The People’s Republic of China says it has ordered businesses doing business with northern Korean entities or individuals must shut down within 120 days.
This would be cool, if it happens. The PRC has said it would enforce other sanctions, also, and then only paid lip service to enforcement while engaging in business largely as usual with the north.
Believe it when you see it actually happen. If it does happen, believe the durability of PRC enforcement when it actually lasts.
The Wall Street Journal ran a couple of pieces on this, one by Matthew Futterman and Andrew Beaton (Behind the NFL’s Frantic Scramble to Hit Back at Trump) and the other an op-ed by Jason Riley.
The former centered on the purported disarray among the NFL’s management, players, players union, owners, and coaches as they tried to figure out how to ride the tiger they’d turned loose with their “protests.” The latter was a sort of coming-of-age piece wherein Riley went from national anthem sitter to a national anthem stander.
My two thoughts are closely related to each other. This is my view of the Futterman and Beaton piece:
….players—many of whom say they are deeply offended by the president’s statements….
That’s OK–many of us are deeply offended by players’ attacks on our flag and national anthem.
Goodell had released a statement that Trump had shown “an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL…failure to understand the overwhelming force for good [we] represent in our communities.”
Where is the good in the NFL’s divisive attacks on our national symbols? Where is the NFL’s respect for these?
These Precious Ones claim to protest inequities against minorities. This is nonsense. Were they interested in protesting inequities against minorities, they’d do that instead of attacking our flag and anthem. Were they interested in working against those inequities, they’d go into communities and work the problems rather than kneeling on the safety of the sidelines saying, “There’s a problem. Someone else fix it.”
This is what Riley’s piece generated in my pea brain:
The players have said they are protesting the unjust treatment of blacks by law enforcement….
This is nonsense. If the players wanted to protest unjust treatment, they would protest unjust treatment. Instead, they’re attacking our flag and our national anthem, and they’re insulting Gold Star families and veterans who fought, many of whom were maimed or killed in those fights, for these guys’ right to protest.
The stereotype of “dumb jock” was ugly 50 years ago, and it’s no prettier today. These players know full well what they’re doing; perpetuating that stereotype by pretending they don’t is as ugly as the stereotype.
Danish Immigration, Integration and Housing Minister Inger Stojberg has posted on her Facebook page a repeat of an image widely posted several years ago by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. What occasioned her post is the timidity of the Skovgaard Museum in Viborg, Denmark.
The museum is running an exhibition about blasphemy since the Reformation, but it has chosen to omit a classic example of blasphemy: images of Islam’s prophet Muhammed. As Stojberg noted, it’s the museum’s right to do this under Danish free speech law, but it’s excessively timid of the museum, and it’s the right of other Dames—including Stojberg—to decry the museum for its decision.
The image is this; the icons are present because this rendition is the wallpaper of her iPad.
The image also can be seen on her Facebook page here.
Because it’s my blog, and so I get to.
Gene Malcolm (@spike012002) has a tweet up:
Next, Japanese businessman will start wearing business suits. When will this cultural appropriation end?
There also is a joke wandering the rounds:
Q: What’s the difference between Los Angeles and yogurt?
A: One of them has a living culture.
Which makes me wonder, in the context of Malcolm’s tweet: between LA and yogurt, which is inflicting cultural appropriation?
Equifax took six weeks to get around to bothering to tell us about it so we individual consumers could begin to take our own corrective and defensive action. That’s unconscionable, Equifax isn’t alone in delaying telling us about hacks into personal information those companies are holding for us, and it’s giving impetus to legislation that would force companies to disclose such hacks much sooner. One such proposed bill is Congressman Jim Langevin’s (D,RI) reintroduction of the Obama era’s Personal Data Notification and Protection Act.
I don’t like regulations, but one here is necessary. The hacks aren’t exposing company property; they’re exposing individual personal property entrusted to the company. Companies have an obligation to safeguard that personal property, and that obligation is strongly expanded by a company’s demand for that personal property as a condition of doing business with it.
Companies don’t want to be embarrassed…[by] having to disclose when people’s data is leaked….
People don’t want to be harmed by those leaks or by delays in finding out their data have been leaked. I’m trying to weight the one against the other in my balance. Oh, wait….
Under this proposed legislation, Equifax would have had to disclose its breach within 30 days….
No, there’s no need for any delay, indeed, delay simply compounds the damage that can be done to us individuals. As Christopher Mims put it at the end of his piece at the link,
When Equifax was breached, hackers got birthdates, Social Security numbers, and other hard facts about most of us. This data has the power to ruin our financial lives….
Any delay, let alone 30 days, is far too long to be held defenseless against that. The legislation’s proposed 30 days are forever in today’s information and financial world, an entire month within which hackers could work their nefarious ends without our being able to defend against those ends. Equifax, et al., should be required to disclose on the day the hack is discovered and then to keep us current on developments with frequent updates that, at the least, explain what’s being done about the hack to reduce the likelihood of a subsequent hack, what’s being done to mitigate the damage to us of the present hack, why the hack wasn’t discovered sooner, and what’s being done to speed discovery for next times.
We need to be able to act in our defense, too.
And contra the attitudes of those who defend delay, we Americans are not too stupid to understand what we’re being told—so long as it’s prompt and truthful—and we can make good use of the information which, aside from our being better able to defend ourselves, would let us see quickly what companies develop a history of exposing our personal information and so are unworthy of our business.