RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
February 11 to February 17, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports that a friend of Hunter Biden enlisted as "gatekeeper" for his father as Vice President remains in a sensitive Pentagon post even though Special Counsel Robert K. Hur implicated her -- without mentioning her by name -- as central to the mishandling of Joe Biden's classified documents: -
Kathy Chung worked for the Vice President until Biden left office in January 2017, and then took on a controversial role packing up Biden's records into some 15 boxes, including top secret materials. -
Last week Biden claimed he had no idea what his executive assistant was packing and that she did it all on her own. The President was defending himself after the Special Counsel concluded that Biden, as a confused old man, shouldn't be charged with willfully disclosing secrets. -
Nor did the prosecutor press charges against the unnamed Chung. Hur said he found plausible her account that she kept the classified papers “by mistake,” even though she had prior experience handling secrets. -
In the late 1990s, Chung was found to have mishandled sensitive documents when she worked with Hunter Biden at the Commerce Department as an administrator, as RealClearInvestigations has reported. -
After the Biden vice presidency, Chung stayed on as the future President’s assistant at his new digs at the Penn Biden Center in D.C. and later worked for his 2020 presidential campaign, earning an unusually high six-figure salary. -
After the election, Biden appointed Chung assistant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, where she has access to the nation’s most sensitive military secrets.
In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski examines “weathering” -- the racial hypothesis that argues that the chronic stress of living in an oppressive, white-majority society causes damage at the cellular level and leads to obesity and other maladies, resulting in shorter lifespans for blacks: -
The hypothesis – pioneered by Arlene Geronimus, a white professor at the University of Michigan -- is now upending medicine and social policy. It provides a window into how social justice ideology advanced by feminist, queer and critical race theorists is recasting healthcare as a power struggle between the privileged and the oppressed. -
Over more than 130 published studies, Geronimus has expanded the weathering hypothesis from an explanation of poverty harming one’s health into a dystopian worldview that identifies middle-class striving as a silent killer of people of color. -
The weathering hypothesis is now widely taught in public health schools. -
The weathering paradox – that “relatively young people can be biologically old” – is now widely influencing all levels of governance. -
An immigration attorney reportedly won early release for foreign-born detainees by arguing they were “biologically older than their chronological age.” -
But critics push back against what they see as the heavy-handed, COVID-era politicization of healthcare. -
In a new book, Boston University’s public health dean warns his profession has veered into overcorrection and revolutionary excess. He rebukes advocates for favoring political narratives over empirical data and denying the reality of social progress.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books $34M Calif. Penal Reforms That Weren't, RCI
COVID Aid Went to Pentagon Gym Gear, RCI
Poor Little EV Tax Credit? That's Rich, RCI
Salsa, Salad and Summer School, RCI
Hard-Up Hospital Pays 4 Retirees $8.9M, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway The Justice Department’s story was always laughable: that it started investigating the Trump campaign for alleged ties to Russia in July 2016 only after a low-level Trump aide had boasted during a night of heavy drinking at a London bar that he had heard Russia had damning material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. This article reports that that the United States Intelligence Community (IC), including the Central Intelligence Agency, illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies to target Trump advisers long before the summer of 2016: In truth, the US IC asked the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies, say sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation. The Five Eyes nations are the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. After Public and Racket had been told that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target, a source confirmed that the IC had “identified [them] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate. They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation.” The reporters add the caveat that they have not seen the documents described to them. “If the top-secret documents exist proving these charges, they are potentially proof that multiple US intelligence officials broke laws against spying and election interference.” But they also note that “CNN, Politico, the Guardian and others reported in 2017 that the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK’s equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA), was the 'principal whistleblower' in the investigation into the alleged ties between Trump and the Russian government.” This article comes in the wake of voluminous reporting by RealClearInvestigations and other outlets detailing how much of the Russiagate hoax emerged in Europe. One of the major claims House Republicans have made against President Biden during their impeachment inquiry – that he received a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian energy company tied to his son – may have just gone up in flames. This article reports that Special Counsel David Weiss has charged a former FBI informant with making up that story -- a step unlikely to quell long-held suspicions that Weiss is soft on the Bidens: Alexander Smirnov, 43, is accused of making a false statement and creating a false record for statements he made to the FBI in 2020 and, if convicted, faces a maximum of 25 years in prison. Smirnov was arrested on Thursday afternoon at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas after arriving the United States from overseas and appeared in federal court in Nevada on Thursday afternoon. If he does not agree to a plea, Smirnov will have his day in court. Recall that one of the prime sources of false information in the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, was charged with perjury by Special Counsel John Durham and acquitted at trial. But his indictment raises the question of why the FBI reportedly paid six figures over the years to such a disreputable informant? Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Biden Falsely Blasted Hur for Raising Beau's Death, NBC
Bobulinski to House: 'Biden Family Business Was Joe, Period’, NY Post
Joe Biden Files Overlap Hunter's Pay-to-Play Schemes, Federalist
Susan Rice, Discord Etc.: How Biden Blew the Border, Axios
House Impeaches Mayorkas, NBC News
IRS Security Still Lax After Anti-Trumper's Huge Leak, Just the News
Congress’ Culture War Over Regulating Nicotine Pouches, Daily Beast Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Beneath the building of the UN’s aid agency for Palestinians in Gaza City is a series of tunnels and rooms filled with rows of computer servers that Israel’s armed forces say served as an important communications center and intelligence hub for Hamas: The location of a Hamas military installation under important U.N. facilities is evidence, Israeli officials say, of Hamas’s widespread use of sensitive civilian infrastructure as shields to protect its militant activities. Tunnel complexes have also been found near or under some of Gaza’s largest hospitals [a tunnel also appeared to pass beneath a U.N.-run school near the headquarters]. … [The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA] said in a statement that reports of tunnels under its Gaza headquarters “merit an independent inquiry,” and said that it “does not have the military and security expertise nor the capacity to undertake military inspections of what is or might be under its premises.” The agency provides housing, schooling, healthcare and other services to nearly six million Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. This article reports that the organization’s main donors, including the U.S., have frozen funding pending the outcome of an investigation into the allegations. Israeli military intelligence has estimated in recent weeks that roughly 10% of UNRWA’s 12,000 or so employees in Gaza, most of whom are Palestinian, have ties to the militant group, including nearly a quarter of its male employees – a percentage that Israel says is higher than the roughly 15% of Gaza males who are linked to the group, through either its military or political wings. From the Annals of Build It and They Will Abuse It, Microsoft said that U.S. adversaries – chiefly Iran and North Korea, and to a lesser extent Russia and China – are beginning to use its generative artificial intelligence technology to mount or organize offensive cyber operations. The technology giant and its business partner OpenAI said they had jointly detected and disrupted the malicious cyber actors’ use of their AI technologies, shutting down their accounts. This article reports: -
The North Korean cyberespionage group known as Kimsuky has used the models to research foreign think tanks that study the country, and to generate content likely to be used in spear-phishing hacking campaigns. -
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has used large-language models to assist in social engineering, in troubleshooting software errors, and even in studying how intruders might evade detection in a compromised network. That includes generating phishing emails “including one pretending to come from an international development agency and another attempting to lure prominent feminists to an attacker-built website on feminism.” The AI helps accelerate and boost the email production. -
The Russian GRU military intelligence unit known as Fancy Bear has used the models to research satellite and radar technologies that may relate to the war in Ukraine. -
The Chinese cyberespionage group known as Aquatic Panda – which targets a broad range of industries, higher education and governments from France to Malaysia – has interacted with the models “in ways that suggest a limited exploration of how LLMs can augment their technical operations.”
In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports that the Chinese state-owned surveillance giant Hikvision, which sits on a U.S. trade blacklist because it provides equipment used in the communist nation's mass surveillance and detainment of Uighur Muslims, is joining a United Nations "sustainability initiative" aimed at fighting climate change and countering "human rights abuses." Nepal is famous for its Everest-climbing Sherpas and gorgeous religious temples, but it has a harder, more desperate side. This article reports that as many as 15,000 Nepali men, desperate to feed their families and flee their unstable government, have joined the Russian military, after the Russian government last year announced a lucrative package for foreign fighters to join the country’s military: The package included at least $2,000 salary a month and a fast-tracked process to obtain a Russian passport. Nepal’s passport is ranked one of the worst in the world for global mobility, below North Korea, according to an index created by global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & Partners, and the Himalayan nation is among the world’s poorest, with a per capita GDP of $1,336 for 2022, according to World Bank data. A Nepali soldier in Russia, who did not want to be named for security reasons, told CNN he had trained on rocket launchers, bombs, machine guns, drones, and tanks. The soldier described his fellow academy cadets as coming from across the global south. He cited Afghan, Indian, Congolese and Egyptian classmates, among others. The late Ken Fritz spent decades trying to build the world’s greatest listening room in his Richmond, Virginia home. His attention to detail included the room itself, Geoff Edgers reports, “a 1,650-square-foot bump-out based on the same shoe box ratio, just under 2 to 1, that worked magic in concert halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.” Fritz constructed 12-inch-thick walls lined with sound panels and outfitted the room with its own electrical and HVAC systems to reduce hum and potential electrical interference. Fritz also hand-crafted much of his sound system, including three 10-foot speakers, each weighing 1,400-pounds, with 24 cone drivers for the deeper tones and 40 tweeters, He also built a $50,000 custom record player, his “Frankentable,” nestled in a 1,500-pound base designed to thwart any needle-jarring vibrations and equipped with three different tone arms, each calibrated to coax a different sound from the same slab of vinyl. The story is about more than just music: You probably know a Ken Fritz. Maybe you are a bit of one yourself. Prosperous mid-century America produced a lot of Kens. The kind of people who gave their all to their hobbies – bowling, gardening, woodworking, stamp collecting – and refused to pay somebody else to manifest their dreams for them. Like a lot of kids born to the children of the Depression, Fritz absorbed his DIY ethos from the previous generation. When their ’51 Chevrolet broke down, [his father] Ken Fritz Sr. didn’t have the money for a mechanic. So he took the engine apart himself and figured out how to install new piston rings. “He had never done that before,” Fritz recalled. “But he was smart enough to know how.” The article ends on a wistful note. Fritz died in 2022. Unable to find buyers who wanted their house and the stereo, Fritz’s family sold his creation piecemeal on the internet. |
