There’s still no evidence of any crime, but there is for Hillary’s campaign.
Category Archives: War Commentary
Jihad
But they are changing us. I’ve written before about what I’ve called the Bollardization of the Western World: the open, public areas of free cities are being fenced in by bollards, as, for example, German downtowns were after the Berlin Christmas attack, and London Bridge and Westminster Bridge were after two recent outbreaks of vehicular jihad. This is a huge windfall for bollard manufacturers – Big Bollard – and doubtless it’s a huge boost for the economy, if your town’s nimble enough to approve the new bollard plant on the edge of town, or if your broker is savvy enough to divest your tech stocks and go big on the bollard sector. As I write, Geraldo is on Fox demanding to know why this bike path wasn’t blocked off with concrete barriers.
Why? Why does every public place have to get uglified up just because Geraldo doesn’t want to address the insanity of western immigration policies that day by day advance the interests of an ideology explicitly hostile to our civilization? Instead Geraldo wants to tighten up vehicle rental. Why? Why should you have to lose an extra 15 minutes at an already sclerotic check-in counter because Hertz and Avis and UHaul have to run your name through the No-Rent list? Why should open, free societies become closed, monitored, ugly, cramped and cowering?
And Bollardization doesn’t even solve the problem, does it? Last week I was tootling through Williston, Vermont, which has just reconfigured its highway system to run green-painted bike paths down the center of the streets. And the thought occurred to me that, once you’ve bollarded off every sidewalk, what’s to stop jihadists mowing down cyclists? After all, if the eco-crowd are installing them in the middle of the roadway, they’re kind of hard to bollard off. And then a second thought occurred: As inviting a target as bike paths are in enviro-poseur communities, they’re even more inviting in genuine bicycling cultures such as the Netherlands or Scandinavia.
And now eight people are dead and dozens more injured – at the hands of a guy who came here in 2010 because he won a Green Card in the so-called “diversity lottery”. Why was that stupid program not suspended on September 12th 2001?
So Uber and truck-rental places are expected to do background checks on people to whom we give “diversity visas.” Wonderful.
Idiot Conservatives
Eric Berger has the story on how, in attacking SpaceX, they’re ripping off the taxpayer and actively damaging national security.
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, the target launch date for Falcon Heavy is now late December.
This would be a nice Christmas present to space enthusiasts and the nation at large. https://t.co/C9MtND81vD
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) November 1, 2017
Mike Griffin
The guy who ignored the advice of the Aldridge Commission and industry to utilize commercial providers for the Vision for Space Exploration, instead issuing no-bid cost-plus contracts for Constellation, that were overrunning and slipping more than a year per year when it was canceled, seems like an odd choice to be put in charge of reforming procurement at the Pentagon.
The Mueller Indictments
Some thoughts from Dan McLaughlin:
The overall picture here looks similar to what we saw with the Trump jr. story: people in the Trump campaign were desperate for dirt on Hillary, they were willing to work with anyone to get it, and Russian interests used this desperation to play them for suckers. Papadopoulos was frequently promised things, and promising things in turn to the campaign, that never got delivered. This is a running theme of Trump’s amateur-hour foreign policy campaign team (in contrast, one would note, to the professionals now running his foreign policy shop).
Where things get dicier for Trump is that the investigation and the Papadopoulos plea both focus on how this can all be tied back to Trump and his senior campaign staff. Papadopoulos pled guilty to lying about when he went to work for Trump relative to when he started talking to the professor; he tried to convince the FBI that he already knew about the professor’s dirt on Hillary before he joined the campaign. And on March 31, 2016, well before Trump had even locked up the Republican nomination, Papadopoulos told Trump and a roomful of Trump’s foreign policy advisers “in sum and substance, that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.” The meeting, like many such things, never happened, but he kept the campaign (including an unnamed “senior policy advisor for the Campaign”) apprised that he was trying to arrange one, and the plea is mostly silent on what he was told by the campaign in return. Then, in late April – still well before the June meeting at Trump Tower – the professor began dangling “dirt” on Hillary: “They [the Russians] have dirt on her”; “the Russians had emails of Clinton”; “they have thousands of emails.”
Let us pause here to note that this is precisely the situation that many of us warned was a grave risk to national security with Hillary’s insecure email server, and which Hillary and her camp loudly denied to be a possibility while basically admitting it when they started complaining during the campaign (let alone after) about Trump publicly seeking leaks of her emails. This entire story is the perfect storm of an aggressive and devious foreign regime, a Republican nominee of low character surrounded by inept and naively cynical amateur advisers, and a Democratic nominee who was heedlessly reckless with national security out of partisan paranoia. Secretary Clinton exposed herself to what amounted to easy Russian blackmail, and everything else that happened followed from that.
Yup. Worst political class in history, and worst candidates in history.
[Update a few minutes later]
Andy McCarthy: Not much there, and a boon for Trump.
But the media will continue to have their hair on fire over it.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Popehat lawsplains the Manafort/Gates indictments, and the Papadopoulos guilty plea.
A New Space Policy
…for the Trump administration. I’ve just started to skim it.
WiFi Security
This is wonderful. WPA2 has a critical flaw. One more reason to continue to distrust wireless.
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, apparently, so far Netgear is not on the case, so not clear what the implications are for our Orbi mesh. Guess until our phones get patched, good idea to not use wifi.
[Update a while later]
Here’s more information. My new phone is Android 7, so it’s affected, but I don’t generally use it with wifi. I’ll definitely avoid it, or at least avoid it for anything mission critical (like bank accounts), until it patches.
[Update a while later]
Now wondering about the Sony Blu-Ray player. Does this make it vulnerable to becoming a DDOS attacker? Wonder if there’s any way to patch it, and if there is, or will be a patch?
[Mid-morning update]
Nothing on line about patching the player; I’ve tweeted a request to @SonyElectronics. Meanwhile, here’s more info at Ars Technica.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here is the web site for the attack technique, with a lot of technical detail.
Gun Control
No, “feel good” remedies won’t solve the problem. As noted over there, an attempt to confiscate Americans’ guns would be tantamount to the government making war on its own people. It would not end well.
[Update a few minutes later]
No, there were not 273 “mass shootings” by any sane definition. There were nine.
The Old Space Age Began
Today is the 60th anniversary of Sputnik. I have some thoughts over at The Weekly Standard. I’ll have more later today at PJMedia.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Henry Spencer reminds me that upon the successful launch, Korolev supposedly said “The road to the stars is now open.” A little premature, I think…
[Update a while later]
For a detailed history of the program, go read Asif Siddiqi over at The Space Review (it’s part one, the second part will appear next Monday).
[Update a couple minutes later, after going through the Siddiqi piece]
This is excellent. It is likely now the best available history of its development.
[Update a few minutes later]
Anatoly Zak reminds us that Sputnik wasn’t about the satellite; it was about the rocket.
[Update a while later]
More from Siddiqi on recent translations. Kind of amazing how much we still don’t know about space history six decades later.
[Update a while later]
How dreams of space-faring zombies resulted in Sputnik. Well, sort of.
[Update late morning]
Here‘s Chris Gebhart’s take.
[Afternoon update]
My (other) take is now up over at PJMedia. As usual, most comments are ignorant and/or idiotic.
[Update a week later]
Part 2 of Siddiqi’s new history is up now.
[Bumped]
Must Pack Heat
A lot of idiots claim that the NRA wants everyone to be armed. They’ve never advocated that, as far as I know, but there is a case to be made for it.
[Update a while later]
It’s not new, but Glenn Reynolds co-wrote a paper on this a while ago.