“MX. Aldrich”: Suspect in Colorado Gay Club Shooting is Non-Binary, Demands They/Them Pronouns thumbnail

“MX. Aldrich”: Suspect in Colorado Gay Club Shooting is Non-Binary, Demands They/Them Pronouns

By The Geller Report

The hell the left wrought.

The Colorado shooter informed the authorities he is non-binary, uses they/them pronouns, and requested to be referred to as Mx. Aldrich throughout the proceedings

CNN is speechless.

Watch in real time as CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota sees her network’s narrative on the Colorado Springs gay night club shooting come crashing down. She was speechless that the shooter identifies as “non binary”: “I don’t know what to say about that.” pic.twitter.com/mLdsZZlCds

— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) November 23, 2022

Colorado gay club shooting suspect identifies as non-binary, lawyers say

Court papers revealed public defenders referred to the suspect as Mx Aldrich, after they legally changed their name back in 2016.

By Lauren Russell, Sky News, 23 November 2022:

The defence team of a suspect facing possible hate crime charges over the fatal shooting of five people at a gay club in Colorado have said they define as non-binary.

Court papers filed on behalf of Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, showed public defenders referring to the suspect as Mx Aldrich, noting that they are non-binary and use they/them pronouns.

Aldrich was taken into custody and treated for injuries after five people were killed and at least 25 others injured at Club Q, an “adult-oriented gay and lesbian nightclub” in Colorado Springs, on the night of 19 November. The suspect was beaten into submission by patrons at the nightclub.

They were scheduled to appear in court via video link from El Paso County jail for the first time on Wednesday.

At a news conference, officers said that a “long rifle” was used and shooting began as soon as the suspect entered the venue. The motive is still under investigation, but Aldrich faces possible murder and hate crime charges, according to authorities.

Charges are currently preliminary and prosecutors have not yet filed formal charges. Hate crime charges require proving that the suspect was motivated by bias against the victims’ actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

The media is not telling you that the mentally ill non-binary guy who shot up the Colorado gay club had an absentee father who did gay porn.

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) November 23, 2022

In new court filing, public defenders for the suspect in the mass shooting at a Colorado gay club that left 5 people dead say that their client is non-binary and that “they use they/them pronouns.” The lawyers refer to their client as Mx. Anderson Aldrich. pic.twitter.com/dPaUpiFXKN

— Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs (@NickAtNews) November 23, 2022

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: Two Years Later, CBS ‘confirms’ Hunter Biden laptop is real 769 days after Post broke story

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Voter fraud happened in 2020 and could happen this time thumbnail

Voter fraud happened in 2020 and could happen this time

By Joan Swirsky

A friend recently reminded me of an article I had written on October 5, 2020, just before the presidential election that found all TV networks reporting that President Donald Trump was crushing Joe Biden across the board—including in the all-important battleground states—and then that coverage mysteriously stopped cold, disappeared for over three hours, and reappeared to report that the exact opposite was true, that Joe Biden had magically become the Crusher in Chief, ultimately “winning” the 2020 election.

“Remember the title of your article?” my friend asked me. In fact, I did, since it was the only time in decades of writing that I had capitalized a word in the title. It read like this:

The ONLY Issue in the 2020 Election is Voter Fraud.

Well, it’s election time again, and sure enough the same thing is true. And after viewing Dinesh D’Souza’s jaw-dropping “2000 Mules,” which documents the massive fraud that indeed took place in 2020, and after reading dozens of reports about audits that were done in the battleground states and others which uncovered overwhelming voter fraud, including thousands of dead voters, it appears that voter fraud is once again the ONLY issue of concern. Great concern.

The reality factor

When you peel back all the layers of the onion of a human being’s psychology, our species is really not that complicated. Whether man or woman, black or white, rich or poor, from whatever background, religion, or culture, we all have similar if not identical needs.

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced the concept of a Hierarchy of Needs, which hasn’t changed much since then. They include:

Physiological needs that are vital to survival:

  • Food
  • Water
  • Breathing
  • Homeostasis
  • Shelter
  • Clothing
  • Reproduction

Security and Safety Needs

Social needs

  • Friendships
  • Romantic attachments
  • Family relationships
  • Social groups
  • Community groups
  • Churches and religious organizations

Yes, these are needs common to everyone, and yet in the past two years, under the Biden regime, every single one of them has been threatened if not destroyed.

When you destroy basic needs

With the stupefying mismanagement of our national budget—and in spite of the booming economy and high employment he inherited— the Biden inflation factor didn’t take long to set in, followed in short order by the Biden Recession. There went the security most Americans felt in buying food and gas and paying rent. Even reproduction is down as younger people hoping to move out of their parent’s basement have hunkered down for an indefinite stay.

At the same time, there went the country’s security and safety needs. With four-million illegal aliens swarming over Biden’s open southern border, including drug cartels with so much Fentanyl that the deaths of young people have already increased exponentially, and thugs and criminals being bused and flown in the middle of the night to cities and suburbs throughout our country, even a walk in the park or a trip to the supermarket has become a looming threat.

And with liberal legislators all over the country ignoring the massive criminality of thuggish groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and innocent pedestrians being assaulted—sometimes fatally—and the passing of no-bail laws that put rapists and muggers and even murderers back on the street 20 minutes after they are so-called “booked,” life in America has become a daily and nightly menace.

Biden destroyed our energy independence

And let’s not forget Biden’s pathetic reliance on foreign oil, going hat in hand literally begging for the resources to keep us going, while only two years ago, President Trump had achieved one-hundred percent energy independence—to last us 500 years!

Then there is the war in Ukraine and the billions (going on trillions) we have sent to what is now widely recognized at The Money-Laundering Capital of the World!

A normal person would look at the bleak state of our union and conclude that the powers-that-be—those running the show from the Oval Office—are so woefully inept, have such patronizing contempt for We the People, and such a deep loathing for America the Beautiful, that it would seem to be a given that every Democrat candidate, including those running for the U.S. Senator or the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, November 8, would lose in a landslide.

However…

Over the past many decades—with the advent of electronic voting machines and mail-in ballots—American elections have not been predictable. Why? Because the only thing Democrats have cared about for the past hundred years is winning elections with the goal of inflicting their strangulating socialist/communist and now Islamist style of government on the American people.

Why don’t they want Trump to run again?

In the past two years in particular, they’ve been maniacally obsessed with insuring that President Trump is unable to run again for POTUS, even if the perpetual sore losers of the left have to buy the guns they say they hate to wage a Civil War!

Why? Because citizen-cum President Trump won the 2016 election by exposing:

  • “The Swamp’s” systemic depravity, corruption, and treason.
  • The Democrats’ America-Last policies.
  • The leftist bias of the bought-and-paid-for Media Whores.
  • The Democrat racism that has kept blacks with broken families, mal-educated, imprisoned, and impoverished for decades on end.
  • The craven deals that made our country dependent on foreign oil.
  • The Obama-Biden regimes’ weaponizing of the FBI, CIA, and the FISA Court, et al.
  • The crooked money “arrangements” enjoyed by higher-ups like former VP Joe Biden in securing multimillion-and-billion-dollar windfalls for himself, his son Hunter, and his brother James. Ukraine, anyone? China, anyone?
  • The horrible treaties, including the Iran deal, NAFTA, NATO, et al, that benefitted foreign countries significantly more than the U.S.
  • The interest of the “anti-war” Democrats in keeping wars going endlessly (always follow the money).
  • This is the very very short list.

The method to their madness

Even diehard leftist partisans acknowledge that Democrats have stolen elections over the past many decades by enlisting the votes of illegal aliens, absentee voters who simply don’t exist, cartoon characters, and of course dead voters.

Then there is Ballot Harvesting, a scheme exclusively used by Democrats to, ahem, win elections. According to California political commentator Stephan Frank, anyone—campaign workers, minors, illegals, et al—go door to door to “help” people fill out ballots that strangely favor Democrats and refuse to collect ballots from anyone they suspect of voting the “wrong” way. They even pay them to vote the “right way.”

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, currently 26 states allow this fraudulence, a practice that was aggressively and somewhat successfully challenged by Tom Fitton of electionintegrity@judicialwatch.org.

Not to omit ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), in operation since 1970. But the group was exposed for its criminal activities in 2009 by James O’Keefe, founder of The Veritas Project, resulting in multiple convictions for massive voter fraud in several states, and it closed its doors in 2010, although it is believed that splinter groups formed and are active to this day.

Let me count the ways voter fraud happened

The following is a tiny example of the vote-rigging methods used exclusively by Democrats going into the 2020 election:

An obvious voter fraud source: dead voters still on the rolls

But Democrats don’t stop! This past August, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s tried to dismiss the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s (PILF) lawsuit for her failure to remove 25,975 dead registrants from the state’s voter rolls.

According to PILF:

  • 23,663 registrants have been dead for five years or more
  • 17,479 registrants have been dead for at least a decade
  • 3,956 registrants have been dead for at least 20 years

In August, the United States Western District Court of Michigan denied Benson’s attempt.

In July, a hearing on the Maricopa, Arizona, 2020 election audit revealed the following:

  • Maricopa County refused to provide their computer’s router, claiming that its data would make private data available. In fact, routers don’t keep such information.
  • Maricopa claimed to have provided images of the mail-in envelopes. In fact, they did not.
  • 74,243 ballots that were received and included in the 2020 Election in Maricopa County show no record that they were ever mailed out.
  • 11,326 people voted in the election who did not appear on the voter rolls on Nov 7th.
  • 3,981 people voted after registering after the October 15, 2020, deadline.
  • On and on and on.
And in Georgia…

In addition, a recent Georgia audit of the 2020 election revealed:

  • A Non-Profit group, called True the Vote provided evidence that as many as 242 voting activists flooded as many as 5,500 drop boxes with fraudulent ballots in the middle of the night.
  • Videos also showed that the activists wore blue rubber gloves when depositing the ballots into the drop boxes. This practice was begun when investigations, in Arizona, over the same crime of ballot harvesting were, successfully, prosecuted, based on fingerprints on the ballots.

Partners in crime

According to a Google whistleblower in Allum Bokhari’s book, #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Electionwhen voters find out what Big Tech companies have done to meddle in the upcoming election, they’ll be rightly furious

at the attempts of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies to sway the election in Biden’s favor.

In addition, Democrats Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi are closely aligned with groups like Majority Forward (created in 2015) that funnel millions in secret cash into 2020 elections, according to FreeBeacon.com.

Linda Goudsmit, author of The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness’, sees the upcoming midterms as yet another “sinister leftist, Islamist, globalist attack on America.” “We are only weeks away from the election,” she said, and “the enemies of America are desperate” and behaving like cornered animals poised for attack. Their survival is at stake because if Republicans take the Congress, they will start the process that President Trump began of taking down the Deep State and exposing them all.

Voter fraud is all the Democrats have left – everything else has failed

It must be incomprehensible to all those liberals/leftists/progressives—with all their prestigious college degrees, high IQs, impeccable credentials, fancy job titles, and positions in the highest reaches of the American government—that every ploy they used against President Trump, every arch machination, every exquisitely formulated plan of action, all resulted in crashing failures, and that everything they’ve done to try to legitimize Joe Biden and enact his deeply anti-American agenda has resulted in equally colossal failures.

But still, there remains ONLY one overriding issue in the 2022 midterm elections, and that issue is Democrat Voter Fraud!

Our Republican and Conservative leaders have had two years to right the egregious wrong of the 2020 election. If that sordid history repeats itself, they only have themselves to blame!

©Joan Swirsky. All rights reserved. 

TAKE ACTION: Tell CDC to Stop Promoting Occult Resources to Youth! thumbnail

TAKE ACTION: Tell CDC to Stop Promoting Occult Resources to Youth!

By The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property

TAKE ACTION: SIGN OUR PETITION TO STOP THE CDC FROM PROMOTING THE OCCULT


The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is directing youth to online discussions on sexual behavior and “transgender” resources. One discussion instructs children on occult practices and astrology. Worst of all, the resources give minors the ability to hide the resources from parents. According to reports:

“The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is promoting to youth an online chat space that discusses sex, polyamorous relationships, the occult, sex change operations, and activism, and is specifically designed to be quickly hidden while being used. It also mixes LGBT adults and children and is run in part by Planned Parenthood [sic].

“Called Q Chat Space, the platform is advertised on the CDC’s LGBT Health Youth Resources page… The chat service, which describes itself as ‘a community for LGBTQ+ teens,’ is available for those ages 13-19, can be hidden from parents, and focuses on a number of mature themes.”

Read more.

(Source: Breitbart.com)

Some of the topics for discussion are:

  • “Drag Culture 101,”
  • “Sex and Relationships”
  • “Having Multiple Genders”
  • “Queer Youth Activism”
  • “Gender Affirmation Surgeries”
  • “Queering Tarot”

Everywhere on the Q Chat site, there is a large, green “quick escape” button, so users can immediately leave the site and appear to be looking at something else. Q Chat also gives the option to have “discreet” text reminders. This allows youth to receive automatic updates about upcoming discussions. But, the message hides the discussion topic and hides the name of the name of the source (i.e., Q Chat). In other words,

CDC is sidelining parents from what their children are learning.

Promoting sexual and occult practices will bring irreparable moral damage to the youth. And encouraging distrust in parents is a grave blow to the bond children should have with their family. Please sign our petition to the CDC, demanding that it remove sexual and occult practices from its resources.


TAKE ACTION: SIGN OUR PETITION TO STOP THE CDC FROM PROMOTING THE OCCULT


PETITION TEXT

To: The Center of Disease Control,

I am appalled at the resources you are offering to youth and minors, as Q Chat. Among the topics included are deviant sexual practices, “transgenderism” and sex-transition surgery, and even occult practices like astrology.

This site also promotes distrust of parents. It provides means to keep the topics from being seen with a “quick escape” button, and deliberately hides topics of discussion with a “discreet” option for automatic reminders.

This will cause serious moral damage to youth. It will open them to immoral practices, and encourage distrust within families. Above all, it is a serious offense to God.

I urge you to remove these resources at once. Stop targeting our youth.

Sincerely and urgently,

EDITORS NOTE: This TFP column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

New Poll Delivers Some Alarming News For Democrats thumbnail

New Poll Delivers Some Alarming News For Democrats

By The Daily Caller

Voters overwhelmingly trust Republicans to manage the economy, a new poll ahead of this year’s midterm elections suggests, while

Roughly 52% of voters said that they trust Republicans to manage the economy, compared to 38% for Democrats, while only 1% of respondents said they agreed with the proposals of both parties to manage it, according to a poll conducted by the Times and Siena College, which measured the relative strength of both parties in advance of the election scheduled on Nov. 8. The economy has been the most important issue to voters heading into the polls; in a July edition of the same NYT/Siena poll, 20% called it the “most important problem facing the country today,” while roughly 76% said that it would be “extremely important” to them as they vote.

Democrats have sought to focus their campaign narrative on social issues such as abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturning by the Supreme Court, as well as gun regulations following mass shootings across the country over the summer.

However, efforts to place social issues at the forefront of voters’ minds do not appear to be working. The NYT/Sienna poll revealed that voters consider economic issues more important to their voting decision than social issues, by an 18-point margin.

The polls come at a time of bad economic news for the Biden administration before November’s election. The White House recently released an economic blueprint listing its various accomplishments, with President Joe Biden holding a series of events to highlight the “Inflation Reduction Act,” a massive spending package that his administration had proposed to the Democratic-controlled Congress.

REUTERS: 🇺🇸 household wealth fell by a RECORD $6.1 trillion in Q2 2022

In 2022:

Nasdaq declined by 26.16%

S&P 500 declined by 18.15%

Bitcoin declined by 57.34%

30 Year Fixed Mortgage Rate:

Jan 2021: 2.65%

Sep 2022: 6.28%

Inflation

Jan 2021: 1.4%

Sep 2022: 8.3% pic.twitter.com/NHC9IqkVNl

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) September 16, 2022

The Consumer Price Index, an aggregate measure of inflation, increased by 0.1% from July to August, though tempered by reductions in the price of gasoline even as food costs rose, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. The news poorly affected stock markets over the week, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling by 1,600 points beginning Monday, closing for the week at 30,841.05 points.

There was some good news for Democrats, who currently control Congress and the White House. Between July and September, the number of voters who believe the country is “heading on the right track” increased modestly, from 27% to 50% for Democrats, and 9% to 27% for independents; however, 53% expressed disapproval of Biden’s performance in office.

The poll surveyed 1,399 registered voters nationwide from Sept. 6 to 14, 2022, its margin of sampling error was +/- 3.6 percentage points.

The White House and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had not responded to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

ARJUN SINGH

Contributor.

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John Kerry, Who Owned 5 Homes And A Private Jet, Cautions Impoverished African Nations Against Natural Gas Projects

NBC Deletes Tweet Comparing Immigrants To ‘Trash’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Federal law enforcement agencies conduct clandestine surveillance of thousands of U.S. citizens with the help of Microsoft

“Targeting of Americans’ records ‘routine’” – Tom Burt, Microsoft Executive


The country is no longer America. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.

Microsoft exec: Targeting of Americans’ records ‘routine’

Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.

Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.

“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.

The relationship between law enforcement and Big Tech has attracted fresh scrutiny in recent weeks with the revelation that Justice Department prosecutors obtained as part of leak investigations phone records belonging not only to journalists but also to members of Congress and their staffers. Microsoft, for instance, was among the companies that turned over records under a court order, and because of a gag order, had to then wait more than two years before disclosing it.

Reuters reports:

Microsoft executive says U.S. overuses secret orders for Americans’ data

By Raphael Satter

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States government is overusing its secret subpoena power to routinely gather vast amounts of data on American internet users, a senior Microsoft executive said in prepared testimony to Congress released on Wednesday.

In remarks for a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, the executive said that in the last five years Microsoft had received 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year and that U.S. courts provided little by way of meaningful oversight.

Tom Burt, a vice president for customer security and trust, said that American law enforcement was ordering Microsoft to stay quiet about between one third to one quarter of the requests for data that it received, “developing a practice of reflexively asking to keep even routine investigations secret.”

“Providers, like Microsoft, regularly receive boilerplate secrecy orders unsupported by any meaningful legal or factual analysis,” Burt told lawmakers. “Many of these orders should never have been approved by the courts.”

The panel called a hearing into secrecy orders in the wake of revelations that the U.S. Department of Justice during Donald Trump’s administration had secretly sought the phone records of reporters and Democratic representatives to investigate the leak of classified material.

Word of the investigations outraged lawmakers and blew new life into efforts to rein in the federal government’s domestic surveillance powers.

Burt said that while the effort to target lawmakers and reporters disturb many Americans, “what may be most shocking is just how routine court-mandated secrecy has become when law enforcement targets Americans’ emails, text messages, and other sensitive data stored in the cloud.”

Burt called for ending indefinite secrecy orders, boosting transparency around their use, forcing the government to notify targets of such orders once their time was up, and raising the bar on such orders to prevent what he described as the current “rubberstamping process.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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OUT OF GAS: What Does The Colonial Pipeline Shutdown Say About U.S. Defence Readiness?

On Friday, May 7, hackers attacked the computer systems of Colonial Pipeline, which operates a major gasoline pipeline that brings gasoline and jet fuel from Houston refineries up through the southeastern United States as far as New Jersey.  Out of concern that the hackers might have obtained data enabling them to do physical damage to their facilities, the pipeline operators shut the pipeline down while it was still under their control.

This may have saved the machinery from damage, but it produced a severe regional fuel shortage that affected everything from flights out of Atlanta to drivers’ vacation plans.  As of Sunday, May 16, the pipeline was fully restarted, but the ripple effects of the shutdown meant 88% of Washington, D. C. gas stations were out of gas at one point over the weekend.

This was a ransomware attack by a group calling itself DarkSide with reported links to Russia.  According to Bloomberg News, Colonial Pipeline paid DarkSide about $5 million in bitcoin for software to unlock their systems, only to find that it ran so slowly that they ended up restoring service without its help.

This is by far the most serious ransomware attack ever mounted on a U. S.-based facility, and should become a turning point in our response to this sort of attack.  Although I’ve stated the following position before in relation to other ransomware attacks, it bears repeating now that millions of people are going without gas, including many in Washington, D. C., and are presumably paying attention to the problem.

Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States reads as follows, in full:

“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.”

The key word of present interest in this section is “invasion.”  An online law dictionary defines invasion as “[a]n encroachment upon the rights of another; the incursion of an army for conquest or plunder.”  The Constitution was written at a time when messages travelled fastest by horseback or sailing ship.  It is safe to say that the current technological facts of instant global Internet access to a domestic firm’s private infrastructure were not in the minds of the drafters of the Constitution.

But notions of justice and international relations were, and the drafters recognised that a federal government that could not successfully defend its constituent states against invasion, as defined above, was not worth organising.  So they put words in the Constitution that gave the federal government the responsibility of defending the states against invasion, and in Article 1, section 8, they also gave Congress the power to “provide for the calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.”  There’s that word “invasion” again.

Pardon what may look like a constitutional detour, but what happened to Colonial Pipeline this month amounts to invasion and plunder by agents of a foreign power.  The DarkSide criminals may not formally be agents of the Russian government, but they operate with its approval or at least without its hindrance.

Suppose a bunch of Canadians armed with tanks and machine guns charged across the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit and took over the headquarters of Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, capturing their main computer centre and demanding $5 million in ransom to turn it loose.  This would quite properly be regarded as a foreign invasion, and no one would raise a finger to object to using whatever military force was necessary to repel such an invasion.

I submit that what happened to Colonial Pipeline is morally equivalent to my hypothetical invasion by Canadians.  The technological details are different, but the responsibility of the US government to defend those within its borders from invasion and plunder is something that the Founders intended it to do.

So what has the federal government in fact done?  Hardly anything — a few warnings not to try keeping gasoline in plastic bags, a few adjustments of shipping regulations to allow more ships to land gasoline from abroad, and that’s about it.

There is a well-known saying that generals always prepare for the last war, not the one they’re fighting now.  And that is certainly true in this case.  According to one source, the U. S. military has over 200,000 troops stationed abroad in over 170 countries.  The vast majority of these are conventional soldiers ready to shoot bullets and drop bombs, and certainly, bullets and bombs haven’t gone out of fashion.  But among the more advanced criminal element, it’s much more chic to keep your fingers clean while typing code that will shut down half of the gasoline going to the U. S. East Coast, and make $5 million in exchange for some software that doesn’t even work.

Congress is reportedly drafting legislation to do something about this sort of thing.  That is where the process should start, but it’s clear that a vast reorganisation and re-prioritising of the entire domestic and foreign military establishment is called for.  Cyberwarfare is where it’s at now.  Metaphorically speaking, the Canadians have been rioting through the entire country for years now, and all we have done is have vague discussions about the future of military combat.  Don’t people get it?  It’s happening now.  The fact that nobody was killed in the Colonial hack is due more to the foresight of the pipeline operators than to anyone else, as an out-of-control pipeline can do unimaginable amounts of damage.

But private companies should not have to shoulder by themselves the burden of protecting their facilities against foreign invasion and plunder.  That’s one of the most basic services of the federal government, and so far it is failing miserably in its job.

The gasoline shortage Washington now enjoys has fallen equally on Republicans and Democrats.  We can only hope that they will unite to make major lasting changes in the structure and priorities of the U. S. military so that we can once more be secure in our persons and property against the depredations of foreign invasion, including ransomware attacks.

This article has been republished with permission from Engineering Ethics.

COLUMN BY

Karl D. Stephan

Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Five reasons Biden’s move to rejoin the WHO is bad news


The WHO promotes permissive policies on prostitution, drug use, abortion, gender theory, and sex for kids.


Last year President Trump halted US funding to the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO). On his first day in office President Biden reinstated US funding for the WHO. Here are five reasons this is a very bad news:
1. The WHO advocates for decriminalizing prostitution. The WHO publication “Sexual Health, Human Rights and the Law” says, “All countries should work toward decriminalization of sex work.” Additionally, at DecriminalizeSex.Work, the WHO is listed as a proud partner in the decriminalization cause. The WHO’s push to make the world into a giant Las Vegas strip downplays the myriad risks to “sex workers” including assault, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, and death as documented by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. The WHO’s enthusiasm for prostitution also ignores the fact that there are no independent studies showing that decriminalizing the sex trade makes it safer.
2. The WHO advocates for decriminalizing drug use. An official WHO report in 2014 said, “Countries should work toward developing policies and laws that decriminalize injection and other use of drugs.” In 2015, the WHO published “HIV and Young Transgender People” which urges the governments of the world to “work toward the decriminalization of…drug use” in the name of helping young people fulfill their “needs and rights.” The WHO—an official United Nations entity—appears to be pushing the decriminalization of injection drugs despite the fact that there is no consensus among UN member states on whether injection drugs should be decriminalized. It is especially troubling that the WHO is recommending decriminalization of drugs for “young people” which is defined by them as “people 10–24 years of age.”
3. The WHO advocates for legalizing abortion worldwide. The WHO produces manualsvideos, and programs that promote abortion and seek to expand the legalized and “safe” killing of pre-born babies throughout the world. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was likely chosen for his post as head of the World Health Organization in part because of his successful campaign to expand abortion as Minister of Health in Ethiopia and his deep commitment to abortion and other tenets of the sexual rights agenda. The WHO regularly partners with abortion giant International Planned Parenthood Federation and has a close relationship with Ipas, maker of the EasyGrip portable abortion device and other grisly abortion innovations. Ipas is pursuing a scheme to expand abortion in accordance with the WHO’s guidance on “self-care” which would enable “health intermediaries” (instead of doctors) to distribute abortion-inducing pills to pregnant women, without a prescription. These women’s babies would then be disgorged into toilets and garbage cans in their own homes.
4. The WHO promotes gender ideology for children. The WHO endorses UN guidelines stating that children should be instructed on gender incongruence starting at age five. The WHO says it is “important to recognize identities that do not fit into the binary male or female sex categories” and that gender conflicted individuals need access to hormonal treatment and invasive, irreversible surgeries “for the protection of their health.” The WHO seems content to ignore the staggering risks (see here and here) that can accompany hormone treatments and transgender surgeries including blood clots, breast cancer, coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, gallstones, liver dysfunction, hypertension, uterine cancer, incomplete mineralization of bone, transition regretsuicidality, sterility, and diminished or demolished sexual function.
5. The WHO advocates for “sexual rights” for children. TheWHO is a supporter of the children’s sexual rights movement and of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) which is founded on the premise that children have inborn sexual rights. The name and logo of the WHO appears on the front cover of UNESCO’s 2018 International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education. This document is peppered with references to children’s sexual rights including these statements:

  • “(Young) people want and need sexuality and sexual health information as early and comprehensively as possible…”
  • Children should have “agency in their own sexual practices and relationships.”
  • Comprehensive Sexuality Education can “help children…form respectful and healthy relationships with…sexual partners.”

Additionally, official WHO partner International Planned Parenthood Federation makes these statements in its 2011 document, Exclaim! Young People’s Guide to ‘Sexual Rights: An IPPF declaration’:

  • “Young people are sexual beings…It is important for all young people around the world to be able to explore, experience and express their sexualities in healthy, positive, pleasurable and safe ways. This can only happen when young people’s sexual rights are guaranteed.”
  • “Sexuality and sexual pleasure are important parts of being human for everyone—no matter what age, no matter if you’re married or not and no matter if you want to have children or not.”
  • “There is a common misconception that young people are not or should not be sexual beings with the exception of certain groups, such as married young people or young people above a certain age. Sexuality is a central aspect of being human during all phases of each person’s life.”

The WHO not only supports sexual rights for children but is a strong advocate for eliminating parental consent in regard to abortion, contraception, and other sexual services for young people.
With these five reasons in view, it is dumbfounding that the Biden administration made a top priority of ensnaring the US in this ethically corrupt organization once again. This is a significant setback to the children, women, and families of the world.
COLUMN BY

Why the Real Villain of 2020 Was Big Government


COVID-19 was going to be bad, no matter what. But the failures of big government made it much, much worse.


The disaster that was 2020 is finally over. Now it’s time for the inevitable post-mortems.
First and foremost, the COVID-19 pandemic posed enormous challenges to American institutions, and continues to do so. Frankly, we were not prepared. We need to diagnose what went wrong, so that we are never caught unaware like this again. Fortunately, the diagnosis is straightforward. COVID-19 was going to be bad, no matter what. But the failures of big government made it much, much worse.
In particular, the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, and public teachers’ unions are the great American villains of 2020. Meanwhile, the heroes of this year are almost entirely in the private sector. From Zoom to vaccine development, Big Pharma and Big Tech—yes, you read that right—made this horrible year bearable. Even amid a crisis that led so many to cry out for vigorous government action, we saw that private markets still work best.
For progressives and so-called “national” conservatives who support big government, 2020 represented the ultimate test for their philosophies. Although they disagree on cultural issues, they see eye-to-eye on the role of government. Both want a big, energetic state promoting what (they believe to be) the good of the nation. Well, here was their chance for the government to shine.
The result was shameful failure. The COVID-19 crisis put left-wing and right-wing statism on trial—and both were found guilty of ill-intent and gross incompetence.
After all, the CDC is the reason America lagged behind other nations for so long in terms of COVID-19 testing. We had the virus genome fully mapped in January, which enabled the rapid production of private testing kits. But the CDC forced these operations to shut down, coming up with its own test—which was flawed, and even contaminated! Testing and tracing could have stemmed the worst of the COVID-19 tide.
On this issue alone, CDC ineptitude is likely responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Its red tape and incompetence made containing the COVID-19 pandemic, like a few other countries were able to, impossible.
How about the FDA?
It is no secret that the vaccine was delayed because it needed FDA approval. Indeed, several working vaccines could have come much earlier, were it not for our bungling bureaucrat gatekeepers. (Dear FDA: Can you please speed things up a little, so people do not, you know, die? It would make us ever so happy if you did. Thanks.)
As for schools, the data show that young people and children are at very low-risk from COVID-19, and that schools are not “super spreaders.” Despite this, largely due to pressure from public teachers’ unions, many schools remained closed in the fall. In fact, the US was pretty much the only country to pursue the alarmist policy of keeping schools closed.
The toll on school-aged children is immense, from psychological trauma to impeded learning. Low-income families were hit especially hard. They often lacked the means to participate in distance learning, and having their kids at home made it harder for parents to earn much-needed income.
Fortunately, there seems to be some well-deserved backlash against the crony public education establishment. Hopefully a mass exodus to more effective and accountable learning platforms will follow, whether that is charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling. Even more hopefully, parents will realize public education racketeers are not their friends. They should demand loud and clear: Fund students, not systems!
In stark contrast to these unacceptable failures by government agencies and employees, the private sector delivered.
Big Pharma and Big Tech are the winners here. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and many other companies did amazing work getting the vaccines developed as quickly as they did. Public health “experts” repeatedly claimed a vaccine would not be available for 18 months, at the earliest. (Shows what they know!)
As for Big Tech, companies like Facebook and Twitter helped us stay connected while we were forced physically to remain apart. Amazon responded well to a huge surge in demand, stemming from the curtailment of in-person shopping. Faced with an immense logistical challenge, the online retailer surpassed expectations.
These sectors and their star performers are not perfect, of course.
In the past, Big Pharma lobbied for many of the regulatory roadblocks that made fighting COVID-19 so hard. Big Tech got egg on its face for covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story. Nevertheless, the takeaway is clear: 2020 would have been much, much more miserable without these supposedly evil big businesses in our corner. We owe them far more than we give them.
2021 is the perfect time to revisit our basic beliefs about the role of government and business in society. Both were unexpectedly challenged by the greatest public health crisis in recent memory.
Government failed. Business triumphed. Statism should be discredited, hopefully for an entire generation. Any coherent political philosophy for the 21st century must start from this basic truth.
COLUMN BY

Alexander William Salter

Alexander William Salter is an associate professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a senior fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research’s Sound Money Project. Follow him on Twitter @alexwsalter.
EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.