Spitballing Putin’s Mystery Ailment

From Ted Noel, M. D. on American Thinker.com (May 5, 2022):

After the fourth email of Putin’s hand flapping crossed my desk, I gave in and started my research. Those dozens of dust-binned claims of Putin being on death’s door might even have some credibility. But what do all of those mean? And why me? Just because I spilled the beans on the public evidence that Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit likely suffers from Parkinson’s Disease? Now everyone thinks Vlad has it, too?

Let’s get one thing clear from the beginning. That hand flapping tremor in the video just doesn’t look like Parkinson’s. PD usually has a “pill rolling” tremor, which is much smaller than the one in the video. This agrees with multiple neurologists who are reported to have concluded that whatever Putin may have, PD doesn’t appear likely. Putin’s is a whole-hand flapping tremor of sufficient violence to blow papers off a desk. And at this point, we must make the standard disclaimers.

I have not examined Vladimir Putin. I have not verified the tremor video, but since it came from several usually reliable sources, it appears legit. And that puts me in the same position as our national intelligence analysts. We must make the most reasonable conclusion possible from admittedly inadequate evidence. In other words, it has become my job to rush in where angels fear to tread. As Willie Edwards from “Swamp People” says about us trying to wrangle alligators, “Good luck with that.”

What follows is informed speculation.

Flapping tremors are called “asterixis” and are most commonly a result of alcoholism and liver failure. The tremor is not what should bother us. Rather, the metabolic consequences of lifetime vodka consumption should concern us. That gradually causes liver failure and increased blood ammonia levels. And while ammonia makes glass clear, it does the opposite for thinking. It’s a sedative. And that takes us to something we’re all familiar with: intoxication. But before we get there, we must take a small side trip.

Vladimir Putin is well known as a Stalinist. He believes that the greatest geopolitical tragedy in history is the fall of the Soviet Empire. He would like nothing better than to impose the Kremlin’s iron gauntlet around the neck of all those nations that broke away beginning in 1989. His invasions of Georgia and Crimea seem to be just preludes to dragging many free peoples back under his steel boot. And as a KGB officer, he is well aware of the mechanisms to keep control once it is established. His murder of Alexander Litvinenko, multiple reporters, and attempted murders of Alexei Navalny and Sergei and Yulia Skrupal show us a completely amoral authoritarian.

Imagine this evil character when a bit intoxicated. Alcohol may be a sedative, but vodka doesn’t put you to sleep at first. Instead, it knocks out your self-control centers. The true you comes through. In vino veritas! We are familiar with this from movies where an angry drunk gets into fights. Now imagine that drunk with an army and nuclear weapons. [read more]

Feds extradite former ‘ER’ actor in $7 million COVID scam

From Washington Times.com (May 4, 2022):

The federal government has managed to extradite a man accused of bilking the government out of more than $7 million in COVID-19 money, marking the first person to be brought back from overseas to face prosecution.

Authorities said Don V. Cisternino was brought back from Croatia to face wire fraud, identity theft and illegal monetary transactions charges.

The government’s willingness to get Mr. Cisternino back to the U.S. for prosecution marks a new chapter in attempts to police the hundreds of billions of dollars in pandemic assistance money that experts believe was stolen by fraudsters, much of it flowing overseas.

“This matter demonstrates that the department will aggressively go after anyone who stole pandemic relief funds, whether they are in the United States or hiding overseas,” Kevin Chambers, director of the Justice Department’s COVID-19 fraud enforcement team, said Tuesday.

Mr. Cisternino, who has an acting credit from an episode of the television show “ER,” was living in Florida when the government was issuing pandemic relief, though it was his New York-based company, MagnifiCo, that he used to apply for funds through the Paycheck Protection Program.

The program, known as PPP, was designed to help companies keep their doors open during the early days of the pandemic shutdowns.

MagnifiCo claimed to have 441 employees and a monthly payroll of nearly $3 million. It said it needed money to make payroll or pay rent. The company was approved for a $7.2 million PPP loan.

Investigators said Mr. Cisternino had no employees other than himself and his girlfriend, and he reported no wages to the IRS in 2019. Of the employees he claimed, 130 had made-up Social Security numbers, 150 were listed with real numbers that belonged to others, and three were dead when they were listed as MagnifiCo employees, an IRS agent told the courts.

Investigators said the loan money was deposited into a single account and was used for plenty of things, but not for keeping the company afloat. Among the expenses that did register were $89,413.71 at a Lincoln dealership, $251,436.21 at a Mercedes-Benz dealership and $48,477.26 for the “payoff” of a Maserati.

Mr. Cisternino also appears to have bought a home in Chuluota, Florida, in the summer of 2020, for $3.5 million. The Justice Department filed a forfeiture notice on that home in December 2020.

That forfeiture may have spooked Mr. Cisternino. By the time he was indicted on criminal charges in February 2021, he couldn’t be found.

Croatian police nabbed Mr. Cisternino a year ago after he crossed the border from Slovenia, according to Croatian news reports.

He told reporters at the time that he fled because he feared the Biden administration would crack down on fraud that was accepted during the Trump administration. In fact, the forfeiture was filed while President Trump was in office.

The government’s seizure of the home was completed last summer, and Mr. Cisternino never contested it. The home’s 12,579 square feet cover seven bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and a theater. It also has a “resort style” pool, tennis courts and a five-stall horse stable. Realtor.com listed the home as sold this year for a price of $4.1 million.

The PPP program, run by the Small Business Administration, is just one of several pandemic assistance efforts beset by fraud.

Experts say more than $150 billion, and perhaps more than $250 billion, may have been stolen from enhanced unemployment benefits. A large chunk of that was stolen by overseas actors, including criminal syndicates with roots in Nigeria, Russia and Romania.

A Nigerian man pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in a scam that netted more than $600,000 in unemployment benefits from 18 states. Abidemi Rufai also stole money from the Economic Injury Disaster Loans program, which like the PPP was run by the SBA.

Rufai was scamming the government even before the pandemic. The Justice Department said he filed 675 false tax claims with the IRS from 2017 to 2020. Most were unsuccessful, but Rufai did get $90,877 from the IRS in bogus payments.

Rufai’s jump from that relatively small fraud to the much larger unemployment fraud underscores the problem experts identified with the pandemic programs, which offered massive amounts of cash without requiring the kinds of basic identity checks that are common in the private sector.

Authorities say Rufai was arrested in May 2021 when he arrived at an airport in New York.

The Congressional Research Service reported last month that 20 of the 50 states were not using all the required cross-matching checks before paying out pandemic unemployment benefits. [source]

There hasn’t been a gov’t program that hasn’t been scammed.

In a new hacking crime wave, much more personal data is being held hostage

From CNBC.com (May 7):

The cybersecurity world faces new threats beyond targeted ransomware attacks, according to experts at the recent RSA cybersecurity industry conference in San Francisco.

Joe McMann, head of cybersecurity services at Binary Defense, a cybersecurity solutions provider, said the new battleground is data extortion and companies need to shift gears to face the threat.

Traditionally, ransomware attackers encrypt or delete proprietary data of organizations and ask for ransom before reverting the attack. McMann said hackers are now focusing on stealing customer or employee data and then threatening to leak it publicly.

“By naming, shaming, threatening reputational impact, they force the hands of their targets,” McMann said.

The International Data Corporation predicts firms will spend over $219 billion on cybersecurity this year, and McMann said cybercriminals constantly evolve their exploitations.

Hackers shifted tactics after ransomware attacks brought an unwelcome level of visibility by law enforcement and governments, and cybersecurity professionals became adept at solving decryption. Instead of paralyzing hospitals and pipelines, he said criminals changed gears to collect data and threaten companies with customer dissatisfaction and public outcry.

At the end of March, OpenAI documented a data leak in an open-source data provider that made it possible to see personal AI chat histories, payment information, and addresses. The team patched the leak in hours, but McMann said once data is out there, hackers can use it.

Hackers looking beyond corporate devices

Chris Pierson, founder and CEO of Black Cloak, a digital executive protection company, said companies understand the growing threat of data extortion after public breaches. In the past year alone, he said Twilio, LastPass, and Uber all faced attacks that saw hackers targeting employees outside corporate security protection.

“For example, the LastPass breach saw one of four key individuals targeted on their personal computer, through a personal public IP address getting in through an unpatched solution,” he said.

The hackers stole credentials “outside the castle wall environment, on personal devices,” he said, using that data months later as a way into the corporate environment.

He said the advent of home offices accelerated employee targeting. As every company transformed into a digital-first world, employees naturally started working on personal devices.

Before the pandemic, Fortune 500 companies spent millions to secure corporate devices and buildings, but employees are not as well protected at home. “The moment an executive walks out of the building, uses their personal device or home network that they share with corporate devices, the attack surface changes,” Pierson said. What’s more, digital footprints are easy to find online, he said. “40% of our corporate executives’ home IP addresses are public on data broker websites.”

Pierson said it only takes one vulnerable device on a home network to open up the entire network.

Looking across the street at the RSA convention building filled with more than 45,000 industry attendants, Pierson said criminals always choose the path of least resistance.

“You don’t have to go in through all the gear that’s out here at RSA protecting the actual company; you go through the $5 of cybersecurity at home and get everything else,” Pierson said. “Cybercriminals are targeting at a personal level because they know they can get the data, and there are no controls out there,” he added.

New cybersecurity regulations

There is higher visibility for cybersecurity this year with an increased number of phishing attempts and scam messages a daily occurrence for most people. And companies know that new SEC proposed guidelines will add another layer of accountability.

When finalized, the rules would require public firms to disclose data breaches to investors within four days, and have at least one cybersecurity-experienced board member. Though a Wall Street Journal survey found three-fourths of respondents had a cybersecurity director, Pierson said companies were at RSA looking for advice.

McMann said companies should focus on the simple fixes first and not worry about AI chat breaches if they aren’t using two-factor authentication on personal accounts. Criminals will first try older methods like ransomware before moving on to new ones.

He said practicing for cyberattacks has become as important as any other emergency drill. On a positive note, McMann said the success of cybersecurity professionals is why criminals are looking for new modes of attack.

“If you don’t have your operations streamlined and effective, if you don’t have good people and processes in place, don’t worry about the other stuff,” he said. “There’s a lot of fundamentals that get skipped.” [source]

Brain surgery performed on a fetus in the womb for first time - study

From J Post.com (May 7):

For the first time ever, surgery was performed on a fetus's brain while it was inside the womb, and the procedure was documented in a recent study.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Stroke on Thursday, documented the process that doctors took to repair a malformed blood vessel in the fetus's brain. The procedure was done while the woman was pregnant at 34 weeks.

The baby ended up being born in March and she did not need any medications or treatments since she was discharged, the study stated, where doctors described the process as a "first-of-its-kind procedure." The trial was done in order to find a new treatment for vein of Galen malformation (VOGM), which is described by the Boston Children's Hospital as a "type of rare blood vessel abnormality inside the brain" where the "misshapen arteries in the brain connect directly with veins."

Left untreated, VOGM can cause blood to rush towards the heart and lungs which forces the heart to work harder to get blood to the rest of the body. It also causes high blood pressure flow which may cause congestive heart failure and high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs.

Process in treating VOGM

Doctors from Boston Children's Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Hospital collaborated on a trial to treat VOGM for the fetus, which will include around 20 babies, and this procedure was the first attempt at the treatment.

The surgery would have usually taken place after the birth but would not have been able to reverse the onset of heart failure, which prompted medical professionals to conduct the surgery before the baby was born.

Medical professionals involved with the initiative stated that there were no negative effects on the baby's brain. [source]

Nice! 👍

Excerpts from “The Hundred-Year Marathon” book Part 2

Starting in 1990, Chinese textbooks were rewritten to depict the United States as a hegemon that, for more than 150 years, had tried to stifle China’s rise and destroy the soul of Chinese civilization. This reeducation effort was placed under the innocuous label of the “National Patriotic Education Program.” Mr. White, the defector, had predicted that this program would bring back the distorted versions of American history that had lain dormant since the earliest days of Mao’s regime—well before the overtures to the United States.

……….

Left unmentioned is that China’s victory in World War II depended on the military intervention of the “Western Capitalist countries” whom the exhibit casts as villains; that American investments and the American market were indispensable to the growth of China’s skyrocketing exports; and that China’s technological progress depended on nearly one hundred agreements with the United States for scientific exchange programs. Instead, the only large photo I saw of any Americans showed civilians disrespecting the emperor a century ago by sitting on the Forbidden City’s imperial throne during the Boxer Rebellion. There was no contextual explanation of why Americans were in China, and the visitor is left with the impression that their primary purpose was to subjugate and humiliate China.

Source: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (2015) by Michael Pillsbury.

Repairman who revealed Hunter Biden laptop sues Schiff, CNN, Politico and the Daily Beast

From NY Post.com (May 3, 2022):

The Delaware computer repairman who blew the whistle on Hunter Biden’s laptop filed a multimillion-dollar defamation suit Tuesday against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, CNN, the Daily Beast and Politico, saying they falsely accused him of peddling Russian disinformation.

The former shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, decided to fight back after losing his business and being harassed for 18 months by Big Tech, the media and Delaware locals in President Biden’s home state.

“After fighting to reveal the truth, all I want now is for the rest of the country to know that there was a collective and orchestrated effort by social and mainstream media to block a real story with real consequences for the nation,” the 45-year-old Mac Isaac told The Post.

“This was collusion led by 51 former pillars in the intelligence community and backed by words and actions of a politically motivated DOJ and FBI,” he continued. “I want this lawsuit to reveal that collusion and more importantly, who gave the marching orders.”

Mac Isaac came to legally own the laptop after Biden’s son Hunter dropped it off at his store for repairs in April 2019 and never came back. The material on the laptop has raised serious questions about what Biden knew of his son’s overseas business deals, during which he and the president’s brother Jim Biden often invoked his powerful name.

Mac Isaac handed over a copy of the laptop’s hard drive to the FBI in December 2019, and eight months later, alerted then-President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who provided a copy of the hard drive to The Post.

The Delaware computer repairman who blew the whistle on Hunter Biden’s laptop filed a multimillion-dollar defamation suit Tuesday against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, CNN, the Daily Beast and Politico, saying they falsely accused him of peddling Russian disinformation.

The former shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, decided to fight back after losing his business and being harassed for 18 months by Big Tech, the media and Delaware locals in President Biden’s home state.

“After fighting to reveal the truth, all I want now is for the rest of the country to know that there was a collective and orchestrated effort by social and mainstream media to block a real story with real consequences for the nation,” the 45-year-old Mac Isaac told The Post.

“This was collusion led by 51 former pillars in the intelligence community and backed by words and actions of a politically motivated DOJ and FBI,” he continued. “I want this lawsuit to reveal that collusion and more importantly, who gave the marching orders.”

Mac Isaac came to legally own the laptop after Biden’s son Hunter dropped it off at his store for repairs in April 2019 and never came back. The material on the laptop has raised serious questions about what Biden knew of his son’s overseas business deals, during which he and the president’s brother Jim Biden often invoked his powerful name.

Mac Isaac handed over a copy of the laptop’s hard drive to the FBI in December 2019, and eight months later, alerted then-President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who provided a copy of the hard drive to The Post.

When The Post’s first story broke in October 2020 — just three weeks before the presidential election — Twitter and Facebook moved to censor it. Then Schiff (D-Calif.) and 51 former intelligence officials labeled the laptop Russian disinformation.

In the aftermath, Mac Isaac says, his business and reputation were ruined.

“Twitter initially labeled my action hacking, so for the first day after my information was leaked, I was bombarded with hate mail and death threats revolving around the idea that I was a hacker, a thief and a criminal,” Mac Isaac said.

Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, “has some explaining” to do, Mac Isaac insisted.

“Without any intel, the head of the intel committee decided to share with CNN and its viewers a complete and utter lie,” Mac Isaac said. “A lie issued in the protection of a preferred presidential candidate.” [read more]

Good for Mac Isaac! The press and Schiff needs to be held accountable.

FBI: Russian cyberthreat fueled almost 2M warrantless searches of Americans’ data in 2021

From Washington Times.com (May 2, 2022):

The threat of cyberattack from Russia fueled more than half of the FBI’s 3.39 million warrantless searches of Americans’ data last year, according to a government report.

The warrantless searches, legal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, were up sharply from approximately 1.32 million reported in 2020, according to the report, published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Almost all of the increase can be traced to one Russian cyberthreat to critical U.S. infrastructure in 2021. The FBI’s response to the threat accounted for approximately 1.9 million searches.

The bureau also changed how it counted the search queries, making it unclear whether the increase in searches necessarily means more surveillance of Americans.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows investigators to use names, phone numbers and email addresses to filter through information that the U.S. government already collects.

Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, said he is concerned that the uptick in searches is either a major problem or is incomprehensible.

“For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans’ communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless,” Mr. Wyden said in a statement. “Somewhere in all that over-counting are real numbers of FBI searches, for content and for noncontent — numbers that Congress and the American people need before Section 702 is reauthorized.”

Whether the spike in searches means more monitoring of Americans is unclear. The FBI said the data reflects the number of queries and not the number of investigations or the number of people investigated.

“In order to safeguard the privacy and civil liberties of the public we are sworn to protect, we have made changes to our systems and processes, and will not hesitate to make additional updates as necessary, to ensure we protect all Americans’ privacy and civil liberties while fulfilling our dual law enforcement and intelligence mission each and every day,” a senior FBI official said in a statement.

The FBI made the changes in advance of the increased searches. The FBI allows agents and analysts to query FISA information and non-FISA information simultaneously.

Last year, the FBI changed the system to require personnel to opt in to search FISA information and to prompt verification that the employee had an attorney’s approval before conducting a search using 100 or more terms.

The FBI said the Justice Department reviewed the queries of foreign information and deemed them compliant with the government’s rules.

The internal review of the FBI’s domestic operations, however, previously showed numerous rules violations. Agents violated FBI rules at least 747 times in 18 months while conducting sensitive investigations involving politicians, candidates, religious groups, news media and others, according to a 2019 FBI audit first reported by The Washington Times.

The FBI has said it made changes to its agents’ training for those domestic investigations and called the errors unacceptable. [source]

THE GOVERNMENT CREATED A NEW DISINFORMATION OFFICE TO OVERSEE ALL THE OTHER ONES

From The Intercept.com (May 5):

WITHIN THE FEDERAL government, offices dedicated to fighting foreign disinformation are springing up like daisies, from the Pentagon’s new Influence and Perception Management Office to at least four organizations inside the Department of Homeland Security alone, as well as ones inside the FBI and State Department.

To oversee the growing efforts — which arose in response to concerns about the impact of Russian meddling in the 2016 election but have now expanded — the director of national intelligence has created a new office.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines for the first time mentioned the creation of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, or FMIC. “Congress put into law that we should establish a Foreign Malign Influence Center in the intelligence community; we have stood that up,” Haines said, referring to legislation passed last year. “It encompasses our election threat work, essentially looking at foreign influence and interference in elections, but it also deals with disinformation more generally.”

The FMIC was established on September 23 of last year after Congress approved funding, but its creation was announced publicly only after The Intercept’s inquiry. Because it is situated within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, it enjoys the unique authority to marshal support from all elements of the U.S. intelligence community to monitor and combat foreign influence efforts such as disinformation campaigns.

The FMIC is authorized to counter foreign disinformation targeting not just U.S. elections, but also “the public opinion within the United States” generally, according to the law.

Haines also made clear that the effort to counter disinformation has expanded beyond not just elections and Russia, but also to other foreign adversaries: “What we have been doing is effectively trying to support the Global Engagement Center and others throughout the U.S. government in helping them to understand what are the plans and intentions of the key actors in this space: China, Russia, Iran, etc.” The GEC is a State Department entity tasked with countering foreign disinformation by amplifying America’s own propaganda.

Creation of the FMIC was debated in Congress for months, with senators questioning how its mission would differ from the bevy of entities that already exist. “We want to be sure that this center enhances those efforts rather than duplicating them or miring them in unnecessary bureaucracy,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in January 2022, adding that there were “legitimate questions about how large such an organization should be and even about where it would fit.” Reached for comment, Warner’s office said the senator’s position hasn’t changed. [read more]

Disinformation according to the gov’t is whatever info it doesn’t like or approve of.

Other articles on the office:

Republicans vow to eradicate Biden's Disinformation Governance Board. Boebert says it is at a 'Stalin level,' DeSantis warns: 'You cannot have a ministry of truth in this country.'

If you can perform surgery on fetuses, then maybe they have value after all

From Washington Examiner.com (May 12):

“A procedure with two patients,” read the subheading of a CNN article about a groundbreaking surgery that took place in March. “For this surgery,” the report noted, “there were two patients: Kenyatta and her baby.”

If you guessed that the procedure was a surgery performed on a preborn baby, you’d be right — and you’d be forgiven for wondering how CNN could be so accidentally pro-life.

Doctors in Boston recently performed a successful brain surgery on a 34-week-old fetus to treat a rare condition that often results in brain injuries or heart failure immediately after birth. Waiting to treat until after the baby was born could’ve risked her life.

So, guided by an ultrasound, doctors threaded tiny metal coils through a catheter into the fetus's brain, relieving a dangerous buildup of blood. Before the surgery, the unborn baby received an injection to keep her from moving and to alleviate pain.

Two days afterward, Denver Coleman, a healthy baby girl, was born.

“I heard her cry for the first time and that just, I — I can’t even put into words how I felt at that moment,” her mother, Kenyatta Coleman, said. “It was just, you know, the most beautiful moment being able to hold her, gaze up on her and then hear her cry.”

This isn't the first time doctors have performed surgery on a fetus, but the American Heart Association called it the “first in-utero brain surgery.” Now seven weeks old, Denver Coleman is a marvel of medical technology and a testament to the value of the unborn.

"She's shown us from the very beginning that she was a fighter. She’s demonstrated … 'Hey, I wanna be here,'" Kenyatta Coleman said.

Even CNN, no bastion of pro-life thought, was eager to characterize baby Denver as a person. Notable as well is that the doctors, realizing fetuses’ capacity for pain, provided her with pain relief during the surgery.

Our society may not have much respect for the unborn, but developing medical technology makes their humanity that much clearer. If you can perform life-saving brain surgery on fetuses, then maybe they have value after all. [source]

Glad the surgery was a success.

Excerpts from “The Hundred-Year Marathon” book Part 1

My [the author’s] faith was first shaken in 1997, when I was among those encouraged to visit China to witness the emergence of “democratic” elections in a village near the industrial town of Dongguan. While visiting, I had a chance to talk in Mandarin with the candidates and see how the elections actually worked. The unwritten rules of the game soon became clear: the candidates were allowed no public assemblies, no television ads, and no campaign posters. They were not allowed to criticize any policy implemented by the Communist Party, nor were they free to criticize their opponents on any issue. There would be no American-style debates over taxes or spending or the country’s future. The only thing a candidate could do was to compare his personal qualities to those of his opponent. Violations of these rules were treated as crimes.

……….

The Marathon strategy that China’s leaders are pursuing today—and have been pursuing for decades—is largely the product of lessons derived from the Warring States period by the hawks. The nine principal elements of Chinese strategy, which form the basis of the Hundred-Year Marathon, include the following:

1. Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent. Chinese strategy holds that a powerful adversary, such as the United States today, should never be provoked prematurely. Instead, one’s true intentions should be completely guarded until the ideal moment to strike arrives.

2. Manipulate your opponent’s advisers. Chinese strategy emphasizes turning the opponent’s house in on itself by winning over influential advisers surrounding the opponent’s leadership apparatus. Such efforts have long been a hallmark of China’s relations with the United States.

3. Be patient—for decades, or longer—to achieve victory. During the Warring States period, decisive victories were never achieved quickly. Victory was sometimes achieved only after many decades of careful, calculated waiting. Today, China’s leaders are more than happy to play the waiting game.

4. Steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes. Hardly hindered by Western-style legal prohibitions and constitutional principles, China clearly endorses theft for strategic gain. Such theft provides a relatively easy, cost-effective means by which a weaker state can usurp power from a more powerful one.

5. Military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition. This partly explains why China has not devoted more resources to developing larger, more powerful military forces. Rather than relying on a brute accumulation of strength, Chinese strategy advocates targeting an enemy’s weak points and biding one’s time.

6. Recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position. The rise and fall of hegemons was perhaps the defining feature of the Warring States period. Chinese strategy holds that a hegemon—the United States, in today’s context—will not go quietly into the night as its power declines relative to others. Further, Chinese strategy holds that a hegemon will inevitably seek to eliminate all actual and potential challengers.

7. Never lose sight of shi. The concept of shi will be discussed in greater detail below. For now, suffice it to say that two elements of shi are critical components of Chinese strategy: deceiving others into doing your bidding for you, and waiting for the point of maximum opportunity to strike.

8. Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. Chinese strategy places a high premium on assessing China’s relative power, during peacetime and in the event of war, across a plethora of dimensions beyond just military considerations. The United States, by contrast, has never attempted to do this.

9. Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others. In what could be characterized as a deeply ingrained sense of paranoia, China’s leaders believe that because all other potential rivals are out to deceive them, China must respond with its own duplicity. In the brutal Warring States period, the naïve, trusting leader was not just unsuccessful in battle; he was utterly destroyed. Perhaps the greatest Chinese strategic fear is that of being encircled. In the ancient Chinese board game of wei qi, it is imperative to avoid being encircled by your opponent—something that can be accomplished only by simultaneously deceiving your opponent and avoiding being deceived by him. Today, China’s leaders operate on the belief that rival states are fundamentally out to encircle one another, the same objective as in wei qi.

Source: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (2015) by Michael Pillsbury.

Interesting book. Principles every potential president should know to understand the Chi-Coms.

Do We Draw the Line at a US Ministry of Truth?

From JB Shurk on American Thinker.com (May 2):

This aspiring dictatorship is getting desperate and dangerous.

Imagine having complete control over America's corporate news propaganda arm and still feeling vulnerable when it comes to "securing the narrative."  Imagine having all the Big Tech censors working for the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the masters of disinformation are still unsure whether they can amply manipulate American opinion.  Imagine dedicating a year and a half to persecuting anyone who questions the legitimacy of the 2020 election and learning that more Americans than ever now view that monstrosity as tainted by fraud.  Imagine shamelessly spinning the Capitol breach into an attempted coup d'état only to find that half the country believes that the federal government is in the business of imprisoning political protesters.  Imagine spending six years framing Donald Trump as a Russian spy; putting him in constant legal jeopardy with a rogue, Democrat-aligned special counsel investigation; impeaching him for the financial corruption of his political opponent's quid-pro-quo schemes in Ukraine; and then impeaching him a second time for the crime of free speech in a congressional operation designed to prevent him from ever running for elective office again — only to learn that he is the runaway favorite to win the 2024 Republican presidential primary and handily beating the current occupant of the White House by six points.

When propaganda, domestic espionage, malicious prosecution, blackmail, and an organized terror campaign of burn-loot-murder mayhem directed against ordinary Americans fail to subdue the citizen population, what do aspiring totalitarians do next?  That's right, friends, come on down: it's Ministry of Truth time!  The same Department of Homeland Security that has never had any interest in securing the homeland (come right over, international terrorists and drug-runners, the border's wide open!) will now dedicate its malignant resources to censoring so much truth that only the government's lies can be heard!  If you can't beat 'em in the arena of ideas, then beat them into submission with clubs, cut out their vocal cords, declare them "enemies of the State," and round up anyone still standing.  It's the Deep State way!

The whole farce of setting up an all-powerful Department of Disinformation (whose only purpose will be to spread disinformation) would be downright comical if we were given a moment's rest to laugh in between the Biden regime's outrageous daily attacks on what's left of the Constitution.  The First Amendment — right at the top, so no future tyrants could miss it — is obviously meaningless if government censors must first approve acceptable speech.  By far and without equivocation, the most important speech deserving of protection from the treachery of government overreach is that speech that the government decries as disinformation!  The First Amendment isn't there for the protection of cookie recipes and weather reports (although those are protected, too).  It's there to make sure that when officials in the federal government betray their oaths and seize illegitimate power for themselves, there are opposing voices that can beat those usurpers down with words before violence becomes inevitable.  In truth, the First Amendment is one of ten easy-to-understand, bold-faced instructions from our Founding Fathers to future generations of Americans that state as simply as possible — so that no one has any trouble comprehending their meaning — when the Republic's very survival is at stake. 

"You future Americans," our Founders effectively declared, "are a free people with expansive liberty limited only by the few delegated powers explicitly written into the Constitution as exclusive duties of the three branches of the federal government.  All other powers belong either to the respective states or to the people.  Is that clear?  If not, here is a convenient list of government limitations and guaranteed freedoms — although by no means a complete description of Americans' inalienable rights and liberties — that you must keep an eye on in order to ensure that your government does not descend one day into despotism and tyranny, as all forms of government inevitably do.  We will call these the Bill of Rights, and if you catch your government abridging or striking down any of these basic American liberties, then it's time to act.  Set forth in item number one, so you understand their importance to our overall design in protecting you from abusive government, are free speech, freedom of the press, the free exercise of religion, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.  In case of emergency — e.g., a tyrant has risen to squash your freedom of speech — break glass immediately, for you are under attack!  Now on to item number two..."

That's the First Amendment in a nutshell!  It's the first and most important item on a ten-point checklist helpfully provided to aid Americans in determining when their government has lost all legitimacy.  If the words we write today are illegal tomorrow, then peace and freedom are made illegal, too.

It has become quite clear that the Intelligence Deep State dictating U.S. policy is convinced that the Chinese communist model is ideal.  The officers of the federal government have sworn oaths to defend the First Amendment but, instead, treat free thought and free expression as threats to their power.  They do not respect dissent.  They do not protect (as is their duty) unsanctioned political protest.  They actively work with private companies to censor speech and opinion.  They actively work with tech monopolies to manipulate public opinion and propagate blatant lies.  They actively spy on the American people.  They harass and intimidate those who have the courage of their convictions.  They criminalize the constitutional rights of citizens and commit crimes under the color of their constitutional authorities.

Let me ask a simple question: will there ever be an end to these government trespasses?  Is it truly possible for America to dip only a couple of toes into the police state pools without sinking into the depths of despotism?  Can the government really cut the Chinese communist baby in half or select only a handful of new totalitarian tools to enforce upon the American people like some à la carte assortment of unconstitutional hors d'oeuvres?  Of course not!  There are no halfsies with totalitarianism.  Once you toss out the First Amendment, the Constitution is soon dead-letter law.

If America is to survive, we must not misunderstand this serious moment.  Americans must not let their freedoms slip away in silence.  The Rubicon lies ahead, and the federal government must turn around before it's too late.

Those who would abuse their power can silence any one of us at any time, but they cannot silence all of us at all times.  Do not go quietly. [source]

Conservatives, Get Busy Ballot Harvesting Or Get Busy Losing

From The Federalist.com (May 9):

Joe Biden has announced he will seek reelection as president. This comes as he is experiencing the lowest approval ratings of his presidency — 37 percent, according to Gallup. Former President Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will almost certainly be the GOP nominee. The blunt reality, however, is that regardless of who the GOP puts up against Biden, they will lose if the party isn’t prepared to get down in the mud and beat the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at their own dirty game: ballot harvesting.

The 2020 election left conservatives shellshocked. How could Trump lose to a supposedly senile candidate who spoke to tiny, lackluster crowds? The consensus for many was that it had to be cheating, which led to persistent claims that the 2020 election was stolen, resulting in a $787.5 million lawsuit against Fox News.

Raging against an illegal election is cathartic, but it doesn’t get to the root cause of Trump’s loss. While voter fraud exists, the reality is that there was no massive election fraud, the DNC simply worked harder, played dirtier, bent every rule, and didn’t care about how they looked as long as they won. It is a mentality that the Republican National Committee (RNC) will have to adopt. In politics, it is better to be a dirty winner than a gracious loser.

So what will winning require in 2024? The first step is to get meaningful voting integrity legislation passed in time.

Election Integrity Legislation

On April 27, the House Administration Committee, chaired by Bryan Steil, R-Wis., held its first hearing on the American Confidence in Elections Act (ACE Act), the key Republican election integrity bill. Among other recommendations, the ACE Act aims to prohibit voting by noncitizens, provide each state with federal data on deaths and citizenship status to better maintain voter rolls, and require a Real ID. In a bid to boost election best practices and to counter the ballot issues that plagued the 2020 election, the bill would require the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission Standards Board to release a series of recommendations by no later than Dec. 31, 2023.

While well-meaning and potentially useful for future elections, the act’s reforms to the Real ID Act will not come into effect until 2025, and the recommendations of the EAC Standards Board will be just that — recommendations for states. There will be no binding legislation. In other words, despite their best efforts, the federal government can’t protect the election process much better in 2024 than it did in 2020.

Conservatives can, however, use the information gathered by the House Administration Committee to identify how to win in 2024. To give a sense of just how dirty the fight will be, in 2020 Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson refused to purge her voter rolls of 26,000 dead registrants in the run-up to the election. Obviously, there is no legitimate reason for not purging the rolls. The GOP will need to ensure that all voter rolls are clean before 2024. Where the DNC refuses to cooperate, the GOP needs to sue in federal court and use the issue aggressively in campaign ads to highlight Democrats’ corruption. After 2020, talk of padded voter rolls was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. In 2024, there is no excuse not to have data in hand and advertising ready in every offending DNC-run state.

Banning ZuckBucks

One of the most actionable and essential recommendations of the ACE Act is passing the End Zuckerbucks Act, which would stop tax-exempt organizations from directly funding official election groups through donations or donated services. In 2020, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $420 million to ostensibly nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations such as the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), which in turn funneled it into funding local government elections offices under the guise of providing Covid relief. However, less than 1 percent of the money went to providing personal protective equipment to election offices. While it seems impossible that this would be legal, it was.

Zuckerberg made sure DNC activists had access to daily ballot information, were able to choose preferential voting methods, and knew exactly where to target get-out-the-vote initiatives, including doorstep ballot curing and witnessing of absentee ballot signatures. Zuckerberg’s efforts were so successful that he has been credited with winning Arizona and Georgia for Biden. As of January 2023, 24 states have banned so-called Zuckerbucks, but six DNC governors have vetoed attempted bans. Among these are the important swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina.

If the End Zuckerbucks Act isn’t passed in time for 2024, GOP donors will have to match the DNC’s billionaires dollar for dollar in funding local election offices and weaponizing poll workers in every battleground state. It goes against the spirit and impartiality of the democratic process, but that line has already been crossed.

Other Billionaires’ Election Efforts

It wasn’t just Zuckerberg who funneled hundreds of millions of private dollars into innovative get-out-the-vote initiatives in 2020. Craig Newmark and George Soros also exploited grassroots and nontraditional means of swaying the election and will do so again in 2024. Since January 2020, Soros has spent roughly half a billion dollars on DNC causes, dispersing his donations through a complex web of nonprofits to obscure its origins. Newmark spent approximately $200 million in the run-up to 2020, for example funding the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law organization, which pushes suing for expanded mail-in voting and opposing voter ID laws. This is why the ACE Act is vital.

In addition, both Soros and Newmark have spent millions of dollars targeting black and immigrant communities to get out the vote over the past two election cycles. Both understand that nonwhite ethnic minority groups in America favor the DNC, with black Americans overwhelmingly voting Democrat. Both men have invested heavily in black get-out-the-vote initiatives. Newmark has funded DoSomething, among others, while Soros donated $2.5 million to the Color of Change PAC and the same amount to Black Pac.

These DNC mega-donors understand which racial demographics are not coming out to vote. In 2020, only 63 percent of black voters turned out. The black vote is, overwhelmingly, the most monolithic bloc in U.S. politics and the backbone of DNC power, with 92 percent voting for Biden in 2020. DNC organizations have the money to pay thousands of volunteers to knock on doors, register voters, and, where legal, harvest ballots. In 2024 they will invest massive amounts of money and time in black urban districts. The RNC needs to match this.

Door-to-Door Efforts

Conservative super PACs need to spend money putting boots on the ground in battleground states. This isn’t like the good old days when the pastor or local pillar of the community drove the elderly to the polls out of his love for democracy and pride in the right to vote. Sure, do that, but PACs need to pay professional, persuasive, and well-trained individuals to go door-to-door to harvest as many ballots as legally allowed.

Laws vary from state to state. In Pennsylvania, for example, those qualifying for an absentee ballot must authorize in writing a representative to return their ballots if they don’t do it themselves. In Arizona, a designated caretaker can return absentee ballots. Therefore, in reliably red areas in these states, there needs to be a designated RNC outreach representative in every care facility, hospice, hospital, and retirement home who is registered to return ballots. An obvious solution to finding individuals to go door-to-door to register first-time voters, sway independents, and ensure strong youth turnout — only 50 percent in 2020 — is to recruit college RNC members. Weaponized local election office staff need to coordinate doorstep ballot curing and signature witnessing on absentee ballots.

While there are useful legislative steps being taken at the party level to ensure election integrity for future elections, the reality is that if the RNC wants to be competitive in 2024, it needs to get busy harvesting or get busy losing. [source]

Good points. And conservatives need to vote early. Don’t wait until election day when something might happen to prevent you from voting.

To the Left politics is war. Republicans are not just an opponent or adversary, they are the enemy. Republicans have to understand this. The Left will use deception and lies to gain and keep power, the Constitution be damned. They will also destroy their perceived enemies personally and financially (and not just politically.) That is exactly what is happening to Trump and anyone who is representing him and advising him.

The Left’s political war:

• Is lady justice still blind?
• George Soros Bankrolls ‘Mysterious’ Institution in Texas Looking to Elect More Democrats, Records Show
• Voter Groups, Funded By Liberal Megadonors, Launch Pressure Campaign For Meta To Censor Election Info
• Fake charities are spending millions to help Democrats win elections
• RINOs and Democrats Just Stole Future Elections in Deep Red Alaska — And the Republican Party DID NOT LIFT A FINGER to Stop It
• RNC Sues Pennsylvania for Dems' 'Brazen Defiance' of Election Law
• 'The Perfect Crime': Tech Companies Are Manipulating Our Elections and Indoctrinating Our Children — How We Can Stop Them
• Trump Charged With Questioning Election Results While Not Being A Democrat

State Department identifies two Chinese bioweapons sites

From Washington Times.com (Apr. 28, 2022):

China carried out offensive biological weapons work until 1987 and failed to disclose the full extent of the activities for years as required under an international agreement, according to the State Department’s annual report on arms treaty compliance.

Additionally, Chinese officials for the second year in a row have refused a meeting with U.S. counterparts to discuss ongoing concerns about China’s biological warfare activities.

China is required under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, signed by Beijing in 1984, to disclose all activities related to current or past biological warfare programs.

“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) continued to engage in activities with dual-use applications, which raise concerns regarding its compliance with Article I of the BWC,” said the report, made public last week. Article I strictly prohibits developing or stockpiling biological weapons.

The report said the U.S. government was unable to determine whether China eliminated past biological weapons as required under the Biological Weapons Convention.

The report for the first time identifies two known Chinese biological weapons production facilities, one in Beijing and a second in Lingbao, in Henan province. The Lingbao plant is near Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 first emerged.

The Chinese offensive biological weapons program began in the 1950s and continued through at least the 1980s, the report said.

“Reporting suggests that the PRC’s [biological weapons] production occurred at two facilities, in Beijing and Lingbao, prior to the PRC’s signing of the BWC in 1972.” The last operational germ weapons production plant in Lingbao ceased activities in 1987.

“Although the PRC has submitted BWC confidence-building measures (CBMs) each year since 1989, the PRC’s CBM reporting has never declared these facilities or otherwise disclosed it ever pursued an offensive BW program, and the PRC has never acknowledged publicly or in diplomatic channels its past offensive program,” the report said.

The biological weapons produced by China in the past include weaponized ricin, botulinum toxins and causative agents for anthrax, cholera, plague and tularemia, the report said.

The latest report changed its assessment of the development of those weapons from “probably” to “reportedly,” an apparent increase in the level of certainty likely based on intelligence agencies’ findings.

Studies conducted by the People’s Liberation Army at military medical institutions have stated that the military has worked on identifying and testing “diverse families of potent toxins with dual-use applications,” the report said. More information on the Chinese bioweapons program was contained in a classified annex, the report authors said.

“The United States has compliance concerns with respect to Chinese military medical institutions’ toxin and biotechnology research and development because of the dual-use applications and their potential as a biological threat,” the report said.

The report said there was no evidence that China had taken steps to destroy its biological weapons or divert them to peaceful purposes as required by the Biological Weapons Convention. China refused to meet with U.S. officials last year, the period covered by the latest compliance report. The Biden administration sought the meeting to resolve the compliance issues.

“A new date had been proposed for early 2022, but the PRC again cancelled the meeting,” the report said.

Al Mauroni, director of the Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies, wrote in a recent journal article that unclassified assessments by the Pentagon and State Department suggest China could now have a biological weapons capability and U.S. officials believe Beijing is not complying with the Biological Weapons Convention.

“In the event of a future conflict with great powers, there is the chance that biological warfare could emerge as a significant threat, perhaps in a form unrecognized from Cold War experiences,” Mr. Mauroni wrote in an article titled “On Biological War,” in the current issue of the Army journal Military Review.

Mr. Mauroni said China’s investment in biotechnology, specifically synthetic biology, has created the base for producing “a range of extant and novel biological warfare agents.”

As for use in a future conflict, China’s clandestine biological weapons program could offer “a capability to perform single, small-scale chemical or biological weapons attacks on focused targets (facilities or individuals) while claiming to be compliant with the BWC.”

Mr. Mauroni said Western military forces are unable to detect biological weapons until after exposure and U.S. forces lack vaccines for a number of known biological warfare agents or engineered diseases.

The Washington Times, citing U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports, reported in May 2020 that China was working on biological weapons designed to attack specific ethnic groups.

‘Ethnic genetic attacks’

“We are looking at potential biological experiments on ethnic minorities,” one senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Times.

Information regarding Chinese ethnic bioweapons research was obtained from people with knowledge of the program. A Chinese general stated in a 2017 book that advances in biotechnology made “specific ethnic genetic attacks” more likely in conflict.

China’s National Defense University also has reported that the Chinese military is preparing for “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”

The State Department concluded last year that China has engaged in a policy of genocide against minority Uyghurs in western China.

The latest arms compliance report made no mention of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A State Department report made public in January 2021 said the institute was engaged in secret military work.

“For many years the United States has publicly raised concerns about China’s past biological weapons work, which Beijing has neither documented nor demonstrably eliminated, despite its clear obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention,” the 2021 report on the Wuhan facility said.

Despite posing as a civilian facility, the Wuhan institute “collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military,” the report said.

“The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017,” the report said.

Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said China strictly fulfills its obligations under the biological weapons treaty.

“China firmly defends the lawful right of developing countries to enjoy the dividend of biotechnological development,” he said, calling on the United States to provide details of what he called Washington’s own “bio-military activities.”

China’s state-owned media in recent weeks have echoed Russian accusations about a string of “covert” U.S.-funded biological research laboratories in Ukraine. U.S. and Ukrainian officials have vehemently denied suggestions that the labs were conducting biowarfare experiments or that the research was conducted in secret.

Two former State Department arms control leaders, Thomas DiNanno and Paula A. DeSutter, said in a report last year that the Biden administration was attempting to play down Chinese violations of the international agreement by omitting information about secret virus research from last year’s arms compliance report.

“This omission serves as a signal to China and other adversaries and to our allies that the United States is not concerned about the potentially dangerous dual-use research that was being conducted at the WIV and its affiliated facilities,” Mr. DiNanno and Ms. DeSutter wrote at the time. They said the State Department “must determine the extent of potential Chinese weaponization of viruses.”

Recent statements by Chinese officials have indicated that the military is interested in pursuing offensive biological arms.

“For example, in 2015, then-President of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu argued that biotechnology would become the new ‘strategic commanding heights’ of national defense, ranging from biomaterials to ‘brain control’ weapons,” Mr. DiNanno and Ms. DeSutter said.

John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence under President Trump, has said U.S. intelligence information indicates China “conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.”

Current DNI Avril Haines said in recent congressional testimony that the COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it could prompt U.S. adversaries to consider developing biological weapons. [source]

Did Covid come from a bio-weapons lab? Wouldn’t surprise me if it did.

UK's first 'three-parent baby' crosses ethical line, says CARE

From Christian Today.com (May 12):

A Christian charity has said it is concerned about safety and the ethics of new biotechnology after the birth of the UK's first baby that has the DNA of three people.

Mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT) uses healthy mitochondria from a female donor and is intended to prevent the transfer of incurable diseases from parents to children.

James Mildred, of Christian charity CARE, said the advent of MDT was "a source of some concern" and that an "ethical line" has been crossed.

He said there were a number of questions around the psychological impact on children and whether the development of MDT might lead to "designer babies".

"Evidence suggests that transferring nuclear DNA into a host donor egg cell is unsafe and could impact future generations," he said.

"The techniques used also lead to the destruction of human embryos, which raises moral questions.

"There are serious questions about how children will be affected. For example, nobody knows how a child will respond psychologically to the fact they have three parents.

"The biotechnology being used, whilst well-intentioned in this instance, also raises the spectre of 'designer babies'. It's clear an ethical line in the sand has been crossed that we come to regret deeply in years to come." [source]

Yea, the charity has a right to be concerned. MDT is venturing into strange and unknown territory.

God Designed Our Limitations

From Breakpoint.org (Mar. 22, 2022):

If there’s a term our culture has little appreciation for, it’s “limitations.” The reality of our limitations, as intended by God, is exactly what makes Kelly Kapic’s newest book You’re Only Human worth reading. Either intentionally or implicitly, we think of our physical, interpersonal, and spiritual limits as things to be ignored, rejected, or transcended. Even in Christian circles, it’s common to constantly feel exhausted or guilty, as if we haven’t done enough for God and His Kingdom. Dr. Kelly Kapic, a professor of theology at Covenant College, provides a compelling counter thesis:

“Many of us fail to understand that our limitations are a gift from God, and therefore good. This produces in us the burden of trying to be something we are not and cannot be.”

Human limitation is different from the idea of “sin” or even “fallenness.” As a feature of time and space, “limitations” are a built-in aspect of God’s design. We need things like food and rest. We were not created to do everything by ourselves, even something as simple as finding our own individual identities. Ultimately, we are dependent, and our dependency is meant to draw us closer to the God who created us.

Recently, Dr. Kapic joined my colleague Kasey Leander for a special episode on the BreakPoint podcast. Their conversation is an especially relevant counter to dangerous assumptions that are shaping our world.

One of these assumptions has to do with physicality. Seized by what some have called a “gnostic impulse,” much of modern life downplays physical limitations. Digital technology tells us we don’t need to “go” anywhere to “be” with people. We sexualize everything, and in the process destroy the possibility of normal, everyday physical touch. The most extreme example of this gnostic impulse is  transgender ideology, which tells people they can only and finally feel fulfilled outside the physical reality of biology.

In God’s original design, the physical world was created “good.” We flourish best, not when we “transcend” our God-given physical limitations, but when we live in accordance with them. This doesn’t mean everything is perfect: Some of our limitations, of course, actually are caused by the fall. However, even in a world infected by evil, Christians have hope in a renewed, physical creation. If God loves our bodies, we should too.

Kapic also highlights the idea of faithfulness in the Christian life. Too often, we’re driven by a desire to do everything, ignoring our limited resources of time and energy. “It was Ben Franklin who said time is money,” he tells us, “and as Christians we have baptized that.”

It makes me wonder what Jesus would make of modern busyness. The Son of God never shied away from challenges or difficulty … yet he spent an inordinate amount of time simply praying and resting. As the Agent of creation and the second Adam, Christ set the standard for a life well lived.

A third takeaway from You’re Only Human. has to do with the Church, the Bride of Christ:

“God extends his love, provision, and values through the people who make up his church. His offer to be a refuge and strength frequently comes through his church. When he wants to bring a word of grace, a safe hug, a warm meal, it often comes through his church. Even when the church cannot do everything itself, it keeps seeking to promote the common good.”

The Christian walk demands community, and our collective limitations also point at something significant about our human limitations. Kapic continues:

“The central mission of the church is to point people continually to the Messiah: he alone fully reveals the love of the Father and pours out his Spirit on us. The goal of all our good efforts is to draw people to the embrace of the triune God, not to serve as a replacement for him. All the gifts we exercise must ultimately point back to the true Giver.”

This is why Christians can read the news without losing hope. We cannot heal or restore our broken world, but Christ can and will. In that respect, our limitation isn’t weakness. It makes us rely on the only true Source of strength. [source]

'Ultrasonic transducers' on VR headsets allow metaverse users to receive facial sensation

From The Blaze.com (Apr. 30, 2022):

Metaverse users could soon have the ability to receive sensations on their faces while making out with their peers in the digital space.

The U.S. Sun reported that scientists have created an add-on device for VR headsets that brings a “feeling sensation” to the mouth, lips, and tongues of those using it.

The scientists reportedly developed this technology by adding a series of “special ultrasonic transducers to a VR headset.”

The technology was demonstrated by having users participate in a digital haunted adventure game that included tactile experiences.

Reportedly, people participating in the experience felt sensations on their lips as they walked through digital spider webs. People wearing the modified headsets also reported feeling sensations on their faces when digital spiders jumped on them in the metaverse and felt a “sensory feeling from exploding spiders” when they shot them.

Other instances had users test the tech by drinking from digital water fountains, sipping metaverse mochas, smoking cyber cigarettes, and warding off digital cavities by brushing their teeth in the simulated reality.

The ultrasonic transducers attached to these people’s headsets were “capable of simulating swipes and vibrations in and around” the wearers’ mouths that they might associate with each activity.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University said, “Haptics boosts realism and immersion, and heightens user reactions.”

The researchers continued, “Although we demonstrated a range of haptic effects, the vocabulary of sensations is still limited compared to that of the real world (a high bar). That said, it is roughly comparable to that of a vibration of motors in handheld controllers and many mobile phones, but with more spatial expressivity. Nonetheless, we believe AR/VR systems should strive for greater realism, and future work is necessary to expand upon our work.”

These immersive and tactile experiences are precisely why organizations such as the Space Force are preparing to create their own metaverse servers to provide their service members with the ability to train in simulated environments.

Considering the preventive expenditure and technical limitations making it effectively impossible for the Space Force to train its new members in — or anywhere near — space, metaverse technology that simulates sensation and immersive visual scenarios can help trainees develop on-the-job skills without having to be in orbit.

On the other hand, there are far darker aspects of the metaverse that have yet to be fully uncovered. For instance, this past winter, researchers went undercover in the metaverse posing as a 13-year-old girl. While doing so, the researchers witnessed grooming, graphic sexual material, and threats of rape.

Ms. Burrows from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children said, “It’s children being exposed to entirely inappropriate, really incredibly harmful experiences. This is a product that is dangerous by design, because of oversight and neglect. We are seeing products rolled out without any suggestion that safety has been considered.” [source]

NEW Controlled Food System Is Now In Place And They Will Stop At Nothing To Accelerate Their Control

From Corey’s Digs (Apr. 27, 2022):

“Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” This famous quote by Henry Kissinger is ringing more and more true by the week. The globalists already control the majority of the money, are moving ever so swiftly to convert the energy system over into systems they are all invested in, and have been taking drastic measures to control the food industry while running much of it under the radar. If they control the seeds they control the food, and if they control the food they can use the digital ID to control consumer access to the food. While a rash of fires suddenly destroy food processing, meat, and fertilizer plants, during a time where farmers are hurting and supply chain issues are kicking in, an entire traceable food infrastructure system has already been built in multiple cities and is making its way across the globe.

Imagine a day where farmers markets no longer exist, you can’t drive over to your local farmer to buy produce or cuts of meat, and the only food growing outside of the globalists secured indoor vertical farming and lab grown meat facilities, is in your windowsill, garden, or greenhouse.

• The indoor vertical farming industry was valued at $5.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $19.86 billion by 2026. Urban indoor farming controlled by the globalists is the future of food they have reimagined, and it’s already in thousands of grocery stores without people realizing it. Whereas the U.S. is leading in this industry, this is a global agenda with vertical farms popping up across the globe.
• For perspective, Bowery Farming’s new facility in Arlington, TX will be able to serve 16 million people in a 200-mile radius. This is only one of dozens of vertical farming companies with massive facilities across the country, backed by big investors.
• AeroFarms, who has the largest indoor vertical farming facility in the world, co-developed the first CRISPR-Cas9 gene-edited produce product, now hundreds are following, while National Geographic believes that gene editing is the next food revolution. AeroFarms also worked on an NIH sponsored trial to produce proteins for the Covid jabs.
• The University of California is developing a plant-based mRNA vaccine in the hopes that farms can grow edible vaccine heads of lettuce.
• Monsanto/Bayer is creating gene edited seeds for vertical farm companies, while Bill Gates, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the World Bank control 10% of the world’s germplasms and hold some of the world’s largest seed banks. Bayer and BASF, two of the world’s largest suppliers of seed, are both involved with the vertical farm industry.
• The USDA and FDA have already approved lab grown meat, genetically modified cattle, and are funding the globalists to research and develop cellular agriculture as well as indoor growers and genetics companies, while they slack on regulations for gene-edited produce.
• Well over a dozen major food processing and meat plants have coincidentally gone up in flames in the past several months.
• Union Pacific is mandating railroad shipping reductions by 20%, impacting CF Industries Holdings, the world’s largest fertilizer company. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street happen to be the top shareholders of Union Pacific, and BlackRock and Vanguard are in the top 3 shareholders of CF Industries Holdings.
• By mapping some of the biggest vertical farms (below in this report), it reveals the crops, grocery stores involved, locations, and billions pouring in by globalist investors and shareholders. It quickly becomes evident that this is the global plan to control all produce – ingredients that go into all food products. [read more]

Welcome to the New World Order. Or as the World Economic Forum calls it “The Great Reset.”

Kouri Richins, Utah mom accused of killing her husband, signaled she was ‘single and available’ on TV show: body language expert

From NY Post.com (May 12):

Utah mom Kouri Richins signaled she was “single and available” during a TV appearance to promote her book about grief after allegedly killing her husband, according to a body language expert.

Richins, 33, wrote the children’s book “Are You With Me?” after the fatal poisoning of her husband, Eric Richins, 39, in March 2022. She appeared on ABC4’s “Good Things Utah” last month to plug it.

Showing up without her wedding ring was what body language and human behavior expert Patti Wood told the US Sun called a “strong choice.”

“Writing a children’s book about grief after losing your husband and promoting it without still wearing a wedding ring is an interesting choice,” Wood told the outlet.

“Everybody grieves differently, some widows want to hold on to the symbol of the union they can see, feel and touch all the time, and some don’t,” she said.

“Nonverbally, she is not just promoting the book, but the fact that she has processed her grief enough to advertise that she is single and available,” Wood added.

Kouri allegedly poisoned her husband with a fentanyl-laced Moscow Mule in March 2022 — then penned the tear-jerker book about coping with grief.

“My husband passed away unexpectedly last year. March 4 was a one-year anniversary for us. He was 39,” she said on the local TV program.

“It completely took us all by shock. We have three little boys, 10, 9 and 6, and my kids and I kind of wrote this book on the different emotions and grieving processes that we’ve experienced in the last year,” Kouri told the hosts.

Wood noted the widow displayed a variety of nonverbal tics that could have suggested she was trying to hide something.

For example, Richins used the phrase “you know” dozens of times during the interview in what could have been a secret ploy to protect herself, the expert told the US Sun.

The expert acknowledged the repeated utterances may have been part of Richins’ normal speech patterns — but also opined she might have been making a desperate cry.

Wood also pointed out that phrases that “cut up communication” can reveal a “lack of honesty.”

“So when you make a definitive statement, typically when you’re telling the truth, there’s strength and delivery that goes from the first word to the end of the sentence,” she told the outlet. [read more]

Definitely a pychopath. Any guy who marries her or even dates her is probably going to end up the same way as her husband—dead.

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common

From Science.org (May 5):

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.

“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”

His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills—secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. “Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff,” says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were “heavily compromised” by articles from paper mills.

Sabel’s tool relies on just two indicators—authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn’t a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate. Other developers of fake-paper detectors, who often reveal little about how their tools work, contend with similar issues.

Still, the detectors raise hopes for gaining the advantage over paper mills, which churn out bogus manuscripts containing text, data, and images partly or wholly plagiarized or fabricated, often massaged by ghost writers. Some papers are endorsed by unrigorous reviewers solicited by the authors. Such manuscripts threaten to corrupt the scientific literature, misleading readers and potentially distorting systematic reviews. The recent advent of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has amplified the concern.

To fight back, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), representing 120 publishers, is leading an effort called the Integrity Hub to develop new tools. STM is not revealing much about the detection methods, to avoid tipping off paper mills. “There is a bit of an arms race,” says Joris van Rossum, the Integrity Hub’s product director. He did say one reliable sign of a fake is referencing many retracted papers; another involves manuscripts and reviews emailed from internet addresses crafted to look like those of legitimate institutions.

Twenty publishers—including the largest, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley—are helping develop the Integrity Hub tools, and 10 of the publishers are expected to use a paper mill detector the group unveiled in April. STM also expects to pilot a separate tool this year that detects manuscripts simultaneously sent to more than one journal, a practice considered unethical and a sign they may have come from paper mills. Such large-scale cooperation is meant to improve on what publishers were doing individually and to share tools across the publishing industry, van Rossum says.

“It will never be a [fully] automated process,” he says. Rather, the tools are like “a spam filter … you still want to go through your spam filter every week” to check for erroneously flagged legitimate content.

STM hasn’t yet generated figures on accuracy or false-positive rates because the project is too new. But catching as many fakes as possible typically produces more false positives. Sabel’s tool correctly flagged nearly 90% of fraudulent or retracted papers in a test sample. However, it marked up to 44% of genuine papers as fake, so results still need to be confirmed by skilled reviewers. Other paper mill detectors typically have a similar trade-off, says Adam Day, founding director of a startup called Clear Skies who consulted with STM on the Integrity Hub. But without some reliance on automated methods, “You either have to spot check randomly, or you use your own human prejudice to choose what to check. And that’s not generally very fair.”

Scrutinizing suspect papers can be time-consuming: In 2021, Springer Nature’s postpublication review of about 3000 papers suspected of coming from paper mills required up to 10 part- and full-time staffers, said Chris Graf, the company’s director of research integrity, at a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee hearing about paper mills in July 2022. (Springer Nature publishes about 400,000 papers annually.)

Newly updated guidelines for journals issued in April may help ease the workload. They may decide to reject or retract batches of papers suspected of having been produced by a paper mill, even if the evidence is circumstantial, says the nonprofit Committee on Publication Ethics, which is funded by publishers. Its previous guidelines encouraged journals to ask authors of each suspicious paper for more information, which can trigger a lengthy back and forth.

Some outsiders wonder whether journals will make good on promises to crack down. Publishers embracing gold open access—under which journals collect a fee from authors to make their papers immediately free to read when published—have a financial incentive to publish more, not fewer, papers. They have “a huge conflict of interest” regarding paper mills, says Jennifer Byrne of the University of Sydney, who has studied how paper mills have doctored cancer genetics data.

The “publish or perish” pressure that institutions put on scientists is also an obstacle. “We want to think about engaging with institutions on how to take away perhaps some of the [professional] incentives which can have these detrimental effects,” van Rossum says. Such pressures can push clinicians without research experience to turn to paper mills, Sabel adds, which is why hospital affiliations can be a red flag.

Publishers should also welcome help from outsiders to improve the technology supporting paper mill detectors, although this will require transparency about how they work, Byrne says. “When tools are developed behind closed doors, no one can criticize or investigate how they perform,” she says. A more public, broad collaboration would likely strengthen them faster than paper mills could keep up, she adds.

Day sees some hope: Flagging journals suspected of being targeted by paper mills can quickly deter additional fraudulent submissions. He points to his analysis of journals that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) put on a public list because of suspicions they contained paper mill papers. His company’s Papermill Alarm detector showed that before the CAS list came out, suspicious papers made up the majority of some journals’ content; afterward, the proportion dropped to nearly zero within months (see chart). (Papermill Alarm flags potentially fraudulent papers based on telltale patterns revealed when a paper mill repeatedly submits papers; the company does not publicly disclose what these signs are.) Journals could drive a similar crash by using automated detectors to flag suspicious manuscripts, nudging paper mills to take them elsewhere, Day says.

Some observers worry paper mill papers will merely migrate to lower impact journals with fewer resources to detect them. But if many journals act collectively, the viability of the entire paper mill industry could shrink.

It’s not necessary to catch every fake paper, Day says. “It’s about having practices which are resistant to their business model.” [read more]

This is sad. It’s bad enough when politics distorts science, but to actually to write fake papers is even worse. Science is about finding the truth. When the public stops trusting science that distrust hurts science’s reputation and integrity. Not to mention politicians use scientific data to help make policy. If the data is false, that can lead to disastrous results for the constituents. Not good.