HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Why Proactive Cybersecurity Is a Must in Today’s Sophisticated Threat Environment Prevention and preparedness begin with discovering the knowns and unknowns in the code that is the backbone of the array of applications and operating networks. By Chuck Brooks

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

https://www.hstoday.us/featured/why-proactive-cybersecurity-is-a-must-in-todays-sophisticated-threat-environment/

In recent years, the cybersecurity focus and activities by both industry and government have been reactive to whatever is the latest threat or breach. As a result, mitigating the threats was difficult because, from the outset, cyber-defenders were always at least one step behind.

The reactive mindset has been changing due to a series of wake-up calls that have included a major series of intrusions by sophisticated threat actors against many high-profile targets (including SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, OPM, Anthem, Yahoo, and many others) that exposed a flawed approach to defending data and operating with a passive preparedness.

As our reliance on the interconnectivity of cyber devices, enterprises, and applications on the cyber landscape has grown, so have the cyber intrusions and threats from malware and hackers. The growing and sophisticated cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation-states. The firm Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025. Cybercrime To Cost the World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025 (cybersecurityventures.com)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Thought of the Day – “Victimhood” by Sydney Williams

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

“There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to be victimized in someway in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control… In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimization…”Edith Eger (1927-)

                                                                                                                             

Too often, we accept victimhood, which can come in myriad guises: A college student cowers under a torrent of “hurtful” words; a banker worries an employee will be offended by the wrong pronoun; a comedian is booed by those claiming victimhood, for humor deemed racist, sexist, or homophobic. The American people were told by elitist Democrats, and “never-Trumpers,” that we were victims of a “fascist-like” Donald Trump.  Doing so, freed his political opponents to pursue any means to destroy him: false accusations of Russian collusion; a two-year, multi-million-dollar (and futile) Mueller investigation; two impeachments, and the recent FBI raid on his home at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach. No matter one’s view of the egotistical Mr. Trump, has not he become a victim?

In this surrealistic world, who is the victim and who the victimizer depends – not on facts – but on political ideology. When Twitter or Facebook censor news reports from conservatives to “protect” readers or viewers from “fake” or “malicious” stories, are not they promoting victimhood? If a corporation does not comply with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) protocols, it is accused of victimizing its employees. Should investment managers seek to maximize portfolio returns, or should they find investments that are ESG (environmental, social, and governance) friendly, regardless of the comparative investment return potential? Have not some pensioners and mutual fund holders become victims to the political aspirations of portfolio managers? The acceptance of victimhood affects the way we value meritocracy and perceive equal opportunity – that past inequities and unequal outcomes make necessary the racial bigotry inherent in affirmative action, which accentuates the divide among people. Is it fair, for example, to lower college admission standards based on race, but not on economic class?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Iran’s Proxy War Against Israel Caused by Biden’s Weakness by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18798/iran-proxy-war-israel

“The US has started packing its bags to leave the Middle East. It is no longer able to impose maximum pressure on us.” — Major General Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, August 4, 2022.

Like their patrons in Tehran, these proxies are all staunchly committed to the destruction of Israel and the killing of as many Jews as possible. PIJ continues to threaten and attack Israel, while Hezbollah and the Houthis are doing their utmost to destabilize security and stability in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia.

In a clear warning to the Biden administration, the Arabs are stressing that the Americans are mistaken to think that Iran will change its dangerous policies and actions once it reaches a new nuclear deal with the US and the other world powers, including the European Union.

“Today, Lebanon is not suffering from war as much as it is suffering from Iranian occupation through Hezbollah, which threatens the collapse of the country as a whole. We are facing an Iranian political fantasy from which the region has gained nothing but devastation and destruction, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, or Syria, as well as Yemen and Iraq.” — Tareq al-Hamid, former editor-in-chief of the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat; aawast.com, August 7, 2022.

“Western countries continue to bet on Iran’s so-called moderation and demand that it change its behavior, reduce its regional influence, and abandon its ballistic missile program. This is an impossible task, regardless of any deal presented to Tehran. Hostility to America is one of the foundations of the Islamic Revolution. Spreading the Islamic Revolution in the region is the task of the Islamic Republic. Iran’s strength is not only with weapons, the Revolutionary Guards, and the army, but also with influence in the region. Iran’s destabilizing behavior in the region is the highest priority in Iranian policy-making.” — Rafik Khoury, veteran Lebanese journalist, independentarabia.com, July 27, 2022.

“These armed groups are working in Iran’s interests. In return, they are rewarded [with weapons and money] for serving Iranian interests.” — Dr. Jassim Khalfan, Emirati political analyst, posts.com, August 7, 2022.

“The [Palestinian] groups just provide services to those who pay them. Wars by proxy and working for external agendas have destroyed the Arab world and many countries….” — Dr. Talal Al-Sharif, former member of Jordan’s Parliament, amad.ps, August 8, 2022.

At this point, one has to ask if the Biden administration is negotiating with Iran and offering it billions of dollars simply not to attack Israel until President Joe Biden’s term is over in another two-to-six years.

Once again, the Biden administration’s irresolution has only served to embolden the terrorists and their masters in Tehran, as well as the Russians and the Chinese Communist Party.

The recent war between Israel and the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) organization in the Gaza Strip should be seen, according to several Arab political analysts and authors, in the context of Tehran’s mullahs’ attempts to force the Biden administration to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. By unleashing Islamic Jihad against Israel, the mullahs are apparently trying to tell the Biden Administration, “You see what we are capable of doing? We have a number of militias and armed groups that could attack Israel and Arab countries. Hurry up and give us (Iran) everything we want before it is too late. Remove the Revolutionary Guard from the list of foreign terrorists. Give us billions of dollars or else we will continue to attack America’s Arab and Israeli friends. Hurry up and sign a new nuclear deal with us or else we will be angry at the US and we will continue to attack Israel and kill Jews.”

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

August 1945: ‘An Eventful Month in World History’ By Barret Tillman

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/august_1945_an_eventful_month_in_world_history.html

In a 1945 summary, a U.S. Army Air Forces unit on Okinawa described August as “an eventful month in world history.”  That understatement holds up 77 years later.

Events had accelerated in the spring and summer of 1945.  Germany surrendered on May 8 but Russia already was shipping massive amounts of men and materiel eastward.  Moscow and Tokyo had a non-aggression treaty that Soviet premier Joseph Stalin cancelled on August 9.  That night a massive Russian assault into Japanese-held Manchuria opened the Far East end game, briefly overlapping impending Japan’s surrender to the Allies.

American forces began deploying from Europe and the continental United States, anticipating the two-phase Operation Downfall invasion of Japan’s home islands.  The first assault, on the southern island of Kyushu, was slated for November.  The second, on the main island of Honshu, was due in March 1946.

Meanwhile, the atomic age had dawned with a 20-kiloton flash in the New Mexico desert on July 16.  The three-year Manhattan Project yielded awe-inspiring results, and Tokyo’s refusal of the Allies’ Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender ensured that the atoms would be loosed.  B-29 Superfortresses from the Mariana Islands 1,500 miles southeast of Japan were prepared to conduct “special missions” beyond conventional methods.  An A-bomb destroyed Hiroshima on August 6 and, lacking any reply from Tokyo, a second weapon leveled Nagasaki three days later.

Even then, Japan’s war cabinet remained evenly divided between surrender and continued war.  Finally, on August 15, Emperor Hirohito exerted unprecedented personal involvement in government affairs.  His decision “to bear the unbearable” was met with fierce resistance in the palace guard but the plotters were quickly overcome.  In his announcement Hirohito credited the A-bombs with his decision, citing “a most cruel new weapon.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Battle for Our Children and Their Minds By Janet Levy

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_battle_for_our_children_and_their_minds.html

In late June 2021, a video went viral of a father being tackled and dragged out of a school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia by burly cops, his t-shirt torn, his hands cuffed, his mouth apparently bleeding.  Scott Smith, 48, had committed the heinous crime of protesting the board’s woke policy of gender-fluid bathrooms because his daughter was sexually assaulted in one, at Stone Bridge High School, by a boy who “sometimes wears a skirt.”

The sexual assault was later confirmed and the assailant arrested.  He was also charged with one more sex crime at another school and is now at a juvenile detention center.  But during the meeting, woke board members and some parents just wouldn’t let Smith speak.  Board members said they knew of no assaults in trans-friendly bathrooms and that the “predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”  For losing his cool at this blatant denial, the cops, says Smith, swooped on him like a “SWAT team.”

Smith now stands vindicated and is suing the school district.  The media and reasonable people are hearing him out and criticizing the board’s cover-up in pursuit of a political agenda.  Smith’s story stands out starkly, for it shows how leftist woke ideas are being quietly but relentlessly injected into schools and how those who oppose them risk being silenced, canceled, or treated like terrorists.

The global leftist agenda for the control of young minds runs deeper than patriotic Americans might suspect.  After a virtual takeover of the humanities departments of our universities, the leftists have been targeting schools by implementing gender-fluid bathrooms and woke curricula without consulting parents.  And then that last formidable frontier — the American family, which they hope to destroy by wresting away control of children from parents.  Should that happen, American values and American society as we know it will self-destruct.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE FBI THEN AND NOW

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

J.Edgar Hoover was director of the FBI from 1935, where he remained for 37 years until his death in 1972. He built the FBI into a crime-fighting agency and instituted  modern  police technology such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.

Although the FBI is housed in a stately building named for him, evidence of his secretive abuse of power surfaced and tarred his legacy. He routinely violated the very laws the FBI was charged with enforcing; used the FBI to harass political dissidents; amassed secret files for blackmailing high level politicians with illegally obtained evidence.

 More recent FBI directors are purveyors of lies and hoaxes:

 Robert S. Mueller, III, September 4, 2001- September 4, 2013

James B. Comey, September 4, 2013 – May 9, 2017

Andrew McCabe (Acting), May 9, 2017 – August 2, 2017

Christopher Wray, August 2, 2017 – Present

 Like the Hoover vacuum cleaner, they all suck! rsk

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

What About Democrats Who ‘Deny Elections’? Where is the concern about “election deniers” when the Left cries foul? Larry Elder

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/what-about-democrats-who-deny-elections-larry-elder/

After the recent annual Conservative Political Action Conference convention in Dallas, CNN published a video with the following headline: “Election deniers take over CPAC after primary victories.” In a recent appearance on CBS, Republican Rep. Paul Kinzinger, R-Ill., who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump and serves on the House Jan. 6 committee, said: “The only thing we need for democracy to survive is the knowledge that you can vote, that that vote counts, and we live with the winner and loser. If half the country believes that that wasn’t accurate, you can’t expect democracy to survive.”

Where was this concern about “election deniers” when Democrats have complained about “stolen” elections?

In 2018, Democrat Stacey Abrams claimed she lost her Georgia gubernatorial race due to voter “suppression.” In her speech after the election was called for her opponent, she refused to concede. Three years later, she told CNN that her opponent “won under the rules of the game at the time, but the game was rigged against the voters of Georgia.” A USA Today fact check said, “There is little empirical evidence (opponent Georgia then-Secretary of State Brian) Kemp stole the election.

Former Vice President Al Gore, in a Washington Post interview two years after his presidential defeat to George W. Bush, said, “I believe that if everyone in Florida who tried to vote had had his or her vote counted properly, that I would have won.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Merrick Garland Is Losing the People Is the attorney general disingenuous or simply naïve? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/14/why-merrick-garland-is-losing-the-people/

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday held a belated press conference to explain that he had personally approved the FBI’s raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence to seize documents deemed U.S. government property.

A clearly agitated and nervous Garland sought to exude confidence in the raid. He went on to heatedly defend the professionalism and integrity of the Justice Department and FBI.

But almost immediately after his sermon, the Justice Department and its affiliates were back to their usual selective leaking (“sources say” . . . “according to people familiar with the investigation”) to liberal newspapers.

In no time, the Washington Post claimed the raid was aimed at finding Trump Administration documents relating to “nuclear secrets.” The now-familiar desired effect was achieved. “Presidential historian” Michael Beschloss quickly tweeted a picture of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, noting that in the past revealing such nuclear secrets had led to the death penalty. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, previously known for comparing Trump’s border detention facilities to Auschwitz and falsely claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian “disinformation,” replied: “Sounds about right.” That is, without any proof, it was legitimate to imagine that the former president of the United States, like the Rosenbergs, should be executed for passing nuclear secrets.

So, as intended, the Justice Department and FBI leaks touched off a round of intended liberal hysteria of the sort we saw during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign aimed at disguising government misdeeds or overreach.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden Puts IRS Funding Ahead of Military and Border Security Even mayors of sanctuary cities are starting to complain. Stephen Moore

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

https://townhall.com/columnists/stephenmoore/2022/08/09/biden-puts-irs-funding-ahead-of-military-and-border-security-n2611444

Everyone should be deeply troubled by the recent report that the Army is on pace to miss its recruiting goal by dozens of thousands of troops and by the report that followed a few days later, alleging that the Border Patrol is running short of agents in Arizona and Texas. The border is so porous these days that even mayors of sanctuary cities are starting to complain about illegal immigration.

So, what is Congress doing about these crises? They are going to spend tens of billions of dollars to increase the number of … IRS employees. The plan calls for spending some $80 billion to hire some 80,000 new agents and investigators. This will give the IRS the resources to double the number of people who get audited every year.

Is this about the most warped set of national priorities you’ve ever heard? If this $80 billion were rerouted to the Army and the Border Patrol, we could easily stop much of the tide of illegal immigration and staff up our military so we have the soldiers we need to defend our country.

According to official budget numbers, the overall cost of border security at the Department of Homeland Security is roughly $55 billion a year. That is less than just the increase in IRS funding to harass the public. Or consider this: The epidemic of opioid and other drug overdoses is killing close to 100,000 a year. We spend about $11 billion a year to prevent these tragic deaths. But the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act calls for 30 times more than this, or more than $300 billion, to try to combat climate change, while the number of those who die from CO2 emissions each year is close to zero.

All of this is to say that the Biden-Manchin-Schumer spending bill that has now passed the Senate is arguably the greatest misallocation of our federal dollars in American history. It spends money in areas where we should be cutting expenses and ignores national security priorities.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Internal Radical Service How the IRS abuses taxpayer dollars to advance leftwing causes illegally and unconstitutionally. David Horowitz and John Perazzo

Posted By on August 15th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/internal-radical-service-david-horowitz-and-john-perazzo/

David Horowitz’s Introduction: On August 7, the Democrats passed a bill that authorizes a ten-year, $80 billion hike in federal funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which will make it possible for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents and will make it larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

The IRS has already been weaponized as a national federal police force to harass, punish and obstruct conservative and religious organizations. Under President Obama, the IRS blocked the efforts of hundreds of Tea Party and other conservative groups to apply for tax-exempt status. The objective was to prevent those groups – and the millions of voters whom they might potentially have influenced – from having a voice in our democracy.

But this persecution of conservatives is only half the story. Over the years, the IRS has allowed hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars to fund left-wing tax-exempt foundations violating its own rules, while denying conservative foundations the same access. This has had the effect of creating a lobby within the Democrat Party that has transformed it into a radical force bent on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”