This one relates to Congressman Eric Swalwell’s (D, CA) apparent compromise by the reputed People’s Republic of China spy Fang Fang (Christine Fang).
It seems that Fang hooked up with Swalwell early on, when he was a local politician, and she helped him rise into Congress: fundraising, staff selections, and the like. My question doesn’t relate, directly, to this particular tale.
These arise from the SolarWinds hack attack that some experts claim doesn’t rise to an act of war (but that I think might do so*).
Why wasn’t it spotted sooner? This applies to SolarWind as much as it does the IT MFWICs and their staffs at the various government agency and private business recipients. Who inspected SolarWind’s “updates,” how were they tested both before SolarWind disseminated them, and how were they tested before the receiving entities implemented them? Were the recipients actually, with straight faces, allowing a remote entity to enter their systems and install software that was uninspected/untested by those recipients?
Ramstein AB, Germany, location of USAFE headquarters, got an emergency alarm over the weekend of an in-progress missile attack on the base. The alarm turned out to be false.
There are a couple of ways such a false alarm might be triggered. One is that the alarm was part of an exercise and the exercise label simply dropped or missed. Another is that, as part of a Russian exercise, by happenstance in also progress, missiles were launched at exercise targets inside Russia during that exercise’s final phase, and detection systems acted on the fact and a short time later (but after the alarm had been sent) recognized the launches for what they were and canceled the alarm.
A letter writer in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section had a thought.
There are some degrees that are worth borrowing money for, but many aren’t. Parents and students, do your homework.
Indeed. Lenders need to do their due diligence homework much more diligently, too. Two ways to incentivize (to coin a term) the lenders: get Government out of the business of making student loans and out of the business of guaranteeing others’ loans to students.
The other way is to require the school being borrowed for to attend to be the primary lender—ideally, the sole lender.
Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón has decided to pick and choose the laws he’ll work to enforce and the crimes he’ll explicitly excuse. Here’s the Directive Gascon issued to the County Prosecutors. This is the opening of his Section I, Declination of Policy Directive [emphasis in the original]:
The misdemeanor charges specified below shall be declined or dismissed before arraignment and without conditions unless “exceptions” or “factors for consideration” exist.
These charges do not constitute an exhaustive list
Here are the high points of Gascón’s non-exhaustive list:
In quotes because it’s far more than that. Recall that Project Veritas has been releasing recordings of CNN’s routine 9am editorial conference calls. In one of those recordings, Cynthia Hudson, CNN‘s Senior Vice President and Managing Director of CNN en Español and Hispanic Strategy, had this:
The Cubans are gonna vote for Trump.
Project Veritas is properly identifying this news outlet’s plainly evident bias. There is, though, far more than that in these calls.
“The Cubans….” Not even “The Cuban-Americans.” CNN is denying these folks their American citizenship.
Shelby Steele had a thought on this. So do I.
Senator Tim Scott (R, SC), Congressman-elect Burgess Owens (R, UT), Herschel Walker, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) and several others, wrote Steele, all spoke at the Republican National Convention. More, each of them spoke as men and women—individual men and women—they did not speak as spokesmen for their color. In particular, they did not speak as the professional victims of “systemic racism.”
They spoke as persons who are part of a new and growing racial order (Steele’s term):
We hardly knew ya.
Actress Melissa McCarthy publicly apologized this week [last week as this is published] for having briefly helped direct charitable donations toward an anti-sex-trafficking organization….
…
Among 20 charities promoted by the actress was Exodus Cry, a group that “fight[s] for the freedom of all sex trafficking victims” and seeks to “break the cycle of exploitation and help those sold for sex[.]”
All because the Daily Beast claims Exodus Cry is anti-abortion—which Exodus Cry denies.
And: Exodus Cry has been expelled from McCarthy’s “20 Days of Kindness” campaign.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board, in its Friday edition, ran a piece strongly decrying the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s shrill attacks on Justice Sam Alito for his effrontery in decrying their attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of religion. In those personages’ eyes, Alito behaved despicably in two ways: defending those two freedoms, and any others, is far too political a thing for any mere Justice to do. And he did it in front of that dastardly bastion of individual liberty, the Federalist Society.
Then the editors deprecated their otherwise excellent piece with this, near the end of their editorial:
Mine just pegged.
Rashida Tlaib
@RashidaTlaib
US House candidate, MI-13
My residents walked by blighted homes, closed schools and breathed in polluted air, to vote for President-elect @JoeBiden & VP-elect @KamalaHarris.
How oblivious can one grown, adult woman be?