Disinformation

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…about his new Truth Division Disinformation Governance Board.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said “there’s no question” he could have more effectively communicated the purpose of his newly-created “disinformation” board….

Mayorkas also said that his

Disinformation Governance Board [is] to combat online disinformation….

Of course, it is. And it’s the Biden-Harris administration personnel and Mayorkas who will decide what is truth and what is fiction and who will dictate via that Truther Board what we American citizens will be permitted to hear, and it’s the Biden-Harris administration personnel and Mayorkas who will tell us how to evaluate what their Board allows to be passed.

And this from Mayorkas:

You know, an individual has the free speech right to spew anti-Semitic rhetoric. What they don’t have the right to do is take hostages in a synagogue, and that’s where we get involved.

That’s a cynically and dishonestly presented red herring. Those two items have little to do with each other, and we already have statutes on the books barring the latter, as well as barring the former from taking the form of inciting the latter. No Truther Board is needed except to push Government censorship.

Putting a woman well-known for her own disinformation-spreading enthusiasm and skill in charge of the Board makes plain the degree of censorship to which this agency’s actions are intended to reach.

Logistics

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Junior officers study tactics, so the military saw goes, while senior officers study strategy, and general officers study logistics.

Then there’s this.

Military spending is set to rise, with the Biden administration requesting $773 billion for the Pentagon’s next financial year, but the military is still running short of some weapons widely used in Ukraine.
Defense-company executives say they are ready to increase production of most weapons, but some experts say the Pentagon has only just begun issuing new contracts that would be required to replace some of the weaponry sent overseas.
“Industry really can’t do a lot until they have their contracts in hand,” said Bill Greenwalt, a former Pentagon official who managed the military’s industrial policy and is now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “We are still in that limbo phase.”
The Pentagon has sent more than $3.7 billion worth of military goods from existing stockpiles to Ukraine since the February 24 invasion, from heavy artillery and tactical drones, to shoulder-fired Stingers and Javelins. But so far, the Pentagon has issued only one new contract, for Puma drones. A Pentagon official last week said the military was working to get others issued soon.

Apparently, no one in DoD, from SecDef Lloyd Austin—who used to be one of those general officers—on down, studies logistics.

A Small Tweak and a Large…Tweak

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In his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Travis Nix reminds us of this tidbit regarding IRS private letters that’s buried in President Joe Biden’s (D) latest budget proposal:

IRS private letter rulings—the agency’s written answers to individual taxpayers’ questions, which the IRS itself says cannot be relied on as precedent.

Here’s a small tweak: make the IRS stand by its rulings by making those rulings binding on the IRS, applicable to all taxpayers, and precedential. And require the IRS to answer the question that was asked—to issue its letter ruling—within 30 days of the question being asked, or failing to do so authorizes, as a matter of tax law, the questioner to answer the question (formally, via its tax return) in its own way.

Nix’ overall op-ed was centered on another item buried in that tax portion of the Biden-Harris budget: a lengthening of the time the IRS has to reach into the past to look at inadvertent tax errors in a taxpayer’s filing. The proposed time would be extended from three years into the past to six years.

However [emphasis added].

Since the IRS already has unlimited time to audit the returns of companies that seem to have deliberately omitted income they knew was taxable, the new regulation would largely target unknowing omissions that result from unclear regulations.

That brings me to a large tweak. The whole question could be entirely eliminated by rewriting our byzantine tax code to have no income tax at all on businesses and to have a single, low, flat individual income tax rate on all income regardless of source and with no subsidies, deductions, credits, or any other “adjustments.”

Such a code would allow individual tax filings to fit on the proverbial post card (but maybe stick it into an envelope for mailing, for privacy’s stake):

Line 1: How much income did you have this tax year? ______

Line 2: Insert income tax due ([10]% of Line 1):           ______

Count Me Unsympathetic

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As the US and our allies ramp up sanctions against Russia over that nation’s invasion of Ukraine, companies facing ransomware attacks think their ability to resolve the attacks is being complexified. Ed McNicholas, Co-Leader of Ropes & Gray LLP’s Data, Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice, has articulated the whine, as cited by the WSJ:

[E]nsuring that ransomware payments aren’t going to sanctioned Russian entities has gotten “much harder” recently.
“The overlap of the rise of ransomware and then these pervasive sanctions against Russia has created quite a firestorm in terms of the ability to pay ransoms,” he said.

No. It’s actually not that hard. These companies need to cut out the firestorm nonsense, and stop encouraging further ransomware attacks on themselves and on other businesses by paying the hackers for their crimes. It’s perfectly straightforward. Don’t make the payments at all.

Instead, do the near-term hard, but intermediate- and long-term high payoff work of taking corporate security seriously: fill the security gaps—both electronic and human—that allow the ransomware attacks to go forward, and learn how to counterattack to eliminate the attackers (not only the attacks), both through court channels and through electronic/virtual pathways.

Coveware Inc CEO Bill Siegel, as cited by the WSJ:

[C]ompanies should be proactive about beefing up their security and run tabletop exercises to try to avoid being caught off guard by an attack.
“Most companies approach this risk for the very first time when the incident happens,” he said.

That last is not just unacceptable, that’s willful negligence, and it should get the companies’ CEOs, COOs, CIOs, and their deputies fired for cause.

An Illustration

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…of President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s war on our energy production industry.

Their war has contributed heavily to our current strong rise in inflation, since energy underlies everything in our economy from industrial production to transportation (shipping and Americans’ travel to/from work) to food, both its production and Americans’ purchases for our families’ tables.

 

H/t: ralf