Bill de Blasio is Disappointed

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The Wuhan Virus bill under discussion in DC (as I write Thursday) doesn’t have any bailout money for States and municipalities. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio isn’t happy about that.

What do we see right now in Washington? Endless discussion that now is leaving out all state and local aid, that means that city government, state government will not be able to get back on our feet and serve our people—it just doesn’t make any sense[.]

What do I see right now in New York City Hall? Endless tin cup rattling that continues to demand other people’s money.

To paraphrase (not very loosely) a man far more intelligent than any of us ordinary Americans,

…there’s plenty of money in [City Hall], it’s just in the wrong hands. Democrats have to fix that[.]

Indeed. De Blasio and his Progressive-Democrat-dominated city council (46 Progressive-Democrat councilmen out of 51 seats) have only to reallocate their spending priorities and their actual spending.

That they won’t—it just doesn’t make any sense.

The Biden Cabinet, So Far

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In Biden’s own words, as summarized by Howard Kurtz:

  • the first-ever openly gay nominee to lead a Cabinet department.
  • the first ever black secretary of Defense
  • the first ever Latino head of the DHS
  • the first ever Latino head of HHS
  • the first woman…of South Asian American descent to lead OMB
  • the first woman and Asian-American to lead [as] the United States trade representative
  • the first black woman to chair the president’s Council of Economic Advisers
  • the first ever woman to hold Alexander Hamilton’s position as Treasury Secretary

And that’s just for starters.

Notice what Biden is bragging about: the first identity square checked off.

Biden isn’t even picking these folks because they’re politically expedient, or because many of them reprise his BFF ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) administration, an indirect political expedience.

No, Biden is picking these folks in furtherance of his Progressive-Democratic Party’s identity politics imperative—a political expedience of an especially…prejudicial…nature.

Notice, too, what Biden isn’t bragging about: these prospective nominees’ qualifications for the job. In keeping with Party’s identity politics ideology, qualification is centered on identity; actual skill or experience is in the far reaches of the system—if present at all.

Even if these folks could be counted on to put in honest effort, their broad and aggregated lack of qualification, their intrinsic incompetence, will be disastrous for our nation.

The Willy Sutton Objection

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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

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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

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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.