Tag Archives: responsibilities

Not the Government’s Job

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DHS wants the Supreme Court to let its agents cut the razor wire barrier Texas has erected along sections of Texas’ border with Mexico, a barrier raised in order to slow the flow of illegal aliens into Texas, and a barrier necessitated by the Biden’s decision to not defend our southern border and to not enforce existing immigration laws. A core part of DHS’ rationalization for eliminating that barrier is this:

Homeland Security says the wire can leave migrants stranded in the river, risking injury.

The razor wire does no such thing. What leaves the illegal aliens stranded in the river is their decision to try to come into our nation illegally, to break our laws as their first act on entry.

It’s not our government’s job—at any level—to protect illegal aliens from the consequences of their own decisions. It is our government’s job—at any level—to protect our nation from illegal aliens’ entry.

Full stop.

A Karen Sues a Company

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So, what else is new? Not this one; it just happened to catch my eye. A Florida Karen, Cynthia Kelly, is suing Hershey’s over its Reese’s labeling, which Kelly claims is misleading advertising. The image below is the cause of her ire and the center of her (proposed class-action) suit:

She would not have purchased the candy had she known there was not actually ap face carved into the item. Given the image, she plainly expected, also, that there would already be a bite taken out of the item. Why would she buy a candy that had already been partly eaten?

This is the depth of the…foolishness…to which so many Precious Ones and outright lawfare gold diggers have stooped.

Protecting Your Cell Phone “from a banking threat”

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Kurt Knutsson has a Fox News article centered on protecting Android cell phones from malware that bypasses Android’s Restricted Setting Feature to steal, among other things, a user’s banking app PIN. It’s well worth reading and taking appropriate action, given that so many users have so many have banking (and other) access apps on their cells.

However.

Knutsson missed, in his article, the larger solution, or perhaps he deliberately elided it given how easy it is to use a cell phone—Android or other—to do things besides make and receive telephone calls or to exchange text messages.

What he missed is that that convenience comes with a very large cost, and that it’s an unavoidable cost given the ubiquitous presence of thieves in the world, including the virtual world of the Internet. The unavoidability of that cost stems directly from the fact that the contest between security and hacking past security is a permanent arms race in which security is, of necessity, reactive and not proactive. The hackers always have the first-user advantage, and that advantage lasts until security catches up—a gap that may be short or long but is always present.

The solution the Knutsson missed? Don’t have those banking (and other) access apps on your cell in the first place. At least, don’t go beyond social media apps—Facebook, Instagram, et al. (as if these are must haves)—at all. What’s not on a cell phone cannot be hacked by a cell phone hacker.

It’s certainly true that a laptop or PC is subject to the same vulnerabilities, but there’s no reason to extend and expand the reach of those vulnerabilities.

Responsibility and Carping

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A couple of letter writers in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section have some remarks about the way Israel is (trying to) prosecute its defense against Hamas’ war of extermination.

First is the Progressive-Democrat Congressman from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton. He so-piously wrapped himself in his status as a veteran and a US Marine to decry the Gaza civilian casualties occurring as Israel fights to defend itself. In his bellyaching about those casualties, he implies that they are the result of IDF action. He very carefully, though, ignores the fact that those casualties are inflicted on Gaza’s civilians by Hamas directly, as those terrorists shoot the civilians who are trying to leave the combat zone, especially including those proximate targets that the IDF routinely is at pains to identify beforehand so those civilians could otherwise depart.

Moulton further carefully ignores the fact that Hamas inflicts those casualties indirectly by placing their weapons caches, their rocket and missile launchers, and their command centers inside Gazans’ residential buildings, schools, and hospitals.

Moulton, perhaps even more despicably, provides no evidence whatsoever to support his contention that the IDF isn’t doing enough to protect the civilians even as it tries to pick out the terrorist immersing himself in the civilian crowd.

Israel certainly is responsible for its actions. So is Hamas. Carping from safety, by anyone, is not responsible action.

On the other hand, a letter-writer from outside the Progressive-Democrat Beltway Bubble, Paul Mertis of Atlanta, pointed out these items, contradicting Moulton:

[Biden to Netanyahu:] “There was no reason why we had to be in a war in Afghanistan at 9/11. There was no reason why we had to do some of the things we did.” Perhaps Mr Biden should be reminded that while it is approximately 7,000 miles from Washington to Kabul, Gaza borders Israel.

To which I add, regarding Biden’s…irresponsible…advice: yeah, that was just some people that did something. And, it’s also 5,900 miles from Washington to Gaza. It’s easy enough for Biden—and Moulton, come to that—to sit safely on the faraway sidelines and carp, while terrorists, operating from inside Gaza, try to destroy the nation on whose borders Gaza sits.

FDA Official Shames…Who?

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Peter Marks, FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director, thinks he’s shaming Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo over Ladapo’s raising the question of whether the FDA has adequately monitored mRNA-based Wuhan Virus vaccines for possible contamination with extraneous DNA fragments. Marks is claiming—and he’s actually serious—that simply raising the question is intrinsically misleading.

Yet he claims this, also:

Given the dramatic reduction in the risk of death, hospitalization, and serious illness afforded by the vaccines, lower vaccine uptake is contributing to the continued death and serious illness toll of COVID-19[.]

The mortality rates for children from a Wuhan Virus infection are

  • 3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year [with their unformed immune systems]
  • 6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years
  • 4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years
  • 5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years
  • 8 per 100,000 for those aged 15 to 19 years

For adults, the rate is 0.5% or less—a maximum of 500 per 100,000. Hospitalization and less than hospitalized serious illness rates are even smaller—and the number of actual infections that are so trivial that the individuals don’t bother to see a doctor about it or even don’t notice the infection illustrates the growing lack of general severity of the Virus.

mRNA vaccines may lower those rates further, but calling such reductions “dramatic” is itself…misleading.

Marks shames himself with his distortion.