Cybersecurity in the age of cyberwarfare

June 16, 2021

The Department of Homeland Security has declared the United States has 16 “critical infrastructure sectors.” Translated, that means these enterprises are crucial to a safe and orderly society. The sectors include: food and agriculture, water, medical and health care, energy, transportation, telecommunications, law enforcement and, of course, our defense systems. With increasing regularity foreign-based cybercriminals are attacking these vital systems and temporarily crippling essential services. Why? Sometimes these keyboard terrorists simply want to create mayhem. More often they ...

Biden and Harris need to act now to fix the border crisis

June 15, 2021

Vice President Kamala Harris’ trip to Guatemala and Mexico this past week showcased her total disregard for the heartbreaking crisis currently taking place at our southern border and a flippant attitude about her own role in exacerbating the issue. Unfortunately, this carelessness is exactly what we have come to expect from the Biden administration. In the time since she has been put in charge of the administration’s immigration response, Vice President Harris has routinely laughed at the prospect of visiting the southern border, dismissed the idea as “political games,” and ...

Are you ready for a road trip?

June 12, 2021

School is out for the summer and everyone’s thoughts are turning toward vacation! After the year we have had, the wide-open road is beckoning each of us. Even though our destinations may be varied, the importance of the family vacation is more crucial than ever. Recently, my thoughts traveled back to vacations spent exploring with my parents and brother more years ago then I care to acknowledge. Mom and Dad would pack up the station wagon, which was the size of a small tank, with a small camp stove, a cooler packed with pounds and pounds of meatloaf and various food items for the ...

Torture enters the courtroom

June 11, 2021

For the first time in American history, a federal judge last week authorized the government to admit as evidence in a criminal case in a public courtroom words uttered by the defendant that were obtained under torture. The fruits of torture — which is any cruel or degrading or intentionally painful or disorienting behavior visited upon a person in captivity to induce compliance or to gratify the torturer — are not permitted in any court in the United States, and their inducement is criminal. Here is the backstory. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a low-level former member of the ...

The state of Black America

June 10, 2021

Listening to all the rhetoric in the popular media, you would think America is the most unfair, racist nation in the world. You would think that Black Americans are uniformly living in oppression and poverty, with no hope for the future, save the federal government arriving on the scene to their rescue. Sorry, liberals, to trouble you with facts. But indeed there are facts. And the facts tell a far different story than what we are hearing. Let’s start with the most recent annual report of the Census Bureau: Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019. According to this report, ...

Reimagining our police forces: what is it we need?

June 9, 2021

Bill Bratton has been the police commissioner of three major cities: Boston, Los Angeles and New York. When asked recently about the value of cops, Bratton, 73, said: “They are the glue that literally holds society together. They are an essential element of a successful democracy.” I agree. But we have come to a place now where we need to decide if police are our guardians or our warriors. The latter is defined as “a person engaged or experienced in warfare, a solider.” In 1990, Congress allowed the Department of Defense to pass on surplus military equipment, including ...