Archive for 2016
December 16, 2016
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To mark the anniversary of Zaevion Dobson’s death, I interviewed his mother. “Zaevion was a protector. He was the protector of my home, of his brother. [When the shooting happened] Zaevion had a chance to run, but he didn’t. He jumped on top of the girls.”
TANKS IN THE SNOW, DECEMBER ’44: This startling color photo of snow-caked M-4 Shermans near St. Vith was StrategyPage’s December 15th “Bulge” photo. Here’s today’s choice: A 101st Airborne team in a foxhole. Yes, a return to stark black and white.
The paratroopers are definitely not in a safe space. A trigger warning? That’s the sound of someone chambering a round.
I learned yesterday that StrategyPage’s webmaster will continue to post new “Bulge” photos through the second week of January. WW2 veterans and their survivors have been donating military photos snapped during the conflict to the National Archives or other historical institutions. The photos aren’t new (obviously) but they are newly available. The webmaster’s series includes several classic photos, but also some rare shots (like the color pic of the Shermans).
THAT COULD BE USEFUL: Dwarf Planet Ceres Is Full Of Water.
Scientists have long theorized that the surface and subsurface of Ceres has vast stores of water ice. A model developed in 1989 suggested the presence of layers of ice measuring between 3 to 330 feet in the surface and subsurface of this extraterrestrial world.
The model was created using data gathered from ground-based telescopes, but recently gathered data suggest that estimates based on this decades-old model was not far off.
Researchers used images captured by Dawn to analyze the craters in the northern polar region of the asteroid and identified regions of perpetual shadow in more than 600 craters. Of these craters, 10 had bright spots that reflect high levels of sunlight. Wavelengths of light that were reflected off these patches revealed the reflective surfaces contain water ice.
“We spectroscopically identify one of the bright deposits as water ice. This detection strengthens the evidence that permanently shadowed areas have preserved water ice on airless planetary bodies,” study researcher Thomas Platz, from Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, and colleagues reported in Nature Astronomy on Dec. 15.
Launching water into space from Earth is prohibitively expensive. So imagine a huge store of water in a low-gravity environment, conveniently located in the asteroid belt between Mars and the outer planets.
HE DIDN’T CARE ABOUT HACKING OF U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY SECRETS, BUT IF THERE’S A CHANCE IT MIGHT HAVE COST THE DEMOCRATS POWER, WELL, THAT’S DIFFERENT: Obama says ‘we will’ retaliate against Russia for election hacking. His language — “at a time and place of our own choosing” — echoes George W. Bush, which just underscores that Democrats view something that costs them political power the way Republicans view a terrorist attack that kills Americans. But we’ve seen that ever since the 2002 elections.
UPDATE: By the way, what does it say that the DNC ignored warnings from the FBI that they were being hacked because they didn’t believe the calls were real?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ouch.
This is the right response. The Dems are trying to distract from what was revealed with ginned-up outrage about how the information was obtained. Meanwhile, if Trump had lost the election because damning RNC secrets showed up on Wikileaks, Obama would be making patronizing remarks about how they needed to learn to play in the big leagues, and Jon Stewart would be mocking Trump’s password skills.
The only outrage that’s not ginned up is their outrage at losing, which stems from a sense of entitlement.
COLUMBIA DOES IT AGAIN: Toni Airaksinen: “Unsafe space”: Ivy League college kills 41-year-old comedy tradition.
MUST-SEE TV: Tucker Takes Down Kurt Eichenwald.
Riches of embarrassment.
IF YOU STRIKE AT THE KING YOU MUST KILL HIM: Left for dead, Sen. Ron Johnson freed to shake up DC, repeal Obama regs.
Newly re-elected Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson isn’t supposed to be here.
After all, Washington’s political-media-donor clique had written off the businessman in a rematch against former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold in a state the pundits said tilts Democratic.
First, the website FiveThirtyEight gave Feingold an 85 percent chance to win. Then Washington-based political action committees stopped writing checks to “RonJohn.” And finally he was mocked by critics for sticking with Donald Trump.
But he didn’t drown his sorrows in beer. He celebrated his independence from Washington with a Milwaukee-made Miller Lite.
“Back here in D.C., I realized how thoroughly I was written off. At least prior to the election, people were giving lip service to the thought I’d have a chance. I always thought I did,” he said in an interview.
And win he did, beating Feingold 50.2 percent to 46.8 percent, a bigger margin that Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton, and getting the largest vote total of any Wisconsin Republican to ever run.
Despite being a one-term senator, Johnson said he ran as an outsider who portrayed Feingold as a political lifer.
“It definitely was an outside of Washington campaign. It was also outside the professional political consultant class. It was breaking away from that and just running a campaign like a business person would trying to market a product. And I was the product,” he said.
Novel approach.
COMPETENCE: Republican National Committee Security Foiled Russian Hackers.
Russian hackers tried to penetrate the computer networks of the Republican National Committee, using the same techniques that allowed them to infiltrate its Democratic counterpart, according to U.S. officials who have been briefed on the attempted intrusion.
But the intruders failed to get past security defenses on the RNC’s computer networks, the officials said. And people close to the investigation said it indicated a less aggressive and much less persistent effort by Russian intelligence to hack the Republican group than the Democratic National Committee. Only a single email account linked to a long-departed RNC staffer was targeted.
The disclosures came as a political furor grows over suspected Russian hacking of U.S. political organizations. The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Russian hackers, whom analysts say work for that country’s military and intelligence apparatus, stole emails from the DNC, as well as another Democratic organization and the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, to harm her candidacy and boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning. Russia has denied the allegations.
The possibility that Russians tried and failed to infiltrate the RNC doesn’t necessarily conflict with the CIA’s conclusion. A senior U.S. official said analysts now believe what started as an information-gathering campaign aimed at both parties later took on a focus of leaked emails about Mrs. Clinton and Democrats.
Two things come to mind. First, which party would you trust more with your national security? And second, it’s perfectly clear that with a Clintonista running things, the DNC servers were always going to contain much juicier material than anything on the RNC’s.
Listen up, Democrats: You can have a Clinton or you can have lax security, but you can’t have both.
COOLING OFF PERIOD: The Impending Collapse Of The Global Warming Scare.
Start with the EPA. To the extent that the global warming movement has anything to do with “science,” EPA is supposedly where that science is vetted and approved on behalf of the public before being turned into policy. In fact, under Obama, EPA’s principal role on the “science” has been to prevent and stifle any debate or challenge to global warming orthodoxy. For example, when a major new Research Report came out back in September claiming to completely invalidate all of the bases on which EPA claims that CO2 is a danger to human health and welfare, and thus to undermine EPA’s authority to regulate the gas under the Clean Air Act, EPA simply failed to respond. In the same vein, essentially all prominent global warming alarmists refuse to debate anyone who challenges any aspect of their orthodoxy. Well, that has worked as long as they and their allies have controlled all of the agencies and all of the money. Now, it will suddenly be put up or shut up. And in case you might think that the science on this issue is “settled,” so no problem, you might enjoy this recent round-up at Climate Depot from some of the actual top scientists. A couple of excerpts:
Renowned Princeton Physicist Freeman Dyson: ‘I’m 100% Democrat and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on climate issue, and the Republicans took the right side. ‘ . . .
Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever: ‘Global warming is a non-problem’ – ‘I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.’
Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years.
Read the whole thing.
The real “problem” of course is that Trump fights like a Democrat, and the climate justice warriors infesting the EPA are incapable of countering their own tactics.
SURELY ALL HIS FAWNING PRAISE OF JEFF SESSIONS WILL DISQUALIFY HIM: Labor Secretary Perez enters DNC chair race.
Labor Secretary Tom Perez on Thursday joined the race to become the next Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman, shaking up a campaign that has so far been dominated by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.)
“I’m in this race because I really believe that this is one of those ‘Where were you?’ moments,” Perez said on a conference call with state Democratic chairmen.
“It’s not just about the future of the Democratic Party, but the future of America, and given what happened last month, I believe that at no point in my life has the Democratic chair been this important. We need strong progressive leadership that can deliver results. I’m a proud progressive and have been getting stuff done my entire career.”
Perez promised to return to the DNC’s “50 state strategy,” implemented under former chairman Howard Dean in the 2000s, which has become a familiar refrain among the candidates in the race.
Many state party officials are frustrated, believing they were ignored by the national party under the leadership of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).
No matter who you are, the nice thing about following Debbie is that, well, you’ll be following Debbie.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: 165 Law Schools Have Reduced The Size Of Their 1L Classes Since 2011, 53 By 33% Or More.
THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: Evernote backs off from privacy policy changes, says it ‘messed up’
The changes to the privacy policy were to come into effect on Jan. 23.
By late Thursday, however, O’Neill was taking measures to fix the crisis caused by the proposed policy change. “We announced a change to our privacy policy that made it seem like we didn’t care about the privacy of our customers or their notes. This was not our intent, and our customers let us know that we messed up, in no uncertain terms. We heard them, and we’re taking immediate action to fix it,” he said in a statement.
The Redwood City, Calif., company will make machine learning technologies available to its users, but employees will be not be reading note content unless users opt in, Evernote said in a blog post.
Good.
WHY IS THE IVY LEAGUE SUCH A CESSPIT OF HATRED AND VIOLENCE? Cornell Student: I Was Assaulted on Campus, Called a ‘Racist Bitch’ for Being Republican.
Corn said the incident was the culmination of a string of hateful incidents sparked by her conservative politics.
She said she has been repeatedly called “racist”, “fascist” and “a disgrace to women” by fellow students, some of whom allegedly threatened to throw acid in her face.
Remember “love trumps hate,” and “they go low, we go high?” Me neither.
WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN? Facebook now flags and down-ranks fake news with help from outside fact checkers.
“We’re not looking to get into the grey area of opinion,” Facebook’s VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri tells me. “What we are focusing on with this work is specifically the worst of the work — clear hoaxes that were shared intentionally, usually by spammers, for financial gain.”
And who is to be entrusted with sorting the real news from the fake?
“Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, ABC News, and AP.”
This should be fun.
LOCK HER UP: Voters oppose Clinton pardon by 3-1 margin.
SEATTLE CORNERBACK RICHARD SHERMAN: “Why I Hate Thursday Night Football,” calls it a “poopfest.”
Thursday
Game day. This is what you live for. But this time, your body isn’t ready. You’re still sore from Sunday’s game. You’re going to go out there and compete and give everything you have, because that’s what you do. But your body just won’t have as much to give as it would have had on a full week’s rest.
That’s why the quality of play has been so poor on Thursday nights this season. We’ve seen blowouts, sloppy play and games that have been almost unwatchable — and it’s not the players’ faults. Their bodies just aren’t ready to play. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Cowboys-Vikings game a couple of weeks ago was the best TNF game we’ve seen this season. You know why?
Because they both played on Thanksgiving the week before, so they each had a full week off.
Thursday Night Football is just another example of the NFL’s hypocrisy: The league will continue a practice that diminishes the on-field product and endangers its players, but as long as the dollars keep rolling in, it couldn’t care less.
Maybe the NFL’s social justice warrior stuff is just a cover for how badly the league treats its players.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. It’s Time To Protect The Right To Earn A Living.
“The right of individuals to pursue a chosen business or profession, free from arbitrary or excessive government interference, is a fundamental civil right.” That’s how the Right to Earn a Living Act, passed overwhelmingly by the Tennessee General Assembly earlier this year, begins.
While this bill did not receive as much attention as some of the others, this new law is an important one for economic liberty in our state. It addresses one of the biggest hurdles placed on Tennesseans who are trying to climb the economic ladder: occupational licensing. Obviously, we all expect our doctor or nurse to go to school and get a license to treat us. But did you know that in Tennessee, you need a license to run an auction or even wash someone’s hair? In fact, a stunning 111 jobs require a license in our state, making Tennessee one of the most burdensome states in the nation to try to earn a living.
This is a problem in many states. This bill — cosponsored by Rep. Martin Daniel in the state House, and Sen. Mark Green in the Senate — is a good start.
IN THE EMAIL FROM MICHAEL HOOTEN: The Raven’s Children (A Bard Without a Star Book 5).
SHE WAS ALWAYS A HORRIBLE CANDIDATE: The real ‘election rigger’ was the bungling Clinton campaign. “Because Vagina” is not a qualification to be president. Besides, we already had an affirmative action president this century. For the rest of the 21st let’s elect the person best qualified/least crooked (Trump won on THAT last qualification) with no regard to color, gender or sexual orientation. Leave it to our grandkids to do stupid stuff. We’re full up on the “idiotic vote” quota, thank you.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH FIRING LIARS AND INCOMPETENTS? How Trump can fix the deadly Veterans Administration.
LEADING FROM (HIS) BEHIND: How Obama invited the Russian ‘hack attack’.