You can review previous month’s instances of political lunacy at the beginning of every month from the listing on the right side of this page.
1) Recent news reports have been reviewing the massive political and liberty problems going on in the Ukraine, formerly a part of the Soviet Union. It appears that the ruling political class in the Ukraine was very corrupt which ruled a country that was on the verge of bankruptcy. When mixed in with the split between those citizens in the Ukraine that wanted to align the country with the West and those that wanted to align the country with Russia, you ended up with a very volatile situation.
The country eventually exploded into street riots, fighting, deaths, and the eventual overturning of the current government. And as of the past few days there are reports that Russian military forces have entered the country and have taken control of at least two airports. This intrusion was relatively simple since the Ukraine and Russia share a geographic border and the area where the intrusion occurred is the part of the country friendly to Russian influences.
Which gets to our Secretary of State, John Kerry. Kerry wants to put up a billion dollars worth of U.S. taxpayer money in a guaranteed loan to the Ukraine to help it survive all of the turmoil including its dire financial situation. Any number of problems with this insanity:
- The Ukraine interim government says it needs at least $35 billion so $1 billion would be like spitting on a forest fire, a total waste.
- Kerry does not specify what the money will be used for or what conditions would be imposed, just wants to give them a $1 billion, a sure fire way to waste it.
- Given that Russian troops are already on the ground in the country, seems like giving a weak interim government would be like giving the Russians the money directly since it is Russia that will eventually have the major influence on what goes on in the country.
- Our national debt is now over $17 TRILLION, we cannot afford to be given away billions of dollars into situations that the political class has no plan or end game for.
- Maybe if this administration had had an effective and proactive foreign policy and strategy to begin with, all of this may have been averted and the billion dollars not put at risk.
The Obama administration has no plan and really no leverage on the situation while the Russians are right there, on the ground, in the country, and pulling all of the strings in connection with their grand plans and strategies. Lack of planning, lack of ability to plan, that is the American political class ineptness in this foreign affairs crisis.
2) In yesterday’s insanity post we described a situation where an 84 year old nun and two accomplices had easily penetrated a government nuclear facility and had gotten inside where they caused cosmetic damage in protest of nuclear technology. We pointed out that the Federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year to protect the country from terrorist attacks, hundreds of billions of dollars that was easy defeated by an 84 year old nun.
Well, it appears that an elderly nun is not the only one that proved our domestic protection plans can be easily defeated despite the huge expenditures. Consider an excerpt from a Business Insider article about an April, 2013 sniper assault on an electrical substation in California:
The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith reports that a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman is acknowledging for the first time that a group of snipers shot up a Silicon Valley substation for 19 minutes last year, knocking out 17 transformers before slipping away into the night.
The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, told Smith.
The sniper or snipers put the substation out of service for months. So now we have a nun and a few snipers that have proven how defenseless our national defense is against terrorists despite the inept Washington political class spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to prevent just such attacks. Insane.
3) But our expensive defenselessness does not stop with a nun or solitary sniper. Consider a minority Senate report headed up by Senator Tom Coburn and published in February, 2014 on how defenseless our government’s cyber secrets and information processes are. The following examples of government computers and files being hacked comes directly from his report, The Federal Government’s Track Record on Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure:
- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission stored sensitive cybersecurity details for nuclear plants on an unprotected shared drive, making them more vulnerable to hackers and cyberthieves.
- The Securities and Exchange Commission routinely exposed extremely sensitive data about the computer networks supporting the New York Stock Exchange, including NYSE’s cybersecurity measures. The information the SEC exposed reportedly could be extremely useful to a hacker or terrorist who wanted to penetrate the market’s defenses and attack its systems.
- Last January, hackers gained access to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' computers and downloaded an entire non-public database of information about the nation’s 85,000 dams — including sensitive information about each dam’s condition, the potential for fatalities if breached, location and nearest city.
- Last February, hackers reportedly broke into the national Emergency Broadcast System, implemented by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as the federal government’s tool to address Americans in case of a national emergency. The hackers caused television stations in Michigan, Montana and North Dakota to broadcast zombie attack warnings. “Civil authorities in your area have reported that the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living,” an authoritative voice stated in the hacked broadcast message, while the familiar warning beep sounded. “Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.”
- Last March, hackers exploited a vulnerability on web servers belonging to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal government’s authority for federal and private-sector cybersecurity. The servers, which hosted the federal government’s database of known software vulnerabilities, had to be taken out of service for several days.
- In addition, hackers have penetrated, taken control of, caused damage to and/or stolen sensitive personal and official information from computer systems at the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, State, Labor, Energy, and Commerce; NASA; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Office of Personnel Management; the Federal Reserve; the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; the Food and Drug Administration; the U.S. Copyright Office; and the National Weather Service, according to public reporting.
Obviously, the zombie attack hacking was not serious. But the other hacks that Coburn uncovered are very serious threats to Americans’ safety, threats that have obviously existed for years and which currently still exist. In fact, Coburn’s research found that the Federal government has spent $65 billon over recent years trying to secure the government’s computer systems, an effort and expenditure that has obviously failed in so many ways.
The Senator found out why the $65 million has not been effective, as he points out in his report: “And yet [government] agencies — even agencies with responsibilities for critical infrastructure, or vast repositories of sensitive data — continue to leave themselves vulnerable, often by failing to take the most basic steps towards securing their systems and information.”
“Fail to take the most basic steps.” Sounds about right when discussing any government entity and its functions, a shortcoming that should be corrected by our elected officials but which never happens, possibly because they are too busy raising campaign funds for their next election.
Defeated by a nun, hackers, bogus zombies, and incompetence. Probably makes the Ukrainians think twice about allying with us, given how insanely inept the American political class and the government operates are. Last set of insanity tomorrow.
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