HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The Rising Economic Cost of Cyberattacks By Cale Clingenpeel

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-rising-economic-cost-of-cyberattacks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The Biden administration should build on the Trump administration’s strategy to confront the increasing security and economic threat of cyberattacks.

It was recently revealed that DarkSide raked in $90 million worth of Bitcoin — including $4.4 million in ransom from the Colonial Pipeline operator — from its cyberattacks stretching back to October 2020. The ransoms paid to DarkSide and similar organizations, however, do not capture the total economic cost of cyberattacks. Targeted firms acting in their individual interests may not fully account for the economic costs that spill over to consumers and to other firms. The result is underinvestment in cybersecurity from the private sector as a whole. While the Biden administration’s “private sector decision” remark helped define its Colonial Pipeline response, the federal government has an important role in closing this cybersecurity investment gap and limiting the future cost of cyberattacks.

Cyberattacks are perpetrated by numerous types of actors and stretch far beyond ransomware attacks such as the attack on the Colonial Pipeline. In fact, ransomware is on average a less costly form of cyberattack. While ransomware attacks on large firms tend to make headlines, according to one report, 70 percent of such attacks are directed at small- and medium-sized firms with fewer than 1,000 employees with 90 percent of the losses against these firms uninsured. The widespread nature of cyberattacks, their pervasiveness across industry and firm type, the varying components that make up the total cost, and the prevalence of underreporting all contribute to the difficulty in estimating the overall economic impact of these incidents, though some studies do exist.

In 2018, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) published a report evaluating the total costs associated with malicious cyberactivity by measuring the stock-price reaction of publicly traded firms to news of cyberattacks that had been made public. After taking into account firms’ underreporting of cyberattacks, spillover effects to other firms, and private costs incurred alongside the costs to publicly traded firms, the CEA estimated that the total cost posed by malicious cyberactivity to the U.S. economy in 2016 was as high as $109 billion (roughly 0.6 percent of 2016 GDP). These estimated costs are very likely to have increased since 2016.

According to annual studies by Accenture and the Ponemon Institute based on extensive surveys of firms and cybersecurity experts, between 2016 and 2018, the average total cost incurred by firms due to malicious cyber activity increased by 58 percent in the United States. Assuming that the total cost to the U.S. economy increased at the same rate as the average cost faced by those surveyed firms, the total cost of cyberattacks in 2018 would be as high as $172 billion (roughly 0.8 percent of 2018 GDP). This assumption likely serves as a lower-bound estimate, however, as the average number of cyberattacks faced by firms globally increased over this period, making it more than likely that the frequency of attacks against U.S. firms also increased. Since 2018 — the last year the study was conducted — the number of cyberattacks, the average cost of cyberattacks, and the total economic costs are likely to have risen even further.

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The Media Finally Discover Antifa By David Harsanyi

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-media-finally-discover-antifa/

The media abdicated their responsibility last summer by minimizing the violence.

L ast summer, New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof headed to Portland to try to locate the “radical-left anarchists” then–president Donald Trump kept mentioning in his campaign speeches. “Help Me Find Trump’s ‘Anarchists’ in Portland” Kristof implored his readers, as he roamed the city, running into well-meaning musicians, activists, technicians, and doctors, but, alas, no anarchists. The masked “protesters” who had thrown mortars, M-80s, and bricks at cops guarding the federal courthouse in Portland only a few weeks earlier were nowhere to be found. The “protesters” who in the week before Kristof’s column was published had been involved in dozens of acts of vandalism, destruction, and violence, including assaults on cops with “flaming projectiles” and bricks, had disappeared. Kristof’s piece is the equivalent of writing a column about the January 6 riot and focusing on the protesters who didn’t go into the Capitol.

Kristof’s piece was one of the most ham-fisted efforts, but he wasn’t alone. The day before left-wing CNN pundit Josh Campbell flew into Portland to mock concerns about violence — “I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos” — a pro-Trump marcher had been shot to death, allegedly by an Antifa member. There was a concerted effort by many in the national media to play down the extent and damage of protests that summer, which turned out to be the most expensive domestic upheaval in insurance history, with costs exceeding $1 billion. Minority neighborhoods and city centers were often left to looters at night, as elected officials were often paralyzed by the fear of offending Black Lives Matter protesters. Some pundits would even argue the property destruction wasn’t “violence” at all — from the comfort of their homes, of course.

Turns out, as the Washington Post reports today, that the extremism Kristof and Campbell couldn’t locate anywhere within Portland’s city limits has done great damage to the city’s poorest communities. It turns out that de-policing efforts — the Portland city council cut $15 million as a “defund” effort and now has a cop shortage — have left some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods open to spikes in violent crime. Anarchists, writes the Post, have hijacked Portland’s “social justice movement,” exacerbating the problems BLM protesters were supposedly trying to fix.

Not that this is surprising to anyone who wasn’t in the liberal bubble. Local stories about black leaders attempting to distance themselves from Antifa were already being written in the summer. A month after Kristof’s column, Mark Hemingway detailed the corrupt 50-year influence of hard-left radicalism in the city in the Wall Street Journal. None of this was useful at the time. An election was coming.

A few weeks before Kristof’s piece, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler had even asked Governor Kate Brown for National Guard troops. One imagines it was not to stop peaceful schoolteachers from being heard on criminal-justice reform. Soon, the feds sent agents to protect the courthouse, which was under nightly attack. Hysteric Charles Pierce claimed that cops had “softly Pinochet’ed in broad daylight.” In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg did him one better, writing that “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun.” (No hyperbole was left on the table during the Trump years.

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A Woke Military Wouldn’t Have Won World War II David Deaval

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://amac.us/a-woke-military-wouldnt-have-won-world-war-ii/

Memorial Day traditionally marks the beginning of summer and a time for patriotic remembrance of our fallen war dead and, for many of us, fallen family members, many of whom were veterans. I have been thinking of the five sons of Victor Sowers, Sr., my mother’s brothers, all of whom served in World War II and returned, while pondering the parlous state of the military today.

The Sowers brothers would, no doubt, have joined a group of veterans and Republicans in Congress who are banding together to fight the imposition of left-wing ideology on the U. S. Armed Forces. Air Force Lt. General Rod Bishop (retired) began Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS) last year when the Air Force Academy football team released a video endorsing both Black Lives Matter and “antiracist” education, reports the Washington Free Beacon. After complaining to no avail, the retired general heard from many other veterans and active duty members of the various branches who were experiencing the same kinds of indoctrination in Critical Race Theory and other progressive doctrines. After U. S. Space Force Lt. Colonel Matthew Lohmeier was fired for self-publishing Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest and the Unmaking of the American Military, a book detailing what he calls the “Neo-Marxist agenda” (and currently #4 among all books on Amazon), thirty members of STARRS sent an open letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asking him to “take action to fight back against the creeping left-wing extremism in the U.S. military.” 

          The Free Beacon reports that there is no response to the STARRS letter from the Pentagon, but the signs are not good given Secretary Austin’s own confirmation testimony that he would work to rid the military of “racists and extremists,” a statement that is ominous given the recent history of reports and statements from various branches of the military, as well as comments such as that of retired Army General Thomas Kolditz, who said that the goal should be to purge “Trump loyalists.”  Mike Gonzalez and Dakota Wood of the Heritage Foundation reported that the Defense Department is “reportedly considering hiring a private company to monitor the free speech of military personal on social media, using key words or algorithms that by their very nature reflect the perspective of those who select the words and write the algorithms.” 

While my Sowers uncles made all the jokes about the foolishness of those running the Army and Navy in the 1940s and laughed about the military censors’ sometimes senseless clipping of passages from their letters, they would not have thought what was happening now is at all funny. They fought for a country they did not believe inherently racist or unjust. They fought for a country where the perfection of freedom was sought. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

US energy policy and the pursuit of failure…again By Peter Z. Grossman

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/556003-us-energy-policy-and-the-pursuit-of-failureagain

We’ve been here before.  

The development of the Biden administration’s energy and climate policies is following a path set by the energy policies of the 1970s. That is not a good model to follow. Failure followed failure. Essentially U.S. energy policy has been created by a four-step process: 

First, an energy crisis is declared. Presidents and legislators feel the pressure to “do something.” 

Second, policy proposals that supposedly will provide a solution are announced. 

Third, assuming the sense of crisis lingers, extreme measures are passed in Congress or initiated by executive action, or both. 

Fourth, the measures prove ineffective and, although billions are spent, the measures are either repealed or just forgotten. In the meantime, market forces end the “crisis.” 

Presidents Nixon and Ford went through steps one and two. The Arab oil embargo and the subsequent gasoline shortages made it necessary for officials to offer radical ideas. But the end of the lines at gas stations and the fall in oil prices meant the end of the sense of crisis. That made officials reluctant to pursue the radical measures that had been proposed.  

It took the energy crisis of 1979-80 to follow the path to its conclusion. The return of gasoline shortages and sky-high energy prices induced President Carter to devise a comprehensive energy plan.  

Carter and his energy secretary believed that the U.S. and most of rest of the world were rapidly running out of oil and natural gas. All remaining oil and the wealth it entailed would go to the oil exporters (especially the hated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC), while we shivered in the dark.  

So drastic measures were needed. Carter’s policies, if enacted, were supposed to make the U.S. energy independent, but would have other virtues including protecting the American way of life. 

The major component of this plan was to replace two million barrels a day of oil imports with a substitute derived from processing American coal. These “synfuels” would cost $88 billion (inflation-adjusted $320 billion), a number then-Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger later admitted “came from nowhere.” Moreover, five different agencies of the government said that the synfuels goal wasn’t feasible.   

As distress at the pump (especially rising prices) continued, Congress passed most of Carter’s plan, including the creation of the Synfuels Corporation.  

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden administration suspends oil and gas leases in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Juliet Eilperin, Josh Partlow

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration-to-cancel-oil-and-gas-leases-in-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge/ar-AAKBBzA

The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, targeting one of President Donald Trump’s most significant environmental acts during his last days in office.

The move by the Interior Department, which could spark a major legal battle, dims the prospect of oil drilling in a pristine and politically charged expanse of Alaskan wilderness that Republicans and Democrats have fought over for four decades. The Trump administration auctioned off the right to drill in the refuge’s coastal plain — home to hundreds of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl as well as the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears — just two weeks before President Biden was inaugurated.

Now the Biden administration is taking steps to block those leases, citing problems with the environmental review process. In Tuesday’s Interior Department order, Secretary Deb Haaland said that a review of the Trump administration’s leasing program in the wildlife refuge found “multiple legal deficiencies” including “insufficient analysis” required by environmental laws and a failure to assess other alternatives. Haaland’s order calls for a temporary moratorium on all activities related to those leases in order to conduct “a new, comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental impacts of the oil and gas program.”

The step, coming just days after the Justice Department defended another drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, underscores the balancing act the new administration aims to strike as it slows fossil fuel development on public lands. While Biden has paused new federal oil and gas leasing and pledged to drastically cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, he has taken a much more cautious approach toward most oil and gas operations approved under his predecessor.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The American Century  of Humiliation By: Kathleen Brush, Ph.D.

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://abyssum.org/2021/06/01/xi-is-surely-enjoying-the-humiliating-footage-of-neutered-police-and-uncontrolled-violence-on-americas-streets-uncontrolled-violence-is-the-marker-of-a-failed-state/

America’s Achilles heel is its disregard for history. Domestically, it leads to ill-informed decisions like centering American history on the historical fairy tale called Project 1619. Internationally, it is an endless source of comic relief. 

The latest fodder was American wrestler and Hollywood star, John Cena, groveling for forgiveness from the Chinese. His non-mistake? He called Taiwan a country. The Chinese response? More groveling from the American. 

China’s President Xi surely savored the show. He loves humiliating the American superpower. Xi is Mao’s protégé and he’s finishing his mission to seek retribution for China’s Century of Humiliation (1839-1949) at the hands of Western, Russian, and Japanese powers, by converting China into the humiliator. 

Historically specializing in psychological warfare, China is suited to the task. Humiliation and intimidation gave China a vast tributary empire in eastern Asia until the early 19th century. Today, China merges psychology with vast economic, cyber, and military assets to exert control over other nations.

To achieve Mao’s mission, the first step was unifying the Chinese population. The second was building economic strength. The disunity of the ethnically diverse Chinese population was a perennial source of endless conflict. Integrated populations had been a secret weapon of their humiliating adversaries. To level the playing field, China mandated assimilation and delivered Han Chinese ethnic homogeneity in record-breaking time – never to be altered.

  

Watching Leftist political leaders leverage the havoc created by rioting Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists to damage America’s once admired integrated population was priceless. China bombarded social media quoting officials like Kamala Harris: “racism is real in America. And it has always been. Xenophobia is real in America, and always has been. Sexism, too.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘We Are Going To Expose You’: Vets Crenshaw, Cotton Create Whistleblower Doc To Combat ‘Woke’ Efforts In U.S. Military By Hank Berrien

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-are-going-to-expose-you-vets-crenshaw-cotton-create-whistleblower-doc-to-combat-woke-efforts-in-u-s-military

On Saturday, Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton and Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, both military veterans, teamed up to release a whistleblower form for military members to fill out if they spot any “woke” training efforts.

Crenshaw tweeted, “Enough is enough. We won’t let our military fall to woke ideology. We have just launched a whistleblower webpage where you can submit your story. Your complaint will be legally protected, and go to my office and @SenTomCotton.”

Crenshaw added, “With written permission we will anonymously publish egregious complaints on social media and tell the country what’s happening in our military. For too long, progressive Pentagon staffers have been calling the shots for our warfighters, and spineless military commanders have let it happen. Now we are going to expose you.”

The whistleblower form states:

We advise that whistleblowers use your personal resources and contact information when communicating submitting this form, and that you do not use your work equipment or work contact information. Further, do not submit classified information or other information barred from release through this form or by email.

Various U.S. laws at the federal, state and local level prohibit retaliation against whistleblowers for providing information to Congress. However, you still take serious risks when you report allegations of wrongdoing. We recommend that you consult an attorney experienced in whistleblower law for further guidance. We respect your confidentiality, and we will use your contact information only to follow up with you regarding your submission. You may submit a disclosure anonymously. However, please be aware that anonymous disclosures may limit our ability to respond to the information that you provide.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hey Facebook, Ban This!

Posted By on June 2nd, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/02/hey-facebook-ban-this/

Last week, we learned that Facebook had been banning posts suggesting that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab. We became aware only when Facebook announced that it would no longer ban such posts, raising the question of why it was doing so in the first place. It wasn’t as though there was no possibility that a lab leak was responsible. There was an ongoing discussion of this.

Then over the weekend, we learned that Facebook apparently has plans to ban posts that might encourage “vaccine hesitancy.” What does that mean? Who knows. Facebook never reveals how it makes such decisions.

“Anything that questions the vaccine or the narrative regarding the vaccine, which is, you know, everyone should get the vaccine and the vaccine is good and you’re not going to get many bad side effects, anything outside of that realm is basically considered under ‘vaccine hesitancy’ by Facebook’s algorithms,” Morgan Kahmann, a former data center technician for Facebook, told Fox News.

How does Facebook justify this? It doesn’t. In one section of its “Community Standards” document, Facebook flatly denies that it removes “false news” posts. It says “we do not remove false news from Facebook but we significantly reduce its distribution by showing it lower in News Feed.”

We’ve run into Facebook’s horrible “false news” attacks ourselves. One of our posts – correctly – stated that then-candidate Joe Biden wanted to outlaw gas-powered cars. That was based on Biden’s own campaign promises. Facebook flagged the headline as false – not the editorial – based on a bogus fact check. Facebook readership of the editorial crashed as a result.

It happened again when Facebook moved to block distribution of an article we published on COVID-19 rates in the U.S., in which we noted how infection rates in Europe at the time were far higher than the U.S., yet the U.S. – or more particularly, President Donald Trump – was being blamed for a massive failure to contain the disease. As with the Biden editorial, readership crashed as soon as Facebook slapped its “partly false” label on it.

Facebook has been not only removing COVID-19 stories it doesn’t like, but posts regarding election fraud as well, according to ABC News.

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Barack Obama’s Parallel Russian Universe By Jack Cashill

Posted By on June 1st, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/barack_obamas_parallel_russian_universe.html

As an admittedly partisan writer, my bias shows up in the subjects I cover, not in the facts I report. I want to know what the other guys know. It is always helpful, often essential.

Reporters in the political center and on left seem to feel no such obligation. Writing for audiences that know no more than what Big Media has chosen to tell them, these “journalists” are inclined to write politically useful fiction and often get away with it.

Such is the case with Edward-Isaac Dovere in his new bestseller, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump. Although no great fan of Barack Obama, Dovere accepts uncritically Team Obama’s collective amnesia about the Russian collusion plot.

As the former Chief Washington Correspondent for Politico, Dovere has no excuse for his ignorance. Despite his time in Washington, he seems totally unaware of the serious reporting done on Russian collusion by people like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, Gregg Jarrett, and Sara Carter of Fox News, John Solomon of Just the News, Mollie Hemingway and Margot Cleveland of the Federalist, Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, Lee Smith of the Hudson Institute, syndicated columnist Diana West, and Peter Schweizer among others.

In the way of example, Dovere has great sport with President Donald Trump’s tweet on March 4, 2017: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found.” According to Dovere, Obama thought the claim “totally absurd.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who wants Biden’s massive budget? The President wasn’t elected to carry out such a vast expansion of centralized government Charles Lipson

Posted By on June 1st, 2021

https://spectator.us/topic/who-wants-bidens-massive-budget/

President Joe Biden just proposed the largest budget (as a percentage of America’s economy) since the country was fighting Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. He’s doing it when there is no emergency, only an overweening desire to pass progressive programs quickly, before they lose their legislative majority.

The best historical analogue to his proposed budget increase is Lyndon Johnson’s cradle-to-grave Great Society Program. It has the same flaws. In fact, Biden’s program is best understood as the next step in a long political arc, extending from Franklin Roosevelt to LBJ to Obamacare.

All of them proposed centralized government solutions to almost every social problem, particularly endemic problems among the poor.

Today, those problems are caused mainly by the breakdown of family structures, high rates of urban violence and public schooling that doesn’t prepare graduates for jobs that require higher and higher levels of education. LBJ’s programs were designed to solve some of those problems, particularly poverty and social breakdown. The direct transfer programs certainly increased recipients’ income, but the big planning schemes only made problems worse. Biden’s programs are likely to do the same.

Roosevelt and Johnson permanently changed Washington’s role in American life to achieve their goals. Again, Biden proposes to extend the core Democratic objective. By vastly increasing the government’s share of the economy, along with ever-increasing bureaucratic regulations, his programs will make America’s government and economy much more like Europe’s social democracy. That means a larger social safety net, higher taxes, and slower growth. It means less control by state and local government, and less autonomy for individuals.

Biden’s budget raises several fundamental questions.