NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Twitter Files: The Real News is that the Left/Dems/Media Do Not Care Move along, nothing to see here. by Larry Elder

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/twitter-files-the-real-news-is-that-the-left-dems-media-do-not-care/

“And what a difference the laptop story suppression made. A survey by The Polling Company found that 17% of Biden voters in seven swing states would not have voted for President Joe Biden had they known about the story. This is nothing short of the biggest election interference in U.S. history.”

New Twitter owner Elon Musk gave reporter Matt Taibbi of Substack access to internal Twitter documents about the media platform’s decision to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story and about how “the Biden team” had a direct pipeline to Twitter executives.

Taibbi tweeted:

“By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’ …

“Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party … Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However … this system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left than the right.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Maxine Waters Blew Sam Bankman-Fried a Kiss How can she conduct an impartial investigation of his Ponzi scheme? Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/maxine-waters-blew-sam-bankman-fried-a-kiss/

Sam Bankman-Fried, according to Victor Davis Hanson, “may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.” He “protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.” Now his dear friend Maxine Waters (D-Incitement), who was caught on video blowing him a kiss in December 2021, will be leading an investigation into his sleazy FTX Ponzi scheme as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Waters initially stepped on a rake when she said that she wouldn’t be subpoenaing her pal Sam, but the winsome congresswoman backtracked after a firestorm and insisted that it was a “lie” that she didn’t plan to subpoena him. So will she actually do so? That remains unclear.

CNBC reported Wednesday that Waters “told the panel’s Democrats she doesn’t plan to subpoena former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at a Dec. 13 hearing about the crypto exchange’s rapid demise, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversation.” She “informed committee members of her decision at a private meeting Tuesday with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler on Capitol Hill, these people said, declining to be named in order to speak freely about the private discussion.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

It’s Time the Green Movement Stopped Demonizing Nuclear The pro-nuclear movement is gaining traction despite vocal opposition by Zion Lights

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://quillette.com/2022/12/10/ts-time-the-green-movement-stopped-demonizing-nuclear/

During the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt (also known as COP27), ELLE UK Contributing Editor Aja Barber couldn’t contain her exasperation at news that pro-nuclear-power demonstrators were in attendance.

“They do this every COP,” she tweeted. “It’s mortifying every time! Nuclear power remains an environment[al] justice issue for me because only the poor end up with the plant and the waste within spitting distance of their neighbourhoods.”

Barber also claimed (falsely) that people living near nuclear power plants were suffering from “real unexplained cancers,” and that those who doubted this fact were racist whites who doubted the perspective of “brown and Black people.” (Barber ignored the fact that I’m brown myself.)

As the founder of Emergency Reactor, a UK-based group of pro-nuclear activists concerned about climate change, I felt the need to call Barber out for spreading misinformation. The people I’ve met who live near nuclear power stations are generally happy to have the jobs and other benefits that these facilities bring. Nuclear energy generation doesn’t emit greenhouse gases or any of the smog we commonly associate with fossil-fuel-based power plants. Modern construction and operating methods ensure that nuclear-power facilities are quiet and safe.

Yet to Barber, anyone who makes the case for nuclear power—including me—must be a “lobbyist.” Nicolas Haeringer of the anti-fossil-fuel group 350.org similarly accuses COP activists of being part of “an industrial lobby pretending to be a movement.” It’s as if these anti-nuclear environmentalists will only take others’ concern for the planet at face value if they’ve superglued themselves to a museum, blocked traffic, or spray-painted someone’s business.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Musk has some new Fauci-based pronouns that you are going to love By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/musk_has_some_new_faucibased_pronouns_that_you_are_going_to_love.html

Elon Musk has dropped another major revelation, this time about Anthony Fauci, the shriveled, malevolent bureaucrat who is responsible for profoundly damaging the American economy, destroying Americans’ health, and putting Biden in the White House. However, if the response from the left to this latest news continues to be the same response with which it greeted earlier Twitter revelations, we may finally have the answer to that old philosophical question: If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?

To date, the Twitter documents have revealed that Twitter was working arm-in-arm with the Biden campaign, the Democrat party, and federal law enforcement to silence conservatives, including the President of the United States, to amplify Democrats, and to stifle any factual reporting that would reflect badly on Biden. The government bureaucrats, by colluding with Twitter to silence political speech, were violating the First Amendment. Meanwhile, Twitter was committing a fraud on the public (and its advertisers) by using covert means and lies (including lies to Congress) to hide its conduct perverting free speech in America.

What’s become clear is that Musk, taking a page out of Andrew Breitbart’s and James O’Keefe’s book, is steadily escalating the nature of the revelations. This is a technique that sees a promised expose start out kind of boring so that leftists can say, “That’s not news,” or “You already knew that,” or “Who cares?” However, as the story ever so slowly gains traction, the conservative outlet begins to produce more serious material highlighting gross misconduct.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

ELON MUSK IS RIGHT: CHARLES COOK

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/elon-musk-is-right/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

His vision for Twitter largely reflects the proper instincts about free speech and transparency.

A more transparent Twitter will be a better Twitter.

Forget, for a moment, the arguments over the First Amendment and Section 230, and look at the matter from the perspective of the consumer. Twitter is a business, and I am a customer, and from the perspective of a customer, I naturally prefer clarity to murkiness. As a daily user of the product, I gain nothing from opacity, or from complexity, or from caprice, because they all make the service worse for me. If I follow someone, I want to see their tweets. If I search for someone, I want to find their account. If a given topic or person or claim is trending, I want to know about it without its being filtered through the personal predilections of other people. Because Twitter is a platform on which people write, I want the staff who work there to be instinctively supportive of free expression, skeptical of government pressure, and loathe to tip the scales in either direction. And if, for whatever reason, some superintendence of my conversations is deemed necessary, I want to know about it without euphemisms.

If my account has been suppressed wholesale, I want to be told that. If my tweet is too offensive to be shared widely, I want to be informed of it. If I am no longer permitted to use the platform — whether temporarily or permanently — I want to be apprised of which rules I have broken and why. I have no legal or constitutional right to any of these provisions, nor would I claim one. Twitter is a private company, and I would like to keep it that way. But to accept that I cannot recruit the state to my side is not to shed all my opinions, and, as a user, I have a whole bunch of opinions to share.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Impossibility Of Bridging The “Last 10%” On The Way To “100% Clean Electricity” Francis Menton

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

As my last post reported, the Official Party Line from our government holds that we have this “100% Clean Electricity” thing about 90% solved. As the government-funded NREL put it in their August 30, 2022 press release, “[a] growing body of research has demonstrated that cost-effective high-renewable power systems are possible.” But then they admit that that statement does not cover what they call the “last 10% challenge” — providing for the worst seasonal droughts of sun and wind, that result in periods when there is no renewable power to meet around 10% of annual electricity demand. That last 10%, says NREL, will require one or more “technologies that have not yet been deployed at scale.”

But hey, we’ve got 90% of this renewable transition thing solved. How hard could figuring out that last 10% really be?

And on that basis the government has embarked upon forcing the closure of large numbers of power plants that use fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, as well as on suppressing exploration for fossil fuels and other things like pipelines and refineries. After all, if we’re transitioning at least 90% to renewables, we won’t need 90% of the fossil fuel infrastructure any more, will we?

Actually, that’s completely wrong. Until the full solution to the so-called “last 10% challenge” is in place, we need 100% of our fossil fuel backup infrastructure to remain in place, fully maintained, and ready to step in when the wind and sun fail.

Let’s take a brief look at what bridging the last piece of the renewable transition actually looks like.

NREL’s August 2022 Report titled “Examining Supply-Side Options to Achieve 100% Clean Electricity by 2035” lays out several scenarios for supposedly achieving that goal. For all the scenarios, the most important piece is the same: building and deploying lots more wind turbines and solar panels. (The scenarios differ in the degree of deployment of other elements like transmission lines, battery storage, carbon capture technology, and additional nuclear.). As foreseen by NREL, by 2035, total electricity generation capacity in the U.S. has more than tripled, with the large majority of the additions being wind and solar. There is substantial overbuilding of the wind and solar facilities, presumably to provide enough electricity on days of light wind or some clouds, while having large surpluses to discard on days of full wind and sun. Some storage has been provided, but mostly “diurnal” (intra-day) and not seasonal.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Accidental uniter: In a divided DC, Biden foreign policy fiascos elicit rare bipartisan scorn From his deal to free Brittney Griner to the Afghanistan withdrawal, key foreign policy decisions by the president have brought lawmakers from both parties together in opposition.By Aaron Kliegman

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://justthenews.com/government/security/bidens-foreign-policy-one-area-where-democrats-republicans-seem-agree

Writing in his 2014 memoir, Robert Gates, the eminent national security professional who served as CIA director under George H.W. Bush and secretary of defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said of Joe Biden: “He has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Gates stood by his statement years later, just two weeks after Biden announced his 2020 presidential bid. 

Fast-forward to today, and several Democrats in Biden’s own party have already sided with Republicans on key foreign policy decisions made by the president, from Taiwan to Venezuela. In a deeply polarized Washington, these much-criticized policies have united many in both parties in opposition to Biden.

Most recently, Biden announced on Thursday he secured the release of WNBA player Brittney Griner from imprisonment in Russia by agreeing to a prisoner swap and releasing notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, nicknamed “The Merchant of Death.”

Griner had pleaded guilty earlier this year to drug possession and smuggling charges and was sent to a forced-labor camp as part of a 9-year prison sentence. Bout was convicted in 2011 of conspiring to kill Americans and providing material support to terrorists.

Republicans blasted the prisoner swap, but they weren’t alone. Some Democrats took issue with Biden’s one-for-one prisoner exchange, which didn’t include ex-Marine Paul Whelan, who’s been detained in Russia since 2018 and is currently serving a hard labor sentence following an espionage conviction.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Jim Crow 2.0? Democrats redouble voter suppression claims despite record high turnout in Georgia By Valerie Richardson

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/11/jim-crow-20-democrats-redouble-voter-suppression-c/

Georgians broke voter turnout records this year in the primary and general elections, but Democrats have no intention of abandoning the “Jim Crow 2.0” narrative.

The state set records in midterm elections for early voting, absentee voting and total turnout. More Georgia votes were cast in the Senate runoff than in the general election, in the January 2021 Senate runoff or on Election Day 2020.

The state also set three single-day records for early voting.

Even the victory of Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock over Republican Herschel Walker in the runoff did not stop Democratic Party leaders from blasting Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021 as a voter suppression tool.

The narrative prompted eye-rolls from conservatives.

“I take it to mean there is no set of facts that will ever, ever be able to dissuade progressive politicians like President Biden, like Rafael Warnock, like Stacey Abrams from their voter suppression argument,” said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project. “It’s a narrative that has absolutely no support in the facts.”

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, insisted that Mr. Warnock won in spite of the state’s election law, which tightened pandemic-era voting procedures while expanding early voting.

“What happened in Georgia, despite the efforts of the Republican legislature to make it harder to vote, our people voted. People voted. Georgians voted,” Mr. Schumer said at a post-election press conference. “They said we’re not going to let these barriers stand in our way even if we have to wait in line in the rain.”

Mr. Warnock, who previously called the election law “Jim Crow in new clothes,” warned that some people “would look at the outcome of this race and say that there is no voter suppression in Georgia.”

“Let me be clear: Just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings, some blocks long, just because they endured the rain and the cold and all kinds of tricks in order to vote doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist,” Mr. Warnock said after his win. “It simply means that you the people have decided that your voices will not be silenced.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 

Israel was ranked the 5th safest country in the world for tourists in a recent study using U.N. and W.H.O. statistics of rates per capita of homicides, vehicle accidents, disease, and other causes of death and injury. The USA was 20th. The study exposes the false perception due to the mainstream media’s emphasis on bad news, and is one of reasons for countering it with this positive newsletter. Michael Ordman

Skip the skewed and biased reporting of the mainstream media. Israel’s safety benefits all its citizens of every faith and ethnicity. Furthermore, the nation’s state of the art research and development in science and medicine make the future brighter and safer for millions of citizens throughout the word. Read it all in this remarkable newsletter. rsk

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Nano-magnets to repair damaged brain cells. Scientists at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University have developed breakthrough technology that could repair damaged neuron (brain cell) functionality. Using iron oxide, magnetic fields, and collagen, they created cells that developed into functional, multi-layered neural networks.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/363619
 
Micro robots to navigate the body. Almost like the 1966 sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage, Israel’s Bionaut Labs develops microscale robots for the treatment of brain diseases and disorders. Bionaut uses magnetic propulsion to navigate the human body and deliver medicine locally to avoid side effects and toxicity.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/h1qqutgpi   https://bionautlabs.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAAp7xeWO-0
 
Stimulating the brain to treat tremors. For the first time, Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center treated a 70-year-old Israeli patient suffering for 20 years from essential tremor, using Deep Brain Stimulation devices from US company Abbott and Israel’s Alpha Omega (see here previously). It made a significant improvement.
https://www.hospitalwithaheart.ca/innovative-procedure-helps-cure-woman-suffering-from-two-decades-of-tremors/  https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-723611
 
Super ultrasound for early diagnosis. Among this summary of promising Israeli IBD breakthroughs is the work of Weizmann Institute scientists to enhance the resolution of ultrasound. They can now identify tiny tumors and lesions, enabling cancer and Crohn’s patients to begin early treatment.
https://www.israel21c.org/7-promising-breakthroughs-in-inflammatory-bowel-disease/
https://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/yonina/super-resolution-ultrasound-and-microscopy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6sSg_7lTVk
 
Medical Smartwatch. (TY Hazel) Israel’s ChroniSense Medical has developed the Polso FDA-approved medical sensor smartwatch. It accurately monitors vital signs, such as blood oxygen saturation, pulse rate, and respiration rate. It comes with a mobile app for patients, and a cloud-based platform for clinicians.
https://nocamels.com/2022/12/smartwatch-monitors-patients-vital-signs/  https://polsowatch.com/
 
UK manages caregivers with Israeli app. UK-based national homecare franchise provider Caremark is using Israel’s Connecteam (see here previously) to manage and engage more than 7,000 remote caregivers across some 115 UK franchise offices. Connecteam is used by 20,000 companies in 80 countries and many industries.
https://www.israel21c.org/one-app-manages-7000-remote-caregivers-at-115-franchises/
 
Therapy app for parents of autistic children. Israel’s SocialMind Autism has released an AI-powered app program based on Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT). Its 22 lessons helps parents increase an autistic child’s motivation to learn, initiate communication, and improve their social skills.
https://nocamels.com/2022/12/finding-a-voice-how-ai-is-helping-children-with-autism/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVZr1aW2pow  https://socialmindautism.com/
 
Airlifting Ukrainian children with cancer. (TY I24 News) Israel’s MASHAV (International development cooperation program) has been working to bring ten Ukrainian children and their families to Israel for cancer treatment. The video highlights some of the huge challenges involved.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-israel-airlifts-ukrainian-kids-for-cancer-treatment/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8ZxOg2Zf2o
 
And from South Sudan for heart repair. (TY Sandra) Israeli non-profit IsraAID is bringing four children from Juba in South Sudan to Israel for surgery from surgeons at Save a Child’s Heart (SACH). Due to Covid, the children have been waiting for nearly 3 years in internally displaced people (IDP) camps.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-first-4-children-from-south-sudan-to-get-life-saving-heart-surgery-in-israel/
https://reliefweb.int/report/south-sudan/first-four-children-south-sudan-receive-life-saving-heart-surgery-israel
https://israelbetweenthelines.com/2022/12/06/first-heart-surgery-for-four-children-from-sudan/

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Donald Makes Tim Cook Do The Right Thing – Again Bob Maistros

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/12/the-donald-makes-tim-cook-do-the-right-thing-again/

A popular game and teaching tool in various forms and guises – “What’s Missing from this Picture?” – seems highly applicable to a Wall Street Journal report that Apple Inc. “has accelerated plans to shift some of its production outside China.” The goal: “ship 40% to 45% of iPhones from India,” with manufacturing of “products such as AirPods, smartwatches and laptops” heading to Vietnam.

It seems Apple is perturbed – and judging by CEO Tim Cook’s studied reticence, embarrassed – by goings-on at factories of Chinese supplier Foxconn.

The Journal helpfully embedded video of authorities beating workers protesting weeks of COVID-driven imprisonment in their facility, closed-off break areas, and dining halls, and carryout meals they schlepped to dormitories a half-hour walk away.  Workers jumped fences to escape.

The article also cataloged the shortcomings of Vietnam – too small population-wise to match China’s manufacturing sites with hundreds of thousands of workers – and India – patchwork regulations that “saddle (Apple) with obligations.”

And, apparently, neither offers China’s “literate and diligent workforce, political stability” and “huge local market for Apple’s products.” Per an ex-Foxconn executive, “They’re not doing high-end phones in India and Vietnam. No other places can do them.”

“No other places,” eh? Catching on to “what’s missing in this picture?” Maybe a country with traditions of large-scale manufacturing and global leadership in “high-end phone” development? High levels of literacy, and laborers clocking some of the world’s longest workweeks? Not to mention the historically “hugest” market for Apple products?