Tag Archives: responsibilities

“Context”

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Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY) asked a question of three university presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, a simple, straightforward question at last week’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing regarding campus antisemitism:

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?

Magill’s answer, smirk on her face:

It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.

Gay repeated the claim:

It can be, depending on the context.

Kornbluth tried to dodge the question altogether:

I have not heard calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus.

Stefanik called her on that…misinformation:

But you’ve heard chants for intifada.

Kornbluth’s response:

I’ve heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.

Wednesday after the hearing, Magill attempted to clarify:

In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies aligned with the US Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable. I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil—plain and simple.

A couple of things about that. At the hearing, Magill spoke from what was in her heart. Further, as a talented academic and a university president, words are her stock in trade. She knew exactly what she was saying, she knew exactly what she was focused on in real time—and she focused and said those words deliberately and consciously. This statement, coming as it does later, after the outpouring of opprobrium, can hardly be taken as sincere. All Magill is doing now is covering her academic and political behind.

The other thing is that, in that statement’s second half (not quoted above, but it’s a two-minute video) Magill made the sotto voce admission that calls for Jewish genocide are not against Penn’s current rules. With that tacit admission, she “promised” to work with the Provost to adjust Penn’s rules. Sometime. She was careful to not offer a timeline for this effort, not even a general one, nor did she commit to what those “adjustments” would look like.

One more thing about Stefanik’s question and those presidents’ answers. An obvious follow-up question is “In what context would such calls for the genocide of Jews be acceptable in any legal way?”

Stefanik did put that question to Gay:

What’s the context?

Gay’s answer:

Targeted at an individual[.]

Stefanik followed up on that “individual” evasion, and Gay then refused to answer beyond repeating her claim if targeting an individual. Apparently, at Harvard, calling for the destruction of groups of Jews is acceptable.  One or two at a time, maybe not.

These are three school presidents who need to be fired for cause—not passively allowed to resign—and these are three schools that need to have all Federal funds headed their way canceled until those schools show, over a suitable number years, that they have corrected their behavior.

Healthcare Systems On Edge

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They’re on edge from a plethora of cyber attacks against them.

According to the Institute for Security and Technology, about 300 hospitals have suffered ransomware attacks this year alone. Cyber experts say hackers typically see health care organizations as a prime target because hospitals are likely to pay ransom to keep critical health services up and running.

Two problems are buried in that simple characterization. One is the continued vulnerability of the hospital systems’ IT systems. Why does this vulnerability continue to exist? Charlie Regan, Nerds On Site CEO:

Cyber criminals trying to get into any network or system are incredibly well-funded and incredibly well-orchestrated, and they have a never-ending source of more creative and effective tools to breach systems[.]

Yes, countering, much less preempting, such attacks is hard. But “hard” means “possible,” and the hospital system IT managers don’t appear to be making much effort to get on top of their companies’ vulnerability—those 300 attacks in just the last several months seem to demonstrate this.

But the larger problem in that characterization is that hospitals are likely to pay ransom. Paying the ransom is nothing other than paying the hackers wages for their labor, aiding and abetting the hackers’ crimes, and increasing the vulnerability of others to hackers’ crimes by guaranteeing that their crimes don’t just pay; they’re lucrative.

Given that, I’m having a hard time summoning any sympathy for the hospital systems. They need to start taking their cyber vulnerabilities seriously.

A Curmudgeon’s Take on the Gifting Season

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The headline on Jason Gay’s op-ed on Christmas gifts in Friday’s The Wall Street Journal actually reads,

The Elusive Challenge of De-Escalating Gifts

That’s the point, though. In Gay’s piece, the season isn’t about Christmas, it’s about whether to incur the expense of profligately scattering presents about, with the Christmas season serving merely as backdrop and an excuse for the ostentation, or as a device for crying about the money—and intrafamilial competition—involved.

Gay pretended to considerable angst about trying to tamp down the gifts (with nary a word about Christmas itself), and he offered a number of excuses [sic] for the failure to tamp. A couple were these:

Complete multilateral de-escalation is essential. You cannot have a situation where five people give no gifts, or tiny gifts, and then someone shows up with a wheelbarrow full of Johnnie Walker Blue and PlayStation 5s. If this means impromptu site visits to make sure a relative isn’t secretly stockpiling an illicit stash of Ugg boots, so be it.

No, it isn’t, yes, you can. And no, you don’t have to be intimidated into any spying-on-relatives visits; that’s just cowardice. Instead, it would be easy enough to shame the wheelbarrow-er for his naked attempt to abuse the season to curry favor, or to show off his own ostentatious wealth, or both. If the wheelbarrow-er, in the end, shows himself to lack the grace to be shamed, then he needn’t be invited back the next year.

Ditto grandparents. It’s easier to talk a squirrel off a bird feeder than it is to convince a grandparent not to give gifts to grandchildren. Gifts are what grandparents are for.

Hard means possible, full stop. And no, gifts are not what grandparents are for, no more than wives are baby making machines for those same grandparents. If they’re unwilling to follow the parents’ strictures, then ditto the misbehaving grandparents. They don’t need to be invited back the next year.

Timidity like Jason Gay’s are why it’s so difficult for so many to have a sane Christmas that’s in keeping with the actual meaning of the season, and of the year surrounding it.

Evidence Tampering

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It seems that the House January 6 Committee videos of witness depositions have…disappeared. Congressman Barry Loudermilk (R, GA), House Administration Oversight Subcommittee Chairman:

All of the videotapes of all depositions are gone[.]

This is a problem because such videos, being the products of official House proceedings, are records that are required to be preserved, stored, and available. These videotapes in particular, having been created by the last Congress’ House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack in its pursuit of its investigation into the events of January 6, 2021, constitute Congressional evidence and especially are required to be preserved. Yet that committee’s Chairman, Mississippi Progressive-Democratic Party Congressman Bennie Thompson (D, MS), now claims (in his best Johnny Carson impression), “I did not know that.”

Imagine that.

The tampering spreads to Committee documents, also.

[T]he Democrat-led House committee sent certain evidence such as transcripts to the Biden White House and Homeland Security Department and now the transcripts have been returned to Loudermilk’s GOP-led subcommittee nearly fully redacted so their contents can’t be read.

This is Thompson evidence-tampering by destroying the videotapes and Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden aiding and abetting in the crime by allowing his staff to tamper with those documents. Party will protect their members, though, so it’s up to us ordinary Americans to rid ourselves of them next November.

They’re Confessing Their Crimes

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They’re really quite blatant about it, too.

A ransomware gang claimed this past week that it broke into the systems of the fintech platform MeridianLink. The breach has been reported to regulators.
The company didn’t report it, as new rules will require them to do. The hackers did.

AlphV (or Black Cat, depending on who’s speaking for the gang) aren’t the only criminal hackers to do this sort of thing. Other hackers are joining in on telling the cops of their deeds, as a means of pressuring the victims to pay up. Or their security failures will be made public.

Aside from only cowards meekly surrender and functionally if not legally aiding and abetting the criminals by paying, and the situation is straightforwardly enough greatly mitigated by those companies getting serious about their IT security, a separate question exists.

These criminals have all confessed their crimes. Where are the regulators? Where is DoJ? Certainly, it’s hard to identify the members of these criminal organizations, but hard means possible. In the meantime, these crime syndicates can themselves be traced back and their accesses to the Internet hindered severely, if not outright blocked. And their identities publicly disclosed.