[BUMPED UP: Scroll down for newer posts] On the day before Thanksgiving, one thing I’m tremendously grateful for…
…is the generosity of many of my readers in donating to this blog, either in a single donation or a monthly recurring one. So here’s a huge “thank you!!” to all of you. It’s a cliche, but words can’t adequately express how deeply appreciative I am. You help make this blog possible.
And now a pivot to another reminder: when you order from Amazon, please use the neo portal. I know some of you have quarrels with Amazon but many nevertheless use it for various reasons, so it helps to know that if you use this blog (the ad widgets on the right sidebar on desktops or laptops, or at the bottom of the blog on cellphones, or the link you can find here) to click through and order, I get a small but meaningful cut.
Thanks again to my wonderful readers.
Election integrity: and then there’s Brazil
Things are happening in Brazil these days, and some of them might sound familiar:
Brazil’s defense ministry has issued a report that highlights flaws in the country’s electoral systems and proposes improvements but contains nothing to substantiate claims of fraud from some of President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters who have protested his defeat.
The document, released [November 9], was the first comment by the military on the Oct. 30 runoff election, which has drawn protests nationwide from Bolsonaro supporters even as the transition has begun for President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s inauguration Jan. 1. Thousands have been gathering outside military installations in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasilia and other cities calling for intervention by the armed forces to keep Bolsonaro in office.
When the defense ministry announced…that it would present its report on the election, some Bolsonaro supporters rejoiced, anticipating the imminent revelation of a smoking gun. That didn’t happen.
“There is nothing astonishing in the document,” said Diego Aranha, an associate professor of systems security at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has participated in the Brazilian electoral authority’s public security tests. “The limitations found are the same ones analysts have been complaining about for decades … but that doesn’t point to evidence of irregularity.”
Of course not – because it could not.
I will say of Brazil what I’ve been saying over and over of the US: unless there is perceived election security, people who supported the loser will infer election fraud. That’s true whether fraud actually occurs or not, and perhaps even more importantly: there will never be definitive evidence that enough fraud occurred to swing the election. There’s a simple reason for that, very simple. It’s that once the rules are changed so that lack of security becomes a significant issue, that same process also erases any ability to track it properly. Recounts will not matter because the thought is not that the count was wrong the first time, but that the votes themselves – ballots, computer data, whatever – were invalid and untethered to the people’s actual will or actual votes.
This is a problem, a big big problem, for those who don’t control the voting rules or the voting mechanisms. In the US it’s done on a state-by-state basis, and the rules vary widely. In Florida there’s little doubt about the validity of the results. In many swing states there is tremendous doubt. In Brazil, I’m going to assume the rules are uniform.
More from the article:
Defense Minister Paulo Nogueira wrote that “it is not possible to say” with certainty that the computerized vote-tabulation system hasn’t been infiltrated by malicious code, but the 65-page report does not cite any abnormalities in the vote count. Based on the possible risk, however, the report suggests creating a commission composed of members of civil society and auditing entities to further investigate the functioning of the electronic voting machines…
Brazil began using an electronic voting system in 1996. Election security experts consider such systems less secure than hand-marked paper ballots, because they leave no auditable paper trail. Brazil’s system is, however, closely scrutinized and domestic authorities and international observers have never found evidence of it being exploited to commit fraud. Outside security audits have been conducted to prevent the system’s software from being surreptitiously altered. In addition, before election day, tests are conducted to assure that no tampering has occurred.
I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: computerized voting machines without a paper trail are an abomination. I don’t care if they’re squeaky clean and make the election officials’ life easier. People don’t trust them and they therefore lead to trouble. Same for mail-in voting. They need to be abolished (or the latter confined to a very tiny number of people), but I doubt that will ever happen. The ratchet only goes in one direction, and it favors the group that appeals to more urban voters.
I know little to nothing about Brazil’s political history. But I see that not only did the machines first come into play in 1996, but an amendment was passed in 1997 that allowed presidents to be re-elected to a second consecutive term, which was a new policy for Brazil. In 1998 the then-president of Brazil was re-elected for a second consecutive term, and in the next election Lula (the declared victor in this most recent election as well) was elected to his first term and then four years later was re-elected. He was followed by Dilma Rousseff, who had been part of his government and later was impeached and removed from office, to be replaced by a VP. Then Bolsonaro in 2018, who represented the first respite from Lula-dominant government since 2002. And now Lula again in 2022 (apparently a third term is allowable when it’s not a consecutive term).
If you want to see a banana republic type of history (even long before 1996), take a look at that Wiki page and try to wade through it (also see this). No wonder the people of Brazil are suspicious.
There is also this alarming post by Thomas Lifson at American Thinker. He writes:
As reported by Susan D. Harris today, the new government in Brazil, following an election that has been widely disputed as fixed by millions of demonstrators, has learned from the totalitarian response of the Trudeau government in Canada, seizing the bank accounts of protesters in that nation’s Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, and is trying to take away demonstrators’ children from the custody of their parents.
If you follow the link to the Harris article, you’ll get more of the chilling details.
Climate reparations
Biden and John Kerry, still hard at work in their dotage (and yes, I think Biden is sentient enough to be part of this):
In a pathetic bid to “show results” from the latest global climate-change confab, the Biden administration followed Western Europe’s hysterical lead by signing on to a lunatic “climate reparations” scheme.
It’s beyond outrageous. It won’t even bring any progress in reducing global carbon emissions, the supposed goal of the COP-27 meetings. If it works as promised, it’s just another wealth transfer from wealthy nations to the (largely corrupt) governing class of poor countries.
On and on it goes – the fake virtue-signaling by “elites” at the expense of ordinary citizens of the Western world.
A useful Fake News list
Think I'm kidding? Most of these outlets are fake news machines. You can add the AP's fake news report on Russian rocket hitting Poland that might as well be begging to start World War III. The most damaging fake news comes from the biggest corporate media outlets. pic.twitter.com/8neIqAQvqv
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) November 22, 2022
And it’s not even inclusive of all the MSM lies.
Open thread 11/23/22
In case you thought it was simple for chimps and birds, it’s not (the clip I’ve cued up is about 5 minutes long):
On the “Respect for Marriage Act”
Here’s a prediction from John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist about what the result would be if the act were passed:
Anyone who owns a small business related to the wedding industry — photographers, bakers, website designers, venue owners, caterers, florists — will be sued into oblivion if they refuse services to same-sex couples. Religious colleges and universities will lose their tax-exempt status. Religious institutions of every kind, if they hold to their teachings and traditions about marriage, will face an onslaught from the Department of Justice and the federal bureaucracy…
No, the bill won’t provide religious institutions with meaningful protections. Yes, the bill could certainly be used as a basis for the Internal Revenue Service to deny tax-exempt status to religious organizations that don’t toe the line on gay marriage. Yes, it could also be used to deny grants, licenses, or contracts. No, weak language about preserving the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not enough to prevent harm to religious liberty.
I will add that the Democrats see this act as “win/win.” That’s because it’s either passed (win!) or not passed because of Republican opposition (win! because then the GOP members of Congress who voted against it are labeled homophobe bigots).
Davidson goes on to mention that the left has been trying to merge those who oppose gay marriage with advocates of anti-miscegenation laws, drumming up a notion that the latter are numerous and powerful. I suppose there are some random neo-Nazis who would love to pass such laws, but they have zero place in the GOP and zero power, and the Democrats of course know that. But it suits the left to pretend otherwise.
[NOTE: In this post from 2010 I discussed the history of anti-miscegenation laws in the US.]
[ADDENDUM: The bill does not contain language that would fix some of its problems concerning religious liberty. That seems to be a purposeful omission. For example:
The marriage bill’s sponsors easily could add a clause saying: “No federal, state, or local taxing authority shall revoke any tax-exempt status or tax benefit of any nonprofit organization because it believes or acts on the belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.” This simple protection would take the tax issue entirely off the table, which is precisely why the bill’s sponsors steadfastly refuse to adopt it…
Although the bill may provide some explicitly religious nonprofits additional clarity outside of the house-of-worship context, few if any religious social service organizations would benefit, including adoption agencies and marriage counseling organizations. That’s because they don’t have anything at all to do with wedding solemnization itself (the only thing ostensibly protected by the bill).
This explains why controversies and lawsuits over same-sex marriage celebrations have focused on bakers, photographers, web designers, printers, meeting halls, bed and breakfasts, and florists—with decidedly mixed success for people of faith.
These documented and repeated examples of people of faith being harassed and driven out of business today over forced same-sex marriage celebrations get no protection at all under Democrats’ bill.]
Elon Musk makes addressing Twitter’s child pornography problem his top priority
Musk, who has made sweeping changes within his newly purchased $44 billion company, responded to a report shared by Twitter user EvaFoxU, which features a human trafficking survivor about how the company “has begun addressing the issue of posting child sexual exploitation content on Twitter after years of the platform’s inactivity on the subject under past management.”
“Priority #1,” Musk said in response to the EvaFoxU tweet.
It wasn’t that past management was 100% inactive on the problem, but it apparently wasn’t all that effective, in part because the exploitators are good at somewhat veiled messages. At any rate, Musk has already done a lot more than his predecessors to make it difficult for those pushing child pornography to find a haven on Twitter.
I’ve said many times that I don’t use Twitter and don’t read there much. Every now and then, though, I post someone’s tweet here in order to make some point or other. But Twitter is big news because it helps to shape opinions for a lot of people. Obviously, the banning of certain ideas and certain people has had a huge effect on election results, and Musk’s commitment to more freedom of speech in that regard on the platform is laudable.
Child pornography and other types of sexual exploitation of children are different – very different – from political freedom of speech, or criticism of certain official medical recommendations on COVID. Child pornography and sexual trafficking are crimes, and rightly so. They need to be stopped on Twitter, and apparently prior to Musk’s acquisition those running Twitter were doing a poor job. He’s determined to do a better one.
As an example of what Musk is doing that the previous Twitter authorities weren’t doing, see this. Some of it involves getting rid of certain hashtags and some involves making it easier and more effective to report instances of child exploitation. New hashtags will spring up, of course. But now that more attention is being paid, the hope is that it will become far more difficult to use the platform for such ends.
Maricopa country: is this what real “voter suppression” looks like?
Democrats often speak of voting security laws as leading to “voter suppression,” particularly of minorities, although evidence is lacking. It’s a fine rhetorical spin, though, because it fits nicely into their “Republicans are racists” message and encourages some people to be against once-commonplace and common sense voting security rules that almost every country in the world except the US practices.
However, “voter suppression” of evil GOP votes is another story. Here’s a report on in-person voting in Maricopa county in Arizona (Maricopa’s voters are mostly red on Election Day):
The 11 attorneys visited 115 out of the 223 vote centers in Maricopa County on Election Day and found that 72 of them (or 62.61%) “had material problems with the tabulators not being able to tabulate ballots,” Sonnenklar reported, “causing voters to either deposit their ballots into box 3, spoil their ballots and re-vote, or get frustrated and leave the vote center without voting.”
Box 3 — also called “Door 3” or “Slot 3” — is a separate box on the tabulators into which ballots not counted by the machines were placed for later tabulation. Maricopa County, however, has admitted that “in some voting locations, ‘Door 3’ non-tabulated ballots were commingled with tabulated ballots,” according to a letter from the Arizona attorney general’s office to the county.
“In many vote centers, the tabulators rejected the initial insertion of a ballot almost 100% of the time, although the tabulators might still accept that ballot on the second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth attempt to insert the ballot,” the RNC attorney report states. “However, many ballots were not able to be tabulated by the tabulators at all, no matter how many times the voter inserted the ballot.”…
Sonnenklar said these reports “directly contradict the statements of County election officials that (1) printer/tabulator issues were limited to only 70 of the 223 vote centers, (2) the printer/tabulator problems were resolved as of 3:00 p.m., and (3) the printer/tabulator issues were insignificant in the entire scheme of the election.”
There were also “significant lines at 59 of the 115 vote centers” (51.30%) that the attorneys visited, with many voters waiting 1-2 hours before receiving a ballot, according to the report. As a result of the printer and tabulator issues, many voters spoiled ballots that wouldn’t tabulate and tried voting with new ballots, sometimes still having the same issues, and causing the process to take longer.
The certification of the election has been delayed till November 28, but I don’t see how that will solve anything in terms of redress.
I have long felt that the phenomenon of voter fraud must be prevented for that very reason – there is tremendous motive to commit it because there is no way to undo it, or at least no way that is ordinarily seen as practical or possible. The traditional remedy is prosecution of the perpetrators, with fines or even sometimes short prison terms if found guilty. But it’s very hard to prove guilt in these cases when the evidence is destroyed or contaminated, and it’s ordinarily impossible to know the effect of the fraud on the result of the election for the candidates: its extent, and whose votes were added illegally or suppressed in any number of ways. Did it change the outcome?
And unless there’s a do-over, which is very rare indeed, it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. The perps have been rewarded for their efforts in the high-stakes game of modern elections in a sharply divided country.
[NOTE: I urge you to read this post of mine from April of 2014. It describes how Obama pressed the idea that Republicans were racist liars in wanting voter ID. Obama had a tremendous influence in shaping the thrust of the Democrat attack on voting security laws.]
Open thread 11/22/22
It’s pass the hat time [BUMPED UP. Scroll down for today’s posts.]
[ADDENDUM: My current donation appeal will be winding down soon. A preliminary THANK YOU! to all who’ve contributed to helping keep this blog running.]
Now that everyone’s depressed about the elections and strapped for cash with the holidays coming, I thought I’d ask for donatio
Never let it be said that my timing was especially good.
But I do need to pass the hat now and then, and I haven’t done it in a long while. I greatly and deeply appreciate all contributions towards running this blog.
You may have noticed that I still have the Paypal button method of donating on the right sidebar (or towards the bottom of the blog if you use a cellphone). That’s because, although I’ve researched tons of Paypal alternatives for many many hours, I have yet to come up with a substitute that will work for me. They all either have similar issues as Paypal, or different ones that include very major privacy problems that only emerged when I started signing up.
I’ll still be looking for a substitute, But for now the Paypal method of donating still works the best.
I also want to mention that it’s possible to set up recurring donations, such as once a month.
Thanks, thanks, THANKS in advance!
NOTE: I’ll be bumping this up each day for about a week.
Swedish prosecutor says Nordstream explosions were attacks, but nothing about who may have done it
Almost two months after the Russian Nord Stream pipelines blew up in the Baltic Sea, the Swedish prosecutors have found traces of explosives at the underwater site and declared that the incident was an act of “gross sabotage.”
The explosions that ripped apart the pipelines at four places had a force of almost “500 kilograms of TNT” and measured 2.3 on the seismic Richter scale — comparable to “a powerful bomb from the second world war,” the German and British media outlets reported.
But is this really news? I suppose the traces of explosives and the official confirmation are news, but I don’t think there have been many people who didn’t conclude quite early on that this was most likely sabotage. Among other things, seismographic data indicated it almost from the start. The real question is whodunnit, and as in the best detective novels, there is no shortage of candidates.
I’d like to add a few things that people don’t usually emphasize. The first is that neither pipeline was active at the time. Number two wasn’t yet operating to begin with, and Russia had purposely stopped the flow of number one for “repairs” close to four weeks earlier (the article just linked was written weeks before the explosions):
Russia’s state-owned energy giant, Gazprom, halted all exports via Nord Stream 1 from Aug. 31, citing maintenance work on its only remaining compressor.
However, while flows were due to resume after three days, Gazprom on Friday cited an oil leak for the indefinite shutdown of the pipeline. The shock announcement came hot on the heels of a joint statement from the G-7 economic powers backing a proposal to put a price-capping mechanism on Russian oil.
In what energy analysts see as an escalation of Russia’s bid to inflict economic pain on the region, the Kremlin has since said that the resumption of gas supplies to Europe is completely dependent on Europe lifting its economic sanctions against Moscow.
The sanctions were not lifted. Also, Gazprom informed Germany’s Siemen’s Energy that until Siemen’s repaired some allegedly faulty equipment, the flow would not be resumed and the shutdown would continue. Siemen’s said this:
…[T]he company told Reuters that it’s not currently commissioned by Gazprom to do maintenance work on the turbine with the suspected oil leak, but said it remains on standby to do so.
Siemens Energy added that it “cannot comprehend this new representation based on the information provided to us over the weekend.”
Even more interestingly, months earlier Russia had already reduced the flow in the only-operating Nord Stream pipeline (number one) to 20% of the originally agreed-upon volume. Then came the report by Russia of a maintenance problem, and then a shutdown that was supposed to last three days, and then an indefinite shutdown supposedly due to a leak. The shutdown was about a month before the sabotage. Even the shutdown was causing great worry in Europe and particularly Germany about fuel shortages:
“Russia’s move to again cut gas supply to the EU just as the region scrambles to fill its inventories ahead of winter is a further escalation of its policy of the past months to inflict economic pain through repeated supply cuts to Germany, the EU’s biggest economy and gas consumer,” analysts at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group said in a research note.
“Sources in Berlin say they are now making all winter energy plans on the assumption of zero supply from Russia,” they added. “That means there will now also be a focus on central and southern Europe, which still receives Russian gas including through pipeline transit of Ukraine and Turkey.”
Again, please note that was written three weeks before the explosions.
It is my impression that many of those blaming the US for the sabotage – and there are plenty of them – seem to be ignoring this build-up. Let me say right here that I do not know who set the explosives. But to me, Russia is the most likely culprit for the simple reason that Russia had already been cutting off the flow through that pipeline for months, and then shutting it off for a month, in order to get the concessions it wanted from Europe. Russia was obviously more than willing to sacrifice whatever revenue it got from the Nord Stream, bargaining that hurting Europe was well worth it. And it had already become clear that Europe wouldn’t cooperate and give Russia what it wanted – with Germany also making it clear that it was trying to free itself from dependence on Russian fossil fuels entirely as soon as possible. So Russia may indeed have calculated that it would be losing nothing by making the already-shut-down Nord Stream pipelines inoperative, and that Europe would be losing much more.
To go back in time a bit further to demonstrate what I mean, in April of 2022 Germany made this announcement:
Germany could end Russian oil imports this year, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Friday, signalling the urgency driving Europe’s biggest economy to wean itself off energy from Russia following its invasion of Ukraine…
“We are actively working to get independent from the import of (Russian) oil and we think that we will be able to make it during this year,” Scholz said during a news conference in London with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson…
The DIW economic institute said in a study published on Friday that Germany might be able to secure enough gas supplies for the coming winter without any imports from Russia through a combination of alternative suppliers and drastic energy-saving measures.
That deadline might have been somewhat premature, but at any rate the intent of Germany was clear way back in April and Nord Stream was due to become obsolete in fairly short order. Then Russia shut it down, and then it was purposely damaged.
I am virtually certain that many people here will disagree with me about the likelihood that Russia was the culprit and not the US. I have no illusions about those running Biden’s administration; I believe they are capable of deeply nefarious activities. But I don’t see strong signs that point to them being the perpetrators in this particular case and I see much stronger signs that point to Russia. That said, nothing would surprise me.
NOTE: This article on the history of Germany’s dependence on Russia is of interest (yes, I know, the Guardian is leftist, but it still seems pretty comprehensive to me). Many ironies abound, including the surprising (to me, at least) fact that the whole thing began in 1970, when Russia was still the USSR. Some details:
On Sunday 1 February 1970, senior politicians and gas executives from Germany and the Soviet Union gathered at the upmarket Hotel Kaiserhof in Essen…to celebrate the signing of a contract for the first major Russia-Germany gas pipeline, which was to run from Siberia to the West German border at Marktredwitz in Bavaria…
Germany would supply the machines and high-quality industrial goods; Russia would provide the raw material to fuel German industry…[This was part of the] new “eastern policy” of rapprochement towards the Soviet Union and its allies including East Germany, launched the previous year under chancellor Willy Brandt…
Before the signing, Nato had discreetly written to the German economics ministry to inquire about the security implications. Norbert Plesser, head of the gas department at the ministry, had assured Nato that there was no cause for alarm: Germany would never rely on Russia for even 10% of its gas supplies.
Half a century later, in 2020, Russia would supply more than half of Germany’s natural gas and about a third of all the oil that Germans burned to heat homes, power factories and fuel vehicles. Roughly half of Germany’s coal imports, which are essential to its steel manufacturing, came from Russia.
The article goes on to list many many people over the years who warned Germany, including a lot about Reagan:
Over 50 years, Germany fought numerous battles with a series of US presidents over its growing dependence on Russian energy. In the process, Germany’s foreign office developed a view of American anti-communism as naive, and a belief that only Germany truly understood the Soviet Union.
“I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”
What name is prominently missing from the entire 4,200+ word article? You can probably guess: Donald Trump. A reminder from 2018; Nord Stream 2 was planned but not yet built at the time:
I haven’t read any apologies to Trump coming from Germany or Western Europe. Perhaps I missed them, but a search didn’t locate them. If you find some, let me know.]