Displaying posts published in

June 2021

Is Pennsylvania on the Verge of a Forensic Election Audit? By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/19/is-pennsylvania-on-the-verge-of-forensic-election-audit-n1455822

Pennsylvania state Senator Dave Argall, who chairs the committee in charge of overseeing elections, told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star that a forensic audit was a “very real possibility.”

“There are a lot of things under consideration right now, and I told them to check back in a week or two and we hope to have some more detail,” Argall said regarding a meeting he had with activists who support the audit on Wednesday.

President Trump called out Argall and other state senators by name in a statement earlier this week. “Why is State Senator Jake Corman of Pennsylvania fighting so hard that there not be a Forensic Audit of the 2020 Presidential Election Scam?” Trump asked in a statement. “Corman is fighting as though he were a Radical Left Democrat, saying that a Forensic Audit of Pennsylvania not take place. Why is Senator David Argall playing the same game? Are they stupid, corrupt, or naive? What is going on?”

“Other State Senators want this Forensic Audit to take place—immediately,” Trump continued. “I feel certain that if Corman continues along this path of resistance, with its lack of transparency, he will be primaried and lose by big numbers. What went on in Philadelphia and other areas of the State must be properly and legally exposed. If it is not, just like with open Borders, we won’t have a Country anymore!”

The Family Law Castle Greg Ellis’s totalitarian nightmare caught him unaware of the moral depravity of modern American bureaucracy. By Bruce Abramson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/19/the-family-law-castle/

In the late 19th century, bureaucracy was heralded as the ultimate progressive reform. After millennia of coveted government positions split between friends and relatives of the powerful and the highest bidder, dedicated civil servants with specialized training would take their place. Meritocratic expert governance would replace corruption with integrity, pettiness with professionalism, bias with compassion.

That progressive vision never worked. Franz Kafka was soon writing poignant novels about the inhuman mills the bureaucracies had become. The Trial and The Castle told chilling tales of innocents at the mercy of faceless, heartless systems oblivious to the human lives they were grinding to dust.

Things have hardly improved over the past century. On March 5, 2015, Hollywood actor Greg Ellis found himself cast in the leading role of a nightmare that would have made Kafka proud. That day, the police descended upon Ellis’s home and pulled him away from his two young sons. 

As Ellis soon learned, he stood accused of having said: “I’m sick of this shit. I’m gonna harm the children.” The allegation alone was enough to destroy his life. The police confined him to a mental health ward “for observation” and ushered him into the system. Six years later, he remains trapped, alone, and separated from his sons.

The naked allegation turned out to be his wife’s subtle way of telling him that she wanted a divorce, she wanted him out of their children’s lives, and she was willing to scorch the earth to get her way. A trained professional might have sought at least a modicum of corroborating evidence. An objective investigator might have wondered about the accuser’s motive. After all, while there are indeed fathers who hurt their children, there are also spouses who lie to secure advantage in the midst of a divorce. 

Military Diversity Officer Who Compared Trump to Hitler Reinstated After Pentagon Probe By Zachary Stieber

https://www.theepochtimes.com/military-diversity-officer-who-compared-trump-to-hitler-reinstated-after-pentagon-probe_3865993.html

A diversity officer in a U.S. military branch has been reinstated after an investigation into his social media posts, which included one missive comparing former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, uncovered no violations of Department of Defense policies.

In March, the U.S. Special Operations Command announced the hiring of Richard Torres-Estrada as its chief of diversity and inclusion. Shortly afterwards, he was reassigned as officials investigated posts he’d made during the Trump administration, including the comparison of Trump to Hitler.

That investigation recently wrapped up after finding no policy violation.

“Mr. Torres-Estrada has resumed the duties of the Chief of Diversity & Inclusion for United States Special Operations Command after a USSOCOM commander-directed investigation into the circumstances surrounding his hiring concluded and found no violations of law or DoD regulation,” a USSOCOM spokesman told news outlets.

“USSOCOM is confident in the hiring process and Mr. Torres-Estrada’s potential to fill this important position.”

Facebook posts reviewed by The Epoch Times show Torres-Estrada compared Trump to Hitler, who perpetrated the Holocaust. He also denigrated Trump on at least one other occasion.

In addition, Torres-Estrada posted an image expressing support for the radical theory of equity, which posits that an equal outcome among people is favorable to certain persons getting ahead of others.

USSOCOM told The Epoch Times in March that officials were not aware of the posts before hiring Torres-Estrada.

The official was not terminated immediately after the posts were discovered because actions involving civilian personnel are governed by federal law and other regulations, a spokesman said.

Antifa Harasses Attendees at Conservative Summit in Denver By Ivan Pentchoukov

https://www.theepochtimes.com/antifa-harasses-attendees-at-conservative-summit-in-denver_3866025.html

Members of the extremist group Antifa targeted an annual conservative summit in Denver on June 19, with videos posted on social media showing Antifa protesters shoving and scuffling with what appeared to be summit attendees.

Two videos posted by Washington Examiner reporter Emily Brooks show a shouting match between a bearded man and the Antifa crowd. A member of the crowd is seen knocking a phone from the man’s hand. The man then attempts to chase the assailant, only to be pushed, shoved, and brought to the ground by people from the Antifa crowd.

Brooks also shared a photo of a “Denver Communists” flyer distributed by the Antifa crowd, which reads “Nazi scum off our streets.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who attended the summit, told Brooks that the Antifa protesters should “get a job.”

“Maybe this is their job. Maybe they’re paid to do it,” Boebert said on June 19. “You see this from extreme leftist progressives because either this is their job, either they are paid to do it, or they have nothing better to do, they’re sitting at home collecting a check, and this is their life.

“I mean, I don’t have time for that. You don’t see conservatives doing things like this because we have families to take care of. We have jobs to work at. We have communities to grow. And that’s our focus—not to destroy, but to build.”

The Antifa group harassed people entering and leaving the hotel venue and blocked traffic. A video recorded by The Blaze reporter Elijah Schaffer showed a woman confronting the crowd for throwing a bottle at her car because she honked when the crowd blocked traffic. In another video by Schaffer, Antifa protesters are seen shouting profanities at police officers guarding the entrance to the hotel.

Andy Ngo, a prominent chronicler of Antifa violence, also attended the conference. Schaffer captured a video of the Antifa crowd’s reaction to spotting Ngo, wearing a leg brace due to injuries he suffered in an Antifa attack. He later posted a video showing the Antifa crowd blocking a street outside the venue.

“Antifa view events like this and even just this speech as extremely threatening to them, which is why they’ve organized the so-called protests outside,” Ngo said at the summit.

How Flawed Social Science Leads Us Astray By Michael M. Rosen

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/07/01/how-flawed-social-science-leads-us-astray/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

There are two classes of people in the world, the old saw goes, those who divide hu­manity into two classes, and those who do not.

The charms of easy categorization and broad generalization have tempted social scientists for centuries. But the trend has picked up speed, especially in psychology, over the last several decades, as Jesse Singal capably demonstrates in The Quick Fix, his engaging and persuasive examination of the growing, unfortunate popularity of faddish theories and their prosperous purveyors.

A heterodox liberal who wrote for various center-left outlets before succumbing to the Substack revolution and starting a popular podcast with fellow nonconformist Katie Herzog, Singal characterizes his book as “an attempt to explain the allure of fad psychology, why that allure is so strong, and how both individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting it.” The product of rigorous research and thoughtful interviews, The Quick Fix surveys a broad expanse of social-science findings and methodically assesses their flaws.

Singal bemoans the all-too-typical “jump from claims that are empirically defensible but complex and context-dependent to claims that are scientifically questionable but sexy and exciting — and simple.” Instead, he argues in favor of slow, incremental progress in social-science research that, while less flashy than the regnant style of inquiry, would not be as susceptible to debunking.

The Quick Fix takes aim at a wide range of pop-psychological trends, including those originating on the left (such as the self-esteem movement, inaugurated in Northern California) as well as those coming from the right (such as the “superpredator” theory of juvenile crime in the mid 1990s, which conservatives championed and which even Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden came to embrace). These swiftly adopted theories all fell woefully short in practice, however, frequently confusing correlation with causation, falling prey to attribution error (unduly emphasizing personality-based explanations over situational reasons for a given phenomenon), and confounding scholarly and popular work.

Particular forms of statistical manipulation have come to infect many of the studies purporting to document key psychological trends. One such method is “p-hacking”: massaging data so that they fit snugly under a widely accepted statistical threshold designed to help exclude results that could have been the product of pure randomness. “Hidden flexibility” is another: suppressing testing results not congenial to the desired hypothesis and instead publishing only supportive data. “File-drawing” is yet another: ignoring unpublished studies that revealed results contrary to the published ones. Then there is “range re­striction”: clustering data samples in a particular segment of distribution, yielding a misleading result.

The Key That Unlocked World War II By Michael M. Rosen

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/book-review-war-of-shadows-the-key-that-unlocked-world-war-ii/

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, by Gershom Gorenberg (Public Affairs, 474 pp., $34)

Russia, Winston Churchill famously said on the eve of World War II, “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”

In an illuminating, thoroughly researched new book, Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg provides a different kind of key to another mystery involving a different sort of Enigma, namely the Nazi system of codes that proved critical to their failure in the Middle East and their ultimate defeat.

In War of Shadows, Gorenberg unlocks a central mystery that befuddled military historians for decades: How was the famed Nazi field marshal Erwin Rommel able to steamroll British and Allied forces in North Africa for more than a year, reaching the brink of conquering Egypt and cracking the British Empire nearly in half, only to suffer an ignominious and consequential humiliation at El Alamein in July 1942 that began to turn the tide of the war?

Gorenberg describes his own book as “a distinctly new portrait of one of the great turning points of the last century.” Indeed, he has marshaled an impressive array of diplomatic cables archived at various British, Israeli, German, Italian, and American facilities, as well as the personal papers of numerous key figures in the story.

Enigma was, at least in theory, an immensely complex system, comprising nearly 2 billion possible settings in its original design. It relied on three toothed wheels containing a nest of wiring that connected a keyboard to a lamp board and enabled encryption. Each keystroke moved the first wheel a single notch, and, after 26 entries, the second wheel ticked one slot. Only after the second wheel completed its full rotation would the third wheel move as well, meaning it took more than 17,000 (26 to the power of three) keystrokes for the wheels to return to their original setting.

A University Dumps a Good Professor Rather Than Look ‘Unwoke’ By George Leef

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-university-

The lack of backbone in American higher ed leaders is astounding. They’re so afraid of getting on the wrong side of the aggressive leftists on campus that they won’t defend good faculty members who come under attack for having offended some Social Justice Warrior.

In today’s Martin Center article, Giovanni Gravano of FIRE writes about a case at Central Michigan University (CMU). A journalism professor, Timothy Boudreau, quoting from court documents, spoke the “n-word.” That was enough to cause a student to file a complaint against him.

How did the CMU administration react? By telling the student to behave like an adult rather than a whiney child? Of course not.

Writes Gravano, “Following class that day on June 22, 2020, a nine-minute video was posted by one of his students, labeling Boudreau ‘racist’ and criticizing his choice to quote the slur in the classroom. As is often the case on social media, a single post criticizing a professor’s speech or course content quickly became an amplified movement to have him punished or fired.”

After the dust had settled, Boudreau was forced into retirement, accepting a small settlement from the school. Remaining faculty at CMU will no doubt have learned to avoid even quoting the forbidden word, but also to worry about anything else that might “trigger” some student with a grudge.

Gravano concludes, “And as universities continue to fail to protect faculty speech, students suffer as good professors decline to return to classrooms. For students to miss out on the opportunity to learn how to properly deal with differences or study the breadth of their respective subject matter is a failure of educational institutions.”

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

If you confront habitual critics of Israel whose opinions are shaped by fake media, fake educators and fake history, ask them about a use of digital and internet devices with components developed  by Israel; advanced treatments for common illnesses; technology that has created non invasive microsurgery and nano technology breakthroughs; agricultural and high-tech partnerships with nations in every continent; global succor and relief for epidemics and natural disasters; and social and humanitarian institutions that protect the rights of all Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. Display and circulate this list compiled every week by Michael Ordman. It is essential for challenging ignorance and bias.  rsk

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
The masks are off. Israelis are now able to show their faces again indoors after Israel’s Health Ministry lifted the indoor facemask requirement. Some 61% of the population has been fully vaccinated and new Covid cases are minimal. Facemasks are only required for the unvaccinated, quarantined, care homes and air travelers.
https://www.jns.org/israel-lifts-indoor-mask-requirement-as-covid-19-recedes/
https://www.israel21c.org/israel-says-goodbye-and-good-riddance-to-covid-masks/
 
Dialing down the immune response. Researchers at Israel’s Technion Institute have identified the specific part of a protein within a T-cell that tells it to attack a virus or pathogen. The discovery of this “regulatory trigger” may lead to medications to prevent cytokine storms in coronavirus patients or to cure autoimmune diseases.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-scientists-move-closer-to-averting-deadly-immune-overreaction-to-covid/
https://www.jimmunol.org/content/206/10/2322
 
How to make vaccines go further. Researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University have evidence that under-30s develop 80% protection after their first SARS-Cov-2 vaccination. They recommend sending the second dose to countries with limited vaccine supplies but high COVID rates.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israelis-propose-1-dose-shortcut-to-herd-immunity-for-vaccine-poor-countries/
 
Preventing cornea rejection. Israeli doctors have discovered that 3% of cornea transplant patients experienced blurry vision following their second Pfizer coronavirus vaccination. The doctors diagnosed that the cornea grafts were being rejected by the awakened immune response and prescribed steroids to quickly stop rejection.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-doctors-identify-and-fix-post-vaccine-problem-for-transplanted-corneas/
 
Protein linked to brain cancer & aging. Scientists at Israel’s Ben Gurion University have found that protein YY1 activates the gene TP73-AS1 which is known to protect glioblastoma brain cancer from chemo treatments. The same protein and gene are present in aging brains and the knowledge advances cancer research.
https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/pages/news/aging_brain%20cancer.aspx https://www.aging-us.com/article/203182/text
https://www.timesofisrael.com/aging-gene-may-make-brain-cancer-chemo-proof-for-some-israeli-study-finds/
 
Lower cholesterol and reduce anxiety. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have been testing beta-sitosterol – a cholesterol lowering substance found in avocados and nuts. They believe it can also reduce anxiety without the side-effects that current anti-depressant medications have. The results support further trials.
https://www.israel21c.org/a-natural-supplement-to-lower-cholesterol-may-ease-anxiety/
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(21)00109-9
 
Micro-surgery breakthrough. Israel’s Lydus Medical has developed Vesseal – a device to help perform the most complex of surgical procedures – connecting ultra-small blood vessels – automatically. It will revolutionize organ transplants, by-pass surgery etc. and will make millions of life-saving surgeries much safer and quicker.
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2021/06/08/lydus-medical-is-new-israeli-medtech-startup/
https://www.lydus-medical.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4SBTcVUbb0
 
More patient data organized. Israel’s new WEF tech pioneer MDClone (see here previously) has added CIUSSS West-Central Montreal to its previous Canadian hospital (Ottawa) now using its ADAMS patient data management system. ADAMS has just been named MedTech’s Best Healthcare Big Data Platform of the year.
https://thecjn.ca/montreal-hospital-partners-with-israeli-digital-health-company/
https://www.mdclone.com/news-press/articles/mdclone-named-best-healthcare-big-data-platform-in-2021-medtech-breakthrough-awards-program  https://medtechbreakthrough.com/2021-winners/
 
 

Our New American Renaissance Pretty soon, perhaps, all the days will be national holidays, one for every left-wing interest group going.  By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/19/our-new-american-renaissance/

My favorite headline from the last week or so came from our new paper of record: “People Who Ruined World’s Economies Gather To Discuss How To Fix World’s Economies.” That’s what’s so great about the Babylon Bee, what makes it so painful-funny. You generally can’t tell where the satire ends and the documentary begins. It was just that which infuriated our former paper of record, the New York Times, which actually threatened to sue the satirical paper for being “a far-right misinformation site.” That didn’t go so well, and the pathetic excuse for a newspaper had to walk back its attacks. 

Never mind. Everything is going great. I know this because David Brooks just told us so from his shiny pulpit at the Times. “The American Renaissance has Begun,” his headline declares. COVID-19 is over and prosperity and comity are breaking out all over. Item: “[A]s more and more immigrants settle in rural areas and small towns, their presence might reduce nativism and increase economic competitiveness.” 

I rubbed my eyes, too. Was this the Times or the Babylon Bee? Can we tell the difference anymore? What about the story that points out that “as more and more immigrants settle in rural areas and small towns, crime rates and disease skyrocket.” I couldn’t find that one in the New York Times so I wrote it myself. As I did so, I wondered whether David Brooks had bothered to take a gander at what is happening at our Southern border. That’s where most of those “more and more immigrants” come from, you know. 

Never mind. It’s all wistful soap bubbles and unicorns. “People are shifting their personal lives to address common problems—loneliness and loss of community. Nobody knows where this national journey of discovery will take us, but the voyage has begun.”

Prize essay topic: What do those sentences mean? Be specific. 

Meanwhile, as we get set to enjoy the new American Renaissance, can there be any more cheerful propaedeutic than Joe Biden, our first Alzheimer’s president. Back when Biden was campaigning against he-who-shall-not-be-named—back in the bad old times before the new American Renaissance—I used to refer to Biden’s campaign appearances, such as they were, as a form of elder abuse. 

I misspoke. I didn’t understand that having a mentally incompetent president was actually a sign of what great shape the country was in. “America is back.” That has been the mantra of the administration since the beginning. In Anchorage in March, our snickerdoodle Secretary of State Anthony Blinken assured his Chinese counterpart of that interesting fact just before the Chinese rolled over him as the tanks rolled over protestors at Tiananmen Square. News reports on the G7 meeting, when they weren’t celebrating the new American Renaissance or commenting on Biden’s London fog, kept telling us that “America is back” now that what’s his name is gone and normality has reasserted itself. 

Against Critical Race Indoctrination A plan to get divisive and radical theories out of our schools. By Donald J. Trump

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/18/a_plan_to_get_divisive__radical_theories_out_of_our_schools_145946.html

As a candidate, Joe Biden’s number one promise was to “unite” America. Yet in his first months as president, his number one priority has been to divide our country by race and gender at every turn.

There is no clearer example than the Biden Administration’s new effort aimed at indoctrinating America’s schoolchildren with some of the most toxic and anti-American theories ever conceived. It is vital for Americans to understand what this initiative would do, what drives it, and, most importantly, how we can stop it.

For decades, the America-blaming Left has been relentlessly pushing a vision of America that casts our history, culture, traditions, and founding documents in the most negative possible light. Yet in recent years, this deeply unnatural effort has progressed from telling children that their history is evil to telling Americans that they are evil.

In classrooms across the nation, students are being subjected to a new curriculum designed to brainwash them with the ridiculous left-wing dogma known as “critical race theory.” The key fact about this twisted doctrine is that it is completely antithetical to everything that normal Americans of any color would wish to teach their children.

Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, it teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice. Far from advancing the beautiful dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.—that our children should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”—the Left’s vile new theory preaches that judging people by the color of their skin is actually a good idea.

Teaching even one child these divisive messages would verge on psychological abuse. Indoctrinating generations of children with these extreme ideas is not just immoral—it is a program for national suicide. Yet that is exactly what the Biden Administration endorsed recently in a rule published in the Federal Register aimed at inflicting a critical race theory-inspired curriculum on American schoolchildren.

The rule explicitly cites the New York Times’ discredited “1619 Project” as a motivation