Monthly Archives: May 2021

Rule Making and Rule Enforcement Pauses

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Commerce has a regulation, enacted in 2019 with effect last March (!), that

allows the government to block foreign telecommunication-gear imports and other business deals deemed a security threat[.]

There’s a clump of US businesses and trade groups that are pressing the Biden administration to “pause” enforcement while it

reviews the best path forward to working with industry on securing the [information and communications] supply chain[.]

There’s a larger problem here.

The objectors raise, entirely legitimately, let’s stipulate, concerns about this telecommunication-gear rule’s supposed excessive breadth of reach. However, willy-nilly cessations of enforcement just because this or that business or group gets a new administration to whom to object, is badly counterproductive. They are disruptive, they reduce predictability of the business environment impacted by that rule/regulation, and they raise the costs of doing business and through that costs to the end buyers.

If a business entity (or anyone else, come to that) has reason to object to a rule or regulation that’s in effect, that entity should take the matter up in a court of law. Appealing to the chief law enforcement facility—the White House—for selective enforcement is not the way to go.

Also: this is another reason for Congress to take back most of its delegation (of rule-making) authority to Executive Branch facilities, and enact—or not—its own, specific, laws that need very little rule making authority by unelected persons.

Basing Options

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It seems the Pentagon is only now beginning to think about where to put the soldiers we’re withdrawing from Afghanistan. (I hope some consideration is starting to be given to the equipment, too, rather than just abandoning it to the Afghanis.)

As some of you might expect, I have a thought.

Maybe work a basing deal with Vietnam (we need one of those for our Navy, too).

Alternatively, or in addition, work a basing deal with India, for its far northeast. The states of Sikkim and Assam come to mind.

In the Land of YGTBSM

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Some of you may recall that a few weeks ago, Texas had several days of electricity (and associated natural gas) blackouts, some of those areas lost water for a number of days, and some areas lost Internet connectivity—and Internet-based communications—for some time.

A Wall Street Journal ran an article last week that looked into the sources of the electricity failures; it’s well worth the read in its own right.

A couple of items jumped out at me, though, concerning ERCOT, a State-level regulator about which I’ve written before.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas activated a program that pays large industrial power users to reduce their consumption during emergencies. But the grid operator, known as Ercot, didn’t know who was being paid to participate in this program and what type of facilities were getting shut off, it has since acknowledged.

How is that possible? How can an entity that bills itself as a reliability facility not know who its members are or what types of facilities it might affect?

It gets better, though, regarding ERCOT’s member facilities.

“We do not know what type of facility it is,” said Kenan Ögelman, Ercot’s Vice Ppresident of Commercial Operations. “We do know [a facility] has qualified and performed to the requirement because we test them, but we don’t know what it is they do.”

How anything be tested if the testing personnel don’t know what [a facility] does?

ERCOT really has to go.

He’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday

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There’s a new entry in the Progressive-Democrats’ Newspeak dictionary.  According to Congressman Ritchie Torres (D, NY), President Joe Biden’s (D) infrastructure…proposals…

are not expenditures, these are investments[.]

That distortion of the plain language of our honest dictionaries isn’t his whole story, though.

In my view, it’s short-sighted to obsess about the dollar amount because these are not expenditures, these are investments[.]

He’ll gladly pay us Tuesday for an investment in his hamburger today.

Wait—this is Tuesday. Pay up, Congressman. Or better, stop spending money you don’t have. Your credit’s no good.

Wait, wait—Tuesday never comes in the Congressman’s world.

Maybe It’s Time

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The Arizona Senate has subpoenaed a considerable amount of documents and electronic equipment from the State’s Maricopa County to support the Senate’s audit of 2020 election results in that county. Actually, that was done some months ago, and the Senate has only recently been able to begin its audit as County officials stonewalled, obstructed, and generally interfered with the start of that audit.

Now, it seems, those County officials are outright refusing to satisfy some of the subpoenas’ requirements.

In its subpoena, the Arizona State Senate had asked for, in part, “access or control of all routers, tabulators, or combinations thereof, used in connection with the administration of the 2020 election, and the public IP of the router.”
The Monday letter from the MCAO said the county was refusing to hand over those routers or even digital copies of them, citing an alleged “security risk” associated with the hardware.

I suspect this pertains to servers more than it does routers. Routers only send data packets—small sets of 1s and 0s—hither and yon, retaining in their own systems only tables of Internet addresses and IT administrative data. The addresses, with their implied networks where they aren’t related to audit requirements, and the admin data are easily protected by auditor-trusted and -specified individuals. These do need to be inspected, though, for unauthorized communications or accesses. Servers will have the directly election-related data that those strings of packets represent when the data are transmitted.

Regardless, the subpoenas are mandatory and binding on the County officials, and they have been upheld, in no uncertain terms, by the Arizona courts.

This is just another example of Maricopa County officials disrupting and attempting to block the State’s audit of the County’s election results. This example repeats the question of what these guys are trying to hide.

Absent their obstruction, this audit would have been long completed, and the officials would have been demonstrated to have performed their duties wholly satisfactorily and the county’s part of the State’s election results shown to be entirely jake.

Or not.

Maybe it’s time for the State to send the State Police into Maricopa County to execute the remaining portions of the subpoenas by physically seizing the equipment in question and delivering them to the audit facility.

And arrest any who obstruct the seizures.

Enough of the County management’s stalling and obstruction.