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Spengler explores several facets of Iran’s computer security problems.
Amid the mass of published analysis of the Stuxnet virus, Iran’s most obvious vulnerability to cyber-war has drawn little comment: much of the Islamic Republic runs on pirated software. The programmers who apparently cracked Siemens’ industrial control code to plant malware in Iran’s nuclear facilities needed a high degree of sophistication. Most Iranian computers, though, run on stolen software obtained from public servers sponsored by the Iranian government. It would require far less effort to bring about a virtual shutdown of computation in Iran, and the collapse of the Iranian economy. …
…Even the software that the Iranian authorities use to block Internet access is apparently stolen. Wikipedia reports, “The primary engine of Iran’s censorship is the content-control software SmartFilter, developed by San Jose firm Secure Computing. However, Secure denies ever having sold the software to Iran, and alleges that Iran is illegally using the software without a license.”
…A country that steals its software cannot build its own, even if the sort of individual who excels at software development wanted to live in Iran. Most of those who can, leave. A 2002 study reported that four out of five Iranians who received rewards in international science competitions subsequently left Iran; too few Iranians have won international awards since then to gather comparable data. In 2006, the International Monetary Fund noted that Iran had the worst brain drain of 90 countries surveyed.
Iran has so few skilled programmers that it could be that the security services do not have the capacity to distinguish sabotage from incompetence. That may explain why Tehran blames foreign intelligence services for a recent succession of economic reverses, including the near-collapse of the local markets for gold and foreign exchange. …
In Reason, Nick Gillespie doesn’t think, judging by their past performance, Republicans will stop the spending.
More signs that the economy is sluggish and that the American Century is over for real:
The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year that ended Sept. 30 will total $1.29 trillion. That’s down by $125 billion from the $1.4 trillion in 2009 – the highest deficit on record.
But don’t worry, America. The political class is dedicated to keeping America’s record-setting-deficit record going:
The Obama administration is projecting that the deficit for the 2011 budget year, which began on Oct. 1, will climb to $1.4 trillion. Over the next decade, it will total $8.47 trillion.
And they’ve even got a secret weapon up their sleeve to make sure this happens: The imminent election of large numbers of Republicans who played such a key role in the massive 104 percent increase in inflation-adjusted government spending during the George W. Bush administration (which was signing the checks for most of FY2009). …
Michael Barone comments on Democrat desperation.
…Back in January, the president attacked the Supreme Court for ruling that corporations and unions have First Amendment speech rights and pointed to the possibility that foreigners might try to influence American election outcomes. Now he and his spokesmen on the campaign trail and on Sunday interview programs are charging that outfits like the Chamber of Commerce are smuggling foreign money into the campaign.
Their evidence? Well, there isn’t much, as even the New York Times, Washington Post and factcheck.org agree.
The smoking gun? The Chamber of Commerce collects $100,000 in membership dues from foreigners out of a $200,000,000 operating budget and spends some of that budget on campaign ads. But Obama uberadviser David Axelrod says it’s up to the chamber to prove it’s innocent.
There are a couple of odd things here. One is that the 2008 Obama campaign, by deliberately not using the address verification software most enterprises use to determine it’s really your credit card, took in a lot more illegal foreign money than its rivals. The Obama folks may be projecting their own sins on their opponents. …
Ken Langone writes that he couldn’t have successfully started Home Depot in the current business climate. He writes this in an open letter to the President in the WSJ.
…A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home Depot. Our dream was to create (memo to DNC activists: that’s build, not take or coerce) a new kind of home-improvement center catering to do-it-yourselfers. The concept was to have a wide assortment, a high level of service, and the lowest pricing possible.
…If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it’s a stone cold certainty that our business would never get off the ground, much less thrive. Rules against providing stock options would have prevented us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up phase—never mind the incredibly high cost of regulatory compliance overall and mandatory health insurance. Still worse are the ever-rapacious trial lawyers.
…I stand behind no one in my enthusiasm and dedication to improving our society and especially our health care. It’s worth adding that it makes little sense to send Treasury checks to high net-worth people in the form of Social Security. That includes you, me and scores of members of Congress. Why not cut through that red tape, Mr. President, and apply a basic means test to that program? Just make sure that money actually reduces federal spending and isn’t simply shifted elsewhere. I guarantee you that many millionaires and billionaires will gladly forego it—as my wife and I already do when we forward those checks each month to charity.
It’s not too late to include the voices of experienced business people in your efforts, small business owners in particular. Americans would be right to wonder why you haven’t already.
George Will looks beyond winning Congressional seats.
…After November, Republican eyes will turn to the prize of the presidency in 2012. Concerning which, McConnell sees cautionary lessons from three other years — 1946, 1954 and 1994.
In 1946, President Truman’s party lost control of both the House and Senate. In 1948, however, Truman won an improbable reelection running against the “do-nothing 80th Congress.” In 1954, President Eisenhower’s party lost control of the House and Senate. But two years later, Eisenhower was resoundingly reelected. In 1994, President Clinton’s party lost control of the House and Senate. In 1996, Clinton cruised to reelection, partly because of reckless behavior — e.g., the government shutdown of 1995 — by congressional Republicans.
Regarding House races, Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard notes that the Democratic Party has “an inefficiently distributed base of voters.” It “consists mostly of union workers, upscale urban liberals, and minority voters, many of whom are clustered in highly Democratic districts.” In many other districts, Democratic candidates depend on “independents and soft partisans,” the very voters who have defected from the Obama coalition of 2008.
…On Nov. 2, there will be 37 gubernatorial elections. On Wednesday, Nov. 3, when the 15-month dash to the Iowa caucuses begins, Republicans may be savoring gains of eight or more governors, to a total of at least 31. They also may have gained 500 seats in state legislatures, mostly by retaking seats lost in the last two elections. This would expand Republican power over the redistricting that will be based on the 2010 census. Polidata Inc. estimates that states carried in 2008 by John McCain will gain a net of seven seats (and electoral votes) and that states Barack Obama carried will lose seven. …
We have NRO shorts. Here are two:
While the Tea Party has been reading Atlas Shrugged and The Road to Serfdom, Alaska’s Joe Miller and West Virginia’s John Raese, Senate candidates both, apparently have been boning up on their Milton Friedman: Each has had intelligent and sober things to say about the minimum wage, which decades of economic analysis has shown to increase unemployment among the poor and unskilled, and which Friedman called “the most anti-black law on the books,” noting its exacerbation of joblessness among African Americans. Their Democratic opponents are howling, of course, never having quite got their heads around the fact that in their elementary economics textbooks, demand curves slope downward: The higher the price of x, the less x is demanded. Mr. Miller, a Yale law graduate who takes a narrow view of federal power, believes that Washington lacks the legitimate authority to impose a minimum wage on the states, while Mr. Raese has made the economically obvious point that an artificial wage floor will foreclose job opportunities for certain workers. American public policy is currently in the grip of three lifelong politicians without a milligram of business experience or economic acumen between them — lawyer Barack Obama, lawyer Harry Reid, and congressional heiress Nancy Pelosi — and it shows. When it comes to economics, Democrats are as reliably anti-science as flat-earthers trying to explain away evolution, and their dinosaur policies are long overdue for extinction.
Geert Wilders has made his career in the Netherlands on a group of related propositions: There are more than enough Muslims in the country, their Koran is a fascist book like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the time has come to protect Dutch culture. A lot of Dutch people share these opinions. Five years ago Wilders founded the Freedom party, and in the recent general elections the party won 24 seats in a parliament of 150. Dutch politics are splintered. Two other conservative parties need the support of Wilders if they are to form a coalition government. Discussions are continuing while Wilders stands trial on the grounds that he has been “inciting hatred” against Muslims. He could be fined and sent to prison. Jan Moors, one of the judges in the case, has accused him of being “good at making statements, but then you avoid the discussion.” Critics, and Muslims among them, make out that Wilders is some sort of fascist, and he replies that he is an elected parliamentarian speaking for all his fellow citizens and exercising his right of free speech. What’s at issue is whether Muslims are to have special privileges enshrined in law, and it is no exaggeration to say that the future far beyond the Netherlands hangs on it.
A review in the WSJ of a new book on the contest between Hitler and Stalin. The title is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Reminds Pickerhead of some lines from a poem by Anna Akhmatova; “She loves, loves blood. This Russian Earth.” She penned that in 1921 before anybody had any idea the number of people Stalin would kill.
… Among his other goals in “Bloodlands,” Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context—to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy. Yet far from minimizing Jewish suffering, “Bloodlands” gives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine. Auschwitz, which wasn’t purely a “death camp,” lives on in our memory due in large part to those who lived to tell the tale. Through his access to Eastern European sources, Mr. Snyder also takes the reader to places like Babi Yar, Treblinka and Belzec. These were Nazi mass-murder sites that left virtually no survivors.
Yet Mr. Snyder’s book does make it clear that Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the purge of European Jewry, was not a fully original idea. A decade before, Stalin had set out to annihilate the Ukrainian peasant class, whose “national” sentiments he perceived as a threat to his Soviet utopia. The collectivization of agriculture was the weapon of choice. Implemented savagely, collectivization brought famine. In the spring of 1933 people in Ukraine were dying at a rate of 10,000 per day.
Stalin then turned on other target groups in the Soviet Union, starting with the kulaks—supposedly richer farmers, whom Stalin said needed to be “liquidated as a class”—and various ethnic minorities. In the late 1930s, Mr. Snyder argues, “the most persecuted” national group in Europe wasn’t—as many of us would assume—Jews in Nazi Germany, a relatively small community of 400,000 whose numbers declined after the imposition of race laws forced many into emigration at a time when this was still possible. According to Mr. Snyder, the hardest hit at that time were the 600,000 or so Poles living within the Soviet Union.
Convinced that this group represented a fifth column, Stalin ordered the NKVD, a precursor to the KGB, to “keep on digging out and cleaning out this Polish filth.” Mr. Snyder writes that before World War II started, 111,091 Soviet Poles were executed. This grim period is little known in Poland itself, but its detailed recounting here shows how a determined totalitarian machine could decimate a national group. Apologists for Stalin, in the West and elsewhere, have insisted that his Great Terror was needed to prepare the Soviets for a coming showdown with Hitler. Mr. Snyder destroys this argument. …