Because it’s my blog, and so I get to.
Gene Malcolm (@spike012002) has a tweet up:
Next, Japanese businessman will start wearing business suits. When will this cultural appropriation end?
There also is a joke wandering the rounds:
Q: What’s the difference between Los Angeles and yogurt?
A: One of them has a living culture.
Which makes me wonder, in the context of Malcolm’s tweet: between LA and yogurt, which is inflicting cultural appropriation?
Equifax took six weeks to get around to bothering to tell us about it so we individual consumers could begin to take our own corrective and defensive action. That’s unconscionable, Equifax isn’t alone in delaying telling us about hacks into personal information those companies are holding for us, and it’s giving impetus to legislation that would force companies to disclose such hacks much sooner. One such proposed bill is Congressman Jim Langevin’s (D,RI) reintroduction of the Obama era’s Personal Data Notification and Protection Act.
I don’t like regulations, but one here is necessary. The hacks aren’t exposing company property; they’re exposing individual personal property entrusted to the company. Companies have an obligation to safeguard that personal property, and that obligation is strongly expanded by a company’s demand for that personal property as a condition of doing business with it.
Companies don’t want to be embarrassed…[by] having to disclose when people’s data is leaked….
People don’t want to be harmed by those leaks or by delays in finding out their data have been leaked. I’m trying to weight the one against the other in my balance. Oh, wait….
Under this proposed legislation, Equifax would have had to disclose its breach within 30 days….
No, there’s no need for any delay, indeed, delay simply compounds the damage that can be done to us individuals. As Christopher Mims put it at the end of his piece at the link,
When Equifax was breached, hackers got birthdates, Social Security numbers, and other hard facts about most of us. This data has the power to ruin our financial lives….
Any delay, let alone 30 days, is far too long to be held defenseless against that. The legislation’s proposed 30 days are forever in today’s information and financial world, an entire month within which hackers could work their nefarious ends without our being able to defend against those ends. Equifax, et al., should be required to disclose on the day the hack is discovered and then to keep us current on developments with frequent updates that, at the least, explain what’s being done about the hack to reduce the likelihood of a subsequent hack, what’s being done to mitigate the damage to us of the present hack, why the hack wasn’t discovered sooner, and what’s being done to speed discovery for next times.
We need to be able to act in our defense, too.
And contra the attitudes of those who defend delay, we Americans are not too stupid to understand what we’re being told—so long as it’s prompt and truthful—and we can make good use of the information which, aside from our being better able to defend ourselves, would let us see quickly what companies develop a history of exposing our personal information and so are unworthy of our business.
It seems that Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos have been invited by the The Berkeley Patriot, a student publication at the university, to speak at a four-day “Free Speech Week” later this month.
UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof is claiming that the organizers haven’t yet “submitted the information or forms required to ensure the events occur.”
“This is all about providing to them the security they want and we want to offer for their events, and it can’t happen overnight,” he added, noting that a speech given by conservative Ben Shapiro on Thursday requires the university bring in “a huge number” of police officers and “spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Recall the violence with which the Left attacked those attending, or trying to attend, Shapiro’s speech. There’s a hint in Mogulof’s remarks regarding the safety of those of whom the Left disapproves. There’s a hint regarding Berkeley’s attitude toward the speech of which its management disapproves.
Cops act out of ignorance, a famous man said.
No, they don’t. They act out of honor and integrity, especially when the chips are down. Or the storm is up. Follow the link in the quoted paragraphs.
Dramatic footage shows a Florida sheriff’s deputy saving an American flag that was being battered in Hurricane Irma’s powerful winds.
The video, which was posted to the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, shows Lt. Danny Cunningham running from his car into strong winds and rain to retrieve the beaten flag from a pole.
“I couldn’t watch it get blown apart,” Cunningham reportedly said.
And this bit by an Aransas Pass cop during Harvey.
The Wall Street Journal wrote an op-ed about Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ speech at George Mason University regarding her intent to withdraw the Obama administration’s infamous Dear Colleague Letter that threatened the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault. In it, though, the WSJ included a misconception.
The Obama Education Department’s response was to circumvent Congress and neglect normal executive-branch rule-making procedures mandated in the Administrative Procedure Act, such as soliciting public comment. Instead, it simply jammed the policy through by sending out a “Dear Colleague” letter, including an explicit threat that noncomplying schools could lose federal funding.
It takes two to tango.
The op-ed implied that the university/college recipients of the Letter were somehow bound by it. This is not true: the Letter was not, and could not be, binding in any way shape or form exactly because the procedure for promulgating it by-passed statutory requirements: the Letter was no more than that, and certainly not a regulation implementing a statute.
The folks sitting in the management chairs at those universities and colleges knew this full well at the time, and they know it today. The Letter gained force only from the cowardice of those folks sitting in those chairs. They had only to push back and to refuse to comply with the urgings of the Letter.
Even the threat to withhold funds could never have effect since it was, and is, an entirely unenforceable claim, coming as it does as part of a non-binding Letter that could only urge an action. The threat, inconvenient as it might have been to resist, had and has only the effectivity of a bully’s threat given it by a coward’s surrender to that bully.
It takes two to tango. But it only takes one to duck and cover.