Tag Archives: culture

How is this Possible?

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Personal information of 7.6 million AT&T customers and of 65 million former AT&T customers have appeared on the dark web in the last two weeks. Stuff happens, even egregiously bad stuff. What makes this stuff especially egregiously bad, though, is AT&T‘s claim that the data appear[] to have come from 2019 or earlier.

That especially bad status flows from some questions:

Why wasn’t the data breach discovered those 5 or more years earlier; why did AT&T not know of the breach of its own systems until they saw the results of the breach just recently?

If AT&T did know of the breach those years ago, why did they sit on the information all this time?

If AT&T did discover the data breach promptly, and the data that appeared on the dark web only happened to be from 2019 and prior, what were the safe guards in place—or not—for what would have been archived data? What are the safeguards for data from 5 years ago through to the present? How does AT&T know those data haven’t been penetrated and stolen, also?

Progressive-Democratic Party’s War on Christianity

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As part of the White House’s Easter celebration and Easter Egg Hunt, the White House held an Easter Art Event. This year, thought, that art contest was censored.

Children of National Guard members are not allowed to submit artwork with religious symbolism for the White House’s 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” event [apparently separate from Jill Biden’s EGGucation theme].
This year, the Adjutants General of the National Guard requested on behalf of First Lady Jill Biden for the children of parents in the National Guard to submit artwork with the theme, “Celebrating our Military Families.”
According to the rules, the Easter egg design “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”

Apparently, Guardsmen or their children aren’t capable of celebrating the resurrection of Jesus as part of celebrating military families. Or such a celebration is questionable.

Perhaps instead, art centered on breakfast tacos would have been acceptable to Jill Biden, in lieu of overtly Christian art on one of the most important and overtly Christian holidays during this White House event that used to be an Easter-centered event. Cynically,

Other material that is prohibited from the designs include “material that promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against any group or individual or promotes discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.”

Except for us Christians. Bigotry, hatred, or harm against us Christians by our children’s exclusion from the children’s art contest based on our religion, was perfectly fine.

It is, though, entirely consistent with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s cynical deprecation of Easter by declaring the day a Transgender Day of Visibility.

How Precious

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The White House folks in charge of such things have announced a theme for this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll.

“A teacher for more than 30 years, First Lady Jill Biden is continuing her theme of ‘EGGucation’ for the event, transforming the South Lawn and Ellipse into a school community, full of fun educational activities for children of all ages to enjoy,” a statement from the White House reads.

Apparently, an Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn needs a theme other than…Easter and unadulterated fun for the kids.

Go figure.

Reassurances

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People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping is busily…reassuring…foreign business leaders, especially American chief executives, that

the country is working to improve its business environment.

Xi mustn’t be taken seriously in any of this.

The PRC’s national security law requires all PRC-domiciled businesses and their affiliates satisfy the nation’s intelligence community requests for information on any subject it deems useful for national security and to actively seek out that information—to conduct espionage if necessary—to obtain that information. That information gathering is far easier when the (foreign) target is present in the PRC.

Further PRC laws require foreign enterprises to partner with local enterprises (though the requirement for equal or majority control by the domestic enterprise has been lifted) and to facilitate technology and intellectual property transfer to the local enterprise as a condition prerequisite to doing any business within the PRC. If those transfers aren’t moving quickly enough to suit the government, the government’s hackers attempt to steal the data.

Yet further PRC laws require Communist Party of China apparatchiks present in those domestic partners to have access to the foreign partner, also.

Overarching all of that: the PRC is a nation that rules by law; it is not a nation that operates under rule of law tenets. As such, the laws by which the PRC operates are malleable and subject to the ephemeral whims of Xi and his Communist Party of China syndicate. That, though, is not unique to Xi, or to the PRC since 1949. Rule by law has been the position of the rulers of mainland China since the nation began coalescing out of the Warring States Period nearly two-and-a-quarter millennia ago.

If those American business heads, already showing excessive credulity by being present at the PRC’s China Development Forum and subsequent personal audience granted by Xi, allow themselves to be taken in by Xi’s blandishments at the audience, they’ll be showing themselves too credulous to be fit to manage their respective businesses.

Threshold Questions

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined on the Supreme Court and Mifepristone in their Monday editorial. Among other things, they wrote that

the threshold question for the Court is whether the doctors have legal standing to sue….

In addition to that, though, another threshold question is whether the Court owes automatic deference to an agency subordinate to a separate branch of government, a branch with which the Court is supposed to be coequal. Especially when that agency has lost as much credibility as has the FDA through its mistakes during the recent pandemic Wuhan Virus Situation.

 

Aside: the WSJ‘s censors wouldn’t allow me to use “Wuhan Virus,” even though they have no problem with Zika, West Nile, or Ebola virus labels. The hypocrisy is strong in the WSJ‘s censors.