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Archive for 2018
February 25, 2018
ROGER SIMON: Why We Need the Second Amendment More than Ever.
Somebody on Twitter was claiming that this clown was set to be Hillary’s choice for FBI director. Given his behavior, that seems entirely plausible.
But, like Harvey Weinstein, he went full-bore against the NRA — and for the same reasons.
WHAT’S THIS? CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS REJECT FEINSTEIN’S RE-ELECTION BID: Yes, Dianne Feinstein, the former San Francisco mayor, has been a U.S. Senator from California since Bill Clinton was in the White House, but she’s not sufficiently “progressive” for the Democrats in 2018? Kathryn Blackhurst of LifeZette counts the unexpected numbers.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stanford Review: Read My Lips: No New Administrators.
Stanford’s bureaucracy has snowballed out of control. Accompanying the increase in university administrators, tuition has risen, student traditions from Full Moon on the Quad to the Stanford Band have been strangled, and accountability in the bureaucracy has decreased. Perhaps most egregiously, over the past few months, FoHo exposed corruption within Stanford’s Office of Community Standards (OCS), charged with implementing the Honor Code and Fundamental Standard.
We should be enraged that the office responsible for enforcing students’ moral standards cannot even follow basic ethics. Only through the investigative reporting of an anonymous newspaper did we learn the full scope of its bureaucratic incompetence: the office has operated without a director for almost a year, and its entire staff vanished at the end of last August, even while it was embroiled in multiple campus probes. The OCS’s investigation of a student’s concussion at “Blood Bath,” a Sigma Nu–Alpha Phi event, was laden with medical privacy violations and poor evidentiary standards.
Though the FoHo’s assiduous coverage of these events was admirable, it raises a much larger question: who is charged with holding the OCS accountable for its hiring and investigative mishaps? The answer is not clear. The recent OCS debacle reveals a much more worrying trend: the rise of an unaccountable, ballooning university bureaucracy that threatens Stanford’s academic commitment to teaching and learning.
Unknown to most Stanford students, the OCS is only one out of the 25 offices that comprise the Student Affairs division of the Office of the Provost. This office, which oversees the university’s academic program and is headed by Persis Drell, has over thirty deans, vice provosts, directors, and special assistants. Many of these positions were only recently established: the Vice Provost for Graduate Education was established in 2007, while the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning was established in 2015. The Office of the Provost, however, is only one small part of administrative bureaucracy: others include the Stanford Alumni Association, Business Affairs, the Office of Development, and Land, Buildings & Real Estate. The web grows even more intricate as one moves down the bureaucratic ladder. For example, within the Office of the Provost, the VP for Student Affairs oversees six associate vice provosts (AVPs), in addition to its 25 offices.
You could fire 90% of these people and nobody would notice.
OUR MORAL LEADERS: UVM activists block rush-hour traffic, delay ambulances.
PARKLAND SHOOTING: Exposing The Rot In The Deep State. Well, and the not-so-deep state.
THIS IS TROUBLING: Centers for Disease Control employee vanishes after feeling sick and leaving work early. “Timothy Cunningham, a 35-year-old commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, left work sick on Feb. 12 and has not been heard from since, WSB reported.”
This is how the zombie plague starts, isn’t it?
THERE ARE SOME PROBLEMS: Byron York: Assessing The New Democratic Intel Memo.
In sum, it appears that of the four bullet points listed by Democrats to support the most important assertion in their memo, three would not be sufficient to win a warrant on Page, and the fourth is — yes — the unconfirmed allegations in the dossier. Democrats say the FISA warrant application made just “narrow” use of the dossier, while Republicans say the application made extensive use of the dossier. (And not just Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, but also the Senate Judiciary Committee, which conducted a separate investigation and concluded the dossier’s allegations made up “the bulk” of the application.) We won’t know who is right definitively until the application is released to the public, but it seems hard to believe a warrant would have been approved absent the dossier’s allegations.
On to other parts of the Democratic memo. The next big point is a refutation of an assertion that Republicans did not make in their original memo. The Democratic memo says at one point that, “Christopher Steele’s raw intelligence reporting did not inform the FBI’s decision to initiate its counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016.” At another point in the memo, Democrats say that “Steele’s reporting…played no role in launching” the investigation.
But the Republican memo did not say that it did. Indeed, the GOP memo said, “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016…” There is some debate about the precise beginning of the FBI investigation, and whether it is of much importance given later reliance on the dossier. But the fact is, the Republican memo did not claim that Steele’s raw intelligence informed the decision to begin the investigation. So the Democratic memo has knocked down a straw man.
Much more at the link.
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THE FBI COULDN’T STOP A SCHOOL SHOOTING WITH MULTIPLE WARNINGS, BUT AT LEAST THEY’RE ON TOP OF COLLEGE SPORTS:
Let’s be clear on exactly what’s happening here. Yahoo! Sports is pushing out a press release for the FBI, which is acting as the enforcement arm of the NCAA. That all feels like a bigger scandal than a spreadsheet that shows, among other things, a basketball recruit’s mom receiving “hundreds of dollars in advances” from an agent.
The FBI is having a bad year, but it’s the FBI’s fault.
JAMES TARANTO IS NOT AMUSED BY YOUR BULLSHIT:
WHY ARE LEFTY ACTIVIST CORPORATIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY AND ABUSE? Google ‘bro culture’ led to violence, sexual harassment against female engineer, lawsuit alleges.
It’s all pathetic, but it’s the total ineptitude at what’s supposed to be his job that makes it really galling.
AMANDA S. GREEN FINISHES LENIN (IF ONLY IT WERE THAT EASY): The End of TSAR, er Lenin (The State and Revolution, Pt. 5).
IT WOULD BE GOOD IF ONE THOUGHT: Before You Tear It Down…
INDEED: If so, then Why Tell Stories?
THEY MISSPELLED PREPOSTEROUS: Irony of Ironies: China Lectures US on Human Rights.
THEY LOVE EVERY CULTURE BUT THEIR OWN: Trudeau Played Dress Up In India: Cultural Appropriation Or Bollywood Audition?
THE NARRATIVE COMES UNGLUED: It’s a Fair Society, But Cops are to Blame.
THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I’VE BEEN AWAITING: Scientists invent floating ‘firefly’ light that rides ultrasound waves.
THE MHTK CAN TAKE OUT MORTAR SHELLS, ARTILLERY SHELLS AND UAVS: New defensive missile is ‘like hitting a bullet with a bullet’
THEY SAY “NAZI COLLABORATOR” LIKE IT’S A BAD THING – ALL HER CELEBRITY FRIENDS WERE ABLE TO OVERLOOK IT, WHY CAN’T WE? This American socialite loved sex, luxury and Nazis.
CIVILIZATIONALLY I DON’T THINK IMPORTING MUSLIMS AND EXPORTING JEWS IS THE ROUTE TO TAKE: Anti-Semitism drove these Jews out of France.