Well, then I guess they do have a point that encryption wouldn’t have been very useful
Seriously, I think it’s time to completely overhaul the civil service system. We just had a cyber Pearl Harbor. Will anyone be punished? We know the answer to that one.
[Thursday-morning update]
The military-clearance OPM breach is an absolute calamity. And Obama can’t even bring himself to admit that the federal government screwed up.
In which he is an idiot (sorry, behind a paywall):
The head of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on Tuesday downplayed the potential national security significance of NASA
continuing payments to Russia to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).“I have a much bigger problem with the Russian rocket engine,” Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters at the Capitol. “I don’t see what the impact is, financially, of the Russian riding as compared with $300 million worth of rocket engines. There’s no comparison.”
But this is what I found interesting:
McCain’s counterpart in the House, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), told reporters Tuesday that U.S. dependence on Russia for space-related items is a national security issue. But Thornberry also said the challenge with paying for Russian rides to ISS is much like the RD-180 scenario: one faced with limited options.
“It ought to be a lesson for all of us about letting key capability atrophy and becoming dependent upon somebody else whose reliability can be called into question,” Thornberry said. “That doesn’t mean you snap your fingers and solve it any more than you snap your fingers and solve the Russian engine issue.”
Actually, we could. All we have to do is be more accepting of astronaut risk.
I’ve already started to work on the project (even though I don’t get the money for a couple weeks). Re-reading the depressing NRC report from last summer. It will be my point of departure for the remix.
“I’m going to continue microaggressing.”
Of course, he has tenure. You’d be crazy to teach at or attend these places.
My best wishes to her, and hopes for a diagnosis and cure for her daughter.
There’s only about seven hours to go, and we’re still two thousand dollars shy of the goal. That’s about the same amount of money that NASA spends on SLS in three seconds. Between now and when the window closes, they will have wasted about one and a half million bucks.
I’d say, at this point, given the current trickle, that either we’re not going to get there, or it will come in close to the end, as people are perhaps holding back to see if it will make it without them.
[Update a couple hours before it closes]
OK, doing pretty well. We just need a little over $600 now before 5:30 Pacific. SLS spends that much every second. Thanks for all the new donors, and the upgrades.
[Update about 3:40 PM PDT]
We did it! Over $12,400, and still an hour and a half to go, for those who still want to support the stretch goal of a video, and get the reward. Thanks to everyone who made it happen. Suck it, Shelby.
My thoughts on today’s anniversary, over at PJMedia. I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been attending a mini-conference on the subject, which was fascinating. I learned a lot of history from a lot of learned people. Sadly, it’s a history that we have not been teaching our youth. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
[Tuesday-morning update]
More thoughts from Iain Murray.
[Bumped]
[Afternoon update]
We need a Magna Carta for the regulatory state.
Indeed.
Alumni of the UC system should immediately cease wasting their charitable dollars on such an anti-intellectual, fascist institution. And any intelligent young person should avoid it like the plague. The system has clearly been captured by individuals with micro-brains possessing micro-tolerance and micro-confidence.
It’s fascinating to sit back and watch the academy destroy itself. Unfortunately, it’s also tragic, and destroying millions of young peoples’ lives, with taxpayer dollars.
[Update a while later]
“The Left’s “microaggressions” are a sign of their micro-totalitarian tendencies.”
No, Obama hasn’t “abandoned” Israel. He’s turned on it:
Finally, in 2014, Israel discovered that its primary ally had for months been secretly negotiating with its deadliest enemy. The talks resulted in an interim agreement that the great majority of Israelis considered a “bad deal” with an irrational, genocidal regime. Mr. Obama, though, insisted that Iran was a rational and potentially “very successful regional power.”
The daylight between Israel and the U.S. could not have been more blinding. And for Israelis who repeatedly heard the president pledge that he “had their backs” and “was not bluffing” about the military option, only to watch him tell an Israeli interviewer that “a military solution cannot fix” the Iranian nuclear threat, the astonishment could not have been greater.
I’d sure like to see the video of the Khalidi birthday party.
…a pleasant little police state.
I’m sure she’d like to expand its boundaries to encompass the entire nation.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hillary Clinton, America’s most boring public speaker? Well, that’s probably an overstatement, but she’s certainly the most prominent one.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Yesterday is over. Compare and contrast.
[Update a while later]
There is only the fight:
So now we have the spectacle of a woman of not only no accomplishment but negative accomplishment (Benghazi, Libya, Russia), who by rights probably ought to be jail, running what to the Leftist media is a credible campaign for the presidency. In a sense, she is the anti-Barack Obama, a candidate about whom we knew (and still know) almost next to nothing when he suddenly appeared in the Oval Office. By contrast, we already know far too much about Hillary Rodham Clinton, and perhaps that is the problem. After a while, it all blurs: Whitewater, Travelgate, the missing FBI files, Vince Foster, Charlie Trie, Huma Abedin and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Clinton Foundation, the missing State Department emails, etc., etc. And not only does it blur, but it creates in the public’s mind a perverse sense of her innocence — after all, if there was something there, wouldn’t she have been arrested and brought low by now? Instead, she keeps soaring, a lead balloon defying the laws of the United States and of gravity.
In short, the more she gets away with the more she can get away with. How do you deal with someone like this?
…She’s interested in “campaign finance reform” because (like McCain) it was her ox that was gored by the Citizens United decision. She’s “fighting” for “national security” because it was on her watch that the world went to hell in a handcart. She “fighting” for the economy, even though it was under the Obama presidency that the country has spent seven years in misery and penury, with only the crony capitalists like the Clintons living high on the hog. And she’s “fighting” for families because it is her political party whose policies have been at the heart of the destruction of the American nuclear family. Besides, her own family — which has been looting treasuries around the globe in the name of its “charity” — is doing just fine, thanks.
“There is only the fight.” And she means it. The problem is, the only thing Hillary Clinton thinks worth fighting for is herself.
Yup.