TWO KILLED IN GERMANY SHOOTING AFTER APPARENT FAILED ATTACK ON SYNAGOGUE: Suspect arrested by police in eastern city of Halle after bid to access temple on Yom Kippur.
Archive for 2019
October 9, 2019
SUCKING UP TO CHINESE DICTATORS IS NOT A GOOD LOOK: Blizzard’s Hong Kong Screw-Up Is Officially an International Incident. “The company’s communities are in chaos and US senators are taking notice, following the suspension of a pro ‘Hearthstone’ player who declared support for Hong Kong’s protest movement.”
Plus: “Activision Blizzard is less than a month from Blizzcon, an annual convention it puts on to showcase new games and celebrate its fans. Some fans are talking about boycotting the convention, others are planning to stage a protest.”
HEADLINE AT VARIETY: Ronan Farrow Book Alleges Matt Lauer Raped NBC News Colleague.
Flashbacks:
● NBC News Investigated Itself and Found No Culture of Harassment at NBC News.
● How NBC ‘Killed’ Ronan Farrow’s Weinstein Exposé.
● Lauer Locked Women In Office — And Management Covered For Him; Update: SOP At NBC?
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: New York Sun: Liberals’ Tears For Kurds Ring Hollow After Vietnam.
WHY WAS THE WHISTLEBLOWER “VISIBLY SHAKEN”? Who Does the Whistleblower Know?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I think it’s worth breaking out this bit from Charlie’s piece:
It seems to me — and this is just a plausible inference, I’m not asserting it’s the truth — it seems to me that the only people who would be “visibly shaken” by that would be someone who already has guilty knowledge of Crowdstrike, Burisma, or both.
Now, look at the really just astonishing irregularity of the “impeachment inquiry”: not just refusing to take it to the floor of the House, but the secrecy, the selective cherry-picking of releases, and the plan to prevent Republican members — not to mention the Nation — from learning anything about either WB1 or WB2.
I think the most plausible inference is that the whistleblowers are connected to Biden’s campaign, or to the DNC, and were shaken by the possibility of Biden and Crowdstrike being investigated because they know there is something there to be found.
It’s time for the Democrat majority on HPSCI to come clean: what did they know, when did they know it, and who are they really protecting with their unprecedented secrecy?
But read the whole thing, because there’s much more.
I FEEL THAT OUR INTELLIGENCE AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS BUREAUCRACIES AREN’T VERY GOOD AT WHAT THEY DO: “A simple traffic accident in Great Britain which could have been handled discreetly with a little sensitivity on the part of the American government has ballooned into an international diplomatic crisis due to incompetence or worse by American intelligence agencies and diplomats, leading to a serious rift in US-UK relations.”
GOOD: The US shale oil boom has made a Middle East war less likely.
Related: Fracking Ban Proposed By 2020 Dems Would Kill Millions of Jobs:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) are among eight remaining 2020 candidates who have called for an all-out ban on fracking, despite the fact that the drilling method has put the United States on a path to energy independence. The practice has also led to cleaner energy alternatives and lower carbon emissions, a key goal of climate change activists.
As Glenn noted last month, “Honestly the only reason I can see for opposing fracking is if you’re on Putin’s payroll…”
ROGER SIMON: Democrats’ Fear of Durham About to Reach Panic Level.
The important news of the day — far beyond the inevitable tedious impeachment jousting — is that John Durham’s investigation of the provenance of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion has expanded, according to several administration officials.
Read the whole thing.
HILLARY CLINTON ON TRUMP: ‘Obviously, I Can Beat Him Again.’
“Again.”
AND THIS TIME IT WILL WORK: California Passes Rent-Control Law Amid Homelessness Crisis.
California will cap rent increases under a new law Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would sign Tuesday, the most significant piece of housing-related legislation in a year that also saw the shelving of a measure to relax zoning and spur more construction.
Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said he would sign the bill into law at a ceremony in Oakland, Calif. The governor has said the rent caps and tenant protections are necessary to help people being squeezed out of their homes. The law limits annual rent increases at 5%, plus the rate of inflation, and adds some barriers for landlords seeking to evict people.
“They will provide California with important new tools to combat our state’s broader housing and affordability crisis,” Mr. Newsom said when the rent measure passed the legislature Sept. 11.
The Housing Gnomes’ three-step plan works like this:
1. Make construction more costly, and also cap prices.
2. ???
3. Housing for everyone!
Fortunately, I have a huge supply Unexpectedlys for use as the steps play out.
THE WOBBLIN’ GOBLIN’S ACTIVE RETIREMENT:
The F-117 stealth aircraft, officially retired 11 years ago, is still flying. F-117s have been spotted over training areas, where they apparently serve as “enemy stealth aircraft” for training purposes. The 52 remaining F-117s were placed in a high-level of storage at the “boneyard” where there are several levels of “retirement”. The highest level, where the F-117 ended up, has the aircraft “semi-retired” and periodically flown.
According to the post the F-117 has been “used as stealth reconnaissance aircraft to determine if a target had been destroyed or just damaged.”
It appears the plane’s retirement photos were premature.
TRANSPORTATION ON THE WAY: CH-47 Chinook helicopters transport wheeled vehicles as part of an air assault mission during the Saber Junction 19 exercise, Sept. 26, 2019. Yes, it’s beautiful Hohenfels, Germany in the fall.
ALGERIA’S “SMILE REVOLUTION” BOILS BELOW THE RADAR:
“Sudan’s 2019 revolutionaries and Hong Kong’s protesters articulate goals akin to those of the young Algerians. All three movements despise dictatorships and, on their own terms, seek to establish a Western-style civil society with an elected government operating under the rule of law. Alas, Marxist professors and multicultural academics will utterly fail to understand.”
My latest Creators Syndicate column.
PUSHING BACK AGAINST THE WHITE GODS: In Search of a Sacred Order: Belief and Cultic Temptation in the Architectural Profession.
Beaux Arts wisdom, derived from a long tradition of comprehensive treatises and essays, gave way to dry and distilled manifestoes that relied on bold critiques of the status quo and a call to action to implement dramatic social change. Reform became urgent after the destruction of war, and past solutions no longer applied to new problems. Innovation was needed, and a reliance on individual genius would become its main source. With the German Bauhaus school, a new educational model arose that tapped into this call, eliminating references to the past and encouraging exploration through experimentation and self-reflection.
However, the public spirit of the Bauhaus, as well as all other architecture schools that it subsequently influenced, masked an essentially individualistic perspective to problem-solving. It elevated the person to the status of a hero whose sweeping vision promised a universal solution to all problems. A new pantheon of architectural gods emerged, with a sort of religious worship for individuals such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn. Pretty soon, architectural education devolved into producing designers who treated a set program as merely a vehicle to project the prevailing aesthetic styles championed by their preferred god.
Students now believed that it wasn’t enough to reveal God’s transcendent order through buildings, but instead it was better to become a god creating designs inspired by the gods they studied. A modernist canon formed to justify the new truths; it served not necessarily to enlighten students but to enforce a strict social order over them. The teacher-student, or master-apprentice relationship, always harbors the potential to turn into cultic one, particularly in a studio environment. Duo Dickinson, FAIA, a widely read architect and educator from Connecticut, expands on this further: “Inside baseball cults of personality, defensive manifestations of common fear avoidance make lemmings of the young that become social movements. Those movements become cults when the aesthetics of their origins become polemic and holistic canon. Architecture is said, by many, to have a canon that is easy to describe as ‘modernism’ but in truth is more about the narcissistic ego as manifest in elitist vision: that ‘my way or the highway’ basis of our present canon means the ossification of diversity to the status quo, where the various cults of personality like Wright, Soleri, and Gropius have been subsumed into a stultifying Canon of the Now: Modern, Correct, and Unquestioned. Diversity has become a uniform cultural good, but it has largely vanished from the Canon of Architecture.”
Long before the phrase “political correctness,” after Hitler’s Germany caused the founders of the Bauhaus to arrive in America to teach, and were welcomed, as Tom Wolfe so memorably wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House, as “The White Gods! Come from the skies at last!”, corporate and government architecture became one of the most blinkered professions around. Sure, there were plenty of successes (such as Mies’s Seagram Building and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum) but acres and acres of stillborn clones of steel and glass Mies boxes, the outright disasters of public housing (inspired by Corbusier’s theories) and the underground nightmare of Penn Station. Read the whole thing, which is by Dallas-area architect Julien Meyrat, the co-author of the Architecture+Morality blog from the pre-Twitter/Facebook golden era of the Blogosphere.
PROCUREMENT BLUES: Bradley Replacement: Army Risks Third Failure In A Row.
Experts fear the Army has undermined a top priority program, the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, by disqualifying one of the only two remaining competitors for not delivering its prototype on time.
“I cannot believe that is the reason,” said a baffled Thomas Spoehr, a retired three-star who headed the Army’s program analysis & evaluation office. There must be, he told me this morning, some more profound problem driving this decision: “Nobody wants to have this major program go forward with only one competitor.”
The news was broken by our colleague Jen Judson on Friday and confirmed to us by several sources. The Army declined official comment. Manufacturer Rheinmetall could not physically ship their Lynx-41 prototype from Germany to the US — which is strange, since they’ve managed to do so before — by the October first deadline. While some Army officials were willing to offer them an extension, the recently created Army Futures Command refused.
That leaves General Dynamics, offering an all-new design we describe below, as the sole competitor for the Engineering & Manufacturing Design (EMD) contract to be awarded early next year. A crucial caveat: Winning EMD does not guarantee General Dynamics will win the production contract, which will be awarded in 2023 in a competition open to all comers.
But any 2023 contender would have to refine their design at their own expense, without the constant feedback from the Army that comes with being on the EMD contract.
I hope there’s nothing fishy going on here, but this doesn’t smell quite right.
FUNDING, DECEPTIVE TACTICS BEHIND LOCAL ‘EQUITY’ CAMPAIGNS EXPOSED: Taxpayers in dozens of cities and counties across the country have been victimized in recent years by local elected officials and bureaucrats who fell for a radical left con job carried out behind the guise of ensuring “racial equity.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation’s (DCNF) Luke Rosiak — who previously exposed the Democrats’ shameful Imran Awan scandal in Congress — dug into the documents and came back with a huge pile of damning details about the deceptive campaign being carried out repeatedly across the country by an interlocking directorate of radical left groups, much of it with funding from George Soros.
Using Fairfax County, Va., as an illustration of how it works, Rosiak explains:
“The [equity] policy required every other county policy to be drafted through the ‘lens’ of racial ‘equity’ in order to do away with differences in wealth and achievement throughout the 1.2 million-person county.
“The policy is seven pages long and uses the words ‘race’ 12 times and ‘equity’ 24 times. ‘One Fairfax’ can only be realized with an intentional racial and social equity policy at its core for all publicly delivered services. A racial and social equity policy provides both the direction and means to eliminate disparities,’ it said.
“After economic and academic arguments attributed to a university led to a vague policy, the complexity of the network of interconnected groups allowed those to be subtly switched with activism when it came time to telling the county what this equity policy should actually mean in practice.”
It’s all based on far left ideology and junk science economics. As Glenn says, this is one you’ll want to “just keep scrolling” on today.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I hired Rosiak for the investigative reporting teams I assembled at the Washington Examiner and the DCNF. As editors and reporters sometimes do, we had some rough spots, but Luke is one of the finest – and unfortunately least heralded – investigative reporters in America.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Make America Great Again’ listed on Calif. college’s ‘white supremacy’ pyramid.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: War on Impeachment Wednesday. “The Dems have been flailing ever since Grandma Nan decided to get on board. Trump and company are probably creating an environment for the opposition to commit more unforced errors, which will no doubt happen.”
