A passel (that’s the technical term) of classified documents purportedly concerning the barbarian’s war in Ukraine and a number of other items have been stolen from DoD, one or two perhaps altered, and then posted at various sites around the Internet.
The search is on for the leaker(s) and/or the security…weakness…in SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD and/or in CJCS General Mark Milley’s organization within DoD.
One discovery should ease that search, and shorten it, also, is this.
A couple of Letter writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section had concerns about a potential ban of People’s Republic of China-domiciled ByteDance’s TikTok.
I disagree with their concerns.
A TikTok ban isn’t the solution. It won’t protect our data privacy, it won’t protect children from the dangers of the internet, and it is a blatant violation of First Amendment rights.
No one is masquerading banning TikTok as the solution; that’s a strawman argument. Much more needs to be done to protect our data privacy and our children—and our intellectual and technology property—but banning TikTok is a useful step. Nor is banning it a violation of anyone’s 1st Amendment rights. No one’s speech would be barred, only a tool of the PRC would be barred.
SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD section, the Department of Defense Education Activity, appears to be disbanding DoDEA’s own section focused on pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion claptrap onto our military members’ children in DoD schools. That subordinate organization, the DEI unit, was founded on explicitly racist tenets. These are from the originally selected head of that organization:
So exhausted at the White folks in these PD sessions. This lady actually had the caudacity to say Black people can be racist, too. I had to stop the session and give the Karen the business. We are not the majority. We don’t have power.
Some otherwise reputable folks want a six-month moratorium on the continued development and improvement of artificial intelligence software.
Several tech executives and top artificial-intelligence researchers, including Tesla Inc Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, are calling for a pause in the breakneck development of powerful new AI tools.
A moratorium of six months or more would give the industry time to set safety standards for AI design and head off potential harms of the riskiest AI technologies, the proponents of a pause said.
The lede in a Wall Street Journal article goes like this:
Western leaders are beginning to have a clearer vision of how they hope the war in Ukraine will end.
What is missing is any plan to make it happen.
On the contrary. The principal, the nation that has been invaded by the barbarian, has a very clear vision of how the war will end. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has articulated that vision since the day the barbarian hordes swarmed over the borders: all Russian forces out of all Ukrainian territory. Full stop.
That’s what conventional “wisdom” says confronts the government of Australia as it contemplates buying nuclear-powered submarines from the US. The buy is part of AUKUS’ combined effort to counter the People’s Republic of China’s military buildup and its continued strengthening of the PLA in the PRC’s occupation of the South China Sea.
Australia is trying to strike a balance between its close relationship with the US and its ties to China, which buys much of its valuable iron ore and is its largest trading partner.
They haven’t happened, yet, but they need to.
The US Air Force this month launched an effort to hire a handful of senior-level diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) managers and is hoping to place these officials in posts across the country, from Washington, DC, to Alaska.
And
The Air Force is looking for a “supervisory diversity equity inclusion and accessibility officer for Air Force headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, which will pay anywhere from $155,700 to $183,500 per year.” The person who fills this position will serve as a “first-level supervisor” who will direct employees assigned to the Air Force’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
Now the Army management corps has struck again, this time doing away with a long- (and I mean long) standing tradition of letting tank crews name their tanks. Unless they perform on the gunnery range (under the range’s necessarily artificial—peacetime safety constraints, and all that—conditions) well enough to suit those in the management corps.
One former Army officer said [brackets in the original],
Sounds like a dumb rule that has [command sergeant major] written all over it[.]
The People’s Republic of China’s Foreign Minister, Qin Gang, seems to be dismayed with us. The Wall Street Journal‘s headline says it:
China’s Foreign Minister Says Ties With US Risk Going Off the Rails
According to the WSJ, Qin said that
the Biden administration was insincere in saying it wanted to preserve relations and warned the US against engaging in what he called new McCarthyism.
And his boss, PRC President Xi Jinping
criticized what he termed a US policy of “all-round containment, encirclement and suppression” of [the PRC].
Recall the People’s Republic of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law that requires all PRC-domiciled businesses, and by extension, the companies which those businesses control that are domiciled in non-PRC nations, to provide, even to actively seek out, any and all information that the PRC’s intelligence community wants those businesses to produce.
Now the PRC is moving to streamline that process.
China is set to create a new government agency to centralize the management of the country’s vast stores of data, as Beijing seeks to address data-security practices by businesses and streamline its regulatory structure.
The new national data bureau is set to become the top Chinese regulator on various data-related issues, people familiar with the matter said, in a shift from the current structure in which multiple ministries share oversight.