President Donald Trump (R) has had done with trying to negotiate with Iran’s government. Finally. For now.
I don’t want to negotiate now. I said, “Let’s not negotiate. Three days ago, we had a deal.
He’s finally figured out, maybe, that it’s not possible to negotiate with terrorists.
In many diplomatic respects, Trump is as naïve as Jimmy Carter was.
The Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie that police gatherings of Google location histories constituted a search and so must be subject to 4th Amendment strictures. From that, we get parents pushing back against K-12 school districts conducting surveillance of students’ parents, explicitly to gather [a]ccess license plate data and develop pattern of life information.
One of those tracking packages, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, explicitly brags about the software’s ability to collect and provide to school managers residency verification, address validation, license plate verification, all with a view to [u]nderstand who owns and lives at the address provided and other related locations and to develop pattern of life information. The purveyors of this PRC-esque surveillance package also brag that school managers can [e]asily connect information about people, businesses, assets, affiliations, and other vital content.
All of that without the parents’ prior knowledge or permission and without any court sanction of the surveillance.
That such invasions of average Americans’ privacy is being done by school system managers is one more reason they need their reins jerked up short.
The estimable editors of The Wall Street Journal spent an entire column dunking on Vice President JD Vance (R) and his foreign policy miscues. Buried in the text, though, were a couple of nuggets.
…hedge-fund magnate Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor, said he’d favor Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a matchup between the two for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination.
Unmentioned by the editors is that Rubio has already said he won’t run for the party’s nomination for President if Vance does, the plain subtext of which is he won’t risk dividing the party with such a contest. This is an assurance Vance has so far chosen not to offer.
And these, regarding the cease fire deal he thought he’d negotiated with the civilians in the Tehran branch of Iran’s government (the other branch being the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps):
I think that they see there’s a real opportunity here to turn over a new leaf so long as they do the right thing[.]
…
They want to have a much brighter future….
As the editors noted, though, the regime’s vision of a brighter future entails nuclear weapons that allow it to control the region, not prosperity for its people.
Vance’s misunderstanding of whose view of “right thing” actually was in play, along with his miss regarding whose vision was operating, are not just statesmanship misses, they’re failures of political acumen.
A letter-writer in Monday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote this while commenting on Alexis de Tocqueville’s praise for our nation’s then-penchant for solving problems locally rather than crying to Mama Government:
A statute can’t manufacture civic energy or entrepreneurial zeal. That has to come from citizens who are politically engaged or not hindered in their efforts to continue the American dream.
That is plainly true. And, pedantically, it echoes Aristotle’s and Plato’s remarks about politics and citizens’ role in it.
The solution is just as plain, and it’s made so by the failing, and increasing depth of the failure, of our public school systems to properly educate our children. We need the competition of school choice, the freely done setup of voucher and charter schools and of homeschooling, whether individually or parents setting up homeschool pods. That competition even improves the performance of local examples of public schools.
That last, though, requires the reduction, if not elimination, of teachers unions, organizations whose management teams care not a farthing about our children, nor even of their teacher members, but only about their own political power.
After 15 years of being hacked, often severely, by Russian government sanctioned, if not government owned operators, the nations of Europe has finally gotten around to responding. With sanctions.
The European Union and the UK said the sanctions would target Russian military intelligence officers, hackers, and private companies that support the Kremlin’s cyberattacks.
As if the sanctions’ targets would care. Those folks, their companies, and their backers will just find other ways to operate. Money isn’t all that much of a critical item for their operations, and the resources they really need are largely untouched by sanctions.
We do get this sort of thing, though, in addition to those sanctions: after years of Russian hacks against the French Ministers of Defense and Foreign Affairs and their networks,
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he would summon Russia’s ambassador in France in the coming days.
For what? Le goutier sans vin? No rush in any event; whenever is fine.
How about, instead, you know—work with me on this; it’s a new concept for some—maybe fighting back and hitting directly Russia’s hack networks, and the computer networks of Russia’s intelligence agencies and defense establishment?
Sanctions alone accomplish very little, as years of them already applied against Iran, northern Korea, the People’s Republic of China—and Russia—clearly demonstrate. Those nations and street gang-run areas have not changed their behavior in the slightest, for all that their pace has been reduced.
What’s necessary is direct responses targeting their ability to operate at all. Get into their networks and erase data in some, insert false data in others, and inject sleeperware in all of them, the last to be triggered at a useful time in the future.