Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada has issued a new decree regulating window placement in buildings, ordering that women must not be visible from neighboring homes while cooking, sitting, or standing.

The five-point decree, announced Saturday, December 29, by the Taliban’s Administrative Affairs Office on X (formerly Twitter), outlines strict measures to ensure women’s privacy.

According to the first article, any new building constructed within a pathway’s distance of another structure cannot have windows facing the neighbor’s kitchen, water well, or any area where women are commonly present.

The second article requires property owners with existing windows overlooking a neighbor’s home to build a wall or take other steps to eliminate the perceived “harm” to neighbors.

Municipalities and other Taliban-controlled bodies are tasked with enforcing these regulations and ensuring that no new windows violate them.

Since reclaiming power in Afghanistan, the Taliban have imposed sweeping restrictions on citizens, particularly targeting women. Women have been effectively excluded from most public spheres.

The latest decree aligns with a broader set of morality laws enacted in August, granting the Taliban’s morality police expanded powers to enforce draconian restrictions on personal freedoms.

Under Akhundzada’s leadership, more than 100 edicts have systematically stripped women of their rights. These include bans on girls’ education beyond the sixth grade, prohibition of women’s higher education and employment—including at UN agencies—and restrictions on access to public spaces such as parks, gyms, beauty salons, and restaurants.

The United Nations has condemned these policies as a form of “gender apartheid,” underscoring the growing isolation and suffering of women and girls under Taliban rule.

Opinion
Guest Essay

By Russel L. Honoré
Lt. Gen. Honoré retired from the U.S. Army in 2008.

It is now fair to ask the question: Is Elon Musk a national security risk?

According to numerous interviews and remarks, Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency co-leader, Vivek Ramaswamy, once appeared to believe he was. In May 2023, Mr. Ramaswamy went so far as to publicly state, “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need,” a reference to China’s leader. In a separate X post targeting Mr. Musk, he wrote, “the U.S. needs leaders who aren’t in China’s pocket.”

Mr. Ramaswamy has since walked back his numerous public criticisms of Mr. Musk, but he was right to raise concerns. According to news reports, Mr. Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, face federal reviews from the Air Force, the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General and the under secretary of defense for intelligence and security for failing to provide details of Mr. Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders and other potential violations of national-security rules.

These alleged infractions are just the beginning of my worries. Mr. Musk’s business ventures are heavily reliant on China. He borrowed at least $1.4 billion from banks controlled by the Chinese government to help build Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory, which was responsible for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries in the third quarter of 2024.

China does not tend to give things away. The country’s laws stipulate that the Communist Party can demand intelligence from any company doing business in China, in exchange for participating in the country’s markets.

This means Mr. Musk’s business dealings in China could require him to hand over sensitive classified information, learned either through his business interests or his proximity to President-elect Donald Trump. No federal agency has accused him of disclosing such material, but as Mr. Ramaswamy put it, China has recognized that U.S. companies are fickle. He added, “If Xi Jinping says ‘jump,’ they’ll say, ‘How high?’”

Mr. Musk’s relationship with China’s leaders could prove a problem for America’s national security given that SpaceX has a near monopoly on the United States’ rocket launches. The United States is in an intense space race with China. In a May interview, Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon, the deputy chief of space operations for intelligence at the U.S. Space Force, said that there has never been a buildup comparable to what the Chinese are attempting in space — not even during World War II — and that “an adversary arming this fast is profoundly concerning.” The last thing the United States needs is for China to potentially have an easier way of obtaining classified intelligence and national security information.

Mr. Musk already has a history of pleasing the Chinese Communist Party. He heaped praise on Mr. Xi to commemorate the party’s 100th anniversary. In 2022, earning thanks from Chinese officials, he went to bat for the party by arguing that Taiwan should become a special administrative region of China.

In May 2023, Mr. Musk also reportedly told Qin Gang, then the Chinese foreign minister, that Tesla opposed the United States decoupling from China, stating that U.S. and Chinese interests are “intertwined like conjoined twins.”

Although claiming to be a free-speech advocate, Mr. Musk was the first foreigner to contribute an article to China Cyberspace, a magazine that is run by the Communist regime’s internet censorship agency.

Chris Stewart, a Republican former congressman and senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, whom Mr. Trump reportedly considered nominating as director of national intelligence, once pushed for closed-door briefings on Mr. Musk’s China ties. Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of state, Senator Marco Rubio, who previously accused Tesla of covering up for the Chinese Communist Party, introduced a bill to prevent NASA and other federal agencies from giving contracts to companies linked to China or Russia.

The question now is whether the incoming Trump administration will take this risk seriously.

Mr. Musk is one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers. Mr. Trump may have gone so far as to reject a bipartisan congressional budget measure because it did not have Mr. Musk’s stamp of approval. In November, after his election, Mr. Trump traveled to Texas to watch Mr. Musk’s Starship launch. That is fine, but doing nothing to ensure America’s space apparatus remains secure from potential vulnerabilities would not be.

The Musk-China concerns might just represent the beginning. In a November letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Pentagon’s inspector general, two Democratic senators asked that they investigate Mr. Musk’s “reliability as a government contractor and a clearance holder” because of his reported conversations with Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials. In a separate letter, the senators asked the Air Force secretary, Frank Kendall, to reconsider SpaceX’s “outsized role” in America’s commercial space integration. Mr. Kendall wrote back stating that, while he was legally prohibited from discussing Mr. Musk’s case, he shared their concerns.

If the federal investigations demonstrate deep connections to China and Russia, the federal government should consider revoking Mr. Musk’s security clearance. It should already be thinking about using alternatives to SpaceX’s launch services.

The fact that Mr. Musk spent a quarter of a billion dollars to help re-elect Mr. Trump does not give the incoming White House the license to look the other way at the national security risks he may pose. If Mr. Trump and his appointees mean what they say about getting tough on America’s adversaries, then they will act on this matter without delay. There is too much at stake to ignore what’s right in front of them.

I vote: Take him seriously. Hard to do with a clown like that...but enough Americans thought he should be our president...that he soon WILL BE AGAIN.

Don't put anything beyond what Trump would do.

...they just never stop spying.

Is the U.S. Sleeping on Threats from Russia and China?
John J. Sullivan, a former State Department official and U.S. ambassador, says yes: “Our politicians aren’t leading — Republicans or Democrats.” He gives a firsthand account of a fateful Biden-Putin encounter, talks about his new book Midnight in Moscow, and predicts what a second Trump term means for Russia, Ukraine, China — and the U.S.

Twenty-five years ago today, Americans—along with the rest of the world—woke up to a new century date…and to the discovery that the years of work computer programmers had put in to stop what was known as the Y2K bug from crashing airplanes, shutting down hospitals, and making payments systems inoperable had worked.

When programmers began their work with the first wave of commercial computers in the 1960s, computer memory was expensive, so they used a two-digit format for dates, using just the years in the century, rather than using the four digits that would be necessary otherwise—78, for example, rather than 1978. This worked fine until the century changed.

As the turn of the twenty-first century approached, computer engineers realized that computers might interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000 or fail to recognize it at all, causing programs that, by then, handled routine maintenance, safety checks, transportation, finance, and so on, to fail. According to scholar Olivia Bosch, governments recognized that government services, as well as security and the law, could be disrupted by the glitch. They knew that the public must have confidence that world systems would survive, and the United States and the United Kingdom, where at the time computers were more widespread than they were elsewhere, emphasized transparency about how governments, companies, and programmers were handling the problem. They backed the World Bank and the United Nations in their work to help developing countries fix their own Y2K issues.

Meanwhile, people who were already worried about the coming of a new century began to fear that the end of the world was coming. In late 1996, evangelical Christian believers saw the Virgin Mary in the windows of an office building near Clearwater, Florida, and some thought the image was a sign of the end times. Leaders fed that fear, some appearing to hope that the secular government they hated would fall, some appreciating the profit to be made from their warnings. Popular televangelist Pat Robertson ran headlines like “The Year 2000—A Date with Disaster.”

Fears reached far beyond the evangelical community. Newspaper tabloids ran headlines that convinced some worried people to start stockpiling food and preparing for societal collapse: “JANUARY 1, 2000: THE DAY THE EARTH WILL STAND STILL!” one tabloid read. “ALL BANKS WILL FAIL. FOOD SUPPLIES WILL BE DEPLETED! ELECTRICITY WILL BE CUT OFF! THE STOCK MARKET WILL CRASH! VEHICLES USING COMPUTER CHIPS WILL STOP DEAD! TELEPHONES WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION! DOMINO EFFECT WILL CAUSE A WORLDWIDE DEPRESSION!”

In fact, the fix turned out to be simple—programmers developed updated systems that recognized a four-digit date—but implementing it meant that hardware and software had to be adjusted to become Y2K compliant, and they had to be ready by midnight on December 31, 1999. Technology teams worked for years, racing to meet the deadline at a cost that researchers estimate to have been $300–$600 billion. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration at the time, Jane Garvey, told NPR in 1998 that the air traffic control system had twenty-three million lines of code that had to be fixed.

President Bill Clinton’s 1999 budget had described fixing the Y2K bug as “the single largest technology management challenge in history,” but on December 14 of that year, President Bill Clinton announced that according to the Office of Management and Budget, 99.9% of the government's mission-critical computer systems were ready for 2000. In May 1997, only 21% had been ready. “[W]e have done our job, we have met the deadline, and we have done it well below cost projections,” Clinton said.

Indeed, the fix worked. Despite the dark warnings, the programmers had done their job, and the clocks changed with little disruption. “2000,” the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal’s headline read. “World rejoices; Y2K bug is quiet.”

Crises get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less. And if that work ends the crisis that got all the attention, the success itself makes people think there was never a crisis to begin with. In the aftermath of the Y2K problem, people began to treat it as a joke, but as technology forecaster Paul Saffo emphasized, “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job.”

As of midnight last night, a five-year contract ended that had allowed Russia to export natural gas to Europe by way of a pipeline running through Ukraine. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky warned that he would not renew the contract, which permitted more than $6 billion a year to flow to cash-strapped Russia. European governments said they had plenty of time to prepare and that they have found alternative sources to meet the needs of their people.

Today, President Joe Biden issued a statement marking the day that the new, lower cap on seniors’ out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs goes into effect. The Inflation Reduction Act, negotiated over two years and passed with Democratic votes alone, enabled the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices and phased in out-of-pocket spending caps for seniors. In 2024 the cap was $3,400; it’s now $2,000.

As we launch ourselves into 2025, one of the key issues of the new year will be whether Americans care that the U.S. government does the hard, slow work of governing and, if it does, who benefits.

Happy New Year, everyone.

I thought John J Sullivan's chat on Freakonomics was illuminating.