ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Election Firm CEO Arrested for Storing Data in China One Day after NYT Reporter Dismissed Allegations as ‘Conspiracy Theory’By Isaac Schorr

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/election-firm-ceo-arrested-for-storing-data-in-china-one-day-after-nyt-reporter-dismissed-allegations-as-conspiracy-theory/

A sympathetic profile of Eugene Yu and his election-logistics software firm, Konnech, was published by the New York Times on Monday. Stuart Thompson, a technology reporter specializing in “misinformation” and “disinformation,” declared that Konnech had been accused of giving the Chinese government “backdoor access” to the personal information of poll workers based on “threadbare evidence,” or even “none at all.”

A day later, Thompson reported that Yu had been arrested, as Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón put it in a statement, “as part of an investigation into the possible theft of personal identifying information” of Los Angeles County poll workers.

According to Gascón, “information was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China,” a breach of the county’s contract with Konnech.

“Data breaches are an ongoing threat to our digital way of life. When we entrust a company to hold our confidential data, they must be willing and able to protect our personal identifying information from theft. Otherwise, we are all victims,” said Gascón, a progressive Democrat who survived a recall effort earlier this year.

The district attorney emphasized that “the alleged conduct had no impact on the tabulation of votes and did not alter election results,” but did note that “security in all aspects of any election is essential so that we all have full faith in the integrity of the election process.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

OPEC Gives Biden and U.S. Consumers the Middle Finger By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/opec-gives-biden-and-u-s-consumers-the-middle-finger/

The U.S. expected bad news from the OPEC+ meeting, but the decision to cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day is even worse than expected.

Today’s Morning Jolt spotlights reports that the Biden administration is “panicking” — their reporter’s words, not mine! — that OPEC is about to enact a production cut that will send the price of oil soaring even further. At the beginning of the week, the fear was that OPEC+ was considering a cut of more than 1 million barrels a day.

It is time to elevate the panic level:

The OPEC+ alliance announced it will cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day, the oil cartel and its allies announced Wednesday, which may set the cost of gas rising again after a year of tumultuous prices at the pump.

In a further humiliation for the administration, this move comes after a “full-court press” from the administration against OPEC+ countries, warning them not to cut production:

Amos Hochstein, Biden’s top energy envoy, has played a leading role in the lobbying effort, which has been far more extensive than previously reported amid extreme concern in the White House over the potential cut. Hochstein, along with top national security official Brett McGurk and the administration’s special envoy to Yemen Tim Lenderking, traveled to Jeddah late last month to discuss a range of energy and security issues as a follow up to Biden’s high-profile visit to Saudi Arabia in July. . . .

The White House has asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to make the case personally to some Gulf state finance ministers, including from Kuwait and the UAE, and try to convince them that a production cut would be extremely damaging to the global economy.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

When a ‘conspiracy theory’ turns out to be…not a theory by Byron York

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/when-a-conspiracy-theory-turns-out-to-be-not-a-theory

On Monday, the New York Times published a story about Konnech, a small election software company that has just 27 employees, 21 based in Michigan and six in Australia. The paper reported that Konnech has been the target of “election deniers” who have made it the focus of “a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential election.”

“Using threadbare evidence, or none at all,” the New York Times’s Stuart A. Thompson reported, the “election deniers” said Konnech “had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States.”

In the last two years, the New York Times added, “conspiracy theorists have subjected election officials and private companies that play a major role in elections to a barrage of outlandish voter fraud claims.” But now, “the attacks on Konnech demonstrate how far-right election deniers are also giving more attention to new and more secondary companies and groups.”

Konnech officials assured the New York Times that “none of the accusations were true.” Thompson reported that employees “feared for their safety” from right-wing violence and that “Konnech’s founder and chief executive, Eugene Yu, an American citizen who immigrated from China in 1986, went into hiding with his family after receiving threatening messages.”

Any reasonable reader would come away with the conclusion that Konnech, an innocent company that makes products to deal with “basic election logistics, such as scheduling poll workers,” has been the target of crazy, and possibly dangerous, conspiracy theories. To press the point, the New York Times used the phrase “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy theorists” nine times in the article, once in the headline — “How a Tiny Elections Company Became a Conspiracy Theory Target” — seven times in the body of the story, and once in a photo caption. Got it?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s Energy Crisis By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/10/03/joe_bidens_energy_crisis_856943.html

The West is experiencing its third energy crisis. The first, in 1973, was caused by the near-quintupling of the price of crude oil by Gulf oil producers in response to America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Their action brought an end to what the French call the trente glorieuses—the unprecedented post–World War II economic expansion. The second occurred at the end of the 1970s, when Iran’s Islamic revolution led to a more than doubling of oil prices. This again inflicted great economic hardship, but the policy response was far better. Inflation was purged at the cost of deep recession. Energy markets were permitted to function. High oil prices induced substitution effects, particularly in the power sector, and stimulated increased supply. In the space of nine months, the oil price cratered from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $10 a barrel in July 1986. It’s no wonder that the economic expansion that started under Ronald Reagan had such long legs.

This time is different. The third energy crisis was not sparked by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or by Iranian ayatollahs. It was self-inflicted, a foreseeable outcome of policy choices made by the West: Germany’s disastrous Energiewende that empowered Vladimir Putin to launch an energy war against Europe; Britain’s self-regarding and self-destructive policy of “powering past coal” and its decision to ban fracking; and, as Joseph Toomey shows in his powerful essay, President Biden’s war on the American oil and gas industry.

Hostilities were declared during Joe Biden’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel,” candidate Biden told a climate activist in September 2019, words that the White House surely hopes get lost down a memory hole. Toomey’s paper has all the receipts, so there’s no danger of that. As he observes, Biden’s position in 2022 resembles Barack Obama’s in 2012, when rising gas prices threatened to sink his reelection. Obama responded with a ruthlessness that his erstwhile running mate lacks. He simply stopped talking about climate and switched to an all-of-the-above energy policy, shamelessly claiming credit for the fracking revolution that his own EPA tried to strangle at birth.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

Yom Kippur : Auschwitz/Birkenau 1944

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

Here in this most wonderful corner of the Diaspora, we are free to spend Yom Kippur as we wish. For me it is a day of reflection and introspection as a new year begins. As always, I reflect on Jewish survival and the memory of those martyrs of the Holocaust for whom it was to be the last Yom Kippur.

Here are excerpts from :

Observing Yom Kippur in the Valley of Death: Auschwitz/Birkenau 1944

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/observing-yom-kippur-in-the-valley-of-death-auschwitz-birkenau-1944/

“despite the most appalling conditions in the camps, where each day brought Jewish prisoners closer to dying of starvation, and despite the exhausting back-breaking labor that the Nazi guards forced Jews to do every day and doubly hard on the High Holy Days, so many still sought to get closer to G-d by fasting on Yom Kippur. ”

“The prisoners understood and knew full well the enormous consequences for observing Yom Kippur by praying and fasting. To quote one, “even if beaten, tortured, and put to death, my eternal life would be greatly strengthened for having ‘returned’ to a pure state.” Make no mistake, like us, they prayed to be put in the book of life, that “the hand of G-d would take them to the day of liberation.” Yet, they faced the probability of imminent death with courage and the strong conviction that “even if it was their last day on earth” they could not do otherwise. ”

They are forever inscribed in the Book of Life…..rsk

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Conservative Influencers Vow to Keep Reporting on Radical Gender Surgeries on Minors After 3 Medical Groups Demand DOJ Investigations By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/04/conservative-influencers-vow-to-keep-exposing-radical-gender-surgeries-on-minors-after-3-medical-groups-demand-doj-investigations/

Three major medical associations on Monday asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate and prosecute people who are allegedly threatening, coordinating or provoking violence against children’s hospitals across the nation that provide irreversible sex change procedures on minors, including puberty blockers, chemical castration, and surgical amputations.

In addition to siccing the Justice Department on their detractors, the groups said they have also pressured social media platforms to censor “high profile users” who “share false and misleading information.”

The increasingly woke American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Medical Association (AMA) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) wrote to Garland on Monday, claiming in a letter that “physicians are being targeted and threatened for providing evidence-based health care.”

Journalist Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, posted the letter onto Twitter:

“These attacks have not only made it difficult and dangerous for institutions and practices to provide this care, they have also disrupted many other services to families seeking care,” the letter states. “In one hospital, a new mother was prevented from being with her preterm infant because the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was on lockdown due to a bomb threat.”

In August, there was a bomb threat against Boston Children’s Hospital, causing it to be locked down with patients and staff inside. A bomb squad discovered that there were no explosives on the premises. Last month, the FBI arrested the alleged perpetrator, 37-year-old Catherine Leavy of Westfield, Massachusetts.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Globalist Climate Agenda is more than a misguided but well-intentioned mistake. It is a brazen lie, promulgated by some of the most dangerous people who have ever lived. Edward Ring

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/04/the-globalist-climate-agenda-is-a-crime-against-humanity/

“This anti-sustainability backlash, this anti-woke backlash, is incredibly dangerous for the world.”
— Alan Jope, CEO, Unilever, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative

It would not be an exaggeration to say this is probably one of the most inverted takes on what is “dangerous” in the history of civilization. Not because anyone is against the concept of sustainability, but because sustainability as defined by Alan Jope is incredibly unsustainable. If he gets his way, he will destroy the world.

Jope, Clinton, the infamous Karl Schwab who heads the World Economic Forum, the ESG movement informally headed by Larry Fink of BlackRock (with over $10 trillion in investments), and all the rest who champion today’s prevailing globalist climate agenda are coercing nearly 8 billion people into an era of poverty and servitude.

The primary target of the “sustainability” movement is fossil fuel, the burning of which allegedly is causing catastrophic climate change. Heedless of the fact that fossil fuel provides more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide, banks, hedge funds and institutional investors throughout the Western world are using ESG criteria (environment, social, governance), to deny the financing necessary to maintain or build new fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s working. Pressure from governments, international NGOs, and global finance is now delivering unprecedented shifts in policies around the world, creating needless scarcity and turmoil. In just the last month, new emissions rules have triggered protests by farmers in the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Sri Lanka, in the process of earning a near perfect ESG score, lost its ability to feed its people. In the ensuing fury, the president was forced to flee the country. Undaunted, globalist climate activists are discouraging African nations from developing natural gas.

It should be easy to see the hidden agenda behind this repression. If you control energy and food, you control the world. The biggest multinational corporations on Earth are empowered by ESG mandates, because marginal or emerging competitors lack the financial resiliency to comply. From small independent private farmers and ranchers to small independent nations, once their ability to produce is broken, the big players pick up the pieces for pennies on the dollar. But that’s not what you read in the Washington Post.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s Time to Mandate Treatment of the Dangerously Mentally Ill: Michael Shellenberger

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.commonsense.news/p/its-time-to-mandate-treatment-of?utm_source=email

What happens when we leave people with psychosis to their demons? Ask the families of Alison Russo-Elling, Nathaniel Rivers, and Michelle Go.

Last Friday in Queens, New York, Peter Zisopoulos, 34 years-old, described by his neighbors as an “odd, quiet loner,” suddenly set upon Lt. Alison Russo-Elling, 61, a veteran paramedic walking back to her station after lunch. He knocked her down then stabbed her to death in a frenzy. He is now being held at the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, awaiting clearance from doctors that he is stable enough to face arraignment on murder charges. Zisopoulos, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was hospitalized in 2018 after allegedly making anti-Asian threats.

This attack is eerily like the one on that took place the afternoon of July 21, in the Bronx, when Nathaniel Rivers, 35, and his wife, the parents of a young son, were sitting in their car near their home, sharing a pizza, waiting for the rain to pass. 

Suddenly, 19-year-old Franklin Mesa came over to Rivers’ car window in an agitated state.Words were exchanged, briefly, before Mesa thrust a knife into Rivers’ chest. Rivers’ wife got out of the car, picked up a pry bar and clobbered Mesa. But it was too late: Mesa had mortally injured Rivers, who died a few minutes later.

Mesa, who has been charged with Rivers’ murder, is said by his family to have schizophrenia. He was well known in the neighborhood for “hostile, aggressive” encounters. Police said he was arrested last year for twice punching somebody in the face. Mesa reportedly once tried to prevent a young mother from getting on a bus.

And yet it appears that nobody made sure Mesa was taking his psychiatric medicine, which his sister said he had been on since he was 15. Had Mesa been properly medicated, Rivers almost certainly would still be alive today.

These horrifying deaths rekindle the national debate over how to prevent violence by the seriously mentally ill. Between 2015 and 2018, 911 calls reporting emotionally disturbed people have jumped by nearly 25 percent in New York City. The share of homeless people in New York with serious mental illness, usually defined as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has most recently been estimated at 17 percent.

Consider the case of Martial Simon, a 61 year-old mentally ill homeless man, who early this year confessed to pushing 40 year-old Michelle Go onto the subway tracks, where she was killed by an oncoming train. Go was a manager at Deloitte who was lauded for her extensive volunteer work with struggling New Yorkers, including the homeless. Simon has spent decades bouncing between jails and hospitals. Declared mentally unfit to stand trial for the murder of Go, Martial is now being held at a psychiatric facility. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary is Still Spreading Trump-Putin Conspiracy Theories Clinging to the fantasy of a triumphant return to the bright lights. Robert Spencer

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hillary-is-still-spreading-trump-putin-conspiracy-theories/

The Russian collusion hoax has been definitively discredited, but Hillary Clinton clings to it nonetheless, apparently hoping that the anti-Russian sentiment that the invasion of Ukraine has stirred up will help propel her into the White House in 2024. But the Left’s war with reality is leading Hillary, along with many other prominent Leftists, into increasing absurdities, and clinging to the Russia hoax only compounds the problem, making Hillary seem increasingly like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, the aging onetime film star who hasn’t realized that the glory has departed and that there will be no triumphant return to the bright lights.

At a symposium of sycophants at Georgetown University on Thursday, Hillary advanced the fanciful notion that everyone’s favorite bête noire, Vladimir Putin, was rubbing his hands in glee and waiting for Donald Trump’s reelection in 2020 to implement his plan to invade Ukraine. “He got his dreams fulfilled when Trump was elected” in 2016, said Hillary for what must be the twenty-thousandth time. “He, you know, decided that he didn’t want to face me as president,” she added. “So he did all the things we now know he did that are well cataloged.” Well refuted, also.

But as if aware that we have heard that song before, Hillary was also ready with some new material, too. “And I believe that if Trump had been reelected, Putin would have waited for Trump to do what he said he was intending to do, which was to pull us out of NATO.” That would have played right into Putin’s fiendish plans, you see. Hillary continued: “And that would have created such a vacuum that invading Ukraine, which he thought was going to be easy anyway, would be a fait accompli.”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

AMA Demands DOJ “Investigate and Prosecute” Critics of Transgender Child Mutilation Daniel Greenfield.

Posted By on October 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ama-demands-doj-investigate-and-prosecute-critics-of-transgender-child-mutilation/

When they get caught abusing children, the first resort of the leftist abusers, whether it’s the
National School Boards Association or the American Medical Association is to label their opponents ‘domestic terrorists’ and demand that the Biden administration use the DOJ to arrest and silence them.

The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics has dispatched a letter to Biden’s Beria, AG Garland, claiming that the sexual mutilation of children for transgender purposes is threatened by a “campaign of disinformation, where a few high-profile users on social media share false and misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals”.

The AMA letter states that it’s working with Big Tech to censor critics and demands that Garland and his DOJ “take swift action to investigate and prosecute all organizations, individuals, and entities responsible.”

If you’re going to sexually mutilate little boys and girls while denying that sex exists, a little thing like the First Amendment isn’t going to get in your way.

If the AMA letter is anything like the NSBA letter, then it was already coordinated with AG Garland, Clarke and the rest of the Biden DOJ’s leadership, and it just serves as the trigger for the actions that the regime was going to implement anyway. Much like Soviet and Chinese Communist open letters are just the regime talking to itself, this is the same thing.

The letter does conclude by stating that the medical organizations involved are providing “gender-affirming care to children and adolescents.”

To children. Children.

This is the sort of admission that the pro-mutilation lobby was claiming was disinformation, now it’s just reality.