May 2021 Archives

Don't miss the significance of Facebook's humiliating free speech disaster just because Politico tries to minimize it by calling it a "policy tweak". The point isn't merely that Facebook and many "experts" were wrong, the point is that the only way to discover truth is through speech. When we limit free speech we cripple our ability to find the truth.

Some people are ascribing political motivations to Facebook's censorship.

While it is welcome news that Facebook has reversed its policy, perhaps the bigger issue here is that Facebook's policy was wrong. Not just because it was incorrect but because Facebook shouldn't be in the business of curating content and making decisions as to what people can and cannot read. This reversal is an indictment of Facebook's entire content-moderation effort, which they say is meant to curb the spread of fake news when, in actuality, it was meant to curb inconvenient news.

This is a pretty easy hypothesis to test. What proportion of Facebook speech restrictions limit left-wing talking points as compared to right-wing talking points? I don't know the answer, but I can guess.

Jonathan Turley is right to say the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack was terrorism but it was also worse than that: the attack was a probe that further revealed the weakness of America's critical infrastructure.

We've heard calls in recent years for an ever-widening category of "terrorists" to encompass groups from the Jan. 6 rioters to antifa to the the Ku Klux Klan. So it is surprising that the White House and the media have referred to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attackers simply as "hackers." "DarkSide" is not just a collection of hackers -- it's a group of terrorists. And the only thing more concerning than the failure to label them correctly is the possible reason for not doing so. ...

The reason is obvious: Colonial just paid a ransom to terrorists. Moreover, gas pipelines are not just "a private company" but a highly regulated industry that closely follows the government's directions.

If it's not possible for the government to protect American infrastructure from cyber attacks then we need to significantly overhaul our national security system.

It may be true that the Biden administration concluded we are defenseless to cyber terrorism despite years of ransomware attacks and hundreds of billions of dollars in cybersecurity programs. If that is the case, the public should be informed. The failure of Congress and our government to defend against such terror attacks is a national security failure of breathtaking proportions. The Colonial Pipeline attack was the cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor. In both cases, we were caught unprepared and unable to deal with a threat we knew was coming. Yet President Roosevelt did not issue a "no comment" on the critical facts after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Back then, we believed FDR when he stated in his first inauguration that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

What the Biden administration seems to fear most is public recognition that it is afraid -- afraid of the vulnerability of our infrastructure, afraid that the public will learn what cyber terrorists already know.

Maybe America has been distracted by nonsense for a while and needs to refocus our attention on real problems.

A bunch of retired generals and admirals have written an open letter advocating for election integrity, along with a bunch of other rightist political preferences and talking points.

I have a lot of respect for our military, active duty and retired, but I think it would be best for America if our military didn't leverage its rightful prestige to influence politics.

Maybe things are "so bad" that it's justified now, and each person is free to make that determination for himself or herself.

This failure of accounting is a humiliating disaster for California.

It's been 21 months since we asked California to do what 49 other states, the federal government, and hundreds of America's largest cities do: produce a line-by-line state checkbook of its spending.

California Controller Betty Yee denied the request from our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com for its spending records, claiming she could not "locate" the records.

So we sued the State of California to get the records that are legally required to be made available to anyone who requests them.

Our initial request on Aug. 23, 2019 was ignored, and follow-up letters in October and November were finally acknowledged - 11 weeks after the first request, a violation of state open records law.

Our request was later denied, with Yee saying that they were "unable to locate" the evidence of payments that her office made and that it did not track payments that went through other state offices.

In 2018, Yee's office paid 49 million bills totaling $320 billion in payments. While she made the payments, she claims she cannot track the payments.

Somehow I doubt California would be very understanding to a taxpayer who couldn't "locate" any financial records when requested.

This failure of one of the most the basic functions of government is embarrassing beyond words.

Unfortunately for everyone, America's bureaucrats have squandered the broad and deep trust that Americans used to give them without question. Now some people are even questioning something as (apparently) simple as the census. "Why Did Biden Census Bureau Add 2.5 Million More Residents to Blue-State Population Count?"

There is something very fishy about the new 2020 Census Bureau data determining which states picked up seats and which states lost seats.

Most all of the revisions to the original estimates have moved in one direction: Population gains were added to blue states, and population losses were subtracted from red states. The December revisions in population estimates under the Biden Census Bureau added some 2.5 million blue-state residents and subtracted more than 500,000 red-state residents. These population estimates determine how many electoral votes each state receives for presidential elections and the number of congressional seats in each state. ...

Remember, the House of Representatives is razor-thin today, with the Democrats sporting just a six-seat majority with five seats currently vacant. So, a switch in a handful of seats in 2022 elections could flip the House and take the gavel away from current Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. A shift of 3 million in population is the equivalent of four seats moving from Republican to Democrat.

When all the "mistakes" favor the same group of people, which also happens to be the group in power, it's very reasonable for citizens to wonder if the "mistakes" are honest or not.