Monthly Archives: May 2021

That’s Nice

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The Senate Homeland Security Committee held a hearing last week regarding the Colonial Pipeline fiasco (which has much wider implications than just one company cravenly paying off its attacker/rewarding its attacker for the attack).

Congressman John Katko (R, NY), Ranking Member of that committee also wrote a letter to Brandon Wales, Acting Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is a part of the Department of Homeland Security. In his letter, Katko asked a number of questions regarding how well CISA works with its counterparts in other agencies and how well CISA’s inspections of the nation’s pipelines were going.

He also wrote optimistically

[T]he Pipeline Cybersecurity Initiative, housed within the National Risk Management Center (NRMC), has shown promise as a voluntary, public-private partnership between CISA, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Department of Energy (DOE), and a range of pipeline-dominant critical infrastructure stakeholders. It is the Committee’s understanding that the core of this initiative revolves around conducting Validated Architecture and Design Review (VADR) assessments on pipeline assets.
These VADR assessments have proven effective at identifying a wide range of potential vulnerabilities within pipeline systems – some of which have been publicly distilled. Better understanding common security flaws and common misconfiguration issues is in everyone’s best interests, and these aggregated insights will help enhance national resilience.

It’s good to erect barriers that actually work.

Two things remain necessary, though. One is, once those barriers are set up, to go clean out the areas behind the barriers: to identify and remove existing malware from the operational and support software, to clean out the existing backups—both of software and of data—to improve training of human operators and support personnel regarding their role in preventing malware from reentering via phishing, spam, and so on, with more severe sanctions than heretofore applied to personnel who fail.

The other is to recognize that those barriers—software and human—will always be imperfect, will always become obsolete in the ongoing arms race between malefactors and targets, and will always need development, upgrade, and anticipation of future developments and potentials for attack.

“Student-Loan Debt Is a Burden on the Young”

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A number of letter writers The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters column expressed their concerns about student debt. One comment, though, jumped in my direction.

It is time for the federal government to get out of the student-loan business.

The writer is well along; that’s a critical half of the problem.

The other critical half, is to not borrow in the first place. If a person can’t afford to go to college on his own nickel or on scholarships, he should go to a trade school or a community college that teaches trades.

Then get a job. The trades are more than honorable jobs, they’re their own Critical Items in our economy: nothing gets built—including the Progressive-Democrats’ turtles all the way down infrastructure—without them. And, the trades provide a nice income as well as actual work experience and time in the real world during which the person can arrive at a more informed decision about what he wants to do with his life and/or what he wants to get out of college.

And in the latter case, he can be accumulating a sum of his own money with which to cover his college costs.

“Polling Error”

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An “expert panel” claims it has figured out the polling errors the industry has made over the last several election cycles—all the way back to the Eisenhower election cycles, in fact.

Pollsters oversampled one party or the other.

NSS.

The “experts” missed the real problem, though, or they chose not to mention it (which elision, if that’s what they’re doing, would be consistent with polling behavior).

Regardless of the cause of their oversampling (and this panel suggested a number of them), the pollsters—in every poll—knew they were oversampling one party or the other by the time they’d closed each poll and begun going over their data. The pollsters then made the decision to make no effort to correct for that oversampling, or to say in their published results that they were oversampling and had no reliable method of correcting for that.

They chose, instead, to masquerade their results as valid without caveat of any sort.

That’s the dishonesty of the pollsters.

And this: the number of polls examined may be too small to indicate whether the apparent bias toward Democrats/Progressive-Democrats is valid, but the appearance should be investigated in its own right.

Inflation is Upon Us

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…or is it?

The editors at The Wall Street Journal worry that the current rise in inflation might not be as “transitory” as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell thinks it will be. It’s a concern worth taking seriously. As the editors cite Milton Friedman as saying,

inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon

and the Feds—and the Fed—have been pumping lots of tons of cash into our economy.

Couple of things, though, on this inflation…spike.

The current inflation is impacted by all the “stimulus” checks coming from the Federal government, and money is the source of demand, not how much folks want things. It’s money that pays the prices, not folks.

The current inflation also is impacted by the return to more normal pre-Wuhan Virus situation demand levels being faster than producers can ramp back up to meet that recovering demand.

That slower production ramp-up is itself impacted by producers’ inability to get employees back to work. So much of the value of those “stimulus” checks makes not working more valuable than working, and recipients, far from being lazy, are making the economically rational decision to not return to work yet.

Underlying all of this is that 2020 was an aberrational year. The economic drop was caused by politics, not a confluence of economic forces, and the present interference with recovery also is politically caused; a slowing unwinding of that confluence isn’t a factor. Inflation comparisons with 2020 are themselves distorted.

A better inflation measure would be against 2019.

Bipartisanship Progressive-Democrat Style

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President Joe Biden (D) and his Co-President Kamala Harris (D)—it is, at Biden’s behest, the Biden/Harris administration—held an infrastructure meeting last Wednesday with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) in which he pushed for acceptance of his $2.3 trillion version of an infrastructure bill along with his commensurately large tax increase plan with which he claims he’ll pay for his infrastructure plan.

Shortly after the meeting, Biden gave an interview to MSNBC, in which he said,

I want to know what we agree on and let’s see if we can get an agreement to kick start this, and then fight over what’s left, and see if I can get it done without Republicans if need be[.]

Since he’s going to pass his stuff along strictly party lines, anyway, what was the point of the meeting?

Plainly, Biden Bipartisanship—Progressive-Democratic Party Bipartisanship—means Republicans go along quietly or be kicked to the curb.

It’s Party’s version of republican democracy: Progressive-Democracy.