RIP, I guess. I never got what was such a big deal about him. “Space Oddity” is the only song of his that I liked, and I never listened to an album. But apparently, according to my Twitter timeline, this is some kind of huge culture loss.
Martian Concrete
They should be using nuclear for power, though, not solar.
The Clinton FBI Probe
…expands to public corruption:
This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton’s personal server.
“The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed,” one source said.
One intelligence source told Fox News that FBI agents would be “screaming” if a prosecution is not pursued because “many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation.”
Meh. Laws are for the little people.
[Update a while later]
Guy Benson has a roundup of everything she’s being investigated for.
Basically, it starts with the massive mishandling of confidential and classified information, which has resulted in multiple counts of obstruction of justice. And a large part of the reason for all of the obstruction of justice was to hide all of the collusion and corruption between the Clinton Foundation and foreign nations while she was Secretary of State. She planned all this from the very beginning, even before becoming SoS. She just figured she’d get away with it, because she got away with so many felonies in the 90s.
[Update a few more minutes later]
The email scandal goes nuclear:
…the June 8, 2011 Blumenthal report doesn’t read like CIA material at all, in other words human intelligence or HUMINT, but very much like signals intelligence or SIGINT. (For the differences see here). I know what SIGINT reports look like, because I used to write them for the National Security Agency, America’s biggest source of intelligence. SIGINT reports, which I’ve read thousands of, have a very distinct style and flavor to them and Blumenthal’s write-up matches it, right down to the “Source Comments,” which smack very much of NSA reporting and its “house rules.”
But is this an NSA assessment? If so, it would have to be classified at least Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, a handling caveat that applies to most SIGINT, and quite possibly Top Secret/SCI, the highest normal classification we have. In that case, it was about as far from Unclassified as it’s possible for an email to be.
No surprise, NSA is aflutter this weekend over this strange matter. One Agency official expressed to me “at least 90 percent confidence” that Mr. Blumenthal’s June 8 report was derived from NSA reports, and the Agency ought to be investigating the matter right now.
I suspect it is.
Trilobites
Two Questions On Climate Change
Put me in the “Maybe/Yes” camp.
Don’t Cry For Me, Syria
My thoughts on what Barack Obama cries about, and what he does not, over at PJMedia.
The Lamest Duck
“I don’t question Obama’s sincerity. I question his sanity.”
Guns In America
People who spout nonsense about the “gun show loophole” have probably never legally purchased a gun.
“We Want Our Safety Back”
Women protest their insane government in Cologne.
As I noted on Twitter yesterday, this was the biggest mass rape of German women since the Soviets invaded.
[Update Saturday afternoon]
This seems related somehow: Swedish women request segregated jacuzzis, due to being groped. It seems to be a recent problem, for some reason that just has me scratching my head.
[Sunday-morning update]
Another report of hundreds of “Arabic” men attacking women on New Years Eve.
Nope, nothing coordinated about this at all.
[Update Sunday afternoon]
Why we can’t remain silent about the Cologne assaults:
Street sexual violence is also—obviously—not exclusive to Arab and Muslim-majority countries. Indeed, among the worst offenders is Papua New Guinea, where two-thirds of women are subjected to some kind of physical or sexual violence, and rapists from “raskol” gangs are happy to pose for photos after their latest rape.
Having said that, what is infuriating and totally counterproductive is to deny that a specifically cultural problem around immigration patterns and European sexual norms has been steadily rising across the continent. To pretend this is not the case only further stigmatizes us brown Muslim men. That the problem requires attention is clear.
German police unions and women’s right groups have recently accused authorities of underplaying cases of rape at refugee shelters. “There is a lot of glossing over going on. But this doesn’t represent reality,” police union chief Rainer Wendt told Reuters. Henry Ove Berg, who was a police chief during Norway’s recent spike in rape cases, said, “people from some parts of the world have never seen a girl in a miniskirt, only in a burqa… when they get to Norway, something happens in their heads.” He added that “there was a link but not a very clear link” between the rape cases in Norway and immigrants. Hanne Kristin Rohde, former head of the violent crime section of the Oslo Police Department, was criticized in 2011 when she went public with data suggesting that immigrants committed a hugely disproportionate number of rapes. “This was a big problem… but it was difficult to talk about,” she remarked. There was “a clear statistical connection between sexual violence and male migrants.”
Any solution to this emerging issue must simultaneously seek to deny the far right the ammunition it desires while preserving Europe’s hard-earned progressive social values.
This is all controversial, but it must be said. Anecdotal attitudes point to the same conclusion. Abdu Osman Kelifa, an Eritrean asylum seeker to Norway, recently told The New York Times that in his home country, “if someone wants a lady, he can just take her and he will not be punished.” He confessed that it was still hard for him to accept that a woman could accuse her husband of rape.Between denying the problem and using it to fuel bigoted far-right rhetoric, an approach grounded in data and a level head is vital. Any solution to this emerging issue must simultaneously seek to deny the far right the ammunition it desires while preserving—not reneging on—Europe’s hard-earned progressive social values.
I hope it’s not too late.
[Update a few minutes later]
The tension between the forces of political correctness and the pent-up forces of repressed cultural traditions is now bursting like a spring wound up beyond containment. Things may start slowly at first but ramp up rapidly, mirroring Cornelius Ryan’s famous description of the Berlin Philharmonic’s last performance as the Red Army stood at the gates of Berlin.
…Seventy years later, the question facing people caught in the middle is where to run. There is nowhere obvious. In Europe, Ross Douthat argues, all exits are temporarily blocked. The left has destroyed the middle, leaving only a choice of extremes. “Just last week Merkel rejected a proposal to cap refugee admissions (which topped one million last year) at 200,000 in 2016.”
…Everywhere one looks the matches are being lit. The sudden outburst of resistance comes the end of what Jonah Goldberg called “a bad day” for the Narrative. A bad sequence of decades since 2001, more like it.
These will be the worst days for Europe in seventy years, I’m afraid. As he notes, the Constitution may save us, but it doesn’t help that the left has trampled all over it for a century, and continue to do so.
[Update a while later]
Sex crimes across Germany. The cover up unravels.
The Smoking Gun
In the latest batch of emails, evidence that Hillary ordered an underling to deliberately mishandle classified information.
I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am.
In a sane world, this woman would never have gotten anywhere near any position of responsibility or consequence, let alone be the putative nominee for president by a major political party.
[Update a few minutes later]
“If she were a Republican, the mainstream media would have (appropriately) disgraced and branded her as a traitor by now.”
Yup. Because she is.