Counterproductive

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The government of the People’s Republic of China now claims, at the end of its three-year Wuhan Virus shutdown, to be open for foreign business. A broad range of folks running American businesses actually are taking that government’s blandishments seriously.

Many companies that are increasing their commitments to China are consumer-facing. They still view China’s enormous market as a promising long-term bet, even if sales took a hit during the zero-Covid era.

This is, at best, counterproductive.

Any product’s technology, consumer-oriented or not, can be dual-used for military or intelligence collection purposes, and in the PRC, it will be—not only to the detriment of PRC citizens, but to our detriment and that of our friends and allies.

More than that, American investment, any sort of doing business, inside the PRC works to the benefit of the PRC’s economy.

No American company should be doing any sort of business with or within an enemy nation.

Full stop.

Gun Control and Racism

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Jacob Gershwin opened his Wall Street Journal piece on gun control with this lede:

Historical, racist gun laws are taking on new relevance in legal battles over modern-day gun regulations, following a Supreme Court ruling that expanded the right to bear arms.

He followed up [emphasis added]:

In the 1700s and 1800s, states across the country passed laws to keep guns out of the hands of slaves, free Black people, Native Americans and Catholics. Such discriminatory gun restrictions would be unconstitutional today, but they have entered the gun-rights debate as judges look to apply the Supreme Court’s decision last June that said gun restrictions must be anchored in historical traditions.

Now, despicably, many Federal and State government “lawyers” are claiming that those old, ugly, and by-design racist and anti-religion—those Evil Catholics—are part of that historical tradition as they continue their efforts to disarm all of us average Americans, in toto. US prosecutors in front of an appellate court:

They [[those racist gun control laws] nevertheless show that the Framers understood that legislatures could make such judgments to categorically disarm groups of people deemed to be dangerous.

Dangerous groups of Americans like those of us who might want to demur from Government behaviors, behaviors like the IRS targeting conservative American political groups, like the Department of Justice targeting mothers disputing with local school boards as domestic terrorists, like the FBI targeting traditional Catholics (those folks again…) as right-wing extremists and “investigating” them.

What prosecutors like those so carefully ignore is that that prior set of laws, that prior “tradition,” was wholly erased from the American body politic—the honest body politic—by the Civil War, the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments, and the recognition that all Americans are equal under American law—under all American laws.

For those persecutors prosecutors to argue that those racist gun control laws are somehow still part of our historical traditions is for them to ignore critical parts of gun control law history: the part that had post-Civil War South and too many jurisdictions in the North enacting gun control laws explicitly to disarm and keep unarmed and helpless black Americans—freed and newly freed—along with their white supporters against depredations, that ranged from rape through lynching, at the hands of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

Those prosecutors are showing their own invidious racist bent.

Passcode Vulnerability

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The subheadline of a Wall Street Journal article on cell phone security vulnerabilities presents the subject of my post.

The passcode that unlocks your phone can give thieves access to your money and data; “it’s like a treasure box”

The article then laid out the problem:

The thieves are exploiting a simple vulnerability in the software design of over one billion iPhones active globally. It centers on the passcode, the short string of numbers that grants access to a device; and passwords, generally longer alphanumeric combinations that serve as the logins for different accounts.
With only the iPhone and its passcode, an interloper can within seconds change the password associated with the iPhone owner’s Apple ID. This would lock the victim out of their account, which includes anything stored in iCloud. The thief can also often loot the phone’s financial apps since the passcode can unlock access to all the device’s stored passwords.
“Once you get into the phone, it’s like a treasure box,” said Alex Argiro, who investigated a high-profile theft ring as a New York Police Department detective before retiring last fall.

This image lays out the technique:There’s nothing magic about iPhones in this regard, though; Android cell phones are just as vulnerable to this sort of attack.

However, there are a couple of solutions to this, regardless of the type of cell phone you use. Each solution also works even better when done in concert with the other, and they rely on something old-fashioned: caution and concern for personal privacy.

One solution is to not use your cell phone to conduct any activity, not only financial, that you don’t want exposed to the public, much less to a thief. That way, if your cell phone is stolen, there’s nothing in it beyond your contact list that can be hacked. The potential cost of doing non-telephone things on your cell phone is far greater than the short-term convenience gained.

The other solution is to not store anything in the cloud. Keep your private material private by keeping it entirely within your home’s network, and ideally even more restricted: keep that information solely on your PC’s or laptop’s hard drive, or better, on an external hard drive that connects only via USB—and keep that external storage device separate from your PC/laptop.

Related, and subsidiary to all of that, don’t store passcodes or passwords on your PC/laptop, even via a passcode/word manager. In the unlikely event your laptop is stolen, or your PC is stolen via home break-in, that manager can be hacked at the thief’s leisure.

Disingenuosity of NATO’s “Biggest European Members”

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Here’s the lede in the WSJ article:

Germany, France, and Britain see stronger ties between NATO and Ukraine as a way to encourage Kyiv to start peace talks with Russia later this year, officials from the three governments said, as some of Kyiv’s Western partners have growing doubts over its ability to reconquer all its territory.

Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelenskyy always has been willing to engage in peace talks with the barbarian invader, and his criteria for entering into those negotiations have been clearly stated all along. That Vladimir Putin refuses to meet those criteria—his insistence, in fact, that Ukraine isn’t even a real nation—are on the barbarian chieftain, not on Zelenskyy. Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and Olaf Scholz, the British Prime Minister, French President, and German Chancellor, respectively, know this full well. I’ll have more on that growing doubt of Ukraine’s recovering its territory (not reconquering, as those three put it) below.

There’s this from a carefully anonymous French…official:

We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable. And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.

None of these wondrous national leaders—or the Biden administration, come to that—believed Ukraine would be able to defeat the barbarian’s initial invasion, either; they expected Ukraine to fall in a matter of days. That was their rationalization for withholding weapons Ukraine—the folks actually doing the fighting, bleeding, and dying—said they needed to drive the barbarian back out. And so here we are, a year later, and the Ukrainians are still fighting, bleeding, and dying, and they have recovered much of the territory the barbarian took (and devastated and inflicted atrocities on the captured populations during the occupations, on the way back out, and still from afar. But these wonders continue to avert their eyes from that).

If these august personages, including our own President Joe Biden (D) were serious about Russia mustn’t win, or whether the war goes on for [too] long, they’d get out of the way of arms transfers to Ukraine, they’d rapidly supply the weapons Ukraine says they need, in the numbers and at the pace Ukraine says they need them, so Ukraine could avoid an attritional war, recover all of their lost territory—including Crimea—and win quickly.

Finally, there’s this most blatant bit of hypocrisy, and outright dishonesty, from Macron himself as he told Mr Zelensky that (as paraphrased by the WSJ)

even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.

Of course. But not until after Germany had been driven back completely out of France—and all other Nazi German-occupied territories. Peace talks were not even allowed until then; the Allies demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender before peace talks could begin. Zelenskyy is not holding out for the barbarian’s unconditional surrender, only that he leave Ukraine.

Any Excuse to Slow-Walk

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Now the Biden Defense Department is saying that it won’t be able to deliver the “promised” M1 tanks to Ukraine before the end of this year or potentially the next. According to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, the military does not currently have the available inventory to supply the tanks. “Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh added:

We just don’t have these tanks available in excess in our US stocks, which is why it is going to take months to transfer these M1A2 Abrams to Ukraine[.]

Actually, we do have the tanks to pass along, excess or not. We have lots of them in active units both here and overseas—like in Europe. It seems that President Joe Biden (D), his SecDoD Lloyd Austin, and Wormuth are concerned about drawing down active inventory and, furthermore, do not take seriously the need to get contracts let (and to get Pentagon bureaucrats out of the way so contracts can be let efficiently) in order to ramp up tank (and other weapon systems) production.

Tanks we have in Europe could be at the Ukrainian fronts in a couple of days plus training time. And the Slavs aren’t as dumb as the German government makes them out to be; they’d train up quickly.

Separately, F-16s, European NATO fighter aircraft, and associated logistics chains could be transferred to Ukraine in a few hours plus training time. A-10s, designed from the ground up to destroy armor and other ground formations and which too many in DoD insist are excess to our needs (so no inventory about which to worry drawing down) could be delivered to Ukraine in a matter of days plus training time. It’s time to stop saying “No.”

I have to ask: what’s the value of weapons that are held in reserve and held in reserve and…? Weapons held in reserve in favor of not drawing down inventory, rather than for sound tactical reasons, are weapons that are not available to defeat an enemy’s offensive, or to punch through enemy defense lines, or to exploit breakthroughs otherwise created. (Note, for instance, that the Ukrainian offensives in the east that liberated Kharkiv and much of that oblast, and in the south that liberated Kherson, petered out by the time the one got to Bakhmut in the east, and the other to the river on the southern edge of Kherson, due to lack of armor and other mechanized systems with which to continue exploiting those efforts’ success.)

Aircraft withheld altogether are aircraft not available to shoot down the barbarian’s aircraft and missiles that the barbarian is using to destroy Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods all across Ukraine and to butcher civilian women and children.

The only effect of holding back these tanks—and of NATO nations (like Germany) slow-walking delivery of their “promised” Leopard tanks—and aircraft is to prolong the barbarian’s war against Ukraine. The only purpose for prolonging that war is to increase the bleeding and the weakening of Russia, with the side effect of increasing the odds that Russia will eventually succeed in overrunning and destroying Ukraine.

That the prolongation also increases the bleeding that Ukrainians are doing—civilian women and children as well as Ukrainian soldiers—doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to Biden and his cronies or to those European NATO nations. That increased Ukrainian bloodshed also comes in close parallel with Biden’s avowed policy of creating and then protecting the invader’s status as sanctuary, proof against Ukrainian strikes against the barbarian’s staging areas and supply dumps that are inside Russia.