The report comprehensively describes the recent prolific activity of state-affiliated hackers all over the world, primarily those affiliated with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
In the case of China, we have a series of “Typhoon”-named cyberattacks: Raspberry Typhoon, Flax Typhoon, and Granite Typhoon, to name a few, that “have intensively targeted entities associated with IT, military, and government interests around the South China Sea.”
The toll of cyberattacks in the U.S. — all kinds from all sources — has been extensive. In the recent year, “389 healthcare institutions were successfully hit by ransomware,” resulting in closures and medical delays.
The report is also about what we’ve been doing to defend ourselves: not enough. The authors say that although better cybersecurity is important, we also need “government action” that makes it costlier for states to launch these attacks.
We need something else, too. We need companies like Microsoft to abstain from helping adversary states to cyberattack us.
At Breitbart, Lucas Nolan reports that Microsoft has been maintaining close ties with the Chinese Academy of Sciences for over a decade. Among the details of a lengthy indictment, Nolan offers a list of publications coauthored by Microsoft and CAS researchers “in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, computer vision, and even cybersecurity.”
Why help China gain knowledge that can be used to hurt us?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877).
On October 22, 1964, philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 — 1980) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but turned down the honor — establishing a precedent that should have been followed by numerous Peace Prize winners, including Barack Obama and the European Union.
Sartre rejected the award on account of having rejected previous honors. In this he was not dissimilar from philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) who refused many doctorates late in life, on the grounds that such awards did an old man no good, and perhaps because he was a cantankerous old coot — a judgment that surely applied also to the later French philosopher.
Sartre is best known for his novel Nausea (1938), his play No Exit (1944) and his treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). One of his main themes was freedom, a concept better explored at the fundamental level of the individual human being than politically, since he become a “Marxist” of sorts … the precise nature of which he elaborated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). He failed to complete his tetralogy of novels, Roads to Freedom, never finishing the final volume.
Let’s unpack.
Ballotpedia summarizes Amendment 1 as prohibiting “state and local governments from allowing noncitizens to vote and allow 17-year-olds who will be 18 by the general election to vote in primary elections.”
Nothing suspicious there. But there is an exclusion, of course. The measure would exclude noncitizens from voting in state and local elections.
“The context,” or what the TDS-afflicted newspaper has apoplectically convinced themselves is the context, “is repeated assertions by President Donald Trump” and other Republicans “that immigrants without citizenship frequently register to vote and vote (more often for Democrats).”
The actual context is simply whether the state constitution should proclaim that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote. A policy that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are unsuspiciously excluded from voting on, but which would have prevented the 19 U.S. cities now allowing noncitizens to vote, including in most cases those here illegally, from doing so.
The Register nonetheless declares that “a higher standard is called for when the enduring language of the state Constitution is involved. That document should emphasize what unites Iowans.”
Yet nothing has united legislators more than this Citizen Only Voting Amendment, which passed each chamber of the Legislature twice without a single dissenting vote.
Bemoaning that “seven states have already, in the past six years, made identical or similar changes in their state constitutions,” The Register further complains that “this fall, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin join Iowa in voting on similar amendments.”
The objection? “That’s a lot of ink spilt to enshrine imaginary protections against imaginary problems.”
These imaginative editors acknowledged, in the same piece, that “[e]xperts say it ties lawmakers’ hands from ever passing laws to permit residents without citizenship to vote in certain local or state elections, such as for school boards.”
Passing Amendment 1 means politicians at the capitol in Des Moines will have to go back to Iowa voters if they want to allow noncitizen voting.
No crying here over spilt ink.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
Ownership means full control of the services that can be derived from a good. This catallactic notion of ownership and property rights is not to be confused with the legal definition of ownership and property rights as stated in the laws of various countries. It was the idea of legislators and courts to define the legal concept of property in such a way as to give to the proprietor full protection by the governmental apparatus of coercion and compulsion, and to prevent anybody from encroaching upon his rights. As far as this purpose was adequately realized, the legal concept of property rights corresponded to the catallactic concept.
Ludwig von Mises (1881 – 1973), Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar’s Edition (1998), first edition published in 1949. “Catallactic” derives from “Catallactics,” a term invented by Richard Whately (1787 – 1863) as an improvement on “Political Economy”; “catallactic” means “pertaining to exchanges” (trade).