90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, August 7, 2021

The Corruption Of The Medical Sciences....

China has stolen enough data to compile a 'dossier' on every American

Top national security officials for former President Donald Trump are sounding the alarm about China's illicit pursuit of data through cyber theft and other means, with one warning the sensitive information is enough for them to put together a “dossier” on every American adult.

Matthew Pottinger, a former Trump deputy national security adviser, warned during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday that China was looking to use the data it had stolen from the United States and worldwide to influence and coerce everyone from political leaders to private citizens.

“Assembling dossiers on people has always been a feature of Leninist regimes, but Beijing’s penetration of digital networks worldwide, including using 5G networks … has really taken this to a new level,” Pottinger said. “So the Party now compiles dossiers on millions of foreign citizens around the world, using the material that it gathers to influence, target, intimidate, reward, blackmail, flatter, humiliate, and ultimately divide and conquer.”

Pottinger added: “Beijing’s stolen sensitive data is sufficient to build a dossier on every single American adult and on many of our children too, who are fair game under Beijing’s rules of political warfare.”

Last month, the U.S. and its allies blamed China’s Ministry of State Security for the massive hack against Microsoft, with the Justice Department also charging members of the Chinese intelligence agency over a separate global espionage campaign.

The U.S. did not implement sanctions against China like it did against Russian intelligence hackers for the SolarWinds hack earlier this year. However, the White House said it raised its concerns about “the PRC’s broader malicious cyber activity” with senior Chinese officials.

William Evanina, Trump’s director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, also provided testimony Wednesday, contending that “the existential threat our nation faces from the Communist Party of China is the most complex, pernicious, strategic, and aggressive our nation has ever faced.”

Evanina warned China’s efforts “drive a comprehensive and whole of country approach to their efforts to invest, leverage, infiltrate, influence, and steal from every corner of U.S. success” and that “it is estimated that 80% of American adults have had all of their personal data stolen by the CCP, and the other 20% most of their personal data.”

He pointed to the “willingness of China and its intelligence services to illegally and legally obtain data to drive artificial intelligence, research, and development programs and to facilitate their military and economic goals." He lamented that “over the past decade we have seen CCP cyber and insider threat breaches and criminality to such a level I fear we are becoming...

The $1.2 trillion “infrastructure deal” is a progressive-sounding label on old-fashioned pork. It will not grow the economy; it will not be “fully paid for,” as promised; and it will not even focus on the “roads and bridges” that are always being cited as the reason for the spending.

Though the media tell us that it will be a “huge political victory” for President Joe Biden, and a boon for Democrat-aligned interest groups, it is not clear what this bill does for the country.

Start with the economic news.

A major purpose of government investment in infrastructure is to provide the means for the private sector to generate economic activity. Public roads let firms move goods to market; aqueducts provide water to farms; trains help people get to work. Infrastructure projects also create direct and indirect jobs.

An infrastructure plan that fails to generate economic growth is worse than useless, a waste of public money that could be better spent.

So when the University of Pennsylvania Penn-Wharton Budget Model declared Thursday that the infrastructure deal would “have no significant impact” on economic growth, that ought to have ended debate on the matter.

That should also warn us that the main effect of the $1.2 trillion will be to divert capital that could actually have generated growth and will instead boost inflation even as lobbyists, unions, and the politicians who passed it eventually take their cut.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also panned the deal, revealing Thursday that it would add a staggering $256 billion to the federal budget deficit. President Biden promised that the deal would be “fully paid for,” assuming that Congress also passed his “corporate tax plan.”

Even if taxes are raised to cover the shortfall, Biden would be asking taxpayers to pay more for a plan that will not grow the economy — in short, simply for the sake of paying the taxes.

Biden is constantly talking about how the infrastructure deal is necessary to spur investment in the technologies of the future, like the electric vehicles he was touting on Thursday. And yet the White House chose an outdated, hopelessly fossil-fuel dependent diesel locomotive as their symbol of the deal.

That reflected Biden’s romantic attachment to the Amtrak railroad service, a perpetual...