Society in General

Light in the Election Fraud Tunnel

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Maybe some light will shine into the election irregularities once blindfolds are removed.  Recent developments unreported in the MSM include

  1. Backup server for Dominion voting system has been seized to audit election transactions and vote transfers.

  2. Report that Biden did worse than Clinton everywhere except in four cities.

  3. Mountain of affidavits witnessing both “old-school” vote tampering and “new-school” electronic manipulations

 

  1. From Gateway Pundits  Did the US Raid European Software Company Scytl and Seize their Servers in Germany? — Company Refutes Claims?

From our source,  Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Tx): The US government, once they determined that this Dominion server was involved in switching votes, then the intelligence community began a search for the server and discovered that the server was in Germany. In order to get access to that server and have it available for use in a legal manner they had to have the State Department work in tandem with the Department of Justice. They had to request that the government of Germany cooperate in allowing this seizure of this server.

The appropriate documents required to affect that kind of seizure were put in place, signed off on, and it appears there was also US military support in this operation. The US military was not in the lead. But this helps explain why Esper was fired and Miller and Kash Patel were put in place — so that the military would not interfere with the operation in any way.

By getting ahold of the server they now are going to have the direct evidence of when they were instructed to stop counting. They will also discover who gave the direction to stop counting and who initiated the algorithm that started switching votes. The CIA was completely excluded from this operation.

2. Pollster: It’s Curious How Biden Underperformed Hillary Clinton In Every City…Except These Four. Excerpts from Town Hall article in italics with my bolds.

Richard Baris of Big Data Poll who noted something funny about Biden’s numbers in the cities, how it lagged behind Clinton’s numbers, but shot off to the moon in these four cities. Just take a look at the states in which these cities are located as well:

How curious that, as Baris notes, “Trump won the largest non-white vote share for a Republican presidential candidate in 60 years. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”

Robert Barnes, the foremost election analyst, observes in these “big cities in swing states run by Democrats…the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.”

Trump’s victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were on target until, in the middle of the night, counting was arbitrarily halted. Miraculously, several hundred thousand votes – all for Biden – were mysteriously ‘found’; Trump’s real leads subsequently vanished.

The protracted, eventual outcome will determine the contemporary relevance of Stalin’s observation. No matter who wins, most pollsters already have lost their credibility and influence.

3..Sidney Powell: ‘We’re Fixing to Overturn the Election Results’ with New Evidence. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Attorney Sidney Powell on “Sunday Morning Futures” said Trump’s legal team is gathering evidence of “election fraud” that allegedly took place in election-related software, like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. As it currently stands, Dominion is being utilized in 2,000 jurisdictions in 30 states. Texas decided not to use Dominion on three separate occasions because of fraud concerns.

According to Powell, the Trump campaign has enough evidence to launch a serious criminal investigation.

“We’re fixing to overturn the election results in multiple states and President Trump won by not just hundreds of thousands of votes but my millions of votes that were shifted by this software that was designed expressly for that purpose,” Powell explained. “We have sworn witness testimony about why the software was designed. It was designed to rig elections.”

According to Powell, the witness that the Trump team has is someone who has seen elections rigged in other countries. Those same tactics and software were allegedly deployed to the United States.

“They did this on purpose. It was calculated. They’ve done it before,” she said. “We have evidence of 2016 in California. We have so much evidence I feel like it’s coming in through a fire hose.”

Is that light the end of the tunnel or an oncoming train?

Background from Previous Post Election Skimming Program Detected

Dr.SHIVA LIVE: MIT PhD Analysis of Michigan Votes Reveals Unfortunate Truth of U.S. Voting Systems

MIT professor Dr. Shiva and colleagues discovered a pattern in Michigan voter data whereby tens of thousands of Trump votes were taken away and added to Biden totals.  As the video describes the program was designed to skim more votes away from large pools of Trump votes and avoid small pools, in order to be less noticeable.  The proportion of straight ticket Republican voters serves as the indicator of precincts where larger numbers of Trump only votes can be switched to Biden only votes (only refers to a vote not part of a party line ballot.  The linear relationship is quite striking and abnormal.  The more voters in a precinct voted Republican party line, the more Trump only votes in that precinct were taken away.

From Jo Nova website:

A “Transistor Function” algorithm has been used to alter voting patterns in Michigan. It has a “Weighted Race” feature.

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, an MIT engineer and Fulbright Scholar, with Phil Evans B.S.E.E. and Benny Smith (election commissioner and data analyst) have back-analyzed the pattern of voting in Michigan and figured out the electronic algorithm used to alter votes. Voting patterns are distorted in a way that can only be explained by a linear transformation (an algebraic equation) and he can approximate that equation and slope of the line. This means he can calculate how many votes were flipped and he does, and it’s massive.

This one form of fraud alone is enough to flip the election to Biden. That’s without all the postal vote backdating, the dead people voting, the out of state votes, the discarded ballots, the crooked media coverups, the pollsters fakery and the Pfizer hiding of the Covid Vaccine news. Trump won the election despite all the other trickery. If there had been real media coverage, honest vaccine headlines, exposure of Hunter Biden and honest polling the election probably could have been called by 8pm on Election day.

The action analysis starts at 13:30 minutes.

In disconcerting news, votes are stored as a decimal fraction. They are not even trying to record votes as whole numbers, as individual choices.

The dashed orange line should be a flat line, instead the downward slope “cuts in” and votes are increasingly distorted in precincts where more Republicans vote.  The ratio depends on the percentage of Republican voters in a precinct. The more Republicans there are, the more likely they are to abandon Trump and vote a Biden-then-Republican ticket.

The slope of that line is “too perfect” — it’s almost perfectly linear. The transistor effect kicks in and shows that the same algorithm was used in different counties across all precincts. The pattern is non-random. Even if you wanted to believe that Rep voters were tired of Trump it would not happen in a perfect line that depended on the number of Rep voters around you. (45 mins.)

Update Nov. 13, 2020


Paul Sperry writes at RealClearInvestigations, Pro-Biden Bug Also Suspected in Georgia’s Vote-Counting Software. Excepts in italics with my bolds.

A curious thing happened as Fulton County, Ga., election officials counted mail-in ballots at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena in the days after the election. In the early hours of Nov. 5, a surge of some 20,000 mail-in votes suddenly appeared for Joe Biden, while approximately 1,000 votes for President Trump mysteriously disappeared from his own totals in the critical swing state, where Biden holds a razor-thin lead.

A poll watcher noticed the suspicious shift in votes while monitoring the interim election results on the Georgia secretary of state website.

“I concluded from looking at these results that this was an irregularity, since there was no obvious reason for President Trump’s totals to have decreased while former Vice President Biden’s totals increased dramatically,” Voter GA co-founder Garland Favorito swore in an affidavit he filed this week with the secretary of state’s office.

Favorito suspects a variety of factors, including that votes were “artificially inflated” for Biden while using the same Dominion Voting system used by Antrim County, Mich., which erroneously transferred 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden. Last year, Georgia contracted with Dominion to automate vote tabulations in all 159 of its counties.

“The software appears to have thrown votes from Trump to Biden here too,” he said in a RealClearInvestigations interview. “Or Biden ballots were manufactured.”

The large disparity of gains between the two candidates “was something I had never witnessed before in my years of election monitoring,” said Favorito, a career IT professional who has been a leading advocate for election integrity in the state over the past two decades. He says he is not a Republican or Trump supporter.

On Nov. 10, Favorito sent his affidavit to Georgia Secretary of State recommending a full, by-hand ballot recount. The next day, his office announced it will conduct such an audit for the presidential race. Biden currently leads Trump by more than 14,000 votes in the state.

In addition to helping certify the presidential race, he said it’s imperative investigators identify the source of the irregularities before the state holds its two U.S. Senate run-off elections on Jan. 5 so they don’t repeat themselves.

But Favorito, who lives in the Atlanta area, said the Fulton County shift was so dramatic it seemed as if someone had “dumped” a huge batch of mail-in ballots for Biden into the system overnight.  “One candidate could not go up by 20,000 and the other do nothing — in Fulton County or any county in Georgia,” he asserted. “That’s just not going to happen.”

Added Favorito: “I think they’re going to find the root cause of the irregularity was something electronic, and I think it’s going to change the results substantially.”

“They knew good and well they should never have bought this system in the first place,” he said. “We explained that Dominion was rejected in Texas for failing to meet basic security standards before they bought it.”

Favorito suspects similar surges in Biden ballots may have taken place during the counting of mail-in ballots on other nights, including Election Night. On Nov. 3, Fulton County elections officials informed observers that they were shutting down the tabulation center before midnight, only to continue counting throughout the night while no one was watching.

“Fulton County elections officials falsely announced that the counting of ballots would stop at 10:30 p.m.,” Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer complained in a recent Tweet. “Officials unlawfully resumed the counting of ballots after our observers left the center.”

Favorito fears that what he observed on Nov. 5 was not an isolated incident. “There could have been multiple 20,000-batch irregularities,” he said, “but they never got reported because they cleared out the observers.”

He does not rule out “ballot harvesting” as the culprit behind the sudden surges of mail-in votes for Biden.

He said the hundreds of drop boxes Raffensperger agreed to distribute at shopping centers and other cities throughout the state may have encouraged third parties to collect ballots in the name of other voters and stuff them into the boxes, which is illegal.

“That’s just begging for fraud,” Favorito said.

Kimberley A. Strassel writes at Wall Street Journal Harvesting the 2020 Election  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Pelosi’s top priority was remaking the electoral system. The virus gave her a boost.

Democrats grandly named their bill the For The People Act, but conservatives had better titles. This page called it the “Majority Preservation Act,” while the editors at National Review described it as an “Unconstitutional, Authoritarian Power Grab.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the bill as a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party,” and dubbed it the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”

Mrs. Pelosi’s bill didn’t become law, despite her attempts this year to jam some of its provisions into coronavirus bills. But it turns out she didn’t really need it. Using the virus as an excuse, Democratic and liberal groups brought scores of lawsuits to force states to adopt its provisions. Many Democratic politicians and courts happily agreed. States mailed out ballots to everyone. Judges disregarded statutory deadlines for receipt of votes. They scrapped absentee-ballot witness requirements. States set up curbside voting and drop-off boxes. They signed off on ballot harvesting.

Meaning, “the fix” (as it were) was in well before anyone started counting votes. Pollsters aside, political operatives understood this election would be close—potentially closer in key states than it was in 2016. The Democratic strategy from the start, as evidenced by that legal onslaught, was to get rules in place that would allow them to flood the zone with additional mail-in ballots.

And of course there was harvesting—as these pages warned. This isn’t a new practice; candidates and campaigns have been honing it for years. Three years ago, the Palm Beach Post ran an expose on the practice in Florida. A North Carolina congressional race in 2018 was roiled by a ballot-harvesting operation, and a new election was ordered. This year simply offered the perfect environment to roll it out at new levels, and throughout the fall conservative groups were documenting examples.

Yet the beauty of ballot harvesting is that it is nearly impossible to prove fraud.

How many harvesters offered to deliver votes, only to throw away inconvenient ones? How many voters were pushed or cajoled, or even paid—or had a ballot filled and returned for them without their knowledge? And this is before questions of what other mischief went on amid millions of mailed ballots (which went to wrong addresses or deceased people) and reduced voter verification rules. As the Heritage Foundation’s election expert Hans von Spakovsky has explained, mail-in voting is the “single worst form of election possible” because “it moves the entire election beyond the oversight of election officials.”

Case in Point:  Erie, Pennsylvania

Bankers Should Mind Their Own Business, not the Climate

Posted on by Ron Clutz

John H. Cochrane writes at the Hoover Institution Central Banks and Climate: A Case of Mission Creep.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The following is adapted from John H. Cochrane’s remarks at the European Central Bank’s Conference on Monetary Policy: Bridging Science and Practice. His full presentation about the challenges facing central banks is here.

Central banks are rushing headlong into climate policy. This is a mistake. It will destroy central banks’ independence, their ability to fulfill their main missions to control inflation and stem financial crises, and people’s faith in their impartiality and technical competence. And it won’t help the climate.

In making this argument, I do not claim that climate change is fake or unimportant. None of the following comments reflect any argument with scientific fact. (I favor a uniform carbon tax in return for essentially no regulation, but this essay is not about carbon policy.)

The question is whether the European Central Bank (ECB), other central banks, or international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development should appoint themselves to take on climate policy—or other important social, environmental, or political causes—without a clear mandate to do so from politically accountable leaders.

The Western world faces a crisis of trust in our institutions, a crisis fed by a not-inaccurate perception that the elites who run such institutions don’t know what they are doing, are politicized, and are going beyond the authority granted by accountable representatives.

Trust and independence must be earned by evident competence and institutional restraint. Yet central banks, not obviously competent to target inflation with interest rates; floundering to stop financial crisis by means other than wanton bailouts; and still not addressing obvious risks lying ahead; now want to be trusted to determine and implement their own climate change policy? (And next, likely, taking on inequality and social justice?)

We don’t want the agency that delivers drinking water to make a list of socially and environmentally favored businesses and start turning off the water to disfavored companies. Nor should central banks. They should provide liquidity, period.

But a popular movement wants all institutions of society to jump into the social and political goals of the moment, regardless of boring legalities. Those constraints, of course, are essential for a functioning democratic society, for functioning independent technocratic institutions, and incidentally for making durable progress on those same important social and political goals.

It’s Not About Risk

The European Central Bank and other institutions are not just embarking on climate policy in general. They are embarking on the enforcement of one particular set of climate policies—policies to force banks and private companies to defund fossil fuel industries, even while alternatives are not available at scale, and to provide subsidized funding to an ill-defined set of “green” projects.

Let me quote from ECB executive board member Isabel Schnabel’s recent speech. I don’t mean to pick on her, but she expresses the climate agenda very well, and her speech bears the ECB imprimatur. She recommends that

“[f]irst, as prudential supervisor, we have an obligation to protect the safety and soundness of the banking sector. This includes making sure that banks properly assess the risks from carbon-intensive exposures. . .”

Let me point out the unclothed emperor: climate change does not pose any financial risk at the one-, five-, or even ten-year horizon at which one can conceivably assess the risk to bank assets. Repeating the contrary in speeches does not make it so.

Risk means variance, unforeseen events. We know exactly where the climate is going in the next five to ten years. Hurricanes and floods, though influenced by climate change, are well modeled for the next five to ten years. Advanced economies and financial systems are remarkably impervious to weather. Relative market demand for fossil vs. alternative energy is as easy or hard to forecast as anything else in the economy. Exxon bonds are factually safer, financially, than Tesla bonds, and easier to value.

The main risk to fossil fuel companies is that regulators will destroy them, as the ECB proposes to do, a risk regulators themselves control. And political risk is a standard part of bond valuation.

That banks are risky because of exposure to carbon-emitting companies; that carbon-emitting company debt is financially risky because of unexpected changes in climate, in ways that conventional risk measures do not capture; that banks need to be regulated away from that exposure because of risk to the financial system—all this is nonsense. (And even if it were not nonsense, regulating bank liabilities away from short term debt and towards more equity would be a more effective solution to the financial problem.)

Next, we contemplate a pervasive regime essentially of shame, boycott, divest, and sanction

“[to] link the eligibility of securities . . . as collateral in our refinancing operations to the disclosure regime of the issuing firms.”

We know where “disclosure” leads. Now all companies that issue debt will be pressured to cut off disparaged investments and make whatever “green” investments the ECB is blessing.

Last, the ECB is urged to print money directly to fund green projects:

“We should also consider reassessing the benchmark allocation of our private asset purchase programs. In the presence of market failures . . . the market by itself is not achieving efficient outcomes.”

Now you may say, “Climate is a crisis. Central banks must pitch in and help the cause. They should just tell banks to stop lending to the evil fossil fuel companies, and print money and hand it out to worthy green projects.”

But central banks are not allowed to do this, and for very good reasons.

A central bank in a democracy is not an all-purpose do-good agency, with authority to subsidize what it decides to be worthy, defund what it dislikes, and force banks and companies to do the same. A central bank, whose leaders do not regularly face voters, lives by an iron contract: freedom and independence so long as it stays within its limited and mandated powers.

The ECB in particular lives by a particularly delineated and limited mandate. For very good reasons, the ECB was not set up to decide which industries or regions need subsidizing and which should be scaled back, to direct bank investment across Europe, to set the price of bonds, or to print money to subsidize direct lending. These are intensely political acts. In a democracy, only elected representatives can take or commission such intensely political activities. If I take out the words “green,” the EU member states, and EU voters, would properly react with shock and outrage at this proposal. If the ECB bought different countries’ bonds at different prices and in different quantities to reward those making greater progress on “green” policy implementation, there would likely be an outcry.

That’s why this movement goes through the convolutions of pretending that defunding fossil fuels and subsidizing green projects—however desirable—has something to do with systemic risk, which it patently does not.

That’s why one must pretend to diagnose “market failures” to justify buying bonds at too high prices. By what objective measure are green bonds “mispriced” and markets “failing”? Why only green bonds? The ECB does not scan all asset markets for “mispriced” securities to buy and sell after determining the “right” prices.

Who Gets the Green Light?

At face value, “carbon emitting” does not mean just fossil fuel companies but cement manufacturers, aluminum producers, construction, agriculture, transport, and everything else. Will the carbon risk and defunding project really extend that far, in any sort of honest quantitative way? Or is “carbon emitting” just code for hounding the politically unpopular fossil fuel companies?

In the disclosure and bond buying project, who will decide what is a green project? Already, cost-benefit analysis—euros spent per ton of carbon, per degrees of temperature reduced, per euros of GDP increased—is lacking. By what process will the ECB avoid past follies such as switchgrass biofuel, corn ethanol, and high-speed trains to nowhere? How will it allow politically unpopular projects such as nuclear power, carbon capture, natural gas via fracking, residential zoning reform, and geoengineering ventures—which all, undeniably, scientifically, lower carbon and global temperatures—as well as adaptation projects that undeniably, scientifically, lower the impact on GDP? Well, clearly it won’t.

The ECB is embarking on one specific kind of green policy, popular at the cocktail parties at Davos, but having little to do with cost-benefit analysis or science of climate policy.

In sum, where is the analysis for this program? I challenge the ECB to calculate how many degrees this bond buying plan would lower global temperatures, and how much it would raise GDP by the year 2100, in any transparent, verifiable, and credible way. Never mind the costs for now: where are the benefits?

And how would the ECB resist political pressure to subsidize all sorts of boondoggles? If the central bank does not have and disclose neutral technical competence at making this sort of calculation, the project will be perceived as simply made-up numbers to advance a political cause. All of the central bank’s activities will then be tainted by association.

This will end badly. Not because these policies are wrong, but because they are intensely political, and they make a mockery of the central bank’s limited mandates.

If this continues, the next ECB presidential appointment will be all about climate policy: who gets the subsidized green lending, who is defunded, what the next set of causes is to be, and not interest rates and financial stability. Board appointments will become champions for each country’s desired subsidies. Countries and industries that lose out will object. This is exactly the sort of institutional aggrandizement that prompted Brexit.

If the ECB crosses this second Rubicon—buying sovereign and corporate debt was the first—be ready for more. The IMF is already pushing redistribution. The US Federal Reserve, though it has so far stayed away from climate policy, is rushing into “inclusive” employment and racial justice. There are many problems in the world. Once you start trying to shape climate policy, and so obviously break all the rules to do it, how can you resist the clamor to defund, disclose, and subsidize the rest? How will you resist demands to take up regional development, prop up dying industries, subsidize politicians’ pet projects, and all the other sins that the ECB is explicitly enjoined from committing?

A central bank that so blatantly breaks its mandates must lose its independence, its authority, and people’s trust in its objectivity and technical competence to fight inflation and deflation, regulate banks, and stop financial crises.

A Narrow Role, and Essential

Working for a central bank is a bit boring. One may feel a longing to do something that feels more important, that helps the world in its big causes. One may feel longing for the approval of the Davos smart set. Why does Greta Thunberg get all the attention? But a central bank is not the Gates Foundation, which can spend its money any way it likes. This is taxpayers’ money, and regulations use force to transfer wealth between very unwilling people. A central bank is a government agency, and central bankers are public servants, just like the people who run the DMV.

Central banks must be competent, trusted, narrow, independent, and boring. A good strategy review will refocus central banks on their core narrow mission and let the other institutions of society address big political causes. Boring as that may be.

See also:  Financiers Failed Us: Focused on Fake Crisis

 

 

Election Skimming Program Detected

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Update Nov. 13, 2020 at the End

Dr.SHIVA LIVE: MIT PhD Analysis of Michigan Votes Reveals Unfortunate Truth of U.S. Voting Systems

MIT professor Dr. Shiva and colleagues discovered a pattern in Michigan voter data whereby tens of thousands of Trump votes were taken away and added to Biden totals.  As the video describes the program was designed to skim more votes away from large pools of Trump votes and avoid small pools, in order to be less noticeable.  The proportion of straight ticket Republican voters serves as the indicator of precincts where larger numbers of Trump only votes can be switched to Biden only votes (only refers to a vote not part of a party line ballot.  The linear relationship is quite striking and abnormal.  The more voters in a precinct voted Republican party line, the more Trump only votes in that precinct were taken away.

From Jo Nova website:

A “Transistor Function” algorithm has been used to alter voting patterns in Michigan. It has a “Weighted Race” feature.

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, an MIT engineer and Fulbright Scholar, with Phil Evans B.S.E.E. and Benny Smith (election commissioner and data analyst) have back-analyzed the pattern of voting in Michigan and figured out the electronic algorithm used to alter votes. Voting patterns are distorted in a way that can only be explained by a linear transformation (an algebraic equation) and he can approximate that equation and slope of the line. This means he can calculate how many votes were flipped and he does, and it’s massive.

This one form of fraud alone is enough to flip the election to Biden. That’s without all the postal vote backdating, the dead people voting, the out of state votes, the discarded ballots, the crooked media coverups, the pollsters fakery and the Pfizer hiding of the Covid Vaccine news. Trump won the election despite all the other trickery. If there had been real media coverage, honest vaccine headlines, exposure of Hunter Biden and honest polling the election probably could have been called by 8pm on Election day.

The action analysis starts at 13:30 minutes.

In disconcerting news, votes are stored as a decimal fraction. They are not even trying to record votes as whole numbers, as individual choices.

The dashed orange line should be a flat line, instead the downward slope “cuts in” and votes are increasingly distorted in precincts where more Republicans vote.  The ratio depends on the percentage of Republican voters in a precinct. The more Republicans there are, the more likely they are to abandon Trump and vote a Biden-then-Republican ticket.

The slope of that line is “too perfect” — it’s almost perfectly linear. The transistor effect kicks in and shows that the same algorithm was used in different counties across all precincts. The pattern is non-random. Even if you wanted to believe that Rep voters were tired of Trump it would not happen in a perfect line that depended on the number of Rep voters around you. (45 mins.)

Update Nov. 13, 2020


Paul Sperry writes at RealClearInvestigations, Pro-Biden Bug Also Suspected in Georgia’s Vote-Counting Software. Excepts in italics with my bolds.

A curious thing happened as Fulton County, Ga., election officials counted mail-in ballots at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena in the days after the election. In the early hours of Nov. 5, a surge of some 20,000 mail-in votes suddenly appeared for Joe Biden, while approximately 1,000 votes for President Trump mysteriously disappeared from his own totals in the critical swing state, where Biden holds a razor-thin lead.

A poll watcher noticed the suspicious shift in votes while monitoring the interim election results on the Georgia secretary of state website.

“I concluded from looking at these results that this was an irregularity, since there was no obvious reason for President Trump’s totals to have decreased while former Vice President Biden’s totals increased dramatically,” Voter GA co-founder Garland Favorito swore in an affidavit he filed this week with the secretary of state’s office.

Favorito suspects a variety of factors, including that votes were “artificially inflated” for Biden while using the same Dominion Voting system used by Antrim County, Mich., which erroneously transferred 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden. Last year, Georgia contracted with Dominion to automate vote tabulations in all 159 of its counties.

“The software appears to have thrown votes from Trump to Biden here too,” he said in a RealClearInvestigations interview. “Or Biden ballots were manufactured.”

The large disparity of gains between the two candidates “was something I had never witnessed before in my years of election monitoring,” said Favorito, a career IT professional who has been a leading advocate for election integrity in the state over the past two decades. He says he is not a Republican or Trump supporter.

On Nov. 10, Favorito sent his affidavit to Georgia Secretary of State recommending a full, by-hand ballot recount. The next day, his office announced it will conduct such an audit for the presidential race. Biden currently leads Trump by more than 14,000 votes in the state.

In addition to helping certify the presidential race, he said it’s imperative investigators identify the source of the irregularities before the state holds its two U.S. Senate run-off elections on Jan. 5 so they don’t repeat themselves.

But Favorito, who lives in the Atlanta area, said the Fulton County shift was so dramatic it seemed as if someone had “dumped” a huge batch of mail-in ballots for Biden into the system overnight.  “One candidate could not go up by 20,000 and the other do nothing — in Fulton County or any county in Georgia,” he asserted. “That’s just not going to happen.”

Added Favorito: “I think they’re going to find the root cause of the irregularity was something electronic, and I think it’s going to change the results substantially.”

“They knew good and well they should never have bought this system in the first place,” he said. “We explained that Dominion was rejected in Texas for failing to meet basic security standards before they bought it.”

Favorito suspects similar surges in Biden ballots may have taken place during the counting of mail-in ballots on other nights, including Election Night. On Nov. 3, Fulton County elections officials informed observers that they were shutting down the tabulation center before midnight, only to continue counting throughout the night while no one was watching.

“Fulton County elections officials falsely announced that the counting of ballots would stop at 10:30 p.m.,” Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer complained in a recent Tweet. “Officials unlawfully resumed the counting of ballots after our observers left the center.”

Favorito fears that what he observed on Nov. 5 was not an isolated incident. “There could have been multiple 20,000-batch irregularities,” he said, “but they never got reported because they cleared out the observers.”

He does not rule out “ballot harvesting” as the culprit behind the sudden surges of mail-in votes for Biden.

He said the hundreds of drop boxes Raffensperger agreed to distribute at shopping centers and other cities throughout the state may have encouraged third parties to collect ballots in the name of other voters and stuff them into the boxes, which is illegal.

“That’s just begging for fraud,” Favorito said.

Kimberley A. Strassel writes at Wall Street Journal Harvesting the 2020 Election  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Pelosi’s top priority was remaking the electoral system. The virus gave her a boost.

Democrats grandly named their bill the For The People Act, but conservatives had better titles. This page called it the “Majority Preservation Act,” while the editors at National Review described it as an “Unconstitutional, Authoritarian Power Grab.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the bill as a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party,” and dubbed it the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”

Mrs. Pelosi’s bill didn’t become law, despite her attempts this year to jam some of its provisions into coronavirus bills. But it turns out she didn’t really need it. Using the virus as an excuse, Democratic and liberal groups brought scores of lawsuits to force states to adopt its provisions. Many Democratic politicians and courts happily agreed. States mailed out ballots to everyone. Judges disregarded statutory deadlines for receipt of votes. They scrapped absentee-ballot witness requirements. States set up curbside voting and drop-off boxes. They signed off on ballot harvesting.

Meaning, “the fix” (as it were) was in well before anyone started counting votes. Pollsters aside, political operatives understood this election would be close—potentially closer in key states than it was in 2016. The Democratic strategy from the start, as evidenced by that legal onslaught, was to get rules in place that would allow them to flood the zone with additional mail-in ballots.

And of course there was harvesting—as these pages warned. This isn’t a new practice; candidates and campaigns have been honing it for years. Three years ago, the Palm Beach Post ran an expose on the practice in Florida. A North Carolina congressional race in 2018 was roiled by a ballot-harvesting operation, and a new election was ordered. This year simply offered the perfect environment to roll it out at new levels, and throughout the fall conservative groups were documenting examples.

Yet the beauty of ballot harvesting is that it is nearly impossible to prove fraud.

How many harvesters offered to deliver votes, only to throw away inconvenient ones? How many voters were pushed or cajoled, or even paid—or had a ballot filled and returned for them without their knowledge? And this is before questions of what other mischief went on amid millions of mailed ballots (which went to wrong addresses or deceased people) and reduced voter verification rules. As the Heritage Foundation’s election expert Hans von Spakovsky has explained, mail-in voting is the “single worst form of election possible” because “it moves the entire election beyond the oversight of election officials.”

Case in Point:  Erie, Pennsylvania

The Odds Against Biden

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Steve Cortes writes at the National Pulse The Statistical Case Against Biden’s Win.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Statistics continue to cast real doubt on the probability of a President Trump loss in the election.

The statistical case is, admittedly, circumstantial rather than conclusive.

But the numbers also firmly point to the intense improbability of the accuracy of the present Biden lead. The statistical case provides more than enough reasonable suspicion to require hand recounts and immediate investigation into fraudulent activities, including the new damning revelations of on-the-record whistleblowers.

There are four key elements to the numerical thesis:

1. TURNOUT

Clearly, high turnout was expected in an intensely political year with vastly expanded access to mail-in voting. But the kinds of numbers reported simply defy reasonable expectations.

For Wisconsin overall, the turnout was above 90% of registered voters. Even in a state with same-day registration, such a number seems implausible.  After all, in Australia, a place where voting is mandatory, and failing to vote is punishable with stiff fines, the total turnout for the most recent election was still only 92%.

Even more importantly, looking within the Wisconsin vote, the decisive locale for Biden was, unsurprisingly, Milwaukee. Wisconsin’s largest city reported an 84% turnout to secure a 145,916 vote lead there for Biden.  Consider a comparison to another very similar Midwestern city, Cleveland, OH. Milwaukee has a population of 590,000, 67% of them minorities. Cleveland has 381,000 people with 60% of them minorities.

But Milwaukee’s 84% turnout dwarfs Cleveland’s more believable 51% turnout rate. Like many of the suspect statistical trends evident from last Tuesday, the abnormal factors favoring Biden seem only present in the key swing states that Biden allegedly won.

2. OUTPERFORMANCE VS. OBAMA

The breakouts higher for Biden relative to Obama’s performances in key areas simply do not seem credible.  Could a candidate as doddering and lazy as Biden really have massively outpaced the vote totals of a politician who boasted rock star appeal?

For example, consider that in key Pennsylvania counties of Chester, Cumberland, and Montgomery, Biden bested the Obama election performances by factors of 1.24-1.43 times. For Montgomery County, Obama won this swing county by 59,000 votes in his 2012 re-election. But in 2020, Biden won Montgomery County by a whopping 131,000 votes, more than twice the prior Obama margin.

Biden’s 2020 total vote in Montgomery is reported at 313,000, crushing Obama’s 233,000 take in 2012 – and population growth does not explain the gains, as the county only grew by 22,000 residents during those eight years.  Such eye-popping outperformance vs.Obama, in just the right places, naturally raises a lot of suspicion.

3. BIDEN-ONLY BALLOTS

Trump campaign legal counsel Sidney Powell reports that, nationwide, over 450,000 Biden-only ballots were cast, meaning the voter allegedly selected Biden but then neglected down-ballot candidates, including closely-contested Senate and House races.  Again, this phenomenon appears far more prominently in battleground states, raising the alarm for manipulation. Why would so many people vote Biden–only in battleground Georgia, but not in deeply-red Wyoming, for instance?

In the Peach State, President Trump’s vote total almost exactly tracked the vote totals for the Republican senate candidates, separated by merely 818 votes out of 2.43 million votes Trump earned there. But, Joe Biden saw an astounding surplus of 95,801 votes over the Democratic Senate candidates.

By comparison, in Wyoming Biden only registered a surplus “Biden-only” take of just 725 votes over the Democratic Senate candidate there, or about 1/4th his take in in Georgia, on a percentage basis. The Biden-only ballots do not conclusively prove fraud, but they sure reek of something very amiss.

4. ABSENCE OF MAIL-IN VOTE VETTING

Democratic governors clamored for massive amounts of mail-in voting, knowing full well that most states would become overwhelmed and wholly unable to establish the validity and legality of almost all the votes that poured in via mail.

In the case of Pennsylvania, Governor Wolf made such changes unilaterally, in stark violation of Pennsylvania law and in contradiction of the clear US Constitutional assignment of voting regulatory authority to state legislatures, not governors. Governor Wolf’s election boards clearly just accepted the ballots… en masse, without appropriate vetting. 

By their own admission, the scant 0.03% of rejected ballots represents a refusal rate that is just 1/30th the level of 2016 in Pennsylvania.  First-time mail-in voters typically see a rejection rate of about 3% historically, or 100 times the rejection rate of Pennsylvania in 2020.

When neighboring New York state moved to widespread mail-in voting this summer, their election officials rejected 21% of mailed ballots in June, representing a rate 700 times higher than Pennsylvania’s. This total lack of filtering or controls raises enormous suspicion regarding a seriously-tainted ballot pool in the Keystone State.

RIGGED?

The statistical case, in isolation, does not prove fraud. But the confluence of highly unlikely results does, emphatically, paint of picture of utter improbability.

Any one of these four factors alone would cast intense doubt upon election results.

Put all four together, and the result is a seemingly impossible statistical perfect storm.

To use a sports analogy, it would be a team pitching a perfect game in the World Series.

Not one game, nor two…but in all four games to “sweep” via pitching perfection.

Is it possible?  Theoretically, sure. Is it probable?

Hell no – and so, we must commence with a vigorous audit as the future of our republic hangs in the balance.

Election Up for Grabs

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Johnathon Turley explains the election process at The Hill America should welcome review for close counts. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

We are finishing only the second of four stages in an election for president. After the voting stage, states began the tabulation stage. We will soon enter the canvass stage, in which local districts confirm their counts and face challenges or recounts. Finally, there is the certification stage, in which final challenges can be raised. In other words, Trump is not deceased yet. Biden has reason to claim his lead as the odds are heavily against Trump. One or two states could flip on a “Hail Mary” challenge. But Trump needs four of those to win in a feat that would hyperventilate Aaron Rogers.

[My Comment: Most of the mass media and all of social media actively campaigned for the Biden-Harris ticket so their declarations of victory are the same as those from the candidates themselves.  With so many states heading for recounts and scrutiny of irregularities, the outcome is not yet determined.  After four years of fake news burying and hiding real news, we now have the challenge to sort between fake votes and real votes.

Nor is Trump “unclassy” for not conceding at this point. Democrats and all Americans were surprised the newspapers of record got it wrong in 1948 when Truman prevailed after all four stages of the election.  Nor did Al Gore give up in 2000.  It took 36 days and went all the way to the Supreme Court.  He lost when a crooked election supervisor in Palm Beach county of Florida was found guilty of favoring the Democrat by voiding Bush votes.  As well thousands of military ballots, which favored Bush by a roughly 2-1 margin, were arbitrarily excluded.]

I think he’s referring to “DQ”, meaning DisQualified.

Yet the public should welcome close scrutiny of these swing states. There are valid reasons to examine the figures based on the many unknowns in a new kind of election. The outcome will be determined by millions of mailed ballots in various states, some of which have never used such mailed ballots to this magnitude, and legitimate concerns were raised before the election.

States used rolls that are notoriously out of date and inaccurate. Some changed rules governing signature authentication or are accused of reducing the discrimination levels for machine authentication. In Nevada, the Trump campaign alleged that thousands of votes were cast from out of state and ballots were sent to dead voters. We cannot judge the merits of these claims until we see the evidence. It is difficult to see any problems without greater access to the ballots and the records of tabulation.

Just as some of us remain skeptical of such claims of fraud, it seems as implausible that this untested form of voting was used across the country without major glitches. Officials in cities like Detroit and Philadelphia with histories of election violations said the counts of mailed ballots were almost flawless, a claim difficult to rebut without review.

We need a review of counts in critical states to resolve a crisis of faith. A recent survey found that almost half of Americans lack confidence their ballots will be counted fairly. A Harvard study also found that only half of young black voters believe their ballots are even counted.

This lack of faith in the electoral process has been fueled by the shift to mailed ballots but builds on growing distrust of our political system.

Desire for Power Hiding Behind Health and Climate Concerns

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Theodore Dalrymple writes at Epoch Times The Desire for Power Hiding Behind Health and Climate Concerns.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

There is a threat of creeping totalitarianism in western societies that comes from health and climate activists. Who (except unfeeling monsters) could possibly be against the saving of human life or the preservation of the planet from future catastrophe? Often the two strands of redemptive enthusiasm go together: after all, environmental degradation is hardly good for health.

Since almost all human activities have health or environmental consequences, especially bad ones, it follows that those who want to preserve either human health or the environment, or both, have an almost infinitely expansible justification for interfering in our lives, indeed they have it to the nth degree.

These days, much medical research that is published in the general medical journals such as the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine is epidemiological rather than experimental.

It finds associations between factor a (shall we say, the consumption of bananas) and illness x (shall we say, Alzheimer’s disease).

Once an association is found that is unlikely to have arisen by chance (unlikely, that is, but not impossible), an hypothesis is put forward as to why the eating of bananas should conduce to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Before long, the statistical association and its alleged explanation leaks out into the press or social media, and people start to be afraid of bananas. The more enthusiastic and less sceptical of the epidemiologists begin to call for banana controls: anti-banana propaganda, extra taxes on bananas, no bananas on sale within a hundred yards of anywhere there might be a child, and so on.

And of course, a reduction in the demand for bananas will assist those tropical countries large parts of which are given over to environmentally-degrading banana monoculture. Banana republics are not called bananas republics for nothing.

Often in the medical literature, the statistical associations are weak: someone who consumes a is, say, 1.2 times more likely to develop disease x than someone who does not. This is described as being a statistically significant increase in risk, but it is not significant in any other humanly important way, especially where the initial risk of contracting the disease is very low in any case. These caveats are often, even usually, missing from not only the scientific literature itself, but from the reports of it that filter into the general public’s awareness.

Not infrequently, sweeping policy changes are proposed on the basis of weak evidence which not only is likely to be superseded in time by new research (though dietary recommendations for the most part they are not very different from those recommended by physicians such as Dr. George Cheyne in the first half of the eighteenth century), but which fail to take into account that health, while an important consideration, is not an all-important consideration, and sometimes must be balanced against others.

For example, it would be easy to reduce the fatal road accident rate to zero by forbidding everyone to leave his house, but this might not be a wise prohibition. Sport is one of the most frequent causes of injury in the western world, yet sport is encouraged because of its other (alleged) benefits.

Good Intentions a Smokescreen

Supposed good intentions are often a smokescreen for an almost sadistic desire to exercise power, or at least influence. A writer of editorials for the influential British newspaper, the Observer, Sonia Sodha, has suggested, for example, that meat should be rationed. She suggests such a measure not because there is a shortage of meat, but because the environmental cost of producing it is too great.

She opposes a tax on it to lower consumption because raising the price would affect the poor more than the rich. The only other solution is to ration it, so that everyone has access to an equal, but small, quantity.

The author is honest enough to admit that she is a hypocrite in the sense that, while she strongly believes meat consumption should decrease in order to save the planet, she will continue to eat it in her accustomed quantities so long as it is available to her. She needs a dictator to get her to do the right thing.

The really striking thing in her article is that she does not consider the kind of apparatus that would be necessary to ration a commodity such as meat. Someone would have to set the ration and many people would have to enforce it.

Evidently, she has never heard of or experienced black markets; nor does she seem to be aware that, where a bureaucracy allocates or distributes goods and services, especially when they are in short supply, privilege flourishes rather than withers.

Nor does she acknowledge that meat is far from the only commodity with a high environmental cost, and that the argument for the rationing of meat could be used for the rationing of many, if not most or even all, commodities.

What the author is proposing, then, implicitly or explicitly, is a kind of communism, in which an administrative class under the direction of an even smaller class of enlightened and informed individuals doles out to the populace what it thinks it ought to have—for its own ultimate good, of course.

The author is certainly intelligent enough to realize that this is the implication or corollary of what she writes (and, to do her justice, she writes very clearly), so one must conclude that a society in which a great deal, if not everything, is rationed first in the name of protecting the environment and second in the name of social justice is one that would be pleasing to her—at least to contemplate in the abstract, if not actually to live in.

That this drastic and very far-reaching scheme is based upon evidence that is itself far from rock-solid or indisputable would probably not worry her very much, because the end result (the theoretical end result, that is, not the end result in practice) is one which she desires a priori: in other words, first the policy, and then the evidence to justify it.

As it happens, more and more young people in western countries are turning to vegetarianism by means of persuasion. I have no objection to this; I think on balance that it is probably a good thing. But no giant state apparatus was necessary to bring this about. It is a change that has welled up from below, not imposed from the top down, and requires no corrupting means of coercion to enforce.

Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor. He is contributing editor of the City Journal of New York and the author of 30 books, including “Life at the Bottom.” His latest book is “Embargo and Other Stories.”

SCOTUS Goes Full Nanny State

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Seeking some comic relief from the US election fiasco, I turned to Babylon Bee and found this satirical piece skewering leftist fears about the US Supreme Court with ACB confirmed. (Just this week Pelosi declared that ACB is an “illegitimate” justice”.)  Give the BB writers credit for flipping leftist control-freak behavior into rulings constraining personal rights and freedoms, but in the opposite direction.

The article is Frightening: Here Are The 23 SCOTUS Decisions Handed Down Since ACB Was Sworn In.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Since Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court, she and the other judges have wasted no time in remaking America in their image. This is what we were warned about. In only two days, 23 landmark cases have been decided by the new conservative Supreme Court. God help us all.

  • United States v. Trump, 6-3 ruling — Determined that Trump has already won reelection
  • Walsh v. Dweedlestein, 5-4 ruling — We are to be a theocracy under God
  • United States v. Trump, 5-4 ruling — Trump is now the Galactic Emperor Of Man
  • Acosta v. Elisha, 9-0 ruling — All journalists shall be thrown into a pit with a she-bear
  • Gorka v. Kagan, 5-4 ruling — All justices must now wear MAGA hats
  • Subway v. Hebrew National, 6-3 ruling — A hotdog is now legally classified as a sandwich
  • Amazon v. Smith, 6-3 ruling — Die Hard is now legally classified as a Christmas movie
  • Gates v. Cook, 7-2 ruling — .GIF must now be pronounced with a hard “G”
  • American Airlines v. Moore, 6-3 ruling — The person in the middle seat of an airplane gets both armrests
  • Casey v. Brown, 6-3 ruling — Washing your feet in the shower is unconstitutional
  • United States v. West, 5-4 ruling — The dress is blue and black
  • United States v. Barrett, 6-3 ruling — All women must have at least 7 children
  • Papa Johns v. Tony’s, 5-4 ruling — All pizzas must now have pineapple on top
  • United States v. Silverman, 9-0 ruling — Annoying celebrity videos telling you to vote are now illegal
  • Bartolli v. Xanderatrix, 5-4 ruling — Single women are now limited to only 3 cats
  • Taco Bell v. Chad, 9-0 ruling — All Taco Bells must put the Crunchwrap back on the dollar menu
  • United States v. Trump, 5-4 ruling — Everyone must have a Christopher Columbus Statue in their yard
  • LaPierre v. Morgan, 6-3 ruling — Gun ownership is now mandatory
  • United States v. Crystal Marina, 9-0 ruling — Grants McConnell Protected Status as an endangered turtle
  • United States v. Trump, 6-3 ruling — All faces on Mt. Rushmore must now be replaced by Trump
  • Babylon Bee v. Facebook, 9-0 ruling — Babylon Bee no longer allowed to tell jokes about AOC
  • Burger King v. Carson, 5-4 ruling — “Impossible Meat” now illegal
  • Thomas v. Breyer, 8-1 ruling — In favor of stealing Justice Breyer’s milk money and shutting him in a locker

Amazing. Let’s see what they come up with next week!

There’s more:

Experts Call For 15 Days Of Counting To Flatten The Curve Of Votes For Trump

Fox News Calls Arizona For Biden After 1 Vote Counted

Miracle: Ballot Counter Turns 5 Biden Votes Into 5,000

 

Society in General

Stalin’s Wisdom

Image | Posted on by Ron Clutz

John Daniel Davidson writes at The Federalist Yes, Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election In Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

In the three Midwest battleground states, vote counting irregularities persist in an election that will be decided on razor-thin margins.

As of this writing, it appears that Democratic Party machines in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are trying to steal the election.

Something strange happened in the dead of the night. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, vote dumps early Wednesday morning showed 100 percent of the votes going for Biden and zero percent—that’s zero, so not even one vote—for Trump.

In Michigan, Biden somehow got 138,339 votes and Trump got none, zero, in an overnight vote-dump.

When my Federalist colleague Sean Davis noted this, Twitter was quick to censor his tweet, even though all he had done was compare two sets of vote totals on the New York Times website. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed—although on Wednesday it appeared that anyone who noted the Biden vote dump in Michigan was getting censored by Twitter.

It turns out, the vote dump was the result of an alleged typo, an extra zero that had been tacked onto Biden’s vote total in Shiawassee County, Michigan. It seems the error was discovered only because Davis and other Twitter users noted how insane and suspicious the vote totals looked, and demanded an investigation that uncovered what was either a typo or an incredibly clumsy attempt to boost Biden’s vote count.

There was also something suspicious about the vote reporting in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016. Initial vote totals there showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate, as plenty of journalists noted.

Then another mysterious all-Biden vote dump happened in Wisconsin. Biden miraculously overcame a 4.1-point Trump lead in the middle of the night thanks to vote dumps in which he got—you guessed it—100 percent of the votes and Trump got zero.

Unless election officials in Michigan and Wisconsin can explain the overnight vote-dumps and, in Michigan, the “typo” that appeared to benefit Biden, and Pennsylvania officials can explain their rationale for counting ballots with no postmark, the only possible conclusion one can come to right now is that Democrats are trying to steal the election in the Midwest.

Biden’s Bluff

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Clearly Biden and the Democrats have gone all in on the electability of the nominee.  The bluff is two-fold.

Something for Everyone

The first dimension is Biden as the blank slate on which a multitude of promises are bestowed.  Everyday there are announcements:

  • Biden’s climate plan has popular approval
  • Biden calls for end to violence in Nigeria
  • Biden has a pandemic plan unlike Trump
  • Biden will repeal Trump’s tax reform law.
  • Biden will be a better friend to Israel
  • Etc.

All of this energetic agenda riding on a geriatric man who puts a lid on public appearances many days.  It reminds of Thomas Sowell’s insight:

In reality, resources are limited, but there is no such constraint on promises. So everyone who wants the progressive agenda will get satisfaction:  open borders, health care for immigrants (legal or not), trillions of green energy $, educational debt forgiveness, racial reparations, police defunding, and so on.  Joe Biden will make all of this happen when elected.

Past Performance Doesn’t Count

The second part of the bluff is to pretend that he is not accountable for mistakes and shady behavior over his 43 years in public offices.  The current airing of his Ukraine bribery is just one of many cases where his family and cronies benefited by his governmental power.  Lee Smith explains at the Tablet: Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

To be clear, the charges against Hunter Biden are not Russian disinformation. The potentially dangerous ramifications of his work on behalf of an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian former official was first reported by The New York Times nearly five years ago. Joe Biden’s efforts to protect a foreign company employing his son that was under investigation by a foreign power were first reported by none other than Joe Biden when he boasted about it in front of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Indeed, the facts of the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine are all matters of public record. Shortly after protesters forced Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to flee Kyiv in February 2014, Vice President Biden was there on the ground. As the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, he was meeting with government officials, including the next president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, telling them they had to do more to root out corruption. In May, Hunter Biden was named to the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian oligarch who’d served in the government of the previous, now exiled, president.

In August 2014, the Ukrainians opened an investigation of Burisma, and in January 2015 the owner of Burisma was put on Ukraine’s most wanted list. Those should have been signals for Hunter Biden to extricate himself from Burisma. Instead, the vice president of the United States began pushing President Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor, Victor Shokin, who was investigating the company that was paying his son more than $50,000 a month.

The 2020 Democratic candidate had previously claimed that he never spoke with Hunter about his foreign business. The New York Post article indicates that Biden’s claim is false.

The 49-year-old Hunter’s well-documented problems made him an obvious target for foreign intelligence services. Drawing money from a foreign company under investigation in a notoriously corrupt country made the son of the vice president of the United States a threat to compromise U.S. national security. At least two State Department officials raised their concerns with the Biden team (one went directly to Joe and Hunter Biden) and were ignored.

It was allegedly the Hillary Clinton campaign that first brought the divide between the State Department and the vice president over Burisma to light. According to a former senior intelligence official in the Obama administration, Clinton deputies were behind the Dec. 9, 2015, New York Times story about Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, “Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch.”

The purpose of the Times piece, says the former Obama official, was to ensure that Biden didn’t change his mind about entering the 2016 race. And so the Clinton campaign fired a shot across his bow to show him they could make life uncomfortable for him. The Times dropped the story just as the vice president was in Kyiv to demand the government root out corruption.

Biden later garbled the story of how he got Shokin canned when he related it to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018. He boasted that he got Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor on the spot during a March 2016 visit, or else he’d leave without giving Kyiv a $1 billion loan guarantee the administration had promised. In fact, Biden had been riding the Ukrainians for months to get them to terminate Shokin.

But the basic facts in Biden’s account were correct—he used American taxpayer dollars as leverage to get a foreign government to call off the investigation of a company that was currently employing his son.

In other words, it’s not “the Russians” who were responsible for the allegations about Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s seedy business in Ukraine—it’s Joe and Hunter Biden.

Will the American Electorate Call Biden’s Bluff?

No one knows since we are in a fog of disinformation from biased polling, anti-Trump media reporting and social media censorship.  I have some misgivings about attacking the credibility of a senior who would be one year younger than I should he become US President next year.  But Dr. Phil often remarked that you should not forgive someone unless and until they admit their wrongdoing, apologize for the harm they’ve done, and ask to be forgiven.  I see no remorse or such repentance from Joe Biden.  Instead he expects to bluff his way into the oval office. Football audiences are treated to touchy-feely commercials showing Biden smiling and greeting children and people of color.  Let’s hope the voters force him to fold, for his own sake and for the good of the republic.

 

Health Sciences Polluted by Critical Race Theory

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Connor Harris writes at City Journal Fighting Racism Instead of Disease. Excepts in italics with my bolds.

The intrusion of critical race theory into medicine and public health threatens the well-being of all Americans—especially nonwhites.

The Covid-19 pandemic in the West has disproportionately harmed racial minorities, especially those of African descent. According to a United Nations report from June, African-Americans in the United States had twice the death rate from Covid-19 as other races, as did black and South Asian ethnic groups in the U.K. Death rates among black minority groups in France and Brazil were also markedly elevated.

Many have taken it for granted that these differences stem from poverty and racism, which force nonwhites into crowded housing and jobs with high disease exposure. For Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, Covid-19 “expose[d] what should have been obvious—that unequal access to healthcare, overcrowded housing and pervasive discrimination make our societies less stable, secure and prosperous.”

But a September 10 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association by three doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York identified another possibility: racial differences in levels of TMPRRS2, a protein in cell membranes that many viruses, including coronaviruses, use to gain access to cells. The authors reported that in a sample of 305 patients at Mount Sinai, black patients had stronger expression of the gene that codes for TMPRRS2 in the tissue lining their nostrils than white, Asian, Hispanic, or mixed-race patients.

When JAMA tweeted this study, though, dozens of Twitter users who advertised their academic credentials in medicine and public health accused the journal and the study’s authors—all nonwhite, and one a black woman—of racism. “I can’t with these folks,” said one doctor with a Master of Public Health degree. “This is sounding way too much like blaming and rings of eugenics.”

“Come on @JAMA_current do better. I hope you a) retract this paper and b) invite an editorial on why publishing articles like this in the first place is a terrible idea,” said Josh Mugele, a doctor with over 35,000 Twitter followers. One M.D.–Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin asked, “Do you have someone on your editorial board who studies racism in medicine or has a background in critical race theory? Repeatedly publishing articles that use race as biology seems to indicate you could use more expertise in that area.”

Many responses claimed that race was a “socially constructed” concept with no biological meaning.

“Race IS NOT genetic,” said one medical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a former researcher with the World Health Organization. Another pediatrician told JAMA, “Attributing genetic variants to race (which is socially constructed) is racist. Stop. And systemic racism is why . . . BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] are disproportionately harmed by COVID-19.” “It is 2020. This is unacceptable. Race is a social NOT biologic construct,” said a researcher at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

Such tweets reflect the penetration of public health by critical race theory (CRT), an intellectual movement that blames racism for every ill that afflicts nonwhites. CRT is hostile to basic scientific norms of skeptical investigation, and it threatens to degrade scholarly standards in the health sciences and worsen the quality of public health—not least for racial minorities.

CRT in public health is founded on the notion that race is a “social construct” without biological meaning, so racial differences must spring from racist social structures. This idea is a corruption of a genuine sociological insight: not that race is illusory or unrelated to genetics, but that delineations of racial categories are somewhat arbitrary and can differ between societies. For example, persons of mixed European and African ancestry usually count as black in the United States, but other societies give them a separate category, such as “coloured” in South Africa and pardo in Brazil. And, to an extent, individuals in liminal racial categories can choose their racial identification: for example, increasing numbers of Hispanics in the United States identify as white.

In any case, though, Americans’ racial self-identifications line up well with genetic clusters.

And even if the genetic divisions between races are fuzzy, they remain meaningful enough that racial differences in medical conditions could stem from genetic differences. To take one clear example, African-Americans suffer Vitamin D deficiency about twice as often as whites—a condition that seems to worsen vulnerability to many respiratory diseases, including Covid-19. On the plus side, though, they contract melanoma at less than 4 percent of the rate among whites. The principal cause of both differences is genetic: dark, melanin-rich skin is less vulnerable to sun damage, conferring a Darwinian advantage in the tropics, but it is also less efficient at synthesizing Vitamin D, a drawback in high-latitude areas with weak sunlight.

Some doctors who object to using race in medicine merely warn that races are crude categories, and that racial averages can obscure within-race variation. For example, the misapprehension that sickle-cell anemia is a uniquely “black” disease, though it is as frequent in some white subgroups such as Greeks and Italians as it is in African-descended populations, has led doctors to overlook many cases among white patients.

But critical race theorists go further. CRT starts from the premise that systemic racism has corrupted the most basic structures and beliefs of society. Ostensibly genetic racial categories, in the CRT view, are themselves tools of racism: they serve to justify mistreatment of nonwhites and pass off the health harms of racism as the consequences of genetic inferiority. Pervasive racism even corrupts the scientific process itself. As Chandra Ford and Collins Airhihenbuwa, two prominent advocates for CRT in public health, put it, “the systematic nature of the scientific method enhances the reliability of empirical findings, but this does not necessarily eliminate the influence of racial bias.” Racism can be overcome, CRT says, only by explicitly race-conscious research methods that amount in practice to assuming from the outset that racism stands behind every racial disparity. Ford and Airhihenbuwa tell researchers to design studies around the assumption that “race is socially constructed [and] is less a risk factor itself than a marker of risk for racism-related exposures.”

The CRT doctrine of omnipresent racism is powerless to explain health discrepancies that disfavor whites, such as their elevated risk of skin cancer or atrial fibrillation, or the consistently lower mortality rates of Hispanics compared with whites. But it is also a severe threat to the health of racial minorities. First, CRT proponents disapprove of efforts to promote healthier behavior among minorities—or, as Boyd and her coauthors put it, “ineffective behaviorist approaches to problems that are actually institutional in nature.” This is a profoundly disempowering message. It would imply, for example, that if African-Americans smoke cigarettes to cope with the stress of racism—a common claim in studies of racism and public health—then it would be futile to persuade black smokers to quit, or to switch to less harmful alternatives such as nicotine gum or vaping, as long as racism lingers.

But more importantly, the no-causes-but-racism doctrine may stymie valuable research and lead doctors to make bad decisions for minority patients. Investigating the biological roots of racial disparities can shed valuable light on the causes of, and possible treatments for, medical problems among nonwhites. If Vitamin D deficiency, for instance, plays a role in higher Covid-19 deaths among blacks, then widespread Vitamin D supplementation could yield immediate benefits for all races and ameliorate ethnic disparities—and far faster than any redoubled effort to eliminate racial socioeconomic gaps could succeed. (One small trial in Spain has suggested that Vitamin D supplementation might virtually eliminate the need to send Covid-19 patients to the ICU.) If recent findings on the role of the TMPRRS2 protein in Covid-19 bear out in larger studies, similarly, drugs targeting that protein might reduce infection and death rates.

Critical race theory in medicine and public health, based on a misunderstanding of the concept of race and an inflexible, unfalsifiable dogma of systemic racism, is a huge obstacle to understanding health problems among racial minorities. A public health and medical profession that follows critical race theory will waste time chasing down phantom racism while overlooking genetic and biological factors that could be addressed immediately. Anyone who cares about public health and improving outcomes for nonwhites should help drive critical race theory out of the health sciences.

Love Of Theory Is The Root Of All Evil
–William M. Briggs, statistician