Tony the Tiger Is a Threat. But not Iranian Hackers.

Government at every level had a productive week: threats were identified, action was taken, and press releases went out. Just kidding. It was another ridiculous week of mind-numbing incompetence and waste.

The Senate’s answer to childhood diabetes: ban Tony the Tiger

Senator Bernie Sanders— himself quite a wealthy man— has spent his career warning America about the greed of the capitalist pigs. Now he’s adding capitalist tigers to his rant.

Earlier this month he named the true enemies of the people: Tony the Tiger, Cap’n Crunch, and the rest of the breakfast-aisle bourgeoisie.

Sanders’ Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act cleared the Senate health committee last week on a 12 to 10 vote. The bill puts warning labels on anything high in sugar, salt, or saturated fat, and it bans child-directed ads featuring cartoon characters, athletes, celebrities, influencers, games, and contests.

If it becomes law, the federal government will officially be in the mascot-policing business.

Now, I’m not a defender of the refined sugar industry. It’s poison. I eat very little, and my kids even less.

But the irony is loud. Remember, this is the same government that spent roughly $18 billion subsidizing corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, and soy oils— the core ingredients of the junk food it now wants to slap warning labels on.

And that doesn’t take into account all the money given to consumers to buy this poison; the US Department of Agriculture’s own study found that about 20 cents of every grocery dollar spent by food stamp households goes to sweetened drinks, desserts, candy, etc., with soft drinks at the top of the list.

Then the government pays for the consequences: treating diabetes costs over $300 billion a year in direct medical care, and government insurance picks up about two-thirds of the tab.

So taxpayers subsidize the sugar, buy the soda, and fund the dialysis, and the Senate’s answer to this pipeline is to ban Tony the Tiger.

They’ll regulate everything about the problem except their own role in creating it.

There was a man in the girls’ locker room. The city’s solution was curtains.

A mother in Lynnwood, Washington says she walked into the women’s locker room at the local recreation center during her daughter’s swim meet on July 12 and found an adult male showering there.

When questioned why he was there, the man answered, “I’m trans.” And that ended the matter.

It had to, because in Washington state, the [biological] woman has no rights, and the local city government doesn’t have the authority to overrule state law. So if anyone tries to stop this grown man from showering in front of little girls, THEY would be the ones in legal trouble!

This leaves the city with very few options to address parents’ concerns. Rather than be able to exercise common sense, the city stated that “our facilities team has installed new full-sized shower curtains in the locker rooms and is exploring other modifications.”

The FDA still requires drug information on paper, thanks to a rule from 1962.

If you’ve ever opened a medication box and found that sheet of paper folded down to the size of a postage stamp, printed in type that practically requires a microscope to read, you’ve experienced a 64-year-old federal mandate in its natural habitat.

Drug companies don’t produce it by choice; the Food and Drug Administration requires it, on paper, based on a rule written in 1962. By the FDA’s own math, the ritual burns through roughly 90 billion sheets of paper a year.

That sheet is the drug’s instruction manual for professionals: dosing, warnings, side effects, interactions. It isn’t even meant for you; it’s meant for doctors and pharmacists, every one of whom already looks that information up on the Internet where it’s kept current.

The FDA proposed the obvious fix back in 2014, letting manufacturers post the document online instead of printing it.

What followed was classic government: eleven straight years of Congress attaching riders to its spending bills forbidding the switch, followed by this year’s bills, which merely encourage it.

So Congress needed six decades to start reconsidering a paper mandate from JFK’s administration, but only one committee vote to go after Tony the Tiger.

That’s the modern government business model in a single week: boundless energy for writing new rules, and glacial pacing for fixing their own.

Hackers took down Minnesota water systems, and the state took a victory lap.

Over roughly 48 hours in late July, a coordinated cyberattack hit the computerized controls of dozens of community water systems across Minnesota.

In the small town of Braham, the attack knocked the well and the treatment plant offline entirely, and the city needed about two hours to get them back; officials blamed “a malicious cyber-attack of computerized operating systems by unknown actors.”

The Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth lost communications at two water towers and several lift stations and had to run its water system by hand.

Officially, nobody knows who did it: days into a federal investigation, the attribution is still “unknown actors.”

Yet federal agencies warned four days before the attack that Iranian-linked hackers were breaking into exactly this kind of equipment at US water utilities. Plus private security researchers needed just three days to name a suspect— an Iranian-linked group called CyberAv3ngers.

A failure of government? Not according to Minnesota’s chief information security officer, who bragged: “Our response worked as intended, enabling agencies at every level of government to rapidly coordinate, contain the incident, and help prevent more serious impacts to critical services.”

More than 30 utilities attacked, a treatment plant knocked offline, zero attackers officially identified. If that’s the response working as intended, we’d hate to see the version that doesn’t.

Source

Simon Black is an international investor, entrepreneur and permanent traveler. His daily letter is both educational and entertaining, and we suggest that those who want unbiased, actionable information about global opportunities sign up for Sovereign Man’s free, actionable newsletter at http://www.SovereignMan.com.

From Simon Black of SovereignMan.com

Source: https://www.schiffsovereign.com/trends/tony-the-tiger-is-a-threat-but-not-iranian-hackers-155552/