Tag Archives: responsibilities

Waffling Weasel Words

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Recall Heritage Foundation‘s MFWIC Kevin Roberts’ full-throated and enthusiastic embrace of Tucker Carlson who did his own bearhug of antisemitic, racist, and misogynist bigot and Hitler fan Nick Fuentes. Roberts’ behavior has badly—perhaps irrevocably—damaged the Foundation. Now Roberts is further demonstrating his unfitness. Regarding his embrace, Roberts began with a pseudo-apology.

That didn’t play well anywhere, so he fired his chief of staff who wrote the statement he read into the camera.

That didn’t work, either, so,

[H]e blamed the audience: “Not as many people as I thought were ready for a little bit of nuance[.]”

No, wait—

Roberts changed tack. “Sometimes you can make a mistake with the best of intentions,” he said Monday. “My mistake was not saying we aren’t going to participate in cancel culture—we’re not. My mistake was letting that…override the central motivation that I had,” which was “fighting against antisemitism in all its forms.”

The Roberts doth waffle too much, methinks.

It’s time for the Heritage Foundation to terminate Roberts for cause. If it will not separate him from the Foundation in any manner, it’s time for the rest of us to put the Foundation away from us.

Even Big Tents have Capacity Limits

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Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, has messed up badly. As Joseph Sternberg described it in his Wall Street Journal op-ed,

The groypers purport to be a movement of disaffected far-right nationalists, predominantly young men, under the sway of charismatic podcasting personality Nick Fuentes. Mr Roberts plunged into hot water last week when he announced that he wouldn’t cut Heritage’s ties with Tucker Carlson after Mr Carlson gave Mr Fuentes a platform to air a sampling of his antisemitic, racist, and misogynistic views uncontested. Mr Roberts argued that to disavow Mr Carlson would be to give in to a form of cancel culture, and insisted the conservative movement should remain a big tent.

Even big tents have capacity limits, though, and there is no room in the Conservative movement for antisemitism, racism, or misogyny. These bigotries aren’t even conservative holdings; they’re beyond even the extremist pale of either end of the spectrum. Severing ties with Carlson has nothing to do with any sort of cancel culture.

It’s time for Kevin Roberts to be dismissed from the Heritage Foundation. Even were Roberts to apologize for his gross error and follow through on cutting ties with Carlson, at this late date it would be impossible to take an apology as truly sincere and not just a collection of words uttered in response to opprobrium, and it would be impossible to believe that he won’t make a similar “misjudgment” regarding bigotries in the future.

If the Heritage Foundation won’t make that move, it could only be because they condone Roberts’ support for the antisemitic and racist bigotry and the misogyny of Carlson and Fuentes. In which case, it’ll be time for the rest of us to dismiss the Heritage Foundation, a once proud and valuable member of the Conservative movement.

What Will She Do with that Intelligence?

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Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum doesn’t want to deal with Mexico’s cartels (mostly drug, but they’re into sex- and child-trafficking, also, and a few other…industries) violently. Her predecessor also swore off hard-style confrontations, insisting on dealing with them with hugs. Scheinbaum wants to increase intelligence efforts in dealing with them, even including a willingness to receive intelligence from the US government. But no more help than that.

Sheinbaum said her government had accepted the US offer for help in obtaining information and intelligence, but she rejected US intervention in Mexico’s affairs. “Intervention isn’t justice,” she said.

That “intervention” was an offer to assist—not to do for or to do instead—Mexico in dealing with the cartels kinetically, which is to say, violently.

Last week, Carlos Manzo, the anti-cartel mayor of Uruapan, the largest city in the state of Michoachan, the state immediately west of Mexico City, was hugged several times, fatally so, by the cartels. Even so,

[Sheinbaum] pledged to continue with her policy of strengthening Mexico’s National Guard, concentrating on the use of police intelligence to take down violent criminals while addressing the social causes of crime.
Sheinbaum criticized political opponents who she said were taking advantage of Manzo’s killing to attack the government, and said she had ordered an investigation into the surge in antigovernment posts on social media.

When those violent criminals and/or their cartel supporters resist being “taken down?” Will she continue to answer their violence with her own hugs? So far, her response is limited to inflicting lawfare violence on those impudent enough to criticize her government’s handling of the cartels. Why not hug them, too, instead?

Scheinbaum apparently has no serious use for that intelligence, American or her own nation’s.

This is what a failing narco- and trafficking-centric nation looks like.

No—All Must Suffer

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Recall House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D, MA) saying the suffering of Americans during this Schumer Shutdown is leverage for Party. Recall further, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) saying the longer his shutdown continues, the better it is for Party.

Now we have two bills on offer that demonstrate the political bankruptcy of Party’s position, to say nothing of its moral bankruptcy. One is a bill on offer from Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO) that would fund the SNAP program during the shutdown so the needy could retain access to nutrition for themselves and their kids. Ten Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors. Exactly one Progressive-Democrat has.

The other bill is one offered by Senator Ron Johnson (R, WI) that would pay essential Federal workers and those furloughed now rather than after the Schumer Shutdown ends. Many of those employees, furloughed or still working, will without their paychecks find themselves—and in too many cases are alredady finding themselves—in any of a variety of breadlines because they can’t afford groceries. The bill would be especially important for those still required to work since those folks are ineligible for unemployment benefits. Here, too, only one Progressive-Democratic Senator has signed up to support it.

Marie Antoinette was a piker. The Progressive-Democratic Party politicians won’t even let our needy and our Federal employees have any cake* to eat.

*Cake: not the modern-day sweet confection, but for the French of Antoinette’s time, cake was the bread crust burned onto the peasants’ tiny oven walls as the loaves expanded hard onto those walls.

Why I’ll Never Do Anything in the Cloud

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For as long as I can, nothing of my interactions on the Internet, nothing of my computer storage or backups, will be done in the cloud. The same stricture should, frankly, apply to businesses. Businesses should construct their own cloud—there’s no doubt clouds are deucedly convenient and, when working properly are highly efficient—and isolate that cloud from the Internet.

Here’s an example of why, brought to us by Amazon.

A glitch with an obscure Amazon database disrupted life for millions of people across the US as core internet services failed to function for an array of companies.
Alexa devices couldn’t hear. Corporate Slack messages wouldn’t post. Students couldn’t turn in assignments or access materials from courses. Financial trades were impossible on certain platforms. Users of Zoom, Venmo, Instacart, and a host of other services faced prolonged outages that rippled through homes and businesses.

Some of that is poor design. Alexa needs connectivity with the Internet? To execute an order to buy this, or to give the weather forecast, sure. But to set a timer for cooking? To set a reminder? An alarm clock? Really?

Back to the main subject. That minor database? It got a minor update that scotched the whole affair.

A minor update to what is called the Domain Name System, or DNS—the kind of software tweak that happens millions of times a day on the internet—sent the well-oiled machine that underpins the modern web careening toward a crash.
DNS acts as a kind of telephone directory for the internet, instructing machines on how to find each other. The faulty update gave the wrong information for DynamoDB, an Amazon Web Services, or AWS, product that has become one of the world’s most important databases.
Suddenly, machines on the East Coast that tried to process trillions of requests were getting the internet’s equivalent of a wrong number.

Think about the effects of time-sensitive moves being blocked from execution for hours and hours, often long enough to prevent the move from happening until it’s far too late and by delay, far more costly. That happens in the financial world—think in extremis overnight repos needing to be unwound….

That kind of foul-up could have been worse: computers not knowing how to contact each other could have prevented the computers hosting the DynamoDB database from being contactable by humans working from other computers in their attempts to correct the glitch in that database. That didn’t happen this time, but next time? Or it might have this time, but Amazon had backup systems it could switch into while they took the offender systems off line to correct.

Regardless, it took the better part of a day for Amazon to get their minor update of a minor database corrected and the effects of the repair to ripple across the Internet.

The article’s subheadline summarizes the situation and is why I avoid the cloud as much as possible:

Outage offers reminder of fragility of global internet connectivity