#FAKENEWS: The School Shootings That Weren’t. “We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.” That’s as a against the 240 the Department Of Education claims.
Archive for 2018
August 28, 2018
IT’S ALL ABOUT TRANSACTION COSTS: How Obamacare and other regulations are leading to the demise of the independent doctor and the corporatization of healthcare. But I thought the left hated corporations? Oh, wait…
HEH: How to Write the Perfect Glossy Profile of Beto O’Rourke.
He’s like a Kennedy!
This one is very important. O’Rourke sort of looks like a Kennedy, and he’s young-ish, and he has Correct Thoughts, thus he is “Kennedyesque.” In the #MeToo Era, the left’s fetishization of a notorious womanizer puzzles to a degree, but narratives gonna narrative.
Town and Country: “With a disdain for highly paid consultants, a willingness to travel to unexpected places, and an inspiring message for an extraordinarily divided electorate, it’s hard to look at O’Rourke and not think of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.”
BuzzFeed: “‘There’s a reason people compare him to a Kennedy,’ Sam Hatton, who’s running a scrappy campaign for the Texas House District 71, told me. ‘And it’s not just those Kennedy teeth.'”
Yahoo: “Rep. Joe Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat and grandson of Bobby Kennedy who happens to be a close friend, has joked that O’Rourke is the ‘best looking Kennedy in Washington.'”
Washington Post: “Democrats might look at O’Rourke—a small-business owner with hipster credentials, a Gen Xer who speaks fluent Spanish and looks more like a Kennedy than the Kennedys do—and see a candidate of thrilling national potential, marred only by where he happens to live.”
TIME: “Elderly voters some-times tell him that he reminds them of John F. Kennedy.”
Texas Monthly: “He looks like a Kennedy. (Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III, Bobby’s grandson, jokes that O’Rourke is ‘known as being the best-looking Kennedy in Washington.’)”
Politico: “‘He reminds me of Robert Kennedy, but more so,’ said one of them, Dianne Martin, a 71-year-old South African immigrant who met Kennedy as a schoolgirl on his 1966 trip to the country and predicts O’Rourke will be president someday. ‘I can’t tell you how much I love this man.'”
Rolling Stone: “‘I’m old enough to remember, and he reminds me of Bobby Kennedy,’ says a woman in a blue flower-print dress. ‘You can look at him and tell he means what he says.'”
Vanity Fair: “As Austin-based political strategist Brendan Steinhauser put it, it doesn’t hurt that O’Rourke ‘looks like a damn Kennedy.'”
Lots of great tips here, which apparently the media is all up on top of already.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The ChiComs Stole Hillary’s Emails and Much, Much More. “So, while the fake news media potatoes have been meowing about RUSSIA, RUSSIA COLLUSION, TRUMP TOWER RUSSIAN MEETING, the Chinese were reading all of the Secretary of State’s emails.”
I’m old enough to remember when their were legal consequences for that kind of criminal negligence.
HOSPITAL BLACKHAWKS: Two HH-60M Hospital Blackhawk helicopters participate in a medical evacuation exercise.
DON’T DO THIS TO YOUR KIDS: Marijuana study finds THC in breast milk up to 6 days after mom’s use.
PAUL BEDARD: NAFTA another win for Jared Kushner.
Kushner, married to first daughter Ivanka Trump, has been a top domestic and foreign policy adviser to the president since the 2016 election. He has been involved in several major agenda victories for the White House, among them the push for prison reform, bringing jobs to the U.S. from overseas, working up a Middle East peace timeline, nailing down the 2028 Summer Olympics, and securing soccer’s World Cup in North America in 2026.
His focus on Mexico during the 2016 presidential campaign was one of the reasons he wanted to work inside the West Wing, said an official. It was Kushner, for example, who worked out the campaign year visit by President Trump to Mexico.
“He has a close relationship with Mexico. It is just natural that he was brought into the NAFTA and other talks,” said the official, who added that Kushner has been working with U.S. officials on NAFTA reforms for a year and a half.
I wonder how his record compares with, say, John Kerry’s?
MALFEASANCE IN OFFICE: FBI AGENT TOLD CONGRESS THE BUREAU USED LEAKED STORIES TO OBTAIN SPY WARRANTS. “An FBI special agent told Congress earlier in August that the bureau has used leaked news stories as justifications to obtain surveillance warrants against American citizens, a source familiar with the testimony tells The Daily Caller News Foundation. During a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees on Friday, Special Agent Jonathan Moffa told congressional investigators that the FBI and Justice Department have leaked stories to the press and then used them to obtain warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).”
So you leak a story to the press, then use the resulting press reports as “evidence” before the FISA Court that there’s something you need to look into. Does the FISA Court have contempt powers?
WELL: SOURCES: CHINA HACKED CLINTON’S PRIVATE EMAIL SERVER.
A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.
The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found that virtually all of Clinton’s emails were sent to a “foreign entity,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, said at a July 12 House Committee on the Judiciary hearing. He did not reveal the entity’s identity, but said it was unrelated to Russia.
Two officials with the ICIG, investigator Frank Rucker and attorney Janette McMillan, met repeatedly with FBI officials to warn them of the Chinese intrusion, according to a former intelligence officer with expertise in cybersecurity issues, who was briefed on the matter. He spoke anonymously, as he was not authorized to publicly address the Chinese’s role with Clinton’s server.
Among those FBI officials was Peter Strzok, who was then the bureau’s top counterintelligence official. Strzok was fired this month following the discovery he sent anti-Trump texts to his mistress and co-worker, Lisa Page. Strzok didn’t act on the information the ICIG provided him, according to Gohmert.
Hmm. Strzok is looking curiouser and curiouser.
It’s as if all this Russia talk is just a distraction from what China is doing.
As Bill Whittle likes to say: We have to build a wall because Democrats wouldn’t let us enforce a border.
THINGS DEMS SAID ABOUT MCCAIN THEY’D NOW LIKE YOU TO FORGET: Do Obama, Biden, Schumer and Pelosi mean it now when they praise John McCain or did they actually mean it back when they were calling him a Bush toady, a corporate tool, and a peddler of despicable political smears? The Internet never forgets.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Life Without Water: Sweaty, Smelly, and Furious in Caracas.
In Caracas, we go without reliable access to an extensive list of basic life essentials, from toilet paper to toothpaste. But if you ask me, dry taps are by far the most unpleasant of the epic shortages.
Dishes are brushed off and reused, and clothing is not something regularly laundered, though, personally, I draw the line at multiple wearings of underwear or socks. You ask friends whether it’s okay to flush. You often do not. We’re sweaty and, yes, smelly, especially in the rainy season when the humidity can top 80 percent. We’re at risk, too, because water stagnating in the vessels that people stash around their homes attracts mosquitoes; malaria rates have soared.
The poorest, as usual, have it the worst, though no one is spared. Hospitals and schools, posh neighborhoods and slums, they all go without water—at times for weeks on end—making this man-made drought arguably the most equalizing disaster the socialist government has ever managed to engineer.
Running out of water in a country with Venezuela’s geography would be like running out of energy in a country with Venezuela’s geography — achievements only a socialist regime could muster.
WELL, SOMEBODY NEEDS TO: Trump Iraq policy shows he’s learned from past US mistakes.
I HOPE IT ISN’T SKYNET: Who will mass produce the first lethal drone?
While drones like the DJI Phantom may match the ubiquity of the AK-47, they certainly don’t match the lethality, making them more akin to the Model-T of drones, or perhaps even the Hilux. What the study is looking for is that seamless pairing of ease of use and lethality, and it’s likely the drone that fills this role doesn’t exist yet.
In a section on drone export controls, the study looks at the ways in which nations may collectively prevent such a drone from being sold broadly. The study itself was funded and published by PAX, a nonprofit with the explicit goal of protecting civilians from violence, reducing armed conflict, and building a just peace.
While a far cry from world peace, nations maintaining high barriers to the export of drones is one way to mitigate who ultimately ends up with armed drones. Instead, the study finds that nations are reducing those barriers, making it easier for smaller states, and ones that would have a harder time passing strict betting, to afford and acquire flying machines. Still, these drones remain the purview of states, priced such that nations can buy them, not insurgent groups.
While that’s true for now, a sharp terror group would would keep their drone-building (and lethality) secret until they had enough on hand and ready to deploy for a 9/11-size attack.
PROFILES IN COURAGE: Joe Manchin Struggles to Defend Vote to Fund Planned Parenthood. “I am pro-life, and I think everyone knows.”
ABOUT THOSE “JOBS AMERICANS WON’T DO:” In fact, such jobs are almost non-existent. Based on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found only six of 474 civilian occupations in which there is a non-native majority. That whooshing sound you hear is the air going out of another Open Borders talking point.
COLLUSION: DSCC Paid David Brock for Research Despite Leaders Wanting Party to Drop Him.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which focuses on electing Democrats to the U.S. Senate, pushed payments to an entity run by liberal operative David Brock for research consulting despite leading Democratic Party operatives complaining he was killing the party, with one former Obama official referring to Brock as “fucking weird.”
The DSCC made two payments totaling $40,000 to Brock’s American Bridge PAC in mid- June for research consulting, the DSCC’s filings with the Federal Election Commission show.
Brock described American Bridge as “the Democratic epicenter of opposition research and rapid response in presidential and Senate elections” in a 49-page confidential memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon at a January 2017 posh Florida retreat hosted by Brock where he huddled with more than 100 donors to plot how to “kick Donald Trump’s ass.”
Numerous Democratic Party organizers and operatives around that time said they wanted the party to drop Brock following Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
“His ability to produce wins for Democrats is nonexistent,” Jeff Weaver, former campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, told the Daily Beast in January 2017. “He does not have the kind of understanding of what kind of coalition you have to bring together to win national races—that’s his fundamental problem.”
One Clinton aide told the Daily Beast that Brock was “useless” and said “you might as well have thrown those [tens of] millions of dollars down a well, and then set the well on fire.”
A former Obama administration official who had met Brock on a number of occasions called him “fucking weird.”
Like Uffie, he’s got a loaded bodyguard.
ON THIS DAY IN 1833: William IV, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, signed the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 into law. There was an exception for possessions of the East India Company (which was removed in 1843).
The British ended slavery quite differently from the way the Americans did. First of all, they compensated slave owners. Second, actual emancipation for slaves came in stages, with most slaves being converted to “apprentices” for a few years before they were able to exercise their actual freedom. Full emancipation is said to have been accomplished by August 1, 1838 (a bit ahead of the original schedule set in 1833).
Modern commentators have sometimes called Britain’s decision to compensate slave owners shameful. Maybe. But America’s alternative method—emancipation by civil war—was one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. The death toll was approximately 620,000 (or more by some estimates). I’m not enough of a Puritan to see the British method as a source of shame. Find another blogger to read if you want that.
I once sat down to write a counter-factual historical novel in which Alexander Hamilton survives Weehawken and persuades George Washington to support a British-style emancipation. In the novel, Hamilton was going to be blamed for every trivial thing that went wrong in implementing the plan (by people who had no idea how ghastly the alternative would have been.) Alas, writing novels is hard.
You never know … I might get back to it one day. Not today though.
IF YOU’RE A WRITER YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN THIS: How to Write A Short Story – And Why You Really Should Learn To (a 10 part series).
YEAH, I REMEMBER THE SEVENTIES. IT’S NOT OUR FAULT, IT’S A COMPUTER ERROR: Algorithms: the Ultimate Excuse.
AND ALWAYS NEEDING THOSE WILLING TO DEFEND HER: Civilization – Precious and Hard Won.