HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Alarming Cybersecurity Stats: What You Need To Know For 2021 by Chuck Brooks

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2021/03/02/alarming-cybersecurity-stats——-what-you-need-to-know-for-2021/

The year 2020 broke all records when it came to data lost in breaches and sheer numbers of cyber-attacks on companies, government, and individuals. In addition, the sophistication of threats increased from the application of emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and 5G,  and especially from greater tactical cooperation among hacker groups and state actors. The recent Solar Winds attack, among others,  highlighted both the threat and sophistication of those realities.

The following informational links are compiled from recent statistics pulled from a variety of articles and blogs. As we head deeper into 2021, it is worth exploring these statistics and their potential cybersecurity implications in our changing digital landscape.

To make the information more useable, I have broken down the cybersecurity statistics in several categories, including Top Resources for Cybersecurity Stats, The State of Cybersecurity Readiness, Types of Cyber-threats, The Economics of Cybersecurity, and Data at Risk.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Are We All Controlled Opposition Now? Diana West

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

http://Are We All Controlled Opposition Now? https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4202/Are-We-All-Controlled-Opposi

 On the matter of whether President Trump’s speech at CPAC uplifted or depressed:

I could not have been more depressed while listening to Part 1. It was a stump speech without a stump. Every reference to the terrible things “the Biden administration” is doing to our country without first and foremost establishing the regime’s illegitimacy has the effect of normalizing that regime. It wasn’t enough for Trump to flick at maybe having to win the presidency for a “third” time, either. I felt as though we were watching the debut of Trump’s capitulation to the Narrative. C-PAC, after all, has a long tradition of enforcing capitulations when it comes to the existential threats of the moment, including immigration, Islam, subversion. I had to turn off the President altogether during what turned out to be his lengthy paeon to “the vaccine.” Is it be possible he is unaware of the peril involved in injecting untested and unneccessary gene therapies into human beings? The role the vaccine(s) plays in the Great Reset agenda to turn humanity into digital slaves? These remain open questions. 

When I dared to turn the sound back on, Trump was into Part 2: the stolen election. No longer was he blinding us to the nightmare that paralyzes the nation by pretending Biden won office freely and fairly. This I found uplifting the way truth is uplifting. Trump ran through some of the stunning election anomalies and fraud events, he excoriated SCOTUS and the courts for their cowardice (I prefer “treachery”) in refusing to hear the cases presenting evidence of same, and tossed out other choice items in the red meat category, including shout-outs to warmonger Liz Cheney and other GOP monsters. I, for one, gobbled it all up hungrily, and listened as he laid out a series of  essential steps Republicans “must” take to restore free and fair elections in the USA, and “Save America,” his new mission. He looked tanned, rested and ready, and that was uplifting, too.

But ready for what? Was it really red meat or junk food? That is, came the dawn, no bounce. Without having Trump before me, without seeing him under the lights, on stage, where I could marvel at his undimmed confidence and charisma, the glow was gone and the message was cold. He went back to being President-in-exile and we were still captives of the circus ring that American political arena has become.

Why do I say “circus ring”? The responsible government authories failed to acknowledge and rectify the election fraud of November 3; worse, they perpetrated and/or enabled it. That means that campaigning in the future will be no more than jumping through hoops; voting will be no more than entering data for an algorthm to apportion to the Swamp candidate of choice. From hereon out, politics in America becomes a pre-scripted affair with all the twists and turns of a debate in the Supreme Soviet. How do we Save America from that?

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

This Hand and That Hand: The Biden Administration on Iran Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

 https://www.newsweek.com/this-hand-that-hand-biden-administration-iran-opinion

The media is full of news about American airstrikes on Iranian-supported militias in Syria. Yes—it is a big deal and an appropriate measure—but if that’s the left hand of the Biden administration, watch out for the right. This is becoming a theme.

In early January, though little remarked upon in the Western press, Iran seized the South Korean oil tanker MT Hankuk Chemi in international waters in the Persian Gulf. Coincidentally (Tehran says), Iran demanded the release of funds frozen by the South Korean government under the U.S.-led sanctions regime. Most of the crew was released in February, but the ship and its captain remain in Iranian waters. South Korea has now agreed to release $1 billion out of an estimated $7–9 billion held by Seoul. According to a Korean Foreign Ministry source, “The actual unfreezing of the assets will be carried out through consultations with related countries, including the United States.”

South Korea, an American ally, wanted its ship and captain back while not breaking sanctions. It appears that the Biden administration offered Seoul a bit of a sleight of hand, suggesting that some of the funds either go directly to pay Iran’s dues in arrears to the UN or go toward humanitarian activity controlled by outside organizations. The Iranian government says Tehran will determine where the money is spent.

If the money ends up in Iranian banks, you will know how that negotiation went.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Robbing Israel’s far-left Labor leader of plausible deniability Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/robbing-israels-far-left-labor-leader-of-plausible-deniability/

Contrary to common wisdom, the overruling of the ban on Ibtisam Mara’ana-Menuhin’s run in the Knesset election is good news for the right.

(March 2, 2021 / JNS) Much of the Israeli right is furious about the Supreme Court ruling on Sunday that Labor Party candidate Ibtisam Mara’ana-Menuhin is kosher to run for a Knesset seat in the March 23 election.

The ruling overturned the Feb. 17 Central Elections Committee (CEC) decision to ban Mara’ana-Menuhin—a documentary filmmaker and creator of the Arabic-language TV series “Bila Muakada” (“No Offense,” broadcast on Israel’s Kan network—from participating in the process. When the Arab-Israeli leftist who calls herself a “Palestinian” won the seventh slot in the Labor primaries at the end of January, opponents dug up her past social-media posts to prove that she is unfit to sit in the parliament of the Jewish state.

These naysayers happened to include fellow Labor Party members who, along with the far-right Otzma Yehudit Party, filed a petition with the CEC to disqualify her. To back up their objections, they went digging into her social-media history.

What they uncovered was political gold. Among the statements that she had made on Facebook were attacks on Zionism in general and the Israel Defense Forces in particular. She also boasted in 2012 about refusing to stand for the two-minute siren on Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen Soldiers.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Have Israel’s courts jumped to the other side? Sure feels like it.By David Isaac

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/

This week saw a trifecta of decisions giving aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies.

Even more frightening, it’s only Monday.

First, the Supreme Court on Sunday reversed the Central Elections Committee’s Feb. 17 ban against Ibitisam Mara’ana, an Arab candidate for the Labor party.K

Among her disgusting comments were those in 2008 when she told an interviewer: “You are naturally frightened. You are a frightened people. Fear [is] in your genetics.”

By “you” she meant Jews.

She continued, “It did not start in the Holocaust and has nothing to do with the Arabs. You are a terribly possessive and domineering people.”

If that’s not anti-Semitic, then we don’t know what is.

She wasn’t done.

“If I would order an apocalyptic script, I would destroy Zichron Yaakov… so they’d go back to the United States or Poland,” she told the interviewer.

Zichron Yaakov, on the Carmel range, is one of the prettiest cities in Israel. It was founded in 1882 at the start of the First Aliyah, the initial wave of Zionist immigration.

The soft-minded would argue she just has something against Zichron Yaakov, where she and her mother once cleaned houses.

That kind of argument reminds us of the famous remark by Zionist leader Max Nordau who said that when you spit on the Jews, they call it rain.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

By Jeff Crouere : Countdown to Kamala

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

https://canadafreepress.com/article/countdown-to-kamala

President Joe Biden is a shadow of his former self. Long gone is the aggressive, pugnacious, and partisan Democrat who mistreated Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his confirmation hearings. Today, Americans see a President who is clearly mentally diminished and is getting worse on a daily basis.

During the campaign, Biden refused to submit to a cognitive test. When asked by CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett if he would take a test, Biden snapped, “No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on man, that’s like saying, before you got in this program, if you take a test where you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?”

Americans have no idea when Biden took his last cognitive test.

Biden refused to take a test because it would show he is in mental decline. His last medical report was issued in December of 2019. While his doctor, Kevin O’Connor of George Washington University, labeled Biden “vigorous” and fit to successfully perform as President, that view was not shared by other experts. 

Dr. David Scheiner, the former personal physician for Barack Obama, claimed that Biden was “not a healthy guy.”  In fact, U.S. Congressman Ronny Jackson (R-TX), the former White House physician for President Obama and President Donald Trump, said Biden “does not have the mental capacity, the cognitive ability to serve as our Commander-in-Chief and head of state.” He also reiterated a concern shared by many Americans, “I really think that he needs some type of cognitive testing before he takes over the reins as our Commander-in-Chief.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fauci’s flip-flops: How ‘America’s Doctor’ has repeatedly reversed himself during Covid crisis By Daniel Payne

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/faucis-flip-flops-how-americas-doctor-has-continuously-reversed-himself-during 

From masks to school closures to preexisting immunity, Fauci’s advice appears to change to suit the moment.

When Dr. Anthony Fauci argued earlier this month that the massive Democratic stimulus bill was key to getting schools reopened, it wasn’t the first time the superstar doctor had gone back on his own advice. 

In late November, speaking to ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, Fauci urged the resumption of in-person education for children.

“The default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school, or to get them back to school,” said the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The reopening of schools, Fauci emphasized, could be accomplished with little risk. 

“If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not really very big at all, not like one would have suspected,” he said. “So, let’s try to get the kids back.”

But within a few short months, Fauci’s position had undergone notable change. Reopening schools was now contingent on passage of the legislative centerpiece of the Biden administration’s domestic agenda, a colossal, $1.9 trillion Covid relief package.

“The schools really do need more resources,” Fauci told George Stephanopoulos on Feb. 14. “And that’s the reason why [the $1.9 trillion] that we’re talking about getting passed, we need that,” he continued. “The schools need more resources.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Is it racist to expect black kids to do math for real?Yes, serious people are arguing this. Make sure they don’t infect your school district. John McWhorter

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-it-racist-to-expect-black-kids?

There is a document getting around called Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction, a guide put together by a group of educators. It has a black boy on the cover.

The idea is to show us how our racial reckoning of late ought change how we expose black kids to math. I suppose the counsel is also intended for kids of other types of melanin, but this is in essence a document that could be called “Math For Black Kids.”

The latest is that state-level policy makers in Oregon are especially intrigued by this document. There is all reason to suppose that its influence will spread more widely.

And this is to resisted, as this lovely pamphlet is teaching us that it is racist to expect black kids to master the precision of math. To wit – its message, penned by people who consider themselves some of the most morally advanced souls in the history of the human species, is one that Strom Thurmond would have happily taken a swig of whiskey to.

Of course the authors have it that “The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visualizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture.” But translated, this means that math as we have always known it is racism. That’s a rich claim, and if correct, it is of earth-shattering urgency. But is it correct? Let’s see how it holds up.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

School parents are mad as hell and they’re not going to take this anymore Political pressure to reopen schools is growing more intense Charles Lipson

Posted By on March 3rd, 2021

http://Chttps://spectator.us/topic/school-parents-mad-hell-teachers-unions/harles Lipson

This week, Matt Meyer did what many parents long to do. He dropped off his kid at school. That’s unusual in Berkeley, California, where he lives, because the schools there have been closed for a year, and the teachers’ union adamantly opposes their reopening. Parents like Mr. Meyer who can afford private schools, which are mostly open, send their kids there. His child has been there since last June. So he dropped off his child and drove off to his job.

His job is head of the Berkeley teachers’ union. His main task there is to keep the public schools closed for everyone else.

Matt’s job and that of other teachers’ union bosses is getting harder — and not just because the hypocrisy is so obvious. It’s getting harder because parents and kids across the country are fed up. The national cry is Howard Beale’s from the 1976 film, Network, ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore. Things have got to change.’

Until now, that cry has been mostly silent, but it is growing more vocal and more urgent. Returning kids to school and returning parents to work are America’s two most important dinner-table issues. The issues are closely linked, of course, because many parents can’t leave home for their jobs if the kids can’t leave home for their schools.

BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

How the 1957 Flu Pandemic Was Stopped Early in Its Path By the time the virus reached the U.S., the country already had a vaccine ready. Becky Little

Posted By on March 2nd, 2021

https://www.history.com/news/1957-flu-pandemic-vaccine-hilleman?li_source=LI&li_medium=m2m-rcw-history

On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day, The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail in particular caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said “women carried glassy-eyed children tied to their backs.” He quickly got to work, putting out the word that there was a pandemic coming and pushing to develop a vaccine by the time school started again in the fall.

The first case of the pandemic had appeared in the Guizhou Province of southwestern China in February 1957. By the time Hilleman read about it in April, the Times reported that an estimated 250,000 Hong Kong residents—or 10 percent of the region’s population—were receiving treatment for it.

“We all missed it,” he later recalled for The Vaccine Makers Project. “The military missed it, and the World Health Organization missed it.”

The day after reading the story, he sent a cable to an Army Medical General Laboratory in Zama, Japan, asking the staff to investigate what was going on in Hong Kong. A medical officer identified a member of the U.S. Navy who’d become infected in Hong Kong, and sent the serviceman’s saliva back to Hilleman in the United States so he could study the virus.