Tag Archives: responsibilities

Maybe Time to Start Holding them Liable

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The heads of the FBI and of Great Britain’s MI5 have a warning for American and British businesses regarding

the threats posed by Chinese espionage, especially spying aimed at stealing Western technology companies’ intellectual property.
In a rare joint appearance on Wednesday at the headquarters of MI5, Christopher Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Ken McCallum, Director-General of MI5, urged executives not to underestimate the scale and sophistication of Beijing’s campaign.
“The Chinese government is set on stealing your technology—whatever it is that makes your industry tick—and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market,” Mr Wray told the audience of business people. “They’re set on using every tool at their disposal to do it.”

Too much of that information aggregates to national security levels, and the lackadaisical protection of it threatens our security indirectly via the degradation of our two nations’ economic capabilities relative to the People’s Republic of China and directly through exposing our defense information to theft. That means business laxness—outright laziness in too many cases—cannot be excused with the companies involved being left simply to take their lumps.

Wray emphasized the matter as it concerns the US.

We want to send the clearest signal we can on a massive shared challenge—China…if we are to protect our economies, our institutions, and our democratic values.

To do that, business executives—particularly CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs, and their deputies—need to do their part and start taking seriously their own obligations to protect company secrets and other proprietary information, along with information of a national security kind.

It may be, then, that business executives need to start being held personally liable, civilly and criminally, for security breaches that allow hackers to steal their companies’ information. The businesses that employ them may need, as legal persons, to be held similarly liable for such breaches.

A Performance Principle

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Norway, it turns out, did really well as a nation during the recent Wuhan Virus Situation.

Not long ago, the World Health Organization published mortality stats from the past two years, which showed that nearly every country’s excess death count spiked during the pandemic. Norway’s barely moved. The Norwegians had pulled off the closest thing possible to an optimal response to the most vexing problems that Covid-19 presented.

Then what? Norway, rather than rest on its laurels, studied the situation, with particular reference to the nation’s successes and failures—and there were some failures, even as Norway did so well overall. Why was Norway, in the words of the WSJ article’s author, so eager to probe its failures? Norwegian economist Egil Matsen is the second chair of the Norwegian commission that was set up early in the virus situation to plan ahead and then to study in hindsight Norway’s response for future reference. He said,

It reflects a desire to see what we did well—and what we did not do well. I think there is perhaps even an expectation that when something this unusual and serious happens to our country, it should be evaluated and we should try to learn from it in the aftermath.

What a concept. Plan ahead, and then see how well the plan did and did not do in an actual situation. Don’t just kick back in celebration—do that, sure, and rue failure when that occurs—but work to do better. Learn from experience. And one lesson here is that, while a physician chaired this sort of commission, an economist was second chair. Economists are trained to take a much more systems approach, to look at the broader picture, of a problem that has a range of national-level implications; a medical professional is trained to understand only the medical implication.

Responding to a pandemic is nothing if not the classic economics problem of weighing costs and benefits.

Federal Abortion Clinics

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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) has is pushing an idea from the Progressive-Democratic Party center:

We have some ideas coming from Senator Warren’s signed letter along with 25 other Democratic senators asking President Biden to explore opening health care clinics on federal lands in red states in order to help people access the health care and abortion. Services that they need.
…
…explore just how much we can start using federal lands as a way to protect people who need access to abortions in all the states that either have banned abortions or are clearly on the threshold of doing so.

Paid for with what funds? This is just another attempt by the Progressive-Democratic Party to have us American taxpayers pay for abortions. It’s yet one more reason we citizens need to get out, vote, and elect majorities to both the House and the Senate and to the State legislatures and to the city and town governances. And to turn the Progressive-Democrat out of the White House in 2024.

Vaccine Efficacy

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An Imperial College of London study of the efficacy of the various Wuhan Virus vaccines, led by Oliver Watson, indicates that around the world, 20 million lives were saved in the first year of the vaccines’ availability. In the US, according to the study, some 1.9 million lives were saved by the vaccines.

Using data from worldometer‘s Coronavirus Web site, that works out to a bit over 2% additional lives saved given a case (not given an actual infection) in the US, which is a good improvement, especially for those 2%. But it’s also only a 2% improvement, and it comes against an already low mortality rate for the virus, other than for those with serious comorbidities and/or who are older than 85-ish.

And the study doesn’t appear to break out lives saved by health or age category, so the improvement could be even less for those who start out largely healthy and not in geezerdom.

That puts the probability of gain down in the region where it’s also useful to consider the probability of deleterious side effects from the vaccines.

The Progressive-Democrats’ Jan 6 Committee

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How’s it doing, so far? Aside from its poor viewership, I mean, as real concerns of us average Americans—things like high and increasing gasoline and diesel prices, high and increasing food prices, high inflation generally, loss of control over our southern border, illegal alien penetration into our nation’s interior (with unknown numbers of terrorists among them), the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine, and on and on—predominate our worries.

Let’s review the bidding.

Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA) altered text messages between Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) and Mark Meadows, then-White House Chief of Staff, and presented his fakery as evidence for the committee.

And

…Capitol Police caught Massachusetts Democrat Congressman Jake Auchincloss’s (D, MA) chief of staff on security footage defacing posters outside the Capitol complex office of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) this spring

And

…Capitol Police directly disputed allegations House January 6 committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D, MS) and Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R, WY) made in May that GOP Congressman (GA) Barry Loudermilk led January 6 demonstrators on a reconnaissance mission the day before the Capitol riots

The Capital Police said, on the record, that security footage showed no such thing occurred.

And

…the committee accused former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik of attending a January 5, 2021, meeting in Washington, DC, to plot to block the certification of 2020 election results. In fact, Kerik was in New York that day, according to phone and toll booth records

It’s Party’s version of the Keystone Kops.

Aside from the Keystone Kops level of performance, all the committee has succeeded in doing is pulling together, sort of, into one place all the old news that the press already has published over the last couple of years, and from the same one-sided aspect as those…publishments.

And none of that reaches to the intrinsically unethical, if not illegitimate under House rules, nature of the J6 Committee. No cross-examination of witnesses is allowed; the committee consists of seven members of the Progressive-Democratic Party and only two members of the Republican Party; and the committee, contrary to 200 years of tradition in addition to those rules, consists of solely of members selected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), including those two Republicans. The members selected by the Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R, CA), which did not include those two Republicans, were deliberately barred by Pelosi from participating.