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BOOKS

Book reveals how Chinese intelligence steals U.S. tech secrets to dominate world Bill Gertz

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/3/deceiving-sky-reveals-how-china-steals-tech-secret/

‘Hey there, do you sell the ‘Poisonivy Program’? How much do you sell it for? i wish to buy one which can not be detect and killed by the Anti-Virus software.”

The email was sent to a Chinese cyber security company from a military officer in a special part of China’s People’s Liberation Army intelligence service, formally known as the Third Department of the General Staff Department.

American intelligence officials know the spy service simply as 3PLA, and it has been one of Communist China’s most successful tools for stealing American military technology through cyber means. A second Chinese military intelligence-gathering arm is called the Second Department of the General Staff Department, or 2PLA. The Fourth Department, or 4PLA, conducts both electronic spying and electronic warfare.

Together the PLA intelligence units have placed China at the forefront of the most significant foreign intelligence threat to American security. All three cooperate closely in stealing a broad array of secrets from the United States. If the information is in digital form, the Chinese steal it.

PoisonIvy is well known in international hacker circles as the favored software of the PLA. It is a remote access tool (RAT) and, while not the most advanced software on the international hacker black market, would turn out to be an extraordinarily effective cyber intelligence-gathering weapon for 3PLA.

Zinns of Omission Mary Grabar definitively discredits America’s top history textbook. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274799/zinns-omission-bruce-bawer

Perhaps the nicest thing you can say about Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is that it shows that even in the era of the Internet a book can continue to have an immense social impact. In Zinn’s case, however, that impact could hardly be more dangerous. Published in 1980, Zinn’s book has for some time been, as Mary Grabar notes in her definitive new study of it, Debunking Howard Zinn, both the bestselling trade history of America and the bestselling American history textbook. When Zinn wrote it, he intended it to provide a skeptical (shall we say) alternative to previous accounts of US history, which Zinn, hardcore America-hater that he was, saw as excessively pro-American. Today, Zinn’s book isn’t just an insidious alternative; it is the reigning book in the field, and its once alternative take on US history has become received wisdom on the establishment left. Not a few of the students who read the book years ago when they were college students, and who fell for Zinn’s take on US history hook, line, and sinker, are now teachers who are using the same book to indoctrinate their own charges.

Many of us have been aware for years of Zinn’s perfidious influence – and have fretted over it in print. But to read Grabar is to realize that the situation is even worse than many of us thought – and to learn things about Zinn that one didn’t know before. One of the things I learned from Grabar is that Matt Damon – who, in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting (which he co-wrote and starred in) worked in a plug for Zinn’s book that gave it a major boost – grew up with Zinn as a neighbor and was sucked in by People’s History by the age of ten.

How To Replace Howard Zinn’s Communist Account Of U.S. History For American Kids By Joy Pullmann

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/28/replace-howard-zinns-communist-account-u-s-history-american-kids/

Americans’ affections for and knowledge of their country need to be fed. The lovely new history ‘Land of Hope’ does so. Another new book, ‘Debunking Howard Zinn,’ provides medicine to those food cannot restore.

The perfect companion accompanied my family’s trip West this summer in the modern covered wagon: A new, single-volume book of U.S. history. As our RV motored across the plains, I read of how they were discovered and settled. I looked across the prairies, the badlands, and the mountains and imagined myself coming in an ox-drawn cart instead of a motor vehicle with a gas stove and bathroom.

“Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story,” by University of Oklahoma historian Wilfred McClay, is extremely readable. It’s written in a conversational but not casual tone, and thus approachable to readers from around age ten onward (if the ten-year-old is accustomed to reading large books like “The Lord of the Rings,” as mine is). An attractive writing style may be its first virtue, because an open door is required for people to enter.

A second virtue is the book’s brevity. To be sure, it is a large and somewhat heavy volume, of 429 pages not including the end material. But that is not too much gas for racing across approximately 500 years of history. I found myself constantly wishing to hear more about the people and ideas in the book, and sad but understanding to instead be whisked away to the next set. Thankfully, McClay provides an extensive “additional reading” list to help satisfy a problem inherent to writing a one-volume overview of American history.

Judge Jeanine Drops Bold New Book: ‘Radicals, Resistance and Revenge’ By Bryan Preston

https://pjmedia.com/trending/judge-jeanine-drops-bold-new-book-radicals-resistance-and-revenge/

“Donald Trump.”

The mere mention of the name makes liberals go apoplectic. It makes the media lose its collective mind. It’s like Voldemort in Harry Potter combined with Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984 – to the left, Trump’s the name that must not be mentioned, but when it is it must be scorned and hated. “Orange man bad!”

The very thought of a Trump presidency drove some Americans mad. It sparked FBI agents to create an “insurance policy” that now looks very much like a conspiracy against an American presidential candidate and – after he won – the sitting President of the United States. That “Russia Russia Russia!” conspiracy cost millions of taxpayer dollars and spilled billions of pixels, and in the end proved to be a hoax.

There was no collusion between Donald Trump, or anyone in his orbit, or any American at all, and the Russians to impact the 2016 election. None.

Judge Jeanine Pirro is out with a blockbuster of a book that investigates the Russia hoax. Radicals, Resistance and Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America blows up Russia gate with a deep dive into the deep state.

Pirro opens with a crushing blow: Russiagate came up empty!

“So, the special counsel comes out with its thirty-four indictments and a final report. None of the indictments involved Donald Trump, his family, the Trump campaign, or any American, for that matter, colluding with Russia. There was full cooperation by the White House, which never claimed executive privilege and handed over more than one million documents…If after two years, 19 prosecutors, 40 investigators, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, several grand juries, and $34 million spent there was not a scintilla of evidence to the collusion claim, whose idea was it to start the investigation and why?”

A Kennedy launches a campaign to tell us little people to quit eating hamburgers and buying cheap cashmere sweaters By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/a_kennedy_launches_a_campaign_to_guilttrip_us_little_people_about_eating_hamburgers_and_buying_cheap_cashmere_sweaters.html

One of the beautiful people out there riding jets for book tours and maybe global warming conferences is very, very, upset with the rest of us for our “inconspicuous” consumption.

Pay no attention any more to the superrich for that conspicuous consumption on carbon-spewing yachts and jets flying to global warming conferences, the big problem now is shaming those who can only afford hamburgers. Biteback, see?

Twenty-nine year old Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg’s new book, “Inconspicuous Consumption” comes out today, and she’s already kicked off a cross-country book tour for it starting in Martha’s Vineyard, wending around to the Hamptons, Manhattan, Cambridge, Portland, Maine, hipster Brooklyn, Los Angeles Seattle, Portland (different Portland), Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Washington, then back to Telluride for the rich ski bums, Denver, then back again to Vermont and ending in Boston, burning a lot of carbon to do it unless she’s taking the bus. There were actually quite a few more toney towns and cities she’ll burn carbon for to make appearances at that I didn’t mention.

According to Mike Allen’s top-ten column in Axios:

Out today, from former N.Y. Times science writer Tatiana Schlossberg, “Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have” (Grand Central Publishing):

When we think about climate change, melting polar ice caps, hurricanes, or forest fires might be the first things that come to mind. … Much lower down on the list, if it comes up at all, is average, everyday, run‑of‑the-mill stuff, including literal stuff: a pair of jeans, a hamburger, Netflix, an air-conditioner.But those four things, and many others, should be much higher on the list. In fact, almost everything we do, use, and eat … has a lot to do with climate change and the environment, because of the way we use resources, create waste, and emit greenhouse gases without even thinking about it. …

Tom Cotton Discusses His New Book ‘Sacred Duty’

https://freebeacon.com/issues/tom-cotton-discusses-his-new-book-sacred-duty/

Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) discussed his new book Sacred Duty about his time serving in “The Old Guard” and honoring fallen American soldiers during an appearance on Fox News’s Fox & Friends on Monday.

“One of the most meaningful things I’ve done is serving in the military, and if I wasn’t serving in Iraq or Afghanistan leading troops in combat, I can’t think of anything more meaningful than serving at Arlington National Cemetery with The Old Guard honoring our nation’s fallen heroes and everything they mean to America,” Cotton said.

Created in 1784, The Old Guard is the oldest regiment in the army and has been the army’s official ceremonial unit since 1948. The regiment sometimes performs more than 20 funerals per day. They also jumped into action after the Pentagon was hit on 9/11.

“On 9/11, when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, funerals continued to go on, but The Old Guard also rushed down to the Pentagon to help provide military aid and security on that site. In a way it became the first army unit to deploy to a new battlefield in the war on terrorism,” Cotton said.

“For the first 170 years before The Old Guard came to Arlington in 1948, they were serving on the front lines of almost every war, all the way up to World War II. The story of The Old Guard’s history is kind of the story of America as a nation,” Cotton added.

White Cargo The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh

https://nyupress.org/9780814742969/white-cargo/

The forgotten story of the thousands of white Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain’s American colonies

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London’s streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide “breeders” for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.

Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.

This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.

The Bogus Story That Launched a ‘Collusion’ Probe By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ball-of-collusion-book-excerpt-bogus-story-that-launched-collusion-probe/

A minor functionary’s farcical encounter with a self-promoting schemer provided the excuse for an investigation.

Editor’s note: Andrew C. McCarthy’s new book is Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. This is the fourth in a series of excerpts; the first can be read here, the second here, and the third here.

The George Papadopoulos Origin Story has never added up. It has been portrayed as the Big Bang, the Magic Moment that started the FBI’s investigation of “collusion” — a suspected election-theft conspiracy between Donald Trump’s campaign and Vladimir Putin’s regime. But if the young energy-sector analyst had actually emerged in early 2016 as the key to proving Trump–Russia espionage, you would think the FBI might have gotten around to interviewing him before January 27, 2017 — i.e., a week after President Trump had been inaugurated, and six months after the Bureau formally opened its “Crossfire Hurricane” probe.

You would probably also think Papadopoulos, Suspect One in The Great Cyber Espionage Attack on Our Democracy, might have rated a tad more than the whopping 14-day jail sentence a federal judge eventually imposed on him. You might even suppose that he’d have been charged with some seditious felony involving clandestine operations against his own country, instead of . . . yes . . . fibbing to the FBI about the date of a meeting.

That, however, does not scratch the surface. We are to believe that what led to the opening of the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, and what therefore is the plinth of the collusion narrative, is a breakfast meeting at a London hotel on April 26, 2016, between Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic we are supposed to take for a clandestine Russian agent. We are to take Papadopoulos’s word for it that Mifsud claimed Russia possessed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands” of “emails of Clinton.” We are further to believe that “the professor” elaborated that, in order to help Donald Trump’s candidacy, the Kremlin would release these “emails of Clinton” at a time chosen to do maximum damage to the Democratic nominee’s campaign.

The story is based on no credible evidence. If it were ever presented to a jury, it would be laughed out of court.

The Election Is Legitimate Only If the Democrats Win By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ball-of-collusion-book-excerpt-election-legitimate-only-if-democrats-win/

Democrats scoffed at charges of ‘election rigging’ until they needed an excuse for Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat.

Editor’s note: Andrew C. McCarthy’s new book is Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. This is the third in a series of excerpts; the first can be read here and the second here.

‘Horrifying!”

As we’ve seen, candidates can get chirpy at final presidential debates less than three weeks from Election Day, and Hillary Clinton was no exception. What “horror” had her inveighing so? The very thought that her Republican rival would question the legitimacy of the presidential election.

Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he wouldn’t budge. He would not pledge to accept the election results a priori. Okay, no, Trump didn’t use the phase a priori. But he did speculate that the electoral process could be rigged. Until he saw how it played out, the Republican nominee said, he could not concede that the outcome would be on the up-and-up.

First, he reaffirmed an allegation for which he’d already been roundly condemned: Foreigners could swing the election — specifically, “millions” of ineligible voters, an allusion to illegal immigration, the piñata of Trump’s campaign. Second, he complained about the gross one-sidedness of the media’s campaign coverage: scathing when it came to him, and between inattentive and fawning when it came to his opponent, whose considerable sins were airbrushed away. Third, he claimed there was deep corruption: Clinton, he maintained, should not have been permitted to run, given the evidence of felony misconduct uncovered in her email scandal. Instead of prosecuting her, law-enforcement agencies of the Democratic administration bent over backwards to give her a pass, and congressional Democrats closed ranks around her, conducting themselves in committee hearings more like her defense lawyers than like investigators searching for the truth.

A flabbergasted Clinton responded that she was shocked — horrified — to hear Trump “talking down our democracy” this way. This was a top theme in her campaign’s closing days: The election was absolutely legitimate; Trump was traitorously condemnable for refusing to say so.

‘The Plateau’ Review: A Culture of Selflessness An isolated community in southern France showed what could be done to protect victims of persecution during World War II.By Caroline Moorehead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-plateau-review-a-culture-of-selflessness-11565736945?mod=ig_booksaugust17

It was in the spring of 1942, as the Germans occupying France began rounding up Jews for deportation, that the inhabitants of the remote Vivarais-Lignon plateau opened their doors to refugees fleeing capture. Situated in the Massif Central region of southern France, high in the mountains and cut off from the rest of the country by thick snow during the winter months, the Vivarais-Lignon had a long tradition of resistance. In the 16th century, it was a stronghold for the Huguenots during France’s wars of religion. Now, as the Nazis and the Vichy government intensified their own persecutions, Catholics, Protestants and Darbyists—followers of John Darby, a 19th-century English preacher—offered sanctuary to Jews. Some hid them in barns and attics; others pretended that they were family members. Many of these saviors were dour, silent people, accustomed to hard lives, who shared a belief that sheltering strangers was not only important but fundamental to who they were.

Much has been written about the plateau and its people, whose selflessness helped save thousands of lives, including many Jewish children. Historians have pored over the area, tracing both the individual acts of courage and the rivalrous interpretations of the past to be found there. In “The Plateau,” Maggie Paxson recounts the story of one brave young teacher who arrived in the region late in the summer of 1942. She also discovers, during the course of her research, something that has been happening on the plateau since 2000, when it became an outpost for the Centres d’Accueil pour Demandeurs d’Asile, a nongovernmental organization that provides assistance to asylum seekers fleeing war and persecution. Kindness to strangers, the author suggests, is imbued in the very soil of this area. “The sacred here” she writes, “feels quiet, steadfast.”