Again, I Ask

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A canonical example of the journalism guild’s view of what constitutes honest reporting is this from CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell and CBS News‘ response to the outcry over her…error. She emitted a tweet regarding the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, claiming

NEW: According to a DOJ official, the FBI is NOT in possession of former President Trump’s passports. Trump had accused the FBI of stealing his three passports during the search of his Mar-a-Lago home.

This was shown later to be obviously wrong; the FBI returned three of Trump’s passports, which of course they could not have done had they not “been in position” of them in the first place.

Notice: O’Donnell claimed to be citing a DOJ official (emphasis mine).

Regarding that,

CBS News protocol is to confirm news with at least two people before reporting it as fact.

Two people.

It used to be the case that journalists were required to cite two on-the-record sources to corroborate an anonymous source’s claim. The journalism guild has long since walked away from that requirement.

And so I ask again.

Why have journalists chosen to walk away from that standard of integrity?

What concrete, measurable standard of integrity do journalists use today in lieu of that one?

She’s Right

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But for the wrong reasons.

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says billions of dollars in upgrades are needed to the power grid in the US to prepare for widespread electric vehicle adoption.

If that’s the spur needed to get the upgrades started and seriously underway, then cool. However, our power grid badly needs upgrade and strengthening in its own right. It’s old, near capacity under normal draw, and highly fragile—as the California portion of the grid demonstrates continually, and as the Texas grid demonstrated a couple of winters ago.

Indeed, nothing has been done since the Northeast blackout of 2003—which itself was a geographic repeat of the blackout of 1965. The proximate causes of these actually were quite trivial, but the fragility of the grid was demonstrated by how fast and far the effects spread: throughout the American northeast (and deep into Canada, which illustrates, also, international implications for strengthening, or continuing to ignore, the decrepit state of our grid).

It’s a national security matter, too, beyond the economic aspects of security.

We also need to drop some dimes (though not as many as might seem) on hardening all of our power grids (plural: not only electricity, but grids distributing natural gas and oil from the well through refiners to end users) against EMP attacks—which needn’t be nuclear weapon-originated, or even large, but merely carefully targeted—and against being software-hacked, as the Russians did when they shut down Colonial Pipeline.

Bitter is…

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…as bitter does.  There’s much to be made of former President Donald Trump’s (R) keeping on about whether the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. (He thinks so, and there was a potful of sloppiness, error, fraud, and illegal changes to the mechanics of voting, but in this not so humble blogger’s view, not enough to aggregate to a “stolen” election.)

Let’s look, though, at soon-to-be former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and her behavior following her decisive loss in the just concluded Wyoming primary (so desperate was she in the runup to actual voting that she was…asking…members of the Progressive-Democratic Party to cross over and vote for her in the primary).

The Wall Street Journal claims

Ms Cheney is a conservative by any measure and she has the courage of her convictions.

The first part of this is plainly not true. Were she truly conservative, she would have adhered to her implied commitment to the citizens of Wyoming to represent them, a commitment made by the fact of her campaigning for and election to Congress in prior cycles.

The second part of that is either plainly not true, as well, or she has badly misplaced convictions. Had she the courage of her convictions, she would have represented her bosses, those Wyoming citizens. In the alternative, her convictions centered on putting her personal positions ahead of—in place of—those of her bosses. If those two sets of convictions truly were that incompatible, a person of truly conservative principles would have resigned her Congressional seat and pursued her convictions as a private person, where it would be legitimate to represent herself instead of her fellow Wyomingians.

Instead, she abused her position, participating in a by design one-sided House J6 Committee until the very last day, and only then pursuing her convictions as a private person.

And what is that personal conviction? It’s nothing that benefits people generally, or Wyomingians in particular. Her conviction—her single goal in life—is to be in the way of a politician whom she hates so viscerally.

Ms Cheney’s concession speech suggests her mission in politics now is to prevent Mr Trump from becoming President again.

In fact, no suggestion at all:

Immediately following her loss to Harriet Hageman in Wyoming’s Republican primary, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., unveiled her next move, launching a new organization with the primary goal of keeping former President Donald Trump from regaining the presidency.

In fine, Cheney has spent years letting her bitterness vis-à-vis Trump govern her Congressional behavior and her behavior while campaigning.

Rearranging the Furniture

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CDC Director Rochelle Walensky now claims she’s going to reorganize the CDC after saying that her agency did not reliably meet expectations during the course of the Wuhan Virus Situation.

The changes will include elevating the laboratory division to report to the CDC’s director and restructuring the communications office….

Because the CDC needs to do a better job of selling its claims. And this bit:

shift the CDC’s culture from highly academic to focus more on preparedness and response

And

Dr Walensky also wants additional funding and more authority for the CDC on matters including mandating data collection from states….

There it is. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s go-to solution for all of our ails—more government funding and more government power.

No.

Aside from the interest in being better at the agency’s used car salesman patter, the wasteful increase in taxpayer money coming her way, and the dangerous increase in government power, mechanically, this is just a cosmetic rearrangement of the furniture. The CDC needs reorganization, but it needs to be seriously reorganized.

There’ll be no culture change so long as the personnel of the current culture remain. Any reorg must begin with personnel, not a change of office symbols. That beginning, then, must be the termination, for reasons ranging from cause to what the military refers to as the good of the service, of the agency’s managers, from Walensky and her staff through her deputies and their staffs on down through (not to) middle management.

Every single one of them needs to go. And then Walensky’s replacement as Director, before any additional hiring occurs, needs to justify in concrete and measurable terms, line by line and position by position, why the personnel slot for that proposed new hire needs to exist.

Only with that change in personnel and that streamlining can the CDC become an efficient and effective organization and an organization us American citizens can trust.

Export Controls Regarding the PRC

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It has come to light that we really don’t have any serious export controls covering technology-related exports to the People’s Republic of China.

Of the US’s total $125 billion in exports to China in 2020, officials required a license for less than half a percent, Commerce Department data shows. Of that fraction, the agency approved 94%, or 2,652, applications for technology exports to China. The figures omit applications “returned without action,” meaning their outcomes were uncertain.
The result: the US continues to send to China an array of semiconductors, aerospace components, artificial-intelligence technology, and other items that could be used to advance Beijing’s military interests.

Why is this being allowed to occur?

Some warn tighter restrictions on US tech sales to China will backfire because allies such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea will step in to fill the void. For export restrictions to be effective, “we need our allies to have the same controls,” said Kevin Wolf, a senior Commerce official during the Obama administration, while testifying on Capitol Hill last year. “It is that simple and logical.”

That would be silly if it weren’t, at bottom, rankly defeatist. We shouldn’t be waiting around on putting curbs on technology transfers to an enemy nation. Instead of looking for consensus first, we need to act, to lead, to let the consensus build as we go, and to give our allies something to follow and a consensus to join. After all, if we don’t care enough to do, there’s no reason anyone else should care enough to do.

Beside that, if we stop exporting our technology to the PRC and our putative allies step in to fill the gap, at least we’ll be stopping our own transfers, and our allies’ technologies, for the most part, aren’t as good as ours. The PRC would be getting second best, continuing to trail us, and that would be to the good for our security.