Category Archives: Technology and Society

Humor, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Satire, Space, Technology and Society

Star Trek Heresy

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Matthew Continetti does not love Spock.

Last week, I tweeted that I was going to write a post about how Obama is not Spock like, but to the degrees that he is, I agree that it’s Spock’s most annoying traits.

[Afternoon update]

The gauntlet has been thrown:

Continetti just glosses over the sacrifice at the Battle of the Mutara Nebula, I assume because he knows it demolishes his case. What about the personal loss at the betrayal of Valeris? What about the hurtful but necessary decision — directly enforced by Spock — to let Edith Keeler die? How I hated him for that! But look, who among us wouldn’t let Hitler dominate the world in exchange for a lifetime of sweet sweet loving from young Joan Collins? Anyone? No one? Just me?

Heh.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Hillary Email Update

11 Comments

So, according to this story, the server was physically in her house. I wonder who actually set it up? It’s hard to imagine her being able to do it.

[Update a while later]

Why you should care about Hillary’s email:

A spokesman for Clinton says that her actions comply with the “letter and spirit of the rules.” To put it kindly, this seems to be complete nonsense. Federal officials are not supposed to have private e-mail silos that are their sole means of official digital communication and are reviewed only by their personal staff. And that should apply doubly to the holder of one of the most important cabinet roles. Moreover, the fact that she never even got a State Department address certainly gives the impression that this was a deliberate attempt to avoid the public eye. She didn’t just sloppily default to her own personal e-mail address, as many people do; she also made sure that it was not possible to accidentally send her an e-mail on a work account that government oversight groups could access.

Even more troubling is the fact that a large number of people in the White House and the State Department must have known that she was using a private address that wouldn’t leave copies on government servers. Why didn’t any of them gently suggest that this was not OK?

If this were a normal campaign, Clinton’s primary opponents would be cackling with glee as they fired up the oppo cannon. But this is not a normal primary season, and Democrats will instead devote their time to coming up with excuses for her behavior, or reasons that it’s really not a big deal that the secretary of state structured her communications to avoid leaving a checkable record. They have to, because jettisoning Hillary Clinton at this point would almost certainly mean losing the race in 2016. She has drawn in all the donor funds and media attention that would normally have been spread among several candidates. There is no one ready to step into that vacuum, and it is already too late to start grooming someone new.

As in the nineties, the Democrats’ utter contempt for us, and the rule of law, is palpable. That’s when I resolved I’d never vote for one again, under any circumstances.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Mark Steyn, and Jonah Goldberg:

Mrs. Clinton weighed in to somewhat greater effect. She tweeted, “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

This was a reference to the “55,000 pages” of e-mails Clinton handed over to the State Department in response to a request. It’s also a classic bit of misdirection. Among the swirling issues at play is whether Clinton handed over all of her official business e-mails as required. (The State Department offers no clarity on this.) The whole point of having your own private server is that no one can check to make sure you didn’t selectively delete or withhold e-mails.

The number of pages is also meaningless. First, if you’ve ever printed out e-mail, you know that “pages” and “e-mails” are not synonymous terms. But even if they were, so what? I could release 99.99 percent of all my e-mails, and you’d see little more than boring work product, press releases, spam, and appeals from Nigerian oil ministers. My incriminating stuff could remain invisible — valuable snowflakes held back from a blizzard of chaff. If you don’t think the Clintons are capable of such legerdemain, I refer you to the Clinton-inspired debate over billing records and the meaning of “is.”

This points to another reason why I think Clinton will survive this mess. If there’s a damning e-mail out there, it’s been deleted, and the relevant hard drive would be harder to find than Jimmy Hoffa’s body. So critics are probably left with the task of proving a negative.

It’s worth noting, though, that given the apparent insecurity of the system, it’s likely that someone has incriminating emails. Maybe even Vladimir Putin.

[Mid-morning update]

Bruce Webster still isn’t convinced that the server was in the house. I haven’t seen any good evidence of it myself. As he notes, if true, this has implications for subpoenas. I should note that I have several domains, that I host on a server which is also my email server. But it’s a hundred miles away.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

My Site Improvements

22 Comments

For those curious about the differences between the out-of-the-box TwentyFourteen theme, and my child theme, I’ve done the following:

  • Changed header and sidebar backgrounds from black to dark gray.
  • Changed all instances of all caps to capitalized first letter.
  • Switched from the sans serif typeface “Lato” to Georgia.
  • Moved meta data from top to bottom of post.
  • Added time stamp (without seconds) to the post date, and the word “by” in front of post author.
  • Increased size of blog title.

Most of these involved style sheet changes, which will be preserved if I have to do a theme update, but a couple (adding time stamp and moving metadata) necessitated changes to the template and tag files in the parent theme. But they’re minor, and can be redone if needed.

One thing I’d still like to do, but have been unable to so far, is to change the color of the blog title from white to the same green as the search box. Not sure why a color change in the CSS won’t do it. I can change font size, but not color.

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society

WordPress Problems

6 Comments

So I’m slowly beating the site into submission, but running into a few issues. First, I’m using a child theme of TwentyFourteen, in order to avoid making changes to the main templates. The way that works is that I add changes to the child style sheet, which then supercede the parent. But there are some things that can’t be fixed with the style sheet. For instance, in order to move things around in the post, I have to actually change the PHP code in the templates, in the parent. Another problem I’m having is that, in theory, a new function file in the child will override a function of the same name in WordPress. I want to display the time along with the date on the post, which is generated by a function called “twentyfourteen_posted_on” (the original can be found here). It retrieves the date, but not the time. In order to get it to do so, I’d have to modify it. But when I copy that into my child theme directory, and make changes, nothing happens. Anyone have any idea what the problem is, or how to troubleshoot?

[Update a while later]

OK, I think I figured out the problem. Apparently you can only override functions that are in the function.php file, in the main template directory. This is a tag, buried in the “inc” directory. So I have to edit it in there. Which means that I’ll lose the changes if I have to update the template. But it’s not a huge deal.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Email Plot Thickens

17 Comments

This is sort of an amazing exchange.

Here’s the thing. She didn’t just use a non-government email address, like Gmail or Yahoo, or her ISP. She set up her own domain and server (though the server may be shared, that’s still unclear to me). That means that she has total control over what data is preserved, and what can be destroyed. Now, in theory, people received her emails, and people sent her emails, so multiple copies exist, even if she purges the server. But if Huma had an address on the same domain, then her emails could be wiped as well. And there’s no explanation of why she did this. But it sure as hell looks like a way to avoid a FOIA, or subpoena. Which is classic Clinton.