BECAUSE IT WAS TOO BUSY POLICING PEOPLE’S FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS FOR RACIST MEMES TO DO THE ACTUAL JOB OF GOVERNMENT: Grenfell Tower – a monument to a broken society: People living in older, high-rise, often council-owned buildings have every right to wonder why the Government did not act when it had the chance.
The more a government, or corporation, or nonprofit, or university talks about social justice and diversity, the more likely it’s neglecting its basic responsibilities.
ANDREW KLAVAN: How the Media Covered the Giffords Shooting.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? Why printers add secret tracking dots.
These “microdots” are well known to security researchers and civil liberties campaigners. Many colour printers add them to documents without people ever knowing they’re there.
In this case, the FBI has not said publicly that these microdots were used to help identify their suspect, and the bureau declined to comment for this article. The US Department of Justice, which published news of the charges against [Reality] Winner, also declined to provide further clarification.
In a statement, The Intercept said, “Winner faces allegations that have not been proven. The same is true of the FBI’s claims about how it came to arrest Winner.”
But the presence of microdots on what is now a high-profile document (against the NSA’s wishes) has sparked great interest.
The EFF has an online guide to help you “read” printer microdots.
BLUE STATES IN CRISIS: The Illinois Meltdown:
Years of cascading fiscal crisis and insoluble political gridlock have driven the Land of Lincoln to the edge of the abyss. . . .
The collapse of governance in America’s fifth-largest state is on a different scale from the problems (and there are many) in other indebted state capitals. But it may not stay that way. Mismanaged pension funds, bloated bureaucracies and special interest carveouts are endemic to blue model governance, especially in big blue cities like Chicago. As the fiscal vise tightens, these institutional failures stand to spill over into the political system, generating vicious fights over resources that bring governance to a standstill.
There is plenty of blame to go around in the Illinois political class—including for Democrats who are circling the wagons around a failed status quo, and for Republicans, who have not produced sustainable fixes beyond holding the line and starving the beast. Meanwhile, the people at the bottom, who rely most on the state’s decaying services, will bear the brunt of the impact from the meltdown.
We need a federal law providing for state bankruptcy. I think that states that go bankrupt should revert to territory status and have to petition for re-admission to the Union.
HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? Oil From OPEC’s Rivals to Exceed Demand Growth in 2018.
The U.S., Brazil, Canada and other producers outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will increase output next year by the most in four years, the IEA said. So while the cutbacks should reduce the world’s bloated oil inventories to average levels by the time they’re scheduled to end next spring, demand for OPEC crude won’t be high enough for the group to reverse the curbs without seeing stockpiles rise again.
“Our first outlook for 2018 makes sobering reading for those producers looking to restrain supply,” said the Paris-based IEA, which advises most of the world’s major economies on energy policy.
Oil prices have slipped 14 percent in New York this year as hopes that supply curbs by OPEC and partners such as Russia would end a three-year surplus have given way to concern that the cuts aren’t deep enough and that U.S. shale drillers will fill any shortfall.
I’ve been enjoying watching the unnatural act of gas prices going down just as the summer road trip season kicks into gear.
So it turns out you can drill your way to lower prices — who knew?
AT AMAZON, Tactical Pen for Self Defense.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA: A Canadian Sea King helicopter participates in an operation with a USN Surface Action Group.
TONI AIRAKSINEN: UW Profs Hold Exams After Sunset for Muslims During Ramadan.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Why Should We Trust Mueller?
The establishment is praising Mueller up and down. They tell me he’s honest. They tell me he’s incorruptible. But they also told me Jim Comey was a towering paragon of virtue instead of a towering pile of Harry Reid. . . .
Why should we believe this isn’t rigged? Because people in D.C. promise us that “Hey, this guy is honest?”
I guess we’re supposed to think “Yeah, well this time they’ve got to be telling us the truth. They’re totally due.”
But here’s the problem – we now have lots of new facts that change the original picture of our esteemed special counsel. Yes, as the Democrat steno pool that is the media has pointed out as we got woke to what’s happening, a lot of conservatives (including me) were initially satisfied with Mueller when he was appointed to investigate the Trump/Russia connection that everyone now admits doesn’t exist. But then came some troubling revelations which – whoa! – made us re-evaluate our prior understanding. So we – brace yourselves! – changed our minds in the face of new evidence.
Let’s look at all of the evidence. Mueller seems like a good guy. War hero. No scandals as FBI director. Not a known scumbag or skeevy perv. In Washington terms, the last one alone puts him miles ahead of the competition.
But now we find out that he’s Leaky Jim Comey’s bestest buddy there ever was. These guys are pals, and now Mueller is going to investigate the dude who fired his amigo? Does that seem cool to you?
If the HR Department at work is investigating you, do they pick as the lead investigator the guy you go drink Budweiser with? Sure they do, unless Chet the Unicorn is free, because the only thing more unlikely than picking a key player in the investigation’s friend to do it is picking a damn unicorn to do it.
So, Jim Comey – whose hurt feelings seem to be the only thing left of this Schumer-show of a scandal – is the key guy in the pseudo-scandal, and he’s got a motive to shaft the president, yet his friend is investigating it and somehow that’s supposed to be A-OK?
UPDATE: From Randy Barnett: “Mueller should resign not recuse. If he recuses, the matter will be delegated to one of the Democrat attack lawyers he’s hired.”
By the way, for those who don’t know, this is a celebrated Georgetown Law Professor who’s now calling for Mueller to step down over conflicts.
Related: Mueller Is Conflicted Out.
28 CFR Section 45.2 provides in part as follows:
Disqualification arising from personal or political relationship.
(a) Unless authorized under paragraph (b) of this section, no employee shall participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with:
(1) Any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution; or
(2) Any person or organization which he knows has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome of the investigation or prosecution….
(c) For the purposes of this section:
(2)Personal relationship means a close and substantial connection of the type normally viewed as likely to induce partiality….Whether relationships (including friendships) of an employee to other persons [outside his or her family] or organizations are “personal” must be judged on an individual basis with due regard given to the subjective opinion of the employee.
Jim Comey and Bob Mueller have been friends for about 15 years. They were partners in the episode that — I think it’s no exaggeration to say — defined Comey’s professional persona more than any other in his career. It would be surprising if it did not also forge a permanent bond with Mueller. . . .
Comey now finds himself smack-dab at the center of the Russian investigation over which Mueller presides. Questions swirl around Comey — about whether the President wanted/hinted/hoped/asked/directed/or something else the investigation of National Security Adviser Gen. Flynn to be stopped/abandoned/slowed/soft-peddled/something else. This is probably the central element of the obstruction of justice case Mr. Trump’s opponents would like to see made against him.
Questions also swirl about Comey’s notes about this conversation, why he gave them to a private individual (Prof. Dan Richman of Columbia Law) to convey to the press. Additional questions have arisen about whether this curious and seemingly devious means of putting contents of the notes in the public domain (leaking, in other words) was designed specifically to bring about the appointment of a Special Counsel outside the President’s direct reach — and, indeed, whether Comey wanted, expected or intended his friend Mueller to get the job.
There is much to be said of all this, none of it very happy-making. But one thing that can be said with considerable clarity if not comfort is that, under the governing rules (set forth above), Mueller has a long-term relationship with Comey that “may result in a personal…conflict of interest, or the appearance thereof.”
He is therefore disqualified. I hope and believe that Mueller, whom I believe to be an honest man and a partisan of the rule of law, will see this for himself. If he doesn’t, I hope Rod Rosenstein will.
Mueller should resign. Aside from the issues above, I don’t see any way that his office’s work will be seen as impartial, defeating the point of a special counsel. And given that — as even Chris Matthews has admitted — the whole Russia-collusion story has imploded, I’m not sure why his office shouldn’t just be shut down.
MORE: From the comments:
Trust Mueller? From the WaPo article on obstruction we get this gem:
“Five people briefed on the interview requests, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly…”
Five friggin’ people on Mueller’s super-secret investigation team leaked!
Yeah, let’s trust these people.
What percentage is that of the office as a whole?
NORMAL BUT DERANGED: The Washington Times examines James Hodgkinson and angry Democrats.
Trump Derangement Syndrome leads to the obsession that every ill and annoyance of life is the work of Donald Trump, a traitor out to betray the nation to its enemies. Millions of Democrats, disappointed with the results of the 2016 elections, have built their lives around despising the president. It isn’t healthy for the republic, it isn’t healthy for those afflicted and it won’t be healthy for those who die at the hands of assassins.
The Alexandria assassin, slain at the site, seemed to have been obsessed with equal parts hatred of the president and devotion to Bernie Sanders. “He did not come off as a radical,” a friend in his hometown says of him. “He did not come off as an unstable individual. He wasn’t belligerent, he was just a kind of normal guy.”
Normal, but deranged. Mr. Hodgkinson’s “social media accounts” — Twitter, Facebook and the other instruments of the life of an obsession with trivia — showed him, observes The New York Times, “as deeply committed to liberal politics and distrustful of Republican-controlled Washington. In posts, he rails against Republicans, lavishes praise upon [Mr.] Sanders … and shows a deep engagement with the churn of news coming out of Washington.”
Senator Sanders isn’t responsible for Hodgkinson’s criminal act.
But Bernie Sanders is part of those who spread the derangement, of making losing an election, with all the pain that goes with it, both science and art. The derangement he suffers carries over into how he conducts his Senate business. The senator, an atheist, declared he wouldn’t vote to confirm a Trump nominee for a trade post because he doesn’t approve of the nominee’s Christian faith, though the Constitution expressly forbids making a religious test a qualification for office.
Read the whole thing.
SARAH HOYT: Fun House Mirrors.
I am not a prophet. I swear I’m not a prophet. But the vague, cold feeling that has been in my stomach for weeks, which got worse after that “discussion” yesterday has coalesced into a clear fear. I just posted this on Facebook:
A radical from a fringe group, led by insane rumor and innuendo, has shot someone who is not even the leader of the faction he hates.
Is Rep. Scalise’s middle name Ferdinand?
Listen to me now; stop believing crazy people, even those in the media. Yesterday, in a friend’s post someone called me racist/sexist/homophobic or implied it because apparently I want to “suppress voices” in science fiction. NO ONE who knows me can believe that. This woman knows me. And this was over an aesthetic disagreement in fricking tiny, irrelevant science fiction.
LISTEN TO ME NOW, it’s time to believe your lying eyes and accept that people can disagree with you without being evil. It’s time to investigate all news, even the ones you think confirm you bias. It’s time to wake up.
YOU DON’T WANT TO GO DOWN THIS ROAD. There is nothing for you here. It didn’t turn out well in 1914. It won’t turn out well now.
I’ve collected at least one idiot already, who thinks that saying republicans are evil doesn’t prove my post. What the actually? What madness is this? Can it end but in blood?
Read the whole thing.
THIS “GET RID OF TRUMP BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY” BUSINESS IS DANGEROUS. IT FOMENTS VIOLENCE. AND IT MAKES ME WONDER IF DEMOCRATS — WHO CALLED MITT ROMNEY HITLER — WOULD ACCEPT ANY REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT. Lawsuit Against Trump’s Businesses Attempts Impeachment By Other Means.
SETH BARRON: Incitement To Violence. “Democrats may be horrified by today’s attempted massacre of the GOP House baseball team by an avowed progressive, but their incendiary demands for ‘massive resistance’ since November have been an open plea for the escalation of words into violent action. The daily repetition that President Trump is an illegitimate usurper who stole the election through collusion with foreign powers has been a hypnotic incantation in search of an Oswald: a siren call for an assassin.”
Related: From Middlebury to Alexandria, the Left Embraces Political Violence.
Flashback: The Left Won’t Rest Until Somebody Gets Killed. “I’m old enough to remember when ‘violent rhetoric’ was the root of all our problems, and crosshairs on a website no one ever saw was the reason for mass murder. Of course, those were different times, times in which the president had a (D) after his name, not an evil (R). . . . But if liberals believed what they were saying back then, what does it tell us about what they’re hoping for now? There’s really only one conclusion to draw: They want blood, literal blood.”
Related: Leaked Screenshots Reveal BuzzFeed Director Wishing for Trump Assassination.
Plus: The Return of Assassination Fascination.
Also: Assassination Threats Against Trump Flood Twitter.
Finally: Scott Adams: The Media Are Trying To Get Donald Trump Killed.
UPDATE: Okay, Stephen already ran this quote from Ace, but I’m going to run it again: “At this point in the Dylan Roof Cycle the media already had enough evidence to demand that all confederate flags be stricken from the masts, and yet here, they can’t draw any kind of line between remorseless leftist agitation to violence and the inevitable fruition of such.”
No word yet on the cause of the explosion.
ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL: NYT still peddling trash about Palin and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.
More: New York Times Determined To Find Political Balance In Shootings, Even if it Means Reviving Old Lie: “Palin might as well sue for defamation. At this point, knowing what we know, this is actual malice.”
“Six years from now, the NYT editorial board will lecture us about that time a right-winger shot Democrats on a baseball field,” Guy Benson tweets. As one of Ace of Spades’ co-bloggers adds on Twitter, “It was only today that I finally understood what it felt like to be subject to ‘gaslighting.’”
Oh, I don’t know; I can remember eight years of the stuff – and so can Bill Whittle:
IF IT WEREN’T FOR DESPICABLE LIES, WHAT WOULD THEY HAVE?
And as Ace wrote last night, “At this point in the Dylan Roof Cycle the media already had enough evidence to demand that all confederate flags be stricken from the masts, and yet here, they can’t draw any kind of line between remorseless leftist agitation to violence and the inevitable fruition of such.”
POLITICAL VIOLENCE IS EASIER TO UNLEASH THAN TO CONTROL: If Donald Trump Befalls the Same Fate as Caesar, We Should All Fear the Ides of March.
THE WASHINGTON POST HAS SUDDENLY FORGOTTEN HOW THE ‘CLIMATE OF HATE’ WORKS:
These are exactly the same sort of links many on the left, not just Paul Krugman, made in 2011. Yes, we understand that Kathy Griffin is a comedian. We understand it wasn’t a call to real violence. Neither was the stuff cited by the left in 2011. It was all political rhetoric designed to rev up supporters, exactly the sort of thing Bernie Sanders was doing when he said “Take your anger out on the right people.”
If Sanders had said, ‘Take out your anger on the right targets’ it would be very close to a rhetorical version of Sarah Palin’s target map in both meaning and intent. All of us, right and left understand this. The problem is that, after Tucson, the left suddenly connected this rhetoric to real violence, absent any evidence. And now that there is violence which might actually have some connection to political rhetoric, folks like Dave Weigel have suddenly forgotten how the climate of hate argument works.
If you want to say that the right is wrong to connect the shooting to left-wing rhetoric, fine. I’m all for blaming the shooter. But you can’t denounce the right for making the “climate of hate” argument without first admitting the left was wrong to make the same sort of argument back then when there was a chance for them to blame it on the right.
Read the whole thing.
Flashback: Memo to Paul Krugman and Rep. Van Hollen: My Search Was Not in Vain.
ONE OF THEM IS PAUL KRUGMAN: How Two Nobel Prize Winning Economists Got Oil Wrong.
In a May 12 2008 column, Krugman pooh-poohed the idea that speculation was driving the oil price (then at $125 a barrel), saying: “all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels. This tells us that the rise in oil prices isn’t the result of runaway speculation; it’s the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China.”
Further, he attributed the tendency to blame speculators on conservatives in this instance, a reversal of the usual politic spectrum, and especially because of their failure to recognize that “a realistic view of what’s happened over the past few years suggests that we’re heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil.” He later doubled down on this, describing “the way ideas go from crazy stuff that only DFHs believe to stuff everyone knows, without ever going through a stage in which the holders of conventional wisdom acknowledge that they were wrong. Oh, and the people who were right are still considered DFHs; you see, they were right too soon.
It looks as if peak oil may be going that way.” [DFH is an acronym that can’t be translated here, but consider ‘treehuggers’ as a good equivalent.]
In this case, the problems are that a) Professor Krugman is not an expert on resource economics, b) he has viewed this through political lenses, c), he has assumed temporary price trends are due to long-term changes; and d) cardinal error: he takes a bad price forecast as evidence of bad underlying theory.
Predictions are hard — especially about the future, as Krugman should know.
A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Two arrested in wake of melee outside Turkish Embassy: report.
wo Turkish men living in the United States have reportedly been arrested by U.S. marshals for their alleged role in assaulting protesters outside the Turkish Embassy last month in Washington, D.C.
In a Wednesday statement, the State Department confirmed to the Daily Caller that the arrests had been made but wouldn’t release the names of the two men.
“Now that charges have been filed, the Department will weigh additional actions for the named individuals, as appropriate under relevant laws and regulations. Any further steps will be responsive and proportional to the charges,” State said.
In May, bodyguards to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan violently clashed with protesters to his administration while Erdogan, who had just come from visiting President Trump at the White House, looked on.
Lawmakers responded with outrage at the time, saying that political violence wouldn’t be tolerated on U.S. soil.
Well, about that. . . .
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