Congresswoman Cori Bush (D, MO) on defunding the police. And an associated screen shot:
H/t Not the Bee
You Bet Your Life
2
Let’s Make Lots of Money
Sounds like a lyric from a Pet Shop Boys song.
The hackers who assaulted Colonial Pipeline, ostensibly for ransom, claim they
only want[] to make money, not disrupt society….
Never mind that their attack on a major oil pipeline does precisely that disruption.
Never mind, either, that these hackers aren’t total idiots—they knew their assault would disrupt a major segment of our economy and so our society. That was the purpose of the attack; this was no petty criminal act. Demanding to be paid by their victim is simply a distraction.
They claimed this, also:
From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.
Right. And they have some bridges across the Reka Vop’ to sell us, also. All illegal behavior, much less terrorist behavior, if left unanswered has social consequences.
No, these…personages…have simply applied a Willy Sutton tenet to their terrorism:
Go where the money is. Go there often.
Our Federal government, actively aided by our State governments, need to get aggressive with active responses to such attacks. The time for passivity, for merely acting defensively after the fact, is long past. Terrorists, physical or cyber, network entities or state-sponsored, need to be burned to the ground.
The negligence of company CEOs, COOs, and CIOs, including those officers at Colonial Pipeline, in not being serious about hardening their systems, also badly wants sanction.
Rule Making and Rule Enforcement Pauses
Commerce has a regulation, enacted in 2019 with effect last March (!), that
allows the government to block foreign telecommunication-gear imports and other business deals deemed a security threat[.]
There’s a clump of US businesses and trade groups that are pressing the Biden administration to “pause” enforcement while it
reviews the best path forward to working with industry on securing the [information and communications] supply chain[.]
There’s a larger problem here.
The objectors raise, entirely legitimately, let’s stipulate, concerns about this telecommunication-gear rule’s supposed excessive breadth of reach. However, willy-nilly cessations of enforcement just because this or that business or group gets a new administration to whom to object, is badly counterproductive. They are disruptive, they reduce predictability of the business environment impacted by that rule/regulation, and they raise the costs of doing business and through that costs to the end buyers.
If a business entity (or anyone else, come to that) has reason to object to a rule or regulation that’s in effect, that entity should take the matter up in a court of law. Appealing to the chief law enforcement facility—the White House—for selective enforcement is not the way to go.
Also: this is another reason for Congress to take back most of its delegation (of rule-making) authority to Executive Branch facilities, and enact—or not—its own, specific, laws that need very little rule making authority by unelected persons.
Basing Options
It seems the Pentagon is only now beginning to think about where to put the soldiers we’re withdrawing from Afghanistan. (I hope some consideration is starting to be given to the equipment, too, rather than just abandoning it to the Afghanis.)
As some of you might expect, I have a thought.
Maybe work a basing deal with Vietnam (we need one of those for our Navy, too).
Alternatively, or in addition, work a basing deal with India, for its far northeast. The states of Sikkim and Assam come to mind.
In the Land of YGTBSM
Some of you may recall that a few weeks ago, Texas had several days of electricity (and associated natural gas) blackouts, some of those areas lost water for a number of days, and some areas lost Internet connectivity—and Internet-based communications—for some time.
A Wall Street Journal ran an article last week that looked into the sources of the electricity failures; it’s well worth the read in its own right.
A couple of items jumped out at me, though, concerning ERCOT, a State-level regulator about which I’ve written before.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas activated a program that pays large industrial power users to reduce their consumption during emergencies. But the grid operator, known as Ercot, didn’t know who was being paid to participate in this program and what type of facilities were getting shut off, it has since acknowledged.
How is that possible? How can an entity that bills itself as a reliability facility not know who its members are or what types of facilities it might affect?
It gets better, though, regarding ERCOT’s member facilities.
“We do not know what type of facility it is,” said Kenan Ögelman, Ercot’s Vice Ppresident of Commercial Operations. “We do know [a facility] has qualified and performed to the requirement because we test them, but we don’t know what it is they do.”
How anything be tested if the testing personnel don’t know what [a facility] does?
ERCOT really has to go.