Archive for 2019
October 9, 2019
ROLL CALL: Democrats face consequences of skipping floor impeachment vote: House Democrats gave themselves political wiggle room, but the strategy also leaves open questions about the inquiry’s legitimacy. “A federal judge, hearing arguments Tuesday about whether the House Judiciary Committee should get grand jury materials from the special counsel report from Robert S. Mueller III as part of an impeachment inquiry, questioned when she could know such an inquiry had begun if there wasn’t a floor vote. . . . That procedural ambiguity underscores the complex politics of impeachment, where Pelosi wants to simultaneously legitimize the House’s constitutional role to investigate the president for wrongdoing and play politics at the same time.”
CONGRESS DOESN’T WANT POWER IF IT COMES WITH RESPONSIBILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY: Hey, Congress: Take Back Your War Powers: Congress abdicated its foreign policy responsibilities long before Donald Trump became president.
THE LIGHTS ARE OUT IN CALIFORNIA, AND THAT WAS THE PLAN ALL ALONG: Before planned blackouts are through in two or three days, as many as three million Californians may go without power.
I WISH IT WERE TRUE: The bizarre fiction of libertarians’ control of Washington. “Little did we know we were Obama’s puppet masters all along!”
THE GHOST OF YASSER ARAFAT IS REALLY GETTING AROUND THESE DAYS: Gaming Giant Blizzard Entertainment’s Statement Regarding Player Who Voiced Support For Hong Kong Was Different In Chinese.
UPDATE: Activists have their ‘Free Hong Kong’ sign confiscated during national anthem at Wizards game.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
#JOURNALISM: CNN Tries to Get Interior Department Official Fired for Opposing Jihad Violence. “And indeed, the Left is increasingly open about its totalitarianism. Those with dissenting views will not be allowed to hold jobs, even if those jobs have nothing to do with the subject of their dissent.” Leftists are trash. Make their behavior less than cost-free and they’ll stop.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Having a dog can lower risk of death from heart attack, stroke.
HEY, IT WORKED ON JOHN ROBERTS: Mau-Mauing Justice Gorsuch on Title VII and Sex Discrimination.
LIKE JIMMY CARTER’S, WE’LL BE CLEANING UP OBAMA’S MESSSES FOR YEARS TO COME: How Obama’s team set up Trump’s Syrian dilemma. “Over the last few days, a host of former Obama officials have been repeating this story, which is highly misleading, to say the least. Rice and her colleagues would have us believe that Team Obama created a highly effective plan for stabilizing the Middle East by working through groups like the YPG, and Trump, mercurial and impulsive, is throwing it all away by seeking a rapprochement with Ankara. That’s nonsense. In fact, the close relationship with the YPG was a quick fix that bequeathed to Trump profound strategic dilemmas. Trump inherited from Obama a dysfunctional strategy for countering ISIS, one that ensured ever-greater turmoil in the region and placed American forces in an impossible position.”
SOMETHING STRANGE DOWNUNDER: Melbourne cyber conference organisers pressured speaker to edit ‘biased’ talk.
Organisers at the Australian Cyber Conference in Melbourne asked a speaker to edit his speech on Australia’s anti-encryption legislation, after they had dropped two other speakers, who were delivering talks related to whistleblowing, from the line-up at the last minute.
Guardian Australia has learned that Ted Ringrose, partner with legal advice firm Ringrose Siganto was told to edit his speech, and conference organisers had sent him an edited version of his slide pack on his talk stating that the original version was “biased”.
He said they took issue with a comparison between Australia’s encryption laws and China’s, despite the fact that his talk points out that while Australia’s look worse on the surface, in reality it is “just about as bad”.
Ringrose said he pushed back at the attempted censorship and the conference organisers agreed to let him present his talk as planned.
This is in contrast to the decisions made regarding speeches by US whistleblower Thomas Drake and University of Melbourne researcher Dr Suelette Dreyfus.
On Tuesday it was reported former national security agency executive turned whistleblower Drake, along with Dreyfus, were kicked off the conference agenda in what Drake described as an “Orwellian” move by the conference partner, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC).
The move was criticised as “super weird” by a key speaker at the event, Bruce Schneier, as Drake and Dreyfus set up a website detailing their now-banned speeches.
At the second day of the conference attended by 3,500 people in Melbourne on Thursday, Security technologist Schneier said it was a “super weird story” for Drake and Dreyfus to be banned from speaking at the event, because the speeches themselves were not particularly controversial.
“[Drake] was going to talk about basically surveillance. It’s the sort of talk I would do – government corporate surveillance and everybody is spying on all of us – nothing we don’t know,” he said. “[Dreyfus] was going to talk on work she did for the EU on building whistleblower platforms to reduce corruption in third world countries – kind of mundane.”
Schneier blamed someone within Australia’s peak cyber security agency for being concerned about the content of the talks.
“My guess is someone at the ACSC saw the word ‘whistleblower’ and because that word is sensitive here, kind of freaked,” he said.
As usual, of course, the talks will get more attention than otherwise.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Who killed the American arts?
The idea that Americans could educate their own sensibilities to international standards lasted little longer than Emerson and Whitman. By the late 1800s, the United States had adopted a university system along German lines, and ambitious Americans were funneling themselves into its specializing disciplines. By the early Sixties, University of California administrators were boasting that they had created a ‘multiversity’ geared to the needs of technocracy, while University of California students were rioting about an alleged lack of free speech.
By the end of the Sixties, students and administrators had arrived at a Westphalian peace. The students permitted the university to stay in the business of training specialists and technicians. The university let the students redefine the humanistic curriculum. Henceforth, the purpose of liberal education was to prevent the education of classical liberals.
In the new age of identity politics, Americanization had to be reverse-engineered, the glorious miscegenation returned to pure essences. No more mingling of Debussy and Gershwin, or Gershwin and Louis Armstrong in the marketplace of musical ideas. No more mingling of European high culture in impressionable American minds. The arts served to confirm political principles. As Soviet film-makers had cranked out propaganda about tractors and steel, so American teachers vouched for provincial mediocrities like Frida Kahlo and Alice Walker. In subsequent decades, these brave innovations filtered into school syllabi.
The idea was to turn the culturally patriotic melting-pot into a radical rainbow coalition. The result, as we know, was Bill Clinton on sax, a collapse in Humanities enrollments in colleges, and the production of historical illiteracy on a scale not seen since the Roman empire went south.
Read the whole thing.
Flashback: Law professors argue colleagues’ ‘bourgeois’ ideal is racist and classist.
BLOOMBERG SYNDROME IN ACTION:
● Shot: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti Elected to Chair Global Climate Leadership Group.
—LA’s KFI 640 AM today.
● Chaser: Some L.A. officials want a state of emergency declared as homelessness crisis worsens.
—The Los Angeles Times, September 30th.
In 2011, Victor Davis Hanson warned of “The Bloomberg Syndrome:” “Quite simply, the next time your elected local or state official holds a press conference about global warming, the Middle East, or the national political climate, expect to experience poor county law enforcement, bad municipal services, or regional insolvency.”
IT’S PAY-TO-PLAY TIME IN CONGRESS AND IT’S ALL LEGAL: Doesn’t mean it’s honest or ethical, however, as these eight case studies by OpenTheBooks.com make crystal clear.
THE REST OF IT, HE WASTED: U.S. Attorney: Professor Spent $190,000 Of Research Grant Funds At Strip Clubs.
ANDY LEVY: The Marvel-less Mr. Martin. “The legendary director of ‘Goodfellas’ doesn’t think comic book movies are ‘cinema’ — and people lost their damn minds.”