Tag Archives: politics

Couple Rude Questions

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These arise from the SolarWinds hack attack that some experts claim doesn’t rise to an act of war (but that I think might do so*).

Why wasn’t it spotted sooner? This applies to SolarWind as much as it does the IT MFWICs and their staffs at the various government agency and private business recipients. Who inspected SolarWind’s “updates,” how were they tested both before SolarWind disseminated them, and how were they tested before the receiving entities implemented them? Were the recipients actually, with straight faces, allowing a remote entity to enter their systems and install software that was uninspected/untested by those recipients?

What’s being done about the hack now—both defensively and offensively?

On what basis would we be able to believe all of the proximately done SolarWind hackware has been rooted out?

What other software is broadly used in government and automatically updated from outside? What inspecting and testing is being done on that software?

What inspection/testing is being conducted on all the private economy cloud software extant?

More serious, though, are these questions:

Was this hack, which embedded spyware, among other things, all of it? Or was this hack intended to be found as a distraction from detecting other, more hidden, more nefarious software—software that could be triggered later to conduct sabotage of critical systems, insert misleading or outright false data into critical databases and imaging systems, cut off communications between critical government and military leadership entities and between those and their field-operational systems at critical moments of a more overt attack?

Was this hack conducted by Russia? Or perhaps by Iran, while framing Russia, the butcher of Chechnya? Or perhaps by northern Korea, while disguising its own culpability by framing Russia? Or by the People’s Republic of China, which still regards Russia as a foe and now recognizes Russia’s political and military impotence vis-à-vis the CCP and the PLA, and so harming two enemies with one exploit?

*Shameless plug

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.