Or one not taking the other seriously. The disconnect between President Joe Biden-Kamala Harris and Russian President Vladimir Putin—or the fact that Putin doesn’t take the Biden-Harris administration seriously—doesn’t get much more clearly demonstrated than by this lead image from a Friday Wall Street Journal article about continuing US-Russia “negotiations” regarding Ukraine.
NBC now says they’ll provide geopolitical context along with their coverage of the upcoming olympics [sic] doings in the People’s Republic of China.
…our coverage will provide perspective on China’s place in the world and the geopolitical context in which these Games are being held.
Tellingly, that claim comes only after prodding by members of Congress.
Sure, though. NBC will provide every syllable of the perspective the PRC government tells it to. And not a syllable else.
I’ll not be watching NBC while Beijing’s olympics are going on. Not during the coverage. Not during any other part of those days and weeks.
I’ve also lost interest in the actual Olympics, summer or winter, as they’re currently run and as long as the incumbent managers remain in place. The International Olympics Committee, and the US part of that, the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, have shown where their values are. I don’t approve of the PRC’s genocide. At best, the IOC and USOPC don’t care about the PRC’s genocide.
Great Britain, in a move toward filling the vacuum left by President Joe Biden’s (D) dangerous timidity when facing Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sent serious arms into Ukraine to help that nation prepare for the coming Russian invasion. (It’s telling that Germany, dependent as it has sold itself into, on Russian energy, forced the British supply aircraft to fly around German airspace to get to Ukraine.)
Putin reacted to that and trotted out his Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, to object to plussing up Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. As cited by Fox News, she said that
Ukraine perceives Western military assistance as a “carte blanche for a military operation in Donbas.”
I certainly hope Ukraine has that perception, and that the perception is grounded in fact. The Donbas is, after all, Ukrainian territory, for all that Russia currently occupies most of it.
The People’s Republic of China government requires everyone attending the Beijing Olympics next month to load a tracking app on their cell phones:
Those who attend the Olympics, including athletes and journalists, are required to download the app and upload their health and vaccination information to track potential outbreaks of COVID-19.
The Citizen Lab, based in the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, has identified what it terms a security flaw.
It turns out that the app, MY2022, fails to validate some SSL certificates. That means it’s a trivial matter for…others…to bypass any security measures, including encryption, that the phone’s owner might have implemented. Those others then can easily intercept and otherwise gain access to the cell phone owner’s sensitive information: all the medical information the PRC government requires to be loaded into the app, ostensibly for Wuhan Virus tracking, along with wholly unrelated information like all traffic in which the phone might be or have been engaged, all passport information, all medical information whether or not related to the Virus, and all other information stored on the cell phone—images and videos, contact lists, other emails, Web sites and bookmarks, and on and on.
The Lab’s key findings are
It’s doubtful, at least to me, that China’s own laws and national standards pertaining to privacy protection are being violated, though, given the PRC government’s already widespread surveillance of all of its citizens. The PRC’s 2017 national intelligence law, too, requires all entities to cooperate with the government’s intelligence community and provide whatever information that community requires, which means that the app’s spying is no violation of the PRC’s own laws.
And there’s this:
[The] Citizen Lab said it had notified the Chinese organizing committee for the Games in December about the potential issues but had never received a response.
The Beijing Organizing Committee’s refusal to respond is itself instructive.
No, this is no flaw; neither PRC government programmers nor Beijing Organizing Committee programmers, who are the ones who officially built the app, are that amateurish. It’s deliberate, and it’s one more reason to not only skip the Beijing Olympics (including not watching them on NBC), but to skip doing any sort of business with any sort of PRC company.
The Lab’s report can be read here.
Ex-SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. had some thoughts on negotiating in his take on the relationship between the Biden-Harris White House and Congress. In one thought in particular, though, Levitt is badly…off.
Governance takes two. If a director opposed the CEO without proposing something better, he’d be ignored. In Washington, Republicans don’t seem interested in negotiating. … Republicans, you can oppose, but if you have an opportunity to shape policy, take it.
Levitt badly misunderstands. Progressive-Democrat Ocasio-Cortez openly hoped for Progressive-Democrat control of Senate explicitly so Party would not need to negotiate with Republicans.
Republicans have often tried to negotiate, only to be told “we won, you lost.” The last time Progressive-Democrats controlled Senate, then-Majority Leader Reid routinely “filled the tree” precisely to prevent Republicans from offering amendments.
Progressive-Democrats have already passed one reconciliation bill so as to exclude Republican amendments, and they’re bent on same a second time. They’re also determined to blow up up the filibuster so they no longer have need even to pay lip service to negotiating.
Where is this “opportunity” of which Levitt wrote for Republicans to shape policy with Progressive-Democrats refusing to negotiate?
President Joe Biden (D) often says it’s his goal to fundamentally change America. How is it possible to negotiate with a Party that refuses to negotiate and that is openly bent on destroying the republican democracy that is the United States and to remake us into their image?