Monthly Archives: February 2021

Where was IT?

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Oldsmar, FL’s, water treatment facility was hacked via a remote access software package, with potentially devastating results (and which access has much broader implications for our nation).

One of them [software functions] regulates the level of sodium hydroxide, or lye—a main ingredient of drain cleaners that also is used to control water acidity and remove metals from drinking water, Sheriff Gualtieri said. The hacker increased the amount of lye from about 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, he said.

That’s bad enough, but there’s this, that enabled the hack [emphasis added]:

The intruder got into the utility’s industrial control-system through TeamViewer, a tool that allows engineers to monitor and repair computers and network machines, Sheriff Gualtieri said in an interview. Though the utility had switched to a different tool six months ago, he said, the TeamViewer program remained in place but unused

Aside from the foolishness of allowing remote software access to any government facility, I have to ask: where was IT on this? Why was a disused and superseded remote access software package left in place for so long?

Another Example

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…of the folly of doing business with companies domiciled inside the People’s Republic of China.

The particular company is Ant, a financial institution that PRC regulators lately decided its owner Jack Ma was getting too impudent regarding government actions—was getting too big for his britches—so the regulators blocked Ant from going public unless and until it massively reorganized and at least to significant extent downsized.

Now let’s back up in time a little bit.

In 2018, an exclusive group of global private-equity firms and mutual-fund managers including Silver Lake, Warburg Pincus LLC, Carlyle Group Inc, and T Rowe Price Group Inc took part in a coveted fundraising by Ant that raised $14 billion and minted the financial-technology giant as the world’s most valuable startup.
More than $10 billion of the money came from international investors, which bought shares in an offshore shell company set up by Ant to raise funds in US dollars. The unusual arrangement came about because in order to secure a payment license to operate Alipay, its highly popular mobile app, Ant had to be domiciled in mainland China. But that also limited the company’s ability to raise funds directly from foreign investors.

That’s the why. Now the what.

The global investors agreed to terms that were highly favorable to Ant, and which limited their ability to cash out if the company didn’t end up going public, according to people familiar with the matter. Ant also didn’t provide a listing time frame or guarantee investors a return while it stayed private, the people added.
The foreign investors didn’t receive any voting rights in Ant…. None was given a seat on Ant’s board.

They can’t recoup their investment; they didn’t even get a say in the governance of the company. Just “Here’s a boatload of money. Y’all have a gud time, y’hear?”

Now that was an exceedingly dumb thing for those investors, supposedly experienced in investing, in international finance, and in investing in PRC businesses, to agree. But the larger thing is demonstrated by the PRC government men’s behavior: investing in a PRC business, or investing inside the PRC, is exceedingly dumb.

A High School Debate

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The impeachment charge against former President Donald Trump that is before the Senate is one of incitement and causing the riotous invasion of the Capital Building.

The argument led by main House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D, MD) is centered on Trump’s claims of election fraud. This has nothing to do with the actual charge, and the change of subject is something that any high school debater would recognize and not be suckered by.

Alan Dershowitz, who is no high school debater, but who is a tremendously successful—because he’s tremendously effective—lawyer, also recognized Raskin’s and his colleagues’ trick, and he has warned Trump’s Senate impeachment trial lawyers—who aren’t as good as a high school debater if their Tuesday afternoon performance is any indication—not to fall for that weak trick.

There are two reasons for Raskin’s move. One is that he and his fellow Progressive-Democrats think that we ordinary Americans—their real audience—are slack-jawed, drooling idiots and will fall for this shenanigan. He also thinks Trump’s lawyers are just as stupid and incompetent.

The other reason is that Raskin and his fellows know they have no case; there was nothing in Trump’s rhetoric that would have caused anyone to riot. (Raskin, et al., also are insulting the intelligence and initiative of the rioters, but that’s for another time.) Lacking a case, they’re bent on raising a smokescreen with misdirection and obfuscation.

Trump’s lawyers need to stick to the subject at hand—the actual charge in the article of impeachment—and show the foolishness of the Progressive-Democrats’ case. They must raise themselves above the cheap tricks of teenage argument.

A Clue Bat

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…just struck. Colorado’s Progressive-Democrats want to censure their US Senator John Hickenlooper (D, CO) for the crime of voting to keep illegal aliens from receiving Wuhan Virus situation stimulus checks.

(Apparently, censure is becoming a thing as, just in the last month or so, Republicans moved to censure Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R, WY), Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE), and a brief low key effort was made to substitute censure for impeachment regarding ex-President Donald Trump.)

That’s not the item of interest here, though. The real clue to Progressive-Democrat intentions with their no-border, no-vetting, come-one-come-all immigration policy is this statement regarding censuring Hickenlooper by State Senator Julie Gonzales (D):

Usually politicians don’t slam the door shut on Latino voters so abruptly[.]

And a confirming clue:

Background below. The party platform opposes laws that make immigrants ineligible for assistance. https://t.co/kysMhSRxNi— Justin Wingerter (@JustinWingerter) February 8, 2021

Illegal aliens are immigrants—and these same illegal aliens are voters.

Be very heads up.

Indictments

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North Carolina Lt Governor Mark Robinson opposed a set of social studies standards proposed to be used in the State’s K-12 schools because he considered them to be fundamentally un-American. As an aside, Robinson is a citizen of the United States and of North Carolina who happens to be black.

In response to Robinson’s opposition, WRAL published the following cartoon:

Wholly independently of the rightness or wrongness Robinson’s argument, North Carolina’s Progressive-Democrats indict themselves in two ways with this political cartoon. One way is their dishonesty in attributing the KKK to the Republican Party. As any graduate of grade school American history and social studies lessons knows, the KKK was created by the post-Civil War Democratic Party (you know that party—the same gang that forced that civil war on us at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives just so Democrats could try to keep their slaves) explicitly to terrorize newly freed blacks and all those who supported them.

The second way those Progressive-Democrats indict themselves is with their…dismay…over a Republican daring to oppose social studies “standards” Progressive-Democrats pretend are in some way inclusive, when those standards are explicitly designed to be divisive and to denigrate all the good things about America—like winning that Civil War and ending slavery, and putting the KKK into the garbage sack, until, that is, Progressive-Democrats dragged the thuggery back out to use as a shibboleth against anyone farther right than their Leftism.