NEWS YOU CAN USE: These are the router makers that have patched KRACK WPA2 Wi-Fi flaws.
Ubiquiti is on the list, and I use and highly recommend their Unifi line of wifi gear.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
October 17, 2017
CELEBRITIES MAKE IT OFFICIAL: Pick Trump or Us.
Christian Toto:
There’s an interesting psychological game going on here, and it’s one Hollywood, Inc. might not relish. The more teeth gnashing we see out of both the press and Hollywood, the more reluctant Trump supporters side with him.
Why?
Entertainers should entertain. The mainstream media should report the facts, not take sides. Seeing both fail to fulfill their duty makes some citizens sympathetic to both President Trump and his histrionics.
We’re already seeing some of the results of this “choose him or us” playbook. Box office numbers are cratering since Trump took office. The president’s Twitter war against NFL players refusing to respect the National Anthem is turning into a slaughter.
Entertainment is where we go — or at least try to go — to escape the daily grind. Gleichschaltung worked in Nazi Germany because outlets were limited and control was total. Hollywood acts as though that’s the case in 21st Century in America when in fact, entertainment (and information) outlets are virtually unlimited — and most attempts at control result in the Streisand Effect or one of its corollaries.
Hollywood and the mainstream media continue to blur the lines between entertainment and news, and between news and indoctrination — a process which seems to be accelerating even as audiences continue shrinking. Now the process may speed up even more as the Ick Factor becomes undeniable. Harvey Weinstein has shown that not only is Hollywood as bad as we imagined, it might be worse than we could imagine.
Back in its heyday, Fox News proved that you could make big ratings and big money by appealing to audiences outside of the NYC-DC-LA Progressive Axis. When will some smart Hollywood studio rediscover the same thing about blockbuster entertainment?
THE TOLERANT LEFT: Dana Loesch Explains Why She’s Being Forced to Move Out of Her House.
October 16, 2017
UH-OH: Megyn Kelly’s ratings hit ‘possible all-time low.’
Her “Megyn Kelly Today” viewership slipped from 0.77 ratings points on Monday to 0.54 ratings points on Tuesday of last week.
“It’s a possible all-time low for ‘Today.’ It may even be lower than her [Fox] cable show. [NBC News president] Noah [Oppenheim] and [NBC News and MSNBC chairman] Andy [Lack] are in big trouble,” a source told us.
Another source added, “That’s a big drop. They have to turn this around.”
Kelly also appeared for the first time on MSNBC earlier this week.
“It’s unthinkable. You don’t see Matt [Lauer] or Savannah [Guthrie] on MSNBC … It’s not a good sign.”
FLASHBACK: Roger Ailes’ Evil-Genius Plan to Sink the Competition Bears Fruit.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The new reason why women cheat on their husbands.
THE AYATOLLAH’S ADVISOR: ‘The Nuclear Deal Will Not be Renegotiated at All.’
Why would they want to deal with us again? The mullahs got cash up front in exchange for little more than a promise to do a slightly better job of hiding their nuclear ambitions.
Thanks, Obama.
ANAYLSIS: TRUE. Dick Durbin: If Democrats ‘Overdo It’ by Being too Liberal, We Can Lose to Trump.
The current Democratic mood however isn’t amenable to Durbin’s advice.
As Islamic State Recedes, Iraqi Forces and Kurds Turn on Each Other.
Elite Iraqi forces took control of the local government building in Kirkuk on Monday, pushing out Kurdish fighters and effectively retaking the city after skirmishes that have raised fears of a wider conflict between two of the closest U.S. allies in the war against Islamic State.
Elite military units seeking to restore federal government authority over territory and resources seized by Kurdish forces during the course of the push against Islamic State advanced toward Kirkuk overnight and by evening had taken control of the provincial government headquarters, according to witnesses and Kirkuk officials.
Clashes broke out between Kurdish Peshmerga forces and elite Iraqi units before dawn, but Iraqi forces said they faced only light resistance in retaking the K1 military base, an airport, the Kirkuk refinery and the Baba Gurgur oil field.
There were several casualties on both sides, according to Kurdish and Iraqi military commanders. Thousands of residents were fleeing Kirkuk into the neighboring semiautonomous Kurdish-led region, leading to huge traffic jams on the way out of the city.
I suspect the Kurds will soon be back, and in greater numbers.
THE NEWS IS BLUE: Oil headed to $10? China may be in the driver’s seat.
“As the world’s largest auto market, China’s EV (electric-vehicle) policy, which is still being formulated, could supercharge the race for EVs,” says Cunningham in a blog post for Oilprice.com.
He rattles off a number of signs of China’s electric-car gear-up, such as big planned investments and a growing clampdown on autos that cloud its skies with pollution.
“It will only take a small change in oil demand to upend price forecasts. After all, prices crashed in 2014, falling from $100 per barrel down to $50 in less than a year,” he says.
Cunningham points to a Financial Times report that says China plans to produce 7 million EVs per year by 2025 and to spend at least $60 billion on related subsidies between 2015 and 2020.
And a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report that predicts EVs will cut crude demand by 8 million barrels a day by 2040 should “send chills down the spines of oil executives,” he warns.
Down the spines of various petrocrats, too.
HOUSE DEMOCRAT DAN KILDEE: GOP, Dems Both Guilty of Harmful District Drawing.
ROLL LEFT AND DIE: Roger Goodell Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.
In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.
The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.
Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.
A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.
I suppose this is now mandatory:
PROCUREMENT BLUES: 108 F-35s Will Not Be Combat Capable.
The new F-35 Program Executive Officer, Vice Admiral Mat Winter, said his office is exploring the option of leaving 108 aircraft in their current state because the funds to upgrade them to the fully combat-capable configuration would threaten the Air Force’s plans to ramp up production in the coming years. These are most likely the same 108 aircraft the Air Force reportedly needed to upgrade earlier in 2017. Without being retrofitted, these aircraft would become “Concurrency Orphans,” airplanes left behind in the acquisition cycle after the services purchased them in haste before finishing the development process.
The F-35 is finally shaping up to be a great jet, but heads need to roll at the Pentagon for such a wasteful and slow development.
MICHAEL LEDEEN: Trump’s Iran Policy Is A Good Start.
IT’S A QUESTION MORE AND MORE PEOPLE ARE ASKING: America, Your Campuses Are Madhouses. Why Are We Paying For This?
All of these protests and disruptions have two things in common. The first is a student body that is increasingly fanatical, irrational, unhinged, and dynamic in the worst way possible. Just a few short years ago, even the most militant and zealous student-activists needed some sort of catalyst to muster the energy to protest. Today’s protester students—bored, underworked, overly stimulated by progressive media, and convinced they are living in a social carbon-copy of Montgomery, Alabama, circa 1962—cannot be bothered with all that waiting. If they can’t find something real to protest, they’ll make it up.
The second common feature to these protests is no less pervasive but far more frightening: college administrations who, through their own obsequious cowardice, have become utterly powerless against the activists running amok on their campuses.
It would be fair to conclude that this is the natural result of eight years of top-down revolution led by a “former” community organizer.
“FUNGIBLE” ISN’T A PART OF CLINTONSPEAK: The Clinton Foundation will not return or re-donate any of the $250,000 it received from disgraced film producer and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein, saying the funds have been spent already.
The only thing wrong with tainted money is there taint enough of it.
TRADECRAFT: Clumsy French spy sends text message to the radical Islamist he was keeping tabs on.
Anyone who has accidently sent a text message to the wrong person might have some sympathy with a member of the French intelligent services who landed himself in trouble with his bosses this week.
The man, who works for the central territorial intelligence services (SCRT) had been keeping tabs on a suspected Islamist extremist.
He wanted to send a text containing important intelligence on his target to a colleague.
But the spy got all his phone numbers mixed up and accidentally sent it to the very suspect he had been closely monitoring.
The “target” was reportedly quick to respond to the message, reminding the spy of how incompetent he had been. And to make matters worse he was able to warn those he had been contact with that they too were probably being listened to.
You might find that just adding headshots to your contacts prevents sending messages to the wrong people, but you’re probably not in the spy biz.
HMM: Officials Sniffing Into How So Many People Win State Lotteries So Many Times.
Gary Miller, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Lottery, said it was unfair to draw any conclusions about the games’ most frequent winners just because they were winning.
“You cannot make any assumptions about frequent winners without knowing how often they play,” said Miller. “And the Lottery has no legal or business reason to track spending or frequency of play by individuals.”
However, Susan Woods, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Auditor General’s Office, told PennLive the Auditor General’s office would be “reaching out to the Attorney General’s Office to discuss what might be the next best steps to ensure the integrity of Pennsylvania’s lottery.”
As unusual or “implausible” as Vukovich’s lottery winning streak might seem, it pales compared to the nation’s top lottery winner — 79-year-old Clarence Jones of Lynn, Mass. One day alone, in December 2016, he turned in 20 winning scratch-off tickets worth a total of $21,000.
Over the past six years, Jones has cashed in more than 7,300 winning lottery tickets with a total of $10.8 million.
Curious.
In an emotional statement posted to what appears to be her private Facebook account, the former Charmed star accused celebrity attorney Lisa Bloom of approaching her literary agent to try and influence McGowan to publicly support Weinstein.
Bloom had represented Weinstein before resigning on October 7 after the scandal broke.
McGowan, who was one of the first women to publicly allege that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her, revealed she did not sign a non-disclosure agreement after reaching a settlement with the media mogul for $100,000 after she claims he raped her at a hotel room in 1997 during the Sundance Film Festival.
‘You know what is truth, Lisa? I feel like people should know that you’ve been calling my literary agent and saying there’d be money for me if I got on the “Harvey’s Changed” bandwagon?’ the actor wrote.
‘You told her that I should care about HIS reputation. How HE has a family now and how HE has changed. Well, guess what? I’ve always had a family and that didn’t stop him from assaulting me.’
Band’s founder Robin Antin denies the charges, but that’s a hard sell in Weinstein’s wake.
PARTY OF YOUTH, YOU’RE DOING IT RIGHT: Austria’s next chancellor a 31-year-old conservative, early results show.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE KING: For Weinstein, a Brush With the Police, Then No Charges.
For decades the film producer Harvey Weinstein succeeded in hiding from public view complaint after complaint of sexual misconduct against him. But on the evening of March 28, 2015, at a rendezvous at the TriBeCa Grand, his longtime pattern of cover-ups was coming to a dramatic end.
Meeting with him at the hotel was Ambra Battilana, a 22-year-old model from Italy, who had reported to the police the night before that Mr. Weinstein had groped her during a business meeting. She was wearing a wire. As Ms. Battilana asked Mr. Weinstein why he had touched her breasts at his office, undercover police officers monitored the exchange, eager to capture his every word.
“Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in,” Mr. Weinstein said as he tried to usher her into his hotel room, his tone alternating between threatening and cajoling, according to the recording. “I’m used to that. Come on. Please.”
“You’re used to that?” she replied.
“Yes,” he said, adding, “I won’t do it again.”
Read the whole, belated thing.
HOWARD FINEMAN: The Method To The Moron’s Madness. “The powers that be are underestimating Trump — again.”
Washington reacts with alarm to his inflammatory tweets, and lately has made a parlor game out of chronicling his outbursts of anger, dismay and ignorance, as news organizations offer a cascade of vivid in-the-room portrayals of an out-of-control boy king.
Democrats hope against hope that he will be impeached over Russia. His approval rating is lower at this point in his term than any previous modern president’s. His former consigliere Steve Bannon has reportedly said Trump has only a 30 percent chance of lasting a full term.
But by the end of this week, it was clearer than ever that if Trump is a moron, he is a moron on a mission ― and with more method to his madness than his enemies understand or want to consider. The tweets are a useful distraction ― a kind of air cover for his carpet bombing of federal policy and programs.
Fineman can call it “carpet bombing” if he wants, but conservatives (and a few libertarians) might call it “winning.”
And who’s the more moronic, the moron or the moron who follows his every tweet?
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: McConnell, Weinstein, Tapper, Kaepernick and Much, Much More.