BOOKS Comments turned off

Inside Cyber by Chuck Brooks: Reviewed – Irish Tech News

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://irishtechnews.ie/inside-cyber-by-chuck-brooks-reviewed/

Inside Cyber, by Chuck Brooks, takes complex ideas about emerging technologies and provides a simplistic explanation of the technology. Brooks takes technology such as quantum computing, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, and explains the positives and negatives of these new technologies.

We live in a world that seems like it’s changing by the day. Keeping up with the times and understanding all of the new technology around us can seem like an impossible task, especially as it affects our daily lives. Just a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence was considered to only exist in Sci-Fi movies. Cellular speeds are coming close to rivalling Wi-Fi as global satellite communication nears. Countries are scrambling as they prepare for the looming threat of cyber attacks aided by AI. These new technologies will forever change the way the world operates. This book dives into what may seem like an existential threat, providing necessary steps to remain safe and secure.

Cybersecurity

Brook’s passion for cybersecurity and protecting the globe against technological threats is clear with over 10 chapters addressing these issues and how to prevent them. The first 5 chapters break down the common definition of cybersecurity; detailing likely targets of cyber attacks, different types and methods of cyber attacks, and how to best prevent them from occuring. It provides a valued education about cyber security and preventative habits to protect yourself, your business, and your home.

According to the book, in 2023, there were 343,338,964 reported victims of cyber attacks. Email is the most common vector for malware, with about 35% of the malware delivered via email in 2023. Business email compromises accounted for $2.7 billion in losses in 2022.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Doctors Have Responsibility But No Authority By Deane Waldman, M.D.

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/doctors_have_responsibility_but_no_authority.html

Nothing proves the title better than the recent reinstatement of a mask mandate in San Francisco hospitals. Every clinical doctor knows the data overwhelmingly proves they don’t work “to prevent the spread of the flu, COVID and other seasonal illnesses,” the ostensible, official reason for re-masking.

Note the adjective “clinical” doctor to contrast MDs in the trenches caring for sick people with bureaucrat MDs who, like Fauci, have never cared for patients in the real world but who dictate how the clinicians must practice medicine.

For most viruses, a cloth surgical mask is as effective as a screen door on a submarine. When (not if) patients get sick with the flu despite healthcare workers wearing masks, who will be responsible to care for them? When patients complain that masks did not prevent illness, who will they blame?

For decades, federal regulations and bureaucratic doctors have been chipping away at doctors’ independence, authority, and valuation. The heart surgeon with the best results can charge more than the surgeon with poor results, yet both are paid the same: an amount much less than their charges and what Medicare determines as “allowable reimbursements.” These are not reimbursements — they are government-pre-determined, low-ball payments.

As an interventional pediatric cardiologist, this author’s charges for a cardiac catheterization in a critically ill newborn baby ranged from $1,500 to as much as $9,000 if a device were implanted. Medicaid paid the maximum allowable reimbursement: $387.

In the past, general physicians would refer their patients to surgeons with the best results for the operation the patient needed. Now they must send the patient to whatever institution (not even who) the insurance company has a contract with.

A personal physician is no longer chosen by the patient. The enrollee, not patient, is assigned a provider on a health plan panel. People wait months to get in for a 15-minute appointment during which the doctor spends most of the time looking at a computer screen and filling out forms. No one takes a history or does a physical exam anymore.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Collapse of Kamala Harris Perhaps if the Harris-Walz ticket does go down in flames, Democrats will pause and take a long, hard look in the mirror. Perhaps. But if history is any indication, they probably won’t. By Josh Hammer

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/18/the-collapse-of-kamala-harris/

On July 26, in the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s ruthless midsummer coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, this column predicted that the elevation of dimwitted cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris to the party’s presidential slot would “spectacularly backfire.” More specifically, I wrote: “Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history.”

I’m feeling pretty good these days about that prognosis.

Harris recently campaigned in Erie, Pennsylvania—a crucial regional hub in this election cycle’s most important battleground state. Conspicuously absent from that snoozefest was incumbent Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.). Harris tried to pass off the snub as a nothingburger, suggesting that Casey was doing the more important work of knocking on doors and getting out the vote. This doesn’t pass the laugh test. Facing a spirited challenge from Republican hopeful Dave McCormick, Casey has clearly concluded that Harris’ immense Bay Area lefty baggage—her history of endorsing the Green New Deal, a national fracking ban, and crippling electric vehicle mandates—is an electoral albatross around his neck.

It’s tough to blame Casey. Other vulnerable Senate Democratic incumbents, such as Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.), reached the same conclusion a while ago. Such a conclusion makes a great deal of sense: A recent Marist national general election poll, for instance, shows Trump up a whopping 10 points on Harris with registered independents. If that margin ends up being anywhere near accurate, it is extraordinarily difficult to see a scenario in which Trump loses.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Hamas Loyalist Professor: Noura Erakat at Rutgers University Celebrating suicide bombers and demonizing Jews. Sara Dogan

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-noura-erakat-at-rutgers-university/

Editor’s note: American campuses are awash in a crisis of Jew hatred. Ineffectual college administrators have taken tentative steps to try and rein in the proponents of terror on their campuses, but they have yet to confront the most obvious source of this poisonous Jew hatred—their own radical faculty who have not only called for an end to Israel but have outright celebrated the barbaric bloodshed of the terror group Hamas.

The Freedom Center is exposing these radical, pro-terror faculty as the Top Ten Hamas Loyalist Professors. We will be publishing one school per day as a series on Frontpage. Noura Erakat, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University, is #8 on our list.

#8: Noura Erakat, Rutgers University

As an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Dr. Noura Erakat has repeatedly used her academic position and influence to promote the terrorist organization Hamas and to justify their barbaric massacre, mutilation, and rape of innocent Israeli Jews.

In a series of tweets issued on October 7th, a day of infamy in which Hamas terrorists slaughtered over 1200 Israel men, women and children, and brutalized and raped many others, taking hundreds of hostages, Dr. Erakat raised her voice to defend Hamas’s horrors.

“#Gaza has been under a naval blockade & land siege for 17 years & its 2 mil Palestinians subject to 4 large scale offensives,” Erakat tweeted. “Any shock in response to this multi scalar attack [by Hamas] reflects an expectation that those Palestinians die quietly and a complicity in their strangulation.”

On that same day of horrors, Erakat also tweeted: “Any condemnation of [Hamas] violence is vapid if it does not begin & end with a condemnation of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and occupation. #Palestine #Gaza #Decolonize.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Orwellian Noble Peace Prize Why we shouldn’t waste our time on the Nobel committee’s Newspeak. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-orwellian-noble-peace-prize/

Last week nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize were announced, and the nominees were typical of the Prize’s history. A perusal of past winners reveals that the majority of prizes are for good intention, moralizing internationalism and its institutions, short-lived peace treaties, feckless disarmament, and any choice that gratifies global anti-Americanism.

And let’s not forget terrorists and their enablers included in this year’s nominees: the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, the International Court of Justice, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. All three reflect the Prize’s long history of promulgating globalism and the “rules-based international order” that has serially failed to deter aggression.

The Wall Street Journal’s profile of this year’s nominees is a must read. Take the International Court of Justice, which took up South Africa’s specious charge of “genocide” against Israel, a despicable lie, given that South Africa seems unconcerned that Hamas’ founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Israel’s Jews. Worse, the ICJ “ruled that Israel ‘must immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah and other areas ‘which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’”

The other two nominees–– United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres––are just as morally idiotic, and obviously hostile to Israel and indifferent to the Israeli people. Employees of the UNRWA joined in Hamas’ butchery, and Secretary General Guterres claimed that Hamas’ violence, rape, and murder did “‘not come in a vacuum,’ but instead was grown from a ‘long-standing conflict, with a 56-year long occupation and no political end in sight.’”

The moral equivalence between the victims and murderers, like the lie “occupation,” makes a mockery of the UN’s claims to serve justice and peace. As the Journal concludes, “These aren’t peace makers. They’re apologists for war makers.”

Fortunately, the Peace Prize was awarded to Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo, an organization comprising atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who lobby to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This choice expresses the Nobel Committee’s preference for good intentions and impossible disarmament dreams, but it’s much more respectable and less morally offensive than celebrating enablers of terrorist murderers.

But the Nobel Peace Prize has before legitimized not just the enablers, but the terrorists themselves. In 1994, Yasser Arafat, head of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization, shared the prize with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” The fruit of that collaboration between the terrorist and two leaders of a liberal democratic state was the doomed Oslo Accord signed in 1993.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s Fundraising Crisis The president of America’s wealthiest university discovers that in the wake of its failure to defend its Jewish students, fundraising has been ‘disappointing.’

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/harvards-fundraising-crisis?lctg=1434403439&recognized_

“Disappointing” is the word being used by Harvard University’s president, Alan Garber, to describe the plunge in financial contributions that the school has recorded this year. His comment, during an interview with the Crimson last week, previews the release later this month of the University’s 2024 financial report, which is expected to show a collapse in funding as a result of Harvard’s pusillanimity in the wake of the war against Israel. 

Mr. Garber may be disappointed, but he can hardly be surprised. Harvard, in the words of six Jewish students suing the school, has become in the past year “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.” The university is in federal court fighting against, incredibly, these Jewish students over its failure to protect them from the “severe and pervasive” antisemitic discrimination that exploded on campus in the wake of October 7.

The university claims that it has taken “tangible steps” to address antisemitism and that the Jewish students’ “dissatisfaction with the strategy and speed” of the school’s efforts “does not state a legally cognizable claim.” The dismissal motion was denied by a district judge who ruled that Harvard had failed to respond to campus antisemitism. “In other words,” the judge wrote, “the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.” 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Jeffrey H. Anderson Border Bait-and-Switch The Biden administration is using misleading statistics and rhetoric to hide its role in perpetuating the migrant crisis.

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/border-bait-and-switch

During the vice presidential debate, Tim Walz claimed, “Look, [border] crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office.” Similarly, CNN reports, “Migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border remain at their lowest levels since 2020,” while a USA Today headline reads, “Illegal migration at the US border drops to lowest level since 2020.” These claims are true only if one doesn’t count it as a “crossing” when an illegal alien arrives at a port of entry along the border and is subsequently released into the United States.

Because the Biden administration is now funneling huge numbers of illegal aliens towards ports of entry with the help of its CBP One app, encounters elsewhere along the border are down. Yet, there are still far more aliens entering the country each month than there were under Trump—or even Barack Obama. The Biden administration continues to perpetuate the border crisis while simultaneously trying to mask that crisis with subtle policy changes and deceptive phrasing.

The primary reason we’ve had a border crisis for more than three and a half years is that the Biden administration—in a marked departure from every prior presidency—has refused to enforce federal immigration laws. Specifically, it has refused to enforce the requirement that asylum seekers be detained until their claims have been adjudicated. Instead, it has simply released them into the U.S. Knowing this, millions of migrants have arrived at our border, uttered the password “asylum,” and reaped the benefits of this administration’s failure to execute the laws.

The Immigration and Nationality Act declares that “if an alien asserts a credible fear of persecution, he or she shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito writes that such detention “requirements, as we have held, are mandatory.” Yet the Biden administration has treated these requirements as discretionary, continually releasing aliens into the interior of the country. As U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell observes, this has been “akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DEI Captures the Treasury Department How left-wing racialism is corrupting America’s national financial system. Christopher Rufo F. RUFO

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dei-captures-the-treasury-department
The Treasury Department is ground zero for the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” DEI agenda. The agency, which serves as the guardian of the American financial system, has translated critical race and gender theories into official policy—all under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals the stunning capture of the Treasury, which, under the current DEI mandate, has worked to advance the principles of left-wing racialism, directing billions of dollars to favored racial and “underserved” groups, hiring a cadre of radical race “experts” to cement the new orthodoxy within the department, and considering potential auditees’ race in IRS tax investigations.

This ideological shift started at the top. In her first months in office, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen sent a statement to the department’s workers that “commitment to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion is expected of every employee.” She sent the statement on the anniversary of the May 2020 death of George Floyd, at 9:29 a.m., to symbolize the nine minutes and 29 seconds that police officer Derek Chauvin had pinned Floyd to the ground. The statement set the tone: the Treasury secretary had a new ideological agenda—and expected compliance all the way down.

To implement this agenda, Yellen quickly built a centralized DEI apparatus within the department, establishing an official Equity Hub, tasked with implementing Biden’s executive orders on diversity, and an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, made up of activists and executives. She also hired left-wing race activist Janis Bowdler as the department’s first Counselor for Racial Equity, a high-level position “charged with coordinating Treasury’s efforts to advance racial equity including engaging with diverse communities throughout the country.”

Yellen and Bowdler wasted no time, working to advance some of Treasury’s most flagrant racial programs, which subordinated lending standards, federal contracting, hiring policy, and even IRS auditing rules to the new racial calculus.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Most Unserious Presidential Candidate Of All Time? Francis Menton

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=818c491012

The American presidency has definitely had its ups and downs over the years, but at least the occupants of the office, and the contenders who have sought it, have taken the job of being President seriously. Until now, uniformly, they have thought it important to outline some kind of a vision for the country, and to propose policies intended to achieve that vision. Even if in some instances you might disagree entirely with the candidates’ vision, at least they had it. Or, if they really didn’t have a vision, or much of one, then they pretended to.

In this sense, has there ever been a more fundamentally unserious candidate for President than Kamala Harris?

Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, so it has now been nearly three months since Harris became the presumptive nominee. In that time, Harris has studiously avoided all occasions to make clear statements about vision or policy. Until this very night, she has declined all interviews with any outlet that might be even slightly challenging. Even more incredibly, she has not held a single official press conference. From Fox News yesterday:

Vice President Kamala Harris has gone 86 days as the presumptive, and now, official Democratic nominee for president without holding an official press conference.

A press conference would be a signal opportunity to get broad public exposure, particularly to people who are not already her supporters. Any serious candidate ought to be affirmatively seeking opportunities for such exposure. The failure to hold a single such event points strongly to the conclusion that she and/or her advisors believe that she is not up to the challenge.

I haven’t yet had a chance to watch tonight’s interview, so I will update this post after I have had that opportunity. However, from what I can quickly learn, she showed up late, severely limited the time available, and filibustered questions in order to run out the clock for possible follow ups. Here’s a review at the Federalist from columnist Eddie Scarry.

The last time I went looking for Harris’s official positions on any issue or policy, her campaign website was completely silent on the subject. Since then, a section has been added to the official Harris website called “Issues,” so I guess that’s progress. But review of that section reveals a combination of platitudes and evasions calculated to avoid the key questions.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FBI Caught Red-Handed Fudging Crime Data

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/18/fbi-caught-red-handed-fudging-crime-data/

Readers of I&I know all about how the Biden-Harris regime has been fudging jobs numbers to make monthly gains look bigger than they really are. Turns out, it’s been doing the same with crime statistics … this time to make it look like violent crime is on the way down.

RealClearInvestigations dug into the FBI’s data and found that the law enforcement agency had been criminally misreporting crime statistics in a way that just happened to help Biden-Harris look like it’s been tough on crime.

Last fall, for example, the FBI reported that violent crime had dropped by 2.1% in 2022. That number was celebrated by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the press, which said it was proof that Donald Trump was lying about a crime wave.

RealClearInvestigations discovered that the FBI had secretly updated its crime statistics, and instead of showing a 2.1% drop in violent crime, there was a 4.5% increase in 2022.  

These weren’t minor revisions in the crime numbers.

Where the FBI originally reported 21,288 fewer cases of violent crime in 2022, its revised number shows a 58,741 increase. Instead of a slight drop in the number of burglaries, the new numbers show an increase of nearly 30,000. Every category was revised sharply upward.

RealClearInvestigations quotes Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, who says that “the huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”