Tag Archives: responsibilities

Apologies

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Daniel Henninger had a thought in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on the relationship between the Wuhan Virus situation (my term, not his) and apologies.

I have my own thought on the broader matter of apologies themselves.

…difficult this year to tell which is greater—the number of people infected with Covid-19 or the number of politicians issuing apologies….

Other than Operation Warp Speed’s chief, General Gustave Perna, I’ve heard almost no politician apologize for anything. In truth, though, the apology was killed long ago.

What is issued in lieu of apology, and not only by politicians, has long been an expression of “regret” for “any offense that might have occurred.” Never mind that offense plainly was taken, or there’d have been no objection. Doubting that is dishonest.

On top of that, the utterer piously announces his regret—for an offense that he’s not convinced even occurred—but he has not a syllable of actual apology for his misbehavior that led to the offense. Masquerading his utterance as an apology is a very large lie.

Aside from that, “accepting responsibility,” “owning the matter,” and similar self-serving claims are cynically meaningless phrases, uttered only to distract from the fact that the speaker does nothing to change his behavior or otherwise to correct his error.

Overreach

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Alphabet strikes again.

Google informs children when their parents are monitoring their account activity, the tech giant confirmed this month, with the company claiming that doing so is a way of balancing the interests of both parents and children.

Such “balancing” is not Google’s call. It’s not the decision anyone or any enterprise can make in place of the parents, with the narrowly bounded exception of a child’s endangerment—which in the present context is what parental monitoring is for. More broadly, the degree of privacy a child has—is accorded—while growing up is a parental decision and no one or no thing else’s. Full stop.

Alphabet, in commenting, pointed to both the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the recently passed UK Age Appropriate Design Code as examples of child-privacy advocacy to which it adheres. This is cynically disingenuous (my deliberate redundancy): Alphabet is not a UN agency, nor is it an arm of the British government. Nor is Alphabet subject to UN proscriptions anywhere or to British law outside of Great Britain.

It’s time to rein in this company. It’s intruded too far into the lives of ordinary Americans, this time unconscionably presuming to take the role of parents, usurping that from a child’s true parents.

Panic

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This is what the Left and their Progressive-Democrat governors are panicking over—actual data that give the lie to their claimed need to exercise control over the doings and businesses of their States’ citizens for those citizens’ own good. An exercise that’s actually for the power of that exercise.

The data don’t support their panic-mongering, though. Via a tweet from Carrie Sheffield, a Just the News anchor:

Getting sick is never fun. However, the mortality rate from the Wuhan Virus has always been very low—and getting very lower—for all ages under 70 years. We’ve learned a lot since the virus outbreak last spring, and the mortality rate for that last age group has gotten quite low, also.

Another Rude Question

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This one relates to Congressman Eric Swalwell’s (D, CA) apparent compromise by the reputed People’s Republic of China spy Fang Fang (Christine Fang).

It seems that Fang hooked up with Swalwell early on, when he was a local politician, and she helped him rise into Congress: fundraising, staff selections, and the like. My question doesn’t relate, directly, to this particular tale.

There is a stock investing technique that centers on gorilla investing. This is a technique that attempts to identify a bunch of companies that are likely to be highly successful while those companies are in their early stages of development. The gorilla investor then pumps money into the stocks of each of those early-identified companies. As some of the companies grow in the market place, and many of them flame out, the gorilla investor bails on the flameouts and adds the money withdrawn from their stocks into to remaining putative gorillas. The process is repeated until only a few gorillas remain, and are true gorillas.

My question is this: are the relevant intelligence and investigative authorities looking into whether the PRC’s intelligence community has been and/or is still engaging in gorilla politician compromise, even actively aiding those most…promising? If so, are those early ones being identified and their histories vetted, with responses for those who still fail vetting?

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