The Federalist: Dutch Doctor Exonerated After Euthanizing An Unwilling Patient

Dutch Doctor Exonerated After Euthanizing An Unwilling Patient
By Georgi Boorman. June 23, 2020

The Dutch doctor who euthanized a 74-year old dementia patient against her will and was exonerated of all charges gave a televised interview recently, in which she defended her actions as “for the best.”

The 2016 incident caused an uproar, in no small part because the doctor began the euthanization process by secretly drugging her patient’s coffee. The horror didn’t end there. When the patient woke up and resisted the lethal injection, now-retired geriatric specialist Marinou Arends asked a relative to hold her down so she could administer the fatal dose.

The patient had two previous directives stating she wanted to be euthanized “when the time was ripe,” but had explicitly declined to be euthanized three times leading up to her death. To Arends, however, ending the patient’s suffering was more important than doing what the patient said she wanted.
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The Dutch Supreme Court ruled on this case that patients with advanced dementia, who are legally incompetent, can be euthanized according to advanced directives. Whether this cautions people against giving advanced consent ahead of dementia, knowing they are the mercy of their physician, remains to be seen.

But if being unhappy is “unbearable suffering,” then the expectation for people who’ve written advance directives, particularly the elderly and sick, is clear: Smile and don’t complain, or risk lethal injection.

In other words, if you make it in any way legal for the medical system to kill you or "pull the plug", then doctors can literally get away with murder. After all, once she's dead, nobody can know what was the actual desire of an old woman with dementia, so the doctors can make up whatever they want and the courts will uphold it.

Yes, I know this is in Denmark, but can anyone seriously believe that the same sitation couldn't possibly happen anywhere else, including the United States? I know I wouldn't trust a US court (including the Supreme Court) to uphold my right to life if doing so should be politically incorrect.

The Federalist: Shootings, Violence Jump In Cities Where Mayors Have Restrained Police

Shootings, Violence Jump In Cities Where Mayors Have Restrained Police
June 21, 2020 By Jordan Davidson

Activist campaigns against police to have accelerated in the wake of a violent altercation between police and George Floyd that prefaced his death. In response, mayors of several cities have reduced police presence. This has led in several cases to dramatic increases in violent crime.

Does this come as a surprise to anybody?

Slow Motion Cat Video

Just a bit of fun stuff to take a break from depressing news articles.

Townhall: Fauci Admits Why Americans Were Initially Misled About Wearing Masks

Fauci Admits Why Americans Were Initially Misled About Wearing Masks
Leah Barkoukis. Posted: Jun 17, 2020 8:40 AM

At the start of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., federal officials told the public they did not need to wear face masks. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said they only made people feel better but were pretty much pointless.
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As time went on, the tone changed, and Americans were encouraged to wear face masks, with many places requiring them.

Now Fauci has admitted that the reason Americans were initially discouraged from using them is because there was a shortage, as Adams acknowledged in the second part of his February tweet.

In other words, the US government deliberately lied to the people.

How many other things have they lied about? And, knowing this, how can we trust anything they say?

Naked Security: eBay staff charged with cyberstalking, sending fetal pig and spiders

eBay staff charged with cyberstalking, sending fetal pig and spiders
By Lisa Vaas. 17 Jun 2020

This is a Halloween mask depicting the face of a bloody pig:

It’s not pretty, but at least it doesn’t scurry. You can’t say the same for the other packages sent in a cyberstalking campaign allegedly orchestrated by eBay management and targeted at a Natick, Massachusetts couple who run an online e-commerce newsletter that’s sometimes critical of eBay.

According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the mask was one of multiple threatening packages sent by the e-behemoth’s (now former) employees as part of a cyberstalking campaign to bully the couple into closing down their newsletter, the name of which was redacted in court documents. Other packages included a preserved fetal pig, live spiders, fly larvae, a funeral wreath, a book on surviving the loss of a spouse, a box of live cockroaches, and a copy of the porn magazine Hustler: Barely Legal that was addressed to the Natick couple but sent to their neighbors’ homes.

On Monday, the office of Massachusetts US Attorney Andrew Lelling announced that six former eBay employees have been charged with “aggressive” cyberstalking of the couple, including some of them coming up with an excuse to fly in to Boston in order to rent a van and drive out to Natick to conduct covert surveillance.

I have never liked eBay corporation very much, but this is a new low even for them.

What's next? Maybe they'll decide to start SWATting people critical of their business practices?

How is any of this different from the acts of hardened criminals? Are they running a legitimate business or are they petty thugs with million-dollar paychecks? I hope lots of people do lots of jail time for this.

Jerusalem Post: Cabinet OKs next step towards ‘Trump Heights’ town

Cabinet OKs next step towards ‘Trump Heights’ town
By LAHAV HARKOV, JUNE 15, 2020

The cabinet voted in favor of the initial budget for establishing a new town in the Golan Heights named for US President Donald Trump on Sunday, which is his 74th birthday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted the steps towards establishing “Trump Heights” at the start of the meeting, noting that the current US administration recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

I think this is a textbook definition of poking your finger in the eye of liberals worldwide. They hate Israel, hate Jews and hate Trump. So they're going to really lose their collective minds over this.

Way to go, Netanyahu!

Conservative Review: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?

Horowitz: Bombshell study: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?
Daniel Horowitz, May 27, 2020

Could nearly half the population not already infected with SARS-CoV-2 be immune to it from having already contracted other forms of coronavirus in recent years?

That is one implication of a major study conducted by over a dozen researchers from several microbiology and immunology institutions in the U.S.

The purveyors of panic are warning of a second wave of the virus and that even if we are correct in asserting that the general fatality rate is extremely low for most people, it will still result in millions of deaths worldwide if we need 70 percent of the population to get the virus in order to achieve herd immunity. Putting aside the fact that their strategy of lockdown doesn’t provide a solution to this hypothetical problem either, even as it kills more people from the collateral damage, there is now promising evidence that more people might already be immune to the virus.

The study is built upon the principle that T cells play a central role in destroying viruses and providing immunity. Not only were these cells discovered in all the blood samples of confirmed recovered COVID-19 patients, but they were also found in 6 of the 11 blood samples from 2015-2018, before those individual donors could possibly have contracted the virus.

It's still too early to be sure, but if further studies come to the same conclusion, this will be great news.

Daily Caller: Andrew Cuomo’s Nursing Home Order Deleted From New York Health Department Website

Andrew Cuomo’s Nursing Home Order Deleted From New York Health Department Website
Peter Hasson, May 27, 2020

Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 order requiring nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to accept recovering coronavirus patients has disappeared from the New York State Department of Health’s website.

The webpage for Cuomo’s order says the document is “not found,” though it can still be seen on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It took the governor roughly six weeks to reverse the order, which has been blamed for the high death rate among New York’s elderly.

The order’s disappearance, which was first reported by Fox News on Tuesday, comes as Cuomo has faced increasing levels of criticism for his handling of coronavirus. A Cuomo spokesperson told Fox News the order’s disappearance was part of a routine website update.

Revisionist history all the way down. Make a horrible decision that kills thousands of people. Then blame other people. Then delete the evidence.

Next up, we should expect Democrats to deny that the order ever existed and accuse the rest of us of making it up.

Too bad all those nursing home administrators have signed paper copies of their orders. It won't be nearly as easy to delete all of them.

Washington Free Beacon: YouTube Censors Criticism of China

YouTube Censors Criticism of China
Yuichiro Kakutani - May 26, 2020 6:30 PM

YouTube is deleting comments that contain two terms Chinese dissidents use to criticize the government, raising concerns about the tech industry's willingness to censor content to gain favor with the communist regime.

Comments on YouTube videos containing the terms 共匪 (Gòngfěi), meaning "communist bandit," and 五毛党 (wǔmáodǎng), meaning "fifty-cent party," are automatically deleted from the site shortly after they are posted. The latter is a derogatory term referring to Chinese internet censors who are allegedly paid 50 cents for every internet post that they erase.

A YouTube spokeswoman acknowledged to the Washington Free Beacon that the website's algorithm has been deleting any comments containing either of the two terms within seconds of their submission. She blamed "an error in our enforcement mechanism" for the deletions, rather than an effort to stymie criticism of the authoritarian government. The deletions have raised eyebrows among Republican lawmakers, one of whom is calling on the Department of Justice to investigate.

Does this come as a surprise to anyone?

I wonder if Google will allow me to post this or if they'll delete it too.

SiliconAngle: GitLab runs phishing test against employees – and 20% handed over credentials

GitLab runs phishing test against employees – and 20% handed over credentials
by Duncan Riley. UPDATED 22:26 EDT / MAY 21 2020

There’s always a lot of talk in cybersecurity about the importance of training employees to be aware of phishing attempts. Training does work but it’s not a panacea, the reality being is that there will always be employees who get tricked even with training.

Although there are various industry estimates, code repository management firm GitLab Inc. decided to phish their own employees to see what would happen. The result was not good: One in five employees fell for the fake emails.

Sadly, this is why cybersecurity research can only go so far. When 20% of employees working for a technology site can be phished like this, no technology product can solve the problem.

I am reminded of the Beagle/Bagle worm. In 2004, this worm was spreading rapidly throughout the Internet via e-mail. When virus scanners got definitions to identify and delete it, the authors created a variation (described in the linked article) which wrote itself to an encrypted zip file, putting the password in the mail message's body. This variation continued to spread despite requiring the recipient to manually save and decrypt an attached zip file, and then run the application contained within.

If people will blindly do whatever they're told in e-mail, then they're doomed no matter what security experts say and do.

Update May 26, 2020: I updated the article to include a link to an article about the Beagle/Bagel worm. At the time I originally wrote the article, I couldn't remember its name, but I was able to do some searching and found it (in one of my own blog posts from 2005: Encryption and security: an overview).