Tag Archives: responsibilities

Where was IT?

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Oldsmar, FL’s, water treatment facility was hacked via a remote access software package, with potentially devastating results (and which access has much broader implications for our nation).

One of them [software functions] regulates the level of sodium hydroxide, or lye—a main ingredient of drain cleaners that also is used to control water acidity and remove metals from drinking water, Sheriff Gualtieri said. The hacker increased the amount of lye from about 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, he said.

That’s bad enough, but there’s this, that enabled the hack [emphasis added]:

The intruder got into the utility’s industrial control-system through TeamViewer, a tool that allows engineers to monitor and repair computers and network machines, Sheriff Gualtieri said in an interview. Though the utility had switched to a different tool six months ago, he said, the TeamViewer program remained in place but unused

Aside from the foolishness of allowing remote software access to any government facility, I have to ask: where was IT on this? Why was a disused and superseded remote access software package left in place for so long?

“We Are Deeply Disturbed”

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That’s what President Joe Biden’s (D) State Department claims (through a carefully unnamed “official”) regarding the People’s Republic of China’s systematic rape, other sexual abuse, and torture of Uighur women in the PRC concentration reeducation camps.

And

These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences[.]

Indeed. The Biden administration, like the Obama administration that Biden is reconstructing, surely will shake its collective finger very firmly at the PRC. And if that fails, the Biden administration will engage in stern chit-chat and tongue clucking.

Yeah. That’s the ticket.

Party and Equity

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Jason Riley’s Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal focused on the idiocy of racial equity and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s zealous proselytization of that ideology. His closing paragraph, though, had this misapprehension:

Mr Biden surely understands this reality, but he’s also the head of a Democratic Party full of people who worship at the altar of identity politics and held their noses to elect a straight white male out of political expediency.

However, if Biden, who surely understands this reality, actually were the head of the Progressive-Democratic Party, he’d put a stop to Party’s far-left shenanigans. On the contrary, he is not the head; he’s merely an expedient. The Far-Left is in charge, to the detriment of Party, if not to its power, and to the nation.

A Trump Legal Legacy

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Brent Kendall had a piece in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, Trump Appointees Poised to Influence Legal Outcomes for Decades to Come, that explored this item. It’s well worth the read.

One statement in particular caught my eye, though.

Republican and Democratic [judicial] appointees often embrace differing legal philosophies that lead to divergent results.

This is at the core of the problem. As our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1 makes clear, there is only one legitimate legal philosophy for judges and Justices. They’re sworn to uphold the Constitution, not some mythical document that better comports with what they want to uphold.

Thus, they must apply the Constitution and the statute(s) before them as they’re written, not as they wish they were written; not as “adjusted” to fit a judge’s personal view of what society needs, as articulated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and acted out by Chief Justice John Roberts; not Thurgood Marshall’s you do what you think is right and let the law catch up.

All of those…philosophies…are political decisions well outside the ken of the judiciary and solely within the scope of the political branches of government and of We the People, who hire and fire those political personages.

Disposability

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At the end of an op-ed in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal‘s editors included in image promoting a short video that showed an alleged teacher along with someone behind her holding up posters saying, “Masks are Disposable. Teachers Aren’t!”

Actually, teachers are disposable, as are folks in all jobs. And, in fact, as the Chicago Teachers Union has demonstrated, teachers already have been disposed of. All that’s left in Chicago are unionists.