Tag Archives: responsibilities

Scapegoat

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Holman Jenkins had a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he described the indictment of Boeing’s 737 MAX Chief Technical Pilot, Mark Forkner, as not necessarily the end of the investigation into Boeing’s MAX failures that led to two fatal MAX crashes.

Jenkins didn’t come right out and say it, so I will. I will also add a couple of questions that Jenkins didn’t ask in his piece.

Straight out: Forkner looks more like Boeing’s scapegoat than he does a major contributor to Boeing’s MAX failures, for all of Forkner’s serious involvement in those failures.

Additional questions: as a test director for a major Defense contractor in my former life, I ask who tested this stuff? Where are they in the investigative/indictment phase of this charade?

Where is Boeing management, who permitted—created—the corporate culture where such shoddiness, if not outright lazy negligence, could exist?

The Green-Eyed Monster of Hypocrisy

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Like the man said, you can’t make this stuff up.

Donald Clark (no flags, no hashtags)
@DonaldClark
COP [UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26)] coming to Glasgow. Leaders staying at Gleneagles Hotel & 20Tesla cars (£100K each) bought to ferry them 75km back & forth. Gleneagles has 1 Tesla charging station, so Malcolm Plant Hire contracted to supply Diesel Generators to recharge Tesla’s overnight. Couldn’t make it up.

Wow.

Naivete

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JCS Chairman Mark Milley wants to deepen the level of military-military communications between the US and Russia.

Army General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the US and Russian militaries need to expand and deepen their communication and stressed that dialogue between the two adversaries could help de-escalate a future crisis.

Milley went on, paraphrased by The Wall Street Journal:

[A]dding to existing communication channels already in effect would help each side understand the other’s plans and moves.

He wants the same with the People’s Republic of China, also.

The problem with this tension-defusion concept is that it depends on the participants, in particular our DoD’s Russian and PRC counterparts, being truthful with each other. Why, though, should we believe that a military buildup opposite the Balkans or the Republic of China, is just a training exercise, just because the relevant Russian or PRC generals say so? Or why should they believe that about us?

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer really only works if the enemies aren’t armed to the teeth.

Ransomware Shame

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Corporate executives openly confess that they would aid and abet ransomware criminals by paying them for their crimes.

  • 78% of C-suite executives claim that they would be willing to pay a ransom
  • 56% would be willing to pay over $100,000 to resume operations

That’s deliberately hanging a target on their enterprises.

And this…

  • 74% of executives with hybrid work environments believe their in-house IT and security teams lack the capability to defend against ransomware
  • 60% of executives believe their employees could not identify a cyberattack

…indicates that those executives aren’t even trying seriously to train their IT and security teams or their employees, or to enforce security measures by their work-from-home employees.

Worse than that, they actively cover up their crime enabling:

well over half (61%) of business owners admitted to concealing a breach

This willingness to reward hackers for their hacking not only endangers their own companies, it endangers other companies, as well, by making the crimes routinely lucrative—which these executives are smart enough to know.

That willingness to pay the fee-for-hacking-services aggregates into a threat to our nation’s weal and security. After all, where are the hackers so willingly rewarded located? In our nation’s enemies: 82% of the attacks come from within Russia and the People’s Republic of China, split evenly between the two.

She Said No Such Thing

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The ACLU, pretending to celebrate the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her position on abortion, has utterly changed—falsified—what she said about the matter.

The ACLU’s fabrication:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices[.]

What Ginsburg actually said was this:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.

But that wasn’t woke enough to suit the “lawyers” at the ACLU, so they fabricated a claim and falsely attributed their artifice to her.

Greg Scott, Senior Vice President of Communications at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), has one aspect of this:

The ACLU literally erasing women.

Additional to erasing women, this is an example of how blatantly dishonest the American Civil Liberties Union—the ACLU—has become.