Monthly Archives: May 2021

Necessary Corrections

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Two, in fact, for a recent Wall Street Journal article concerning the blacklisting of People’s Republic of China smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi Corp. The blacklist barred US investors from investing in Xiaomi, and Biden is backing away from that.

The first correction is the article’s headline. Pentagon Backs Off Xiaomi Blacklisting After Legal Challenge s/b Biden’s Pentagon Backs Off Xiaomi Blacklisting After Legal Challenge.

It’s misleading to imply that the Pentagon did this on its own, without President Joe Biden’s (D) instruction, especially with the body of the article making it plain that the Pentagon, in its original action, was acting on then-President Donald Trump’s (R) instruction.

The second is this one. The retreat comes two months after Xiaomi won a key victory in a federal lawsuit challenging the listing… s/b Biden’s retreat comes two months after Xiaomi won a key victory in a federal lawsuit challenging the listing….

Biden didn’t even have the courage to challenge the DC trial court’s ruling in the DC circuit or, potentially, the Supreme Court. Overruling the trial court, even at the circuit level, would have been a distinct possibility.

Self-Serving

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The World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus set up an inquiry board to look into efforts to deal with the Wuhan Virus situation as the virus was beginning go out from the People’s Republic of China.

The Tedros’ WHO board has made a couple of very unsurprising findings.

The World Health Organization should be given the power to swiftly investigate threatening pathogens in any country….

National sovereignty be damned. A supranational entity should be able to go where it pleases. Especially WHO.

The second finding centers on these:

The panel’s report, however, doesn’t directly criticize [the People’s Republic of China] and instead praises it….

Never mind that the world first learned of the virus from the Republic of China (which the People’s Republic of China continues to block from participating in any WHO proceedings). The board’s report also spikes

mention [of PRC] authorities’ efforts to prevent medical staff and health officials from sharing information on the emerging disease.

This against the backdrop of PRC…influence…over the WHO and over Tedros in particular.

Nothing self-serving here. Not a bit.

A Test of Biden

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The Wall Street Journal editors wrote of a Hamas test of Israel and of President Joe Biden (D) in the context of the Hamas terrorists’ indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli cities and oil facilities and of Iran’s funding and supplying of its client, Hamas.

The editors concluded their piece with this:

[Biden] has not endorsed the left’s distorted interpretation of the conflict as a dichotomy of privilege and victimhood, with Israel responsible for every wrong.

That was supposed to be a (sort of) favorable remark about a part of Biden’s performance so far.

However.

That lack of endorsement is a bit of a non sequitur here. The Left isn’t distorting, so much as its “interpretation” is a precise reversal of the situation. The actual privileged are the terrorists, so enamored of by the Left and by the core of the Progressive-Democratic Party as embodied by the likes of Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), Ilhan Omar (D, MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D, MI). The victim is Israel, so openly hated by that same collection of persons, and now so plainly under terrorist attack by Party’s heroes.

Their beloved terrorists are murdering children over property.

Stipulate, arguendo, that Palestinians deserve that property and that their lives would be so much better if they had it.

Today, the murdered children are still dead, and the Palestinians, without that property, are still alive.

But, but–children in Gaza are being killed by the hated-Israelis’ as the latter respond to being attacked? True enough. The Left’s heroes should stop hiding behind their own children, stop using them as cover for their own launch sites.

This is the test that Biden and his Progressive-Democrat henchmen are failing.

Let’s Make Lots of Money

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Sounds like a lyric from a Pet Shop Boys song.

The hackers who assaulted Colonial Pipeline, ostensibly for ransom, claim they

only want[] to make money, not disrupt society….

Never mind that their attack on a major oil pipeline does precisely that disruption.

Never mind, either, that these hackers aren’t total idiots—they knew their assault would disrupt a major segment of our economy and so our society. That was the purpose of the attack; this was no petty criminal act. Demanding to be paid by their victim is simply a distraction.

They claimed this, also:

From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.

Right. And they have some bridges across the Reka Vop’ to sell us, also. All illegal behavior, much less terrorist behavior, if left unanswered has social consequences.

No, these…personages…have simply applied a Willy Sutton tenet to their terrorism:

Go where the money is. Go there often.

Our Federal government, actively aided by our State governments, need to get aggressive with active responses to such attacks. The time for passivity, for merely acting defensively after the fact, is long past. Terrorists, physical or cyber, network entities or state-sponsored, need to be burned to the ground.

The negligence of company CEOs, COOs, and CIOs, including those officers at Colonial Pipeline, in not being serious about hardening their systems, also badly wants sanction.