Tag Archives: politics

New Possibilities

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The People’s Republic of China has already said it intended to expand its presence in Antarctica to

add new ground stations in Antarctica to support its satellite activity and data collection as concerns mount over Beijing’s surveillance programs and the rising security threats directed at the US.

Rick Fisher, Senior Fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center and Global Taiwan Institute Advisory Board member has an additional concern.

In 2021, state media revealed that China had put a LIDAR—a laser radar—into the Zhongshan station to conduct “atmospheric research.’ Any kind of laser raises the possibility that the LIDAR could be upgraded to be a far more powerful laser.

That’s true enough, and it’s a fairly simple upgrade and one about which to be concerned. However, for many of our satellites and those of our friends and allies, it would be a low angle attack through much of our atmosphere to get at very many of our satellites.

I have a larger concern, one also touched on by Fisher.

If you’re going to be attacking the United States in that manner—traversing Antarctica—it is extremely useful to have the ability to update a FOBS [Fractional Orbit Bombardment System] bus[.]

The PRC has already tested an around-the-world hypersonic nuclear missile attack profile; that test missile missed its target after its circumnavigation by some 25 miles. The route wouldn’t need to be all that close to over-the-south-pole to pick up a precise course update from the PRC’s Antarctica ground station. And at this point in our deteriorating defense capability, such a system gone operational would give the PRC a first-strike capability.

Christine Wilson’s Weak Apologia

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Soon to be ex-Federal Trade Commissioner Christine Wilson issued her “explanation” for quitting her post as FTC Commissioner. Her lengthy rationalization of her decision to walk away from her responsibilities as FTC Commissioner aggregated to as a minority member of a Left-dominated Commission, she was unable to get the FTC Chairwoman to change her ways.

This is how the Left wins. Putative Conservatives turn tail and run when things get tough, cutting and running especially during a time when the erstwhile Conservative chair will be sat in by a Progressive replacement.

I have failed repeatedly to persuade Ms Khan and her enablers to do the right thing, and I refuse to give their endeavor any further hint of legitimacy by remaining. Accordingly, I will soon resign as an FTC commissioner.

Any excuse to run away. Staying on would give legitimacy only if she meekly acceded to Khan’s misbehaviors. If she kept the fight going, even if losing the fight, she would be lending no legitimacy to Khan; on the contrary, she would be highlighting Khan’s misbehaviors. But it’s just personally easier to…quit.

Liability

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The Supreme Court is taking up a case centered on Internet platform liability, or lack of it, for things posted on those platforms by users. Wall Street Journal editors asked a couple of questions on the matter.

But are internet sites liable for the algorithms they use to sort and present content?

Liable for the algorithms in the legal sense? That’s an open question, and the Supremes are likely to answer it Gonzalez v Google, albeit unusefully narrowly.

However, the Internet sites most assuredly are responsible for the algorithms and what the algorithms sort and present. Those algorithms, after all, were written by the Internet sites’ human employees.

On the other hand,

Do social-media sites have immunity for fact-checks they append to disputed posts? What if search engines use language models to directly answer user queries, with text synthesized from the web?

Absolutely, they do not have immunity. This is the social-media site doing after-the-fact commenting on the legitimacy of what a user has posted, and so the site is creating its own liability with that after-the-fact legitimacy-checking. Keep in mind, too, those search engines, language models, and text synthesizing algorithms all are written by human employees of those social-media sites. Since that software does only what the human programmers code it to do, and those human programmers code what the site employs them to do, the use of that after-the-fact software deepens the social-media sites’ lack of immunity.

TikTok

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TikTok is trying to negotiate an agreement with our government that would allow it to continue operations within our nation.

TikTok has been negotiating with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, an interagency government panel, for more than two years on a way to wall off the company’s data and operations from the Chinese government.

The article’s headline, though, correctly identifies what should be the deal-breaking factor:

TikTok’s Talks With US Have an Unofficial Player: China

The China in question is the People’s Republic of China.

TikTok is a wholly owned subsidiary of ByteDance. ByteDance is a company domiciled in the PRC. The PRC has a 2017 National Intelligence Law that makes all PRC-domiciled companies beholden to the PRC intelligence community for any and all intelligence-gathering and reporting tasks the intel community might choose to levy on the company. That makes TikTok a potential espionage facility operating for the PRC within our nation.

There shouldn’t be any negotiation at all regarding TikTok: there’s nothing to discuss. The “unofficial player” isn’t hidden at all; it’s the PRC with its intelligence-gathering imperative.

Caveat Emptor

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In a Wall Street Journal editorial centered on the rule-making moves by the Biden administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Trade Commission to cap or to outright ban so-called junk fees, there’s this tidbit offered in all seriousness by the FTC’s Lina Khan (the WSJ didn’t directly attribute this to her, but she’s the FTC’s Chair, so the tidbit wasn’t offered without her prior permission):

Consumers who select and travel to dealerships based on an advertised offer, only to learn late in the process (if at all) that the advertised offer does not apply, have often spent hours trying to purchase a car[.]

This, of course, is nonsense. Every car maker in the US, from “ordinary” car makers and dealers to luxury car makers and dealers, offer on their Web sites options to “build your car” for every model on offer, and the build options present every option available to the model along with the effect of option’s inclusion or removal on the car’s final price. Consumers who select and travel to dealerships, even if the selection is originally based on an advertised offer, will have already built their going-in preferred model and have their eyes wide-open to counteroffers and to other options offered or no longer available—together with their costs and savings identified during those discussions.

These proposed rules are nothing more than Government attempting to dictate to businesses how they must operate and to us average Americans what we will be permitted to buy. And that’s not just the exampled car-buying, it’s how this government wants to control how we do our banking, our investing, how we and our businesses in general operate in an economy.

Maybe it’s not caveat emptor. Maybe it’s cave imperium that we should operate under.