Displaying posts published in

July 2020

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

4 Evolving Technology Areas Of Smart Cybersecurity Chuck Brooks

By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2020/07/05/4-evolving-technology-areas-of-smart-cybersecurity/#57940b3368fc

The surge in digital connectivity and more sophisticated cyber-threats has promulgated the need for smart cybersecurity.  Smart Cybersecurity is a logical reaction to try to manage risk by lessening security gaps often posed by reliance on manual processes that are impacted by a continual cybersecurity skills shortage and the administrative burdens of data security management.

Despite the challenges, there is promise for reducing dependence on humans and bolstering cybersecurity capabilities. A myriad of evolving cognitive technologies can help us enhance cybersecurity and navigate the increasingly malicious and disruptive cyber threat landscape. They include:

•     Artificial Intelligence

•     Machine Learning

•     Automated and Adaptive Networks:

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Made In China by Linda Goudsmit

By on July 6th, 2020

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24366/made-in-china  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

http://lindagoudsmit.com

Made in China is a mutating phrase depending upon its political context. At one time, made in China inferred precision manufacturing and low prices. If clothing was made in China the stitches were precise, uniform, and accurate. Tools, computers, sports equipment, shoes, furniture, virtually anything made in China was considered high quality low price. What happened?

China’s Cultural Revolution is the “sociopolitical movement in China from 1966-1976. Launched by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC), its stated goal was to preserve Chinese Communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements (imperialism) from Chinese society, and to reimpose Mao Zedong thought (Maoism) as the dominant ideology in the CPC.”

Chairman Mao was ideologically a Marxist-Leninist, a hybrid political philosophy of gradualism that seeks to establish a socialist state in preparation for an eventual communist state. Communism is the collectivist socio-political system marketing itself as, “a classless system with common ownership of the means of production, with full social and economic equality of all members of society.”

The seductive narrative of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was that capitalism was evil and had to be removed by violent class struggle. Mao engaged young people to participate in “purging” the country through widespread destruction of historical, religious, and cultural artifacts. Sound familiar? It should. China’s Cultural Revolution was a reeducation campaign designed to erase China’s history and culture.

Mao’s Marxist-Leninist dogma is the source of the “social justice” and “economic equality” narrative taught in American universities, in American high schools, in American middle schools, and even elementary schools K-12. Marxist-Leninist dogma is the root of the slogans that indoctrinated Americans echo like parrots at political protests, and that paid political anarchists shout while burning American cities.

Continue reading →
P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Wave of criticism smashes Lin-Manuel Miranda as leftists declare ‘Hamilton’ to be ‘problematic’

By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.theblaze.com/news/hamilton-problematic-lin-manuel-miranda-criticism?utm_source=theblaze-breaking&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=
Leftists trying to cancel ‘Hamilton’ is peak 2020. The circular firing squad of progressivism has taken aim on one of its former darlings. Leftists loved the musical “Hamilton” when it hit Broadway in January 2015. Democratic leaders, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the Obama family, flocked to see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical over the years. The musical is based on founding father Alexander Hamilton but with a modern twist and heavy influence of hip-hop.Flash forward to 2020, and now the progressives say the founding fathers should solely be remembered for being slave owners, and all of their achievements have been nullified by many leftists. Some progressives not only declare that the founding fathers should no longer be admired, but they call for their statues to be ripped down. Now, there are people who want to cancel the “Hamilton” musical because it is based on the founding fathers. Many of the harsh critics are the same people who made the musical into a cultural leviathan.

“Hamilton” was trending on social media this weekend as the film-version made its debut on Disney Plus. There was also an undercurrent of leftists saying that “Hamilton” is “problematic.”

“Are y’all ready to talk about how problematic Hamilton is? Lin Manuel Miranda created a piece of work that used hip hop (a genre created by black people) to tell the story of colonizers and slave owners,” one Twitter user wrote.

“As much as I love the show, it and it’s writer are deeply problematic,” another wrote. “I’ve intentionally or unintentionally ignored these things for years, but I’m trying to fix this now so I can fully contextualize and understand Hamilton and it’s effect as a whole.”

“Hamilton is deeply problematic in concept and so is Lin Manuel Miranda to some degree,” another person tweeted.

“I mean I think the fact that a musical like Hamilton (which is deeply problematic and nationalist) has to exist in order for non-white actors to have a space on Broadway is just very indicative of how non-white stories will never be able to thrive on this elitist medium,” another person said.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Xi Jinping Is Reshaping the World Rowan Callick

By on July 6th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/china/2020/07/clive-hamiltons-brave-and-urgent-alarm/

Last year an agent for Chinese printing companies – which have the most advanced and cheapest production facilities in the world — handed Australian publishing houses a list of words and topics that could not appear in any books that were to be printed in China. The overwhelming majority of these books are for markets – including Australia — outside China itself, which has become the default printer globally.

Naturally, the names of Chinese dissidents, such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who died excruciatingly while still incarcerated in China in 2017, are high on this list. But it also includes those of the country’s paramount leader Xi Jinping and his muse and propagandist Wang Huning, predecessors Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and references to Tiananmen 1989, the Hong Kong protests, or the Xinjiang conflict, as well as to the island groups in the South China Sea.

This is one of the myriad intriguing and concerning anecdotes replete in the new book by Clive Hamilton, co-written with Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World.

The challenges that are aligned globally against freedom, democracy and the rule of law – public values which 30 years ago appeared, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, to have “won” — are today legion. But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged in the last few years as by far the most significant, due to its immense economic and military capacity, its unparalleled and unconstrained surveillance and control technologies, its purposefulness… and its great institutional success. This was underlined on July 1 by the publication of the extraordinarily comprehensive and far-reaching “security” legislation effectively bringing Hong Kong fully within the PRC’s direct control – marking another great step forward by Xi, whose progress has persisted, unhindered in its thrust by the occasional burst of Western rhetoric or of temporarily inconvenient trade gestures.

The USSR posed nothing like the challenge China does today. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consumed a vast amount of time and energy in reviewing what went wrong for its former “big brother” Russian party, and concluded essentially that it failed because it conceded ground, it liberalised, it lost control of history, including by permitting criticism of its great dictator Joseph Stalin.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese party’s general secretary since November 2012, has instead doubled down on core communist values. On July 23 next year, he will lead the celebration of the centenary of the party – whose period in untrammelled power, 70 years, has already surpassed that of the Russian party.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Palestinians Terrorize Their Own People by Bassam Tawil

By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16196/palestinians-censorship-terror

“We see corruption everywhere. Is the Palestinian Authority headed towards self-destruction? Or is it just destroying the [Palestinian] people so that its own sons and relatives can rise to power?” — Nadia Harhash, journalist, who awoke on June 1, 2020 to find her car being torched, raialyoum.com.

Instead of heeding the call of the Palestinian Coalition for Accountability and Integrity and many Palestinians to end nepotism and ensure accountability and transparency, the PA has chosen to remain silent.

Thanks to the criminal negligence of the international community and the so-called human rights organizations, however, the Palestinian Authority leadership can simply continue to pursue its policy of deadly intimidation against Palestinian journalists. These groups are much too busy drafting condemnations of Israel to have time left over to expose the true Palestinian menace: the Palestinian Authority.

The leadership of the Western-funded Palestinian Authority (PA) has again proved that it does not — and will not — tolerate any form of criticism, particularly when it comes from its own people. In the past few days, at least three Palestinian journalists have fallen victim to the PA’s long-time policy of terrorizing and silencing dissenting voices.

PA leaders have always resorted to various methods to silence and intimidate their critics. These methods include, among other things, arrests, recurring summons’ for interrogation, dismissal from work, and physical and psychological abuse.

The PA leadership has drawn deeper from its well of malevolent creativity to muzzle Palestinians from expressing critique: they are now also torching private cars.

This is an old technique of Palestinian activists to silence voices that dare to speak out against corruption, embezzlement of public funds and abuse of power.

The victims of car-torching are considered “lucky”: fire is directed at their property and not their bodies — it is better to have your car set on fire for your views than to get shot or stabbed for them. Torching cars has a twofold goal: to inflict financial damage and to send a deterrent message to both the victim and the surrounding environment.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Mullah’s Spies and Assassinations in the West by Majid Rafizadeh

By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16174/iran-spies-assassinations

The Iranian regime has been involved in assassinations, terror plots, and terrorist attacks in more than 40 countries.

While the Iranian regime continues its assassinations and terrorist plots in the West, the EU and the UN — which it is time for the US to defund — remain silent.

Another spy from the Iranian regime, Mohammad Davoudzadeh Loloei, 40, has been sentenced to prison in a European court — this time, Denmark — for being an accessory to the attempted murder of one or more individuals who are opponents of the Iranian regime. What is unusual is that this is all taking place while Europe’s leaders continue to pursue a policy of appeasement with the ruling mullahs of Iran.

According to Roskilde District Court, in Denmark, Loloei had collected information on a dissident, so far unnamed, and given it to Iran’s intelligence service, who planned to murder the man. The information included photos of the target’s house, street and surroundings. “The court found that the information was collected and passed on to a person working for an Iranian intelligence service, for use by the intelligence service’s plans to kill the exile,” the court’s statement read.

The public prosecutor, Soeren Harbo, pointed out that the Iranian spy has received a permanent entry ban and would also be expelled from Denmark after serving his sentence. Harbo added that “It’s a historic case. And it’s a powerful message to (foreign) intelligence services: they have to handle their conflicts among themselves and stop involving us.”

Remarkably, this case involving the Iranian regime’s intelligence service carrying out espionage and attempting to assassinate its opponents abroad is not a rare one. The Iranian regime has been involved in assassinations, terror plots, and terrorist attacks in more than 40 countries.

Last fall, in November 2019, another dissident, Massoud Molavi, who ran a social media channel on Telegram criticizing the Iranian regime and exposed corruption in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was gunned down while walking on the streets of Istanbul.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Second Wave of Stupidity By Christopher Roach

By on July 6th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/05/a-second-wave-of-stupidity/

The coronavirus panic was starting to ebb after the successful state reopenings of May and enthusiastic public protests of June. Rather than acknowledging this good news story, the same lunatics are clamoring to tighten the screws again.

First we were warned about an exponential increase. Cases were doubling and tripling in as many days. Soon millions would be sick and dying. Then we were warned of rising deaths, even though many of these deaths had other causes.

We were told to flatten the curve. We needed to stay home. We should not wear masks. Then we should wear masks.

The whole experience has been dizzying.

The Testing Solution

The media and experts then began selling tests as the key. Why exactly was unclear, with the vast majority of people having mild symptoms, no cure or vaccine in sight, and no realistic way for our decrepit public health system to do contact tracing. But tests it would be.

We now conduct a lot of tests. “Drive-by” testing has happened in some locales. Private companies, local walk-in clinics, and county health departments are all offering tests. So far, 36 million coronavirus tests have been administered.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

An Industry of Untruth The brand of all cultural revolutions is untruth about the past and present in order to control the future. Why we have this happening to our country is the only mystery left. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 6th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/05/an-industry-of-untruth/

The current revolution is based on a series of lies, misrepresentations, and distortions, whose weight will soon sink it.

Viral confusion

Unfortunately few in authority have been more wrong, and yet more self-righteously wrong, than the esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci. Given his long service as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his stature during the AIDS crisis, he has rightly been held up by the media as the gold standard of coronavirus information. The media has constructed Fauci as a constant corrective of Trump’s supposed “lies” about the utility of travel bans, analogies with a bad flu year, and logical endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a “what do you have to lose” possible therapy.

But the omnipresent Fauci himself unfortunately has now lost credibility. The reason is that he has offered authoritative advice about facts, which either were not known or could not have been known at the time of his declarations.

Since January, Fauci has variously advised the nation both that the coronavirus probably was unlikely to cause a major health crisis in the United States and later that it might yet kill 240,000 Americans. In January, he praised China for its transparent handling of the coronavirus epidemic, not much later he conceded that perhaps they’d done a poor job of that. He has cautioned that the virus both poses low risks and, later, high risks, for Americans. Wearing masks, Fauci warned, was both of little utility and yet, later, essential. Hydroxychloroquine, he huffed, had little utility; when studies showed that it did, he still has kept mostly silent.

At various times, he emphasized that social distancing and avoiding optional activities were mandatory, but earlier that blind dating and going on cruise ships were permissible. Fauci weighed in on the inadvisability of restarting businesses prematurely, but he has displayed less certainty hedged about the millions of demonstrators and rioters in the streets for a month violating quarantines. The point is not that he is human like all of us, but that in each of these cases he asserted such contradictions with near-divine certainty—and further confused the public in extremis.

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

The original black American patriots By Fritz Pettyjohn

By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/the_original_black_american_patriots.html

The American cause hung by a thread in the summer of 1781.  The British were entrenched in New York, and the main Continental Army commanded by George Washington was incapable of dislodging them.  In Virginia, a British Army of 7,000 men led by Lord Cornwallis wreaked havoc, opposed only by 900 Continentals under General Lafayette. Governor Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Assembly had been chased from Richmond and Charlottesville.  Vital supplies to General Nathaniel Greene’s army in South Carolina were cut off.

Washington’s appeals to the states for reinforcements had gone unanswered, and when he decided to march south to confront Cornwallis, he had only 2,500 able-bodied men.  They were actually outnumbered by the accompanying French force of 3,000 soldiers.  It was a fateful decision.  Failure would almost certainly be fatal to the war for independence.

When they reached Virginia in September of 1781, Cornwallis was holed up at Yorktown.  His force had been decimated by malaria, the curse of all Europeans south of the Mason-Dixon line.  The rest of the history of the Battle of Yorktown is familiar to most literate Americans.  The British surrender effectively ended the War of Independence.  American sovereignty was born.

The small force of American soldiers who marched south with Washington 239 years ago had very few veterans left from the armies of 1775 to 1780.  These original Continentals had served their terms of enlistment and had returned to their farms and families.  Washington took anyone who would serve, and hundreds of free blacks joined the cause, eager for gainful employment.  Of the 2500-strong force who arrived with Washington at Yorktown, as many as 20% were free blacks.  They had an inherent genetic advantage over the Europeans.  Because their ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa, they were naturally resistant to malaria, and were strong, healthy men, fully capable of discharging their duties.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Campus Culture Seizes the Streets Taxpayers, parents and donors need to save higher education from activists who claim to be scholars. By John M. Ellis

By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campus-culture-seizes-the-streets-11593973851?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

How did radical ideas like abolishing or defunding the police move from the fringes to official policy seemingly overnight in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York? And after George Floyd’s killing by police touched off protests, why did so many prominent journalists and intellectuals rationalize looting and violence? For an answer, look to the nation’s politicized college campuses.

A well-known professional standard for college professors warns against “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.” That statement, from the American Association of University Professors, dates from 1915 but is still in force.

Most campuses have similar rules of their own. Yet across the country, these categorical prohibitions are now ignored. Academia has become politicized from top to bottom.

Continue reading →