The Willy Sutton Objection

Posted on by
Reply

Facebook has joined with Epic Games in the latter’s lawsuit against Apple over how to charge—and who gets to make the charge—for apps installed on Apple’s iPhones. Facebook is doing so to further its feud with Apple over Apple’s decision to give iPhone users tools with which to protect their private information.

Facebook isn’t alone in the beef.

Apple has said starting early next year its iOS 14 operating system will give iPhone and iPad users the option to no longer share personal information that many developers rely on to tailor ads. When users open an app, they will see a message asking permission to track what other apps and websites they visit, their location, and other behaviors.
Apple’s plan has drawn criticism from a range of businesses and trade groups…saying that Apple’s plan was anticompetitive.

Because people moving to protect their private information from snooping and private enterprises moving to protect their products from being used as tools for the snooping is somehow anticompetitive.

It’s an objection that Willy Sutton would have loved: how anticompetitive of those banks to obstruct his business model?

Clarity

Posted on by
Reply

Walter Russell Meade, with whom I agree far more often than not, had a piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. He titled his piece Can Biden Find Clarity on China and Russia? and he closed it with this:

The global governance issues that many on Team Biden care most about cannot be addressed without the hard-nosed geopolitics that many Democrats reject. The president-elect’s foreign policy will stand or fall on his ability to manage that paradox.

I think the answers to the question, and the fixing of the paradox, stem from Biden’s own words:

The PRC isn’t “a patch on our jeans.”
“[T]hey’re not bad folks, folks.”

Biden’s position on the PRC seems pretty clear to me.

The widow of a Moscow mayor sent Hunter Biden $3.5 million.
On Russia generally, Biden has this: “He [Romney] acts like he thinks the Cold War is still on [and] Russia is still our major adversary. I don’t know where he has been.”

Biden’s Russia position, which remains unchanged in deed, his current words notwithstanding—and the Russian hooks in his family—are equally clear.

A Training Opportunity

Posted on by
Reply

Ramstein AB, Germany, location of USAFE headquarters, got an emergency alarm over the weekend of an in-progress missile attack on the base. The alarm turned out to be false.

There are a couple of ways such a false alarm might be triggered. One is that the alarm was part of an exercise and the exercise label simply dropped or missed. Another is that, as part of a Russian exercise, by happenstance in also progress, missiles were launched at exercise targets inside Russia during that exercise’s final phase, and detection systems acted on the fact and a short time later (but after the alarm had been sent) recognized the launches for what they were and canceled the alarm.

In any event, as “a Pentagon official” said,

It’s important that we find out what happened, for a lot of reasons. We don’t want people getting needlessly alarmed, and we don’t want them to be complacent in the face of a genuine alert.

“Ramstein officials” also noted

Today, the Ramstein Air Base Command Post was notified via an alert notification system of a real-world missile launch in the European theater.  The Command Post followed proper procedure and provided timely and accurate notifications to personnel in the Kaiserslautern Military Community.

And in response to the alarm, those officials said,

Those who heard the warning took it seriously.

Which raises another important aspect of the false alarm: the real-world operational training opportunity the alarm presented to the base and the surrounding Kaiserslautern Military Community. Finding out what happened regarding the transmittal of a false alarm should include a detailed, critical post mortem on the base and community response to the fact of the alarm. That post mortem also should include an assessment of why less than everyone heard the alarm.

Progressive-Democrats and Religious Freedom

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democrats want to vastly curtail, if not eliminate altogether, religious freedoms. You recall those—the core part of our 1st Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….

The Secular Democrats of America PAC, an arm of the Progressive-Democrat movement, counts the Trump administration’s actions to advance religious freedom a national security threat. Moving radically beyond merely eliminating our national motto because it dares mention God, this crowd denounces our national heritage and our belief in ourselves as a Christian nation (which is a distortion of theirs; we actually hold ourselves to be a Judeo-Christian nation).

In a 28-page list of “recommendations” this crowd sent to Progressive-Democrat President-Elect Joe Biden, they included the following:

  • withhold federal funds from any faith-based organization perceived as discriminatory on the basis of religion
  • repeal non-medical exemptions based on religious grounds
  • mandate inclusion of non-religious advisors at all faith-based gatherings at the White House
  • Biden (apparently personally) should discourage politicians from using the words “God” and “country” while speaking

So, this part of the Progressive-Democratic Party wants Government to tell religious organizations they are not allowed to practice their religion and receive the same government funding other organizations get. Government must heavily deprecate religious practices.

This crowd also insists on dictating what speech an elected official might use and who he must have in his meetings: “elected official” because there’s no reason to believe this demand, once acceded to, won’t spread far from the White House.

Biden has chosen not to comment on these recommendations. His considered silence smacks of agreement with it. If Republicans don’t hold the Senate, it’ll be a long four years of destruction.

Student Loans

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section had a thought.

There are some degrees that are worth borrowing money for, but many aren’t. Parents and students, do your homework.

Indeed. Lenders need to do their due diligence homework much more diligently, too. Two ways to incentivize (to coin a term) the lenders: get Government out of the business of making student loans and out of the business of guaranteeing others’ loans to students.

The other way is to require the school being borrowed for to attend to be the primary lender—ideally, the sole lender.