Monthly Archives: September 2025

Silly Question

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Progressive-Democratic Party Zohran Mamdani now claims he will “discourage” calls to globalize the intifada. The editors at the WSJ wonder

if he really understood [the term and the phrase], wouldn’t he go further and outright condemn such language?

It’s a silly question. Mamdani’s claim is empty rhetoric, intended solely to garner votes, with nothing whatsoever to do with any sincere conversion of understanding.

Mamdani fully understands the phrase and the term; that’s why encouraged it in the first place, and that’s why he continues, consciously and deliberately, to refuse to condemn it and to consciously and deliberately to weasel-word his way around questions of why he will not condemn.

This is who Party chose for their mayoral candidate, and this is who New York City residents are on the cusp of electing as their mayor.

The city is about to get an up close and personal demonstration of what it means to have a socialist who also is an anti-Semitic bigot running their show. The rest of our nation is about to get an object lesson in the outcomes of broad socialism and rank bigotry at the top of a city government.

Hopefully, it awaken the rest of our nation and take us back toward the virtuous people that one of our Founders readily acknowledged is a necessary prerequisite for a republic and for a population to govern itself.

I support and endorse Mamdani’s election for precisely that lesson.

Conflagration of Norms

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As President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Branch nominations languish in the Senate (300 of them), Republicans there are considering changing the rules to speed the nomination confirmation/rejection process. As The Wall Street Journal puts it in its lede,

…Democrats will call it President Trump’s latest conflagration of norms.

This would be, of course, typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ hypocrisy. Senate norms have already been burned to ashes in the conflagration of Party’s unprecedented obstruction of nearly all things President (read Trump) and nearly all things Republican. But especially all things (not just nearly all) regarding the President’s nominations and Party’s knee-jerk, universal attempts to block and its successes in slowest-walking the confirmation process. Progressive-Democrats are actively stalling even minor nominees who won bipartisan support in committee, just in petty protest of Trump policy (Party politicians claim it’s over his firing of Party-favored Executive Branch appointees, but their obstruction is much broader than that).

Changing the rules in the way Republicans are proposing—limited time to debate each nomination, allowing nominations to be considered in batches, with each batch subject to that same limited debate time—are sorely needed, and the change would benefit all Presidents, not just Trump.

The folks a President nominates and wants confirmed are intended to be members of the President’s team. Party politicians, though, are with their actions demanding confirmees be members of Party’s team, regardless of which party is in power from administration to administration.

I Will Be Brief

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But the climate-funding industry mavens still will not enjoy this. Steven Koonis, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and one of five authors of a Department of Energy report on climate—what really is known and not known about our changing climate—had these points in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

  • Elevated carbon-dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.
  • Complex climate models provide limited guidance on the climate’s response to rising carbon-dioxide levels. Overly sensitive models, often using extreme scenarios, have exaggerated future warming projections and consequences.
  • Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.
  • While global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.
  • Natural climate variability, data limitations and model deficiencies complicate efforts to attribute specific climate changes or extreme events to human CO2 emissions.
  • The use of the words “existential,” “crisis” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.
  • Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

It’s long past time to stop funding that industry and shift the funding to energy production while maintaining environmental damage controls. Environmental damage: not from atmospheric CO2 or too many jet aircraft contrails, for instance, but from damages as the acid rain of mercury-laden fossil fuel smoke (nearly completely eradicated); from the disposal of lithium batteries at the end of their battery car lifetimes; and from the tailings from mining the likes of lithium, copper, and cobalt to make those batteries and battery cars.

The Short and Sweet of It

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Government debt is ballooning globally, but this short post centers on US government debt.

Over the past two decades, governments went on a debt binge, fueled by low interest rates. Now that rates have risen, investors worry that Western governments aren’t willing to make politically difficult decisions to curb public spending….

Of particular interest to me is that this has gone on in extreme parallel (to coin a phrase) in the US. In the years (too many of them) following the Panic of 2008, the US Fed kept interest rates, via its benchmark rate setting artificially suppressed, holding them down almost all the way to zero. That fueled the borrowing, since payments on the debt were so cheap. (The heavily negative impact on fixed-income Americans holding, as their primary income source, corporate and government debt instruments was of no mind to the Fed or to the administrations then in power.)

Federal spending needs to come down, certainly, but that’s made harder to do (the primary impediment is political timidity) at the higher interest rates currently extant.

Therein lies the rub. The Fed’s benchmark rates currently are at, or a skosh below, the rates historically consistent with the Fed’s 2% target inflation rate. The current push to lower them even further, globally as well as here at home, is mistaken. That won’t reduce borrowing; it’ll only increase it, partly to roll existent debt and partly to “take advantage of” the lower rates to increase net borrowing.

No. It’s time for the Fed to be quiet and sit down, leaving its benchmark rates at their current level. The only thing for the Fed to say publicly about rates is to announce in clear, no uncertain terms—no Fed speak—that it’s going to sit down and be quiet, and leave its benchmark rates at their current levels. It’ll be costly and slow for existing debt to be paid down, but our economy will recover to even greater prosperity on the other side. The cost of not sitting tight at current levels will be even greater in the long run of burgeoning debt that ends up so great it cannot be repaid, except with inflation destroyed dollars.

John Maynard Keynes once said that in the long run, we’ll all be dead (so who cares, went his subtext). But our children and grandchildren will be living in today’s long run. We should care today.

Corporate Cybersecurity Training

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It isn’t very effective, apparently.

To measure the effectiveness of different methods of cybersecurity training, the authors [of a study] divided employees into four groups. After each attack, each group received a different training method: one received generic tips about avoiding phishing attacks, a second received an interactive Q&A on cybersecurity, a third was informed about the specific methods used in the most recent attack, and the fourth received an interactive Q&A that also included details about the most recent attack. A fifth group was also created, and the employees in that group received no training.
The authors found that on average, employees who received training of any sort had only a 1.7% lower failure rate than employees who had no training.

The authors’ solution?

The study’s takeaway for organizations, says [lead author Grant] Ho, is to rely on measures other than training, like phishing-detection software that automatically eliminates the need for employees to detect phishing attacks.

Software aids are important in this milieu, but the weak link remains the human. Software aids by themselves are insufficient.

There needs to be more to the training than just a slide presentation and some lectures, or in the present case, “interactive” Q&As. The training sessions need to be plussed up, a lot, but that can’t be the end of it. Schools and responsible companies run fire drills that run to completion with evacuation of the building and head counts and roll calls while the evacuees are gathered up at their assigned evacuation points. So it must be with cybersecurity training. Simulated cyber attacks (phishing, social engineering, etc) attacks should be run against a rotating collection of employees to test their training and their responses to the attacks. Those simulations should be run some weeks after the training and more frequently than those fire drills, and they should not use IT-ginned up attacks, either; they should use serious real-world attacks, altered only to get them targeted to the collection of employees being tested.

Beyond that, there needs to be teeth attached to the training and to employees’ failure to take the training seriously.

There are three outcomes from this. One is an empirical assessment of the quality of training, its durability, and identification of weaknesses in the training program, which then can be corrected (not given up on). A second results from those teeth: once management is satisfied with the training quality, employees still falling for the attacks should be terminated. They’re too great a risk to the company.

The third outcome is a very great increase in the cyber safety of the company and of its employees (with a follow-on: those employees will be better able to maintain security in their homes’ cyber environment). The added training and testing will incur costs to the company, but the risk of the far greater cost of a cyber breach—both direct and indirect through liability—is too great to ignore.