World Turning

Hillary Clinton ... Wikipedia's sleight of hand ... the deadly pager hoax ... and the plight of men.

Oct 04, 2024

Strange times. A lot has happened since that clot temporarily blocked the flow of blood to my brain. But I’m catching up.

Hillary Clinton: Jail time for misinformation

My forever president, my War Queen, the feminist GI Jane, Hillary Clinton, recently came out swinging for something truly nuts.

She said on Rachel Maddow’s show that those who spread “misinformation” about election interference should face criminal consequences.

“I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases, criminally charged, is something that would be a better deterrence because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States.”

Oh, really? Americans go to jail for speaking their minds.

What is it about former Secretaries of State and Presidential candidates? John Kerry said the same thing last week at the World Economic Forum.

I’m a broken record on this but to be clear, here are a few examples of misinformation that have been banned:

Whether COVID came from a Chinese lab (it did)
Whether you got total protection with vaccination (you didn’t)
Hunter Biden’s laptop (it’s real, not Russian disinformation)
Anything to do with the various trans debates (there aren’t 76 genders)
Whether or not border czar Kamala Harris was named “border czar” (she was)
Joe Biden’s long descendence into La-La Land (don’t wake him)

Take any hot-button topic of the last decade, and whatever isn’t the progressive line is called misinformation.

Now Hillary, my hero, my boom shakalaka, wants to make all of this misinformation jailable.

Saving Democracy really is tough work.

Wikipedia’s sleight of hand

I always believed the Wikis were not reliable sources. In fact, as a Lit teacher before I became a pensioner six years ago, I never accepted any of the Wikis in any research paper, regardless of citations. They are poorly written and generally cite questionable sources. Crowd-sourced fact-checking was just poor scholarship.

But recently I noticed a very distinct change in the Wikis that concerns me. I detected a turn in tone, a change of outlook that is both suspicious and somewhat sinister.

The Wikis, it seems, have gone “W word.” (I hate that word and look forward to an upgrade).

I first became aware of this two years ago when the definition of Recession came to light during a six-month economic downturn. A couple of years ago, Wikipedia stated a recession happens when there’s an economic collapse of consecutive fiscal quarters. The United States qualified, as inflation jumped from 2 percent in Q3 2021 to 9 percent in Q1-2 2022.

But when the news hit, so did Wiki. Overnight the definition changed.

The edit was subtle: it went from “two consecutive quarters” to “more than a few months.”

Gone was any mention of inflation. Imagine that. The U.S. was dragged down by the highest prices in 50 years, but you’d never know it by the Wikis, which relied on Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Democratic sycophant Paul Krugman for interpretation.

“Prices have leveled if you don’t count the cost of housing, food and transportation,” said Krugman at the time.

Whew! What a relief! Never mind that if it wasn’t for bread and milk, shelter and transportation everything would be peachy.

Exploding Pagers

Regardless of whose side you’re on — and believe me there are plenty of views on Israel-Gaza — you have to give Mossad credit for Spycraft of the Decade.

The Israeli version of the CIA pulled off an incredible hustle last month in Lebanon when it rigged more than 3,000 pagers with explosive devices and then detonated them simultaneously. The following day the same thing happened to Lebanese walkie-talkies.

The low-tech stunt was more than two years in the making.

In 2022, the leadership of Hezbollah, the terrorist group that serves as proxy for the Lebanese government, decided that communicating via cell phone was easily compromised and too risky to use in light of detection by Israel. So they switched to 80s technology beepers as the delivery device of choice.

It seems these pagers were purchased in bulk off the black market. Some of the technology — specifically the lithium batteries — was produced by companies in Taiwan and Japan, but had been out of production for more than a decade. The out-of-date pagers were then purchased by BAC Consulting, a company in Budapest, Hungary later named Apollo Systems LTD.

Share Quoth the Maven

But it turns out the Hungarian company was a front for Mossad and Shin Bet operatives, who had learned of the Hezbollah decision to purchase pagers rather than relying on cell phones. What followed was about 18 months of destructive genius, where devices were meticulously rigged with explosive devices that were incredibly sophisticated … and deadly.

How deadly? Thirty-seven people were killed and more than 3,000 injured when the devices were detonated on Sept. 17. Two experts in demolition and disposal said it was the most intricate operation of its kind they’ve ever seen.

Donations to U.S. Colleges

Remember when student protesters demanded divestment from Israel as part of their protest charter?

In the latest Department of Education report (October 2023), the most up-to-date total foreign investment in U.S. colleges is $22 billion, or roughly 40 percent of all expenditures ($51 billion).

More than 50 percent comes from authoritarian and antidemocratic Middle East governments, according to the veteran accountant hired on the recommendation of international accounting firm KPMG.

The No. 1 contributor: Qatar at $4.1 billion. Israel is 12th at $1.6 billion.

Kamala: The teleprompter queen

The message is very simple: If you are to be a huge Kamala fan and disguise yourself as a journalist, you must learn all the impactful and meaningful phrases (“I believe America is good”) and learn how to say a whole lot of nothing in 1,000 words (stay “inspired” and be “holistic”).

Most importantly, you must be ready to debase yourself. Then you’ll get to hear some “answers” to some “questions” in a one-on-one interview with Kamala and her teleprompter.

It might sound crass, but as Kamala rises in the polls and journalists tear off their blazers to reveal Kamala Harris chest tattoos, I’ve never been more bullish on the would-be POTUS.

The message to mainstream media: Keep on keeping on. And if you’re a CNN or MSNBC anchor you might also post a Kamala appreciation TikTok dance to get your own sit-down interview.

Word salad dictionary and transcription required.

A second Texas whistleblower fired

Vanessa Sivadge, a registered nurse who blew the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital for allegedly billing gender procedures to Medicaid in August, has been fired. This follows the federal charges in June against Houston surgeon Eithan Haim of four counts of criminal HIPAA violations after leaking internal documents that allegedly showed that Texas Children’s Hospital continued to provide gender-affirming services to minors after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in February 2022 stating gender-affirming care was a form of child abuse.

In May 2023, Haim shared the documents with Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Now, the U.S. Department of Justice is accusing Haim of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which was passed to protect patient health information. According to Rufo, the documents contained no information that “identified any individual.”

The Texas Children’s Hospital said it was ceasing gender-affirming care shortly after Paxton’s opinion. However, according to Haim, the hospital secretly continued to provide gender-affirming care to children throughout the following year.

The U.S. Department of Justice has refused comment.

Weaponizing the DOJ? Naw. Unthinkable.

Men

I have frequently featured the problems of men and boys in this space … overall health, declining education, underemployment, depression, loneliness, etc. But the biggest problem is that men are dying at a younger age. Suicide, drugs, alcohol, homelessness, incarceration … “Deaths of despair” they call it.

And no one seems to care.

According to Healthy People 2030, a non-profit benefitting the general health and welfare of Americans, the future isn’t looking too good, either.