sufficient force to deter it, and the White House’s fixation on forcing Israel to end the war on Hamas and abide by the establishment of what would almost certainly amount to a Palestinian terror state to boot.

The shadow Iran nuclear deal can be summarized as follows: bribe and baby the mullahs, and bludgeon Israel for “peace.”

Upon entering office, President Joe Biden eased his predecessor’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran and its proxies, such as the Houthis, in the run-up to an effort to reprise the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the so-called Obama–Biden Iran nuclear deal.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

How to understand—and rectify—the foreign policy disaster of 2024. David Goldman

Posted By on February 14th, 2024

Saving America’s Future from the Blob
https://americanmind.org/salvo/saving-americas-future-from-the-blob/

Never believe what bipartisan foreign policy establishment hacks say about China and Russia. They don’t believe what they say, either. The Blob (as Obama aide Ben Rhodes called it) learned through generations of strategic blunders that if everyone closes ranks and sticks to the same story, its members will survive a strategic disaster of any magnitude with their careers intact. The same principle explains why not a single American banker went to jail after the subprime collapse of 2008, the biggest fraud in all financial history. The Blob’s logic is simple: If you go after one of us, then you have to go after all of us, and who will be left to put things back together?

Whether it was right for America to go abroad seeking monsters to destroy in Moscow and Beijing, the way we went about it was abominably stupid. “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared,” Machiavelli advised. Washington has wounded Russia and China but not disabled them, setting in motion a tragic sequence of responses that in the worst case will lead to war, but more likely will leave the United States with vastly diminished strategic standing.

The rise of China and the resilience of Russia have persisted through serried waves of tech restrictions, $125 billion of NATO support for Ukraine, and an unprecedented sanctions regime against Russia, including the seizure of $300 billion in reserves, among other measures.

The Black Legend propounded by the Blob states that China is on the verge of invading Taiwan because its Communist leaders hate democracy, and because it wants to distract its citizens from their economic misery. It claims that Vladimir Putin wants to revive the Russian Empire and invaded Ukraine because it “is a country that for decades has enjoyed freedom and democracy and the right to choose its own destiny.”

In fact China has bracing economic challenges, but no crisis, and no widespread popular discontent. It wants to preserve the status quo, barring a Taiwanese move toward sovereignty, which is all but ruled out by the results of Taiwan’s national elections this January. China is a formidable strategic competitor, but its global plan centers on dominating key industries and export markets rather than military deployments—and that plan is proceeding at a rapid clip, despite American efforts to hobble it.

OPINION Comments turned off

Double standard:Islamophobia: A tale of two cities Diane Bederman

Posted By on February 14th, 2024

https://dianebederman.com/double-standardislamophobia-a-tale-of-two-cities/

What a difference a decade can make. Today, in 2024, there seems to be a double standard in Toronto. Although Brazau was charged because language can be a weapon, those calling for the extermination of Israel and the Jews are allowed to speak whatever they want and protest anywhere – without fear. 

Islamophobia seems to be everywhere these days – or at least accusations of it. What does it mean?

Too often it leads to silencing people who have questions about Islam and its teachings.  I don’t know of any laws preventing people from criticizing or questioning Christianity or Judaism – in Judaism it seems that what is said is based on context! (Prof. Gray when asked whether pro-Palestinian student activists calling for “Jewish genocide” violated Harvard’s code of conduct on harassment she claimed it would depend on the context.)

In 2015, Eric Brazau, not particularly fond of Islam, decided to run an experiment  on free speech on a Toronto Subway. He, another fellow in Israeli colours and carrying an Israeli flag, and another acquaintance who videoed the proceedings, got on the subway where Mr. Brazau began loudly denouncing Islam and its holy book, the Koran. He did this around the time Israel was at war(always and forever) with Gaza. Seems a passenger was so offended he pulled the emergency cord. The subway was stopped at the next station and police brought in. Mr. Brazau was charged for his actions on the subway. He was denied bail before his trial and was held in custody from his arrest that day, July 29, for five months and nine days.

Ontario Court Judge, Gerald Lapkin, slapped him with breach of the peace (for interfering with Toronto Transit Commission service – the subway was delayed 30 minutes), and causing a disturbance ( using insulting language). A female passenger had testified she had felt intimidated, though not in danger. She had shared her views, too. Judge Lapkin was not impressed. He snapped, “Language can be a weapon, too.”

Now, this was not Brazau’s first interaction with the court over his views on Islam. After Hillary Clinton’s apology in 2012 for the film that “caused” the riots that started in Benghazi,  Brazau had distributed fliers at Dundas Square in Toronto, and on the Ryerson Campus, now called the Toronto Metropolitan University. He was heard shouting:

“I do this in support of free speech & artistic expression. This is my expression.”