The real issue is whether in the future we will have open discussion of political issues and free elections. Think about what we have now — a federal bureaucracy that is fiercely partisan. An IRS that tries to regulate speech by denying on a partisan basis tax-exempt status to conservative organizations. A Department of State that hides the fact that its head is not observing the rules to which everyone else is held concerning security of communications and that colludes with a Presidential campaign to prevent the release of embarrassing information. A Department of Justice that ought to be renamed as the Department of Injustice, which does its level best to suppress investigations that might embarrass the likely nominee of the Democratic Party. An assistant attorney general that gives a “heads up” to that lady’s campaign. An Attorney General who meets on the sly with her husband shortly before the decision is made whether she is to be indicted....There has been rampant collusion, over the course of years, to bring us to this passage.
Think about what else we have now — a press corps that colludes with a campaign, allowing figures in the Clinton campaign to edit what they publish. Television reporters who send the questions apt to be asked at the presidential debates to one campaign. A media that is totally in the tank for one party, downplaying or suppressing news that might make trouble for that party....
The Democratic members of the Federal Election Commission have pressed for regulating the internet — for treating blogposts as political contributions and restricting them. Members of the Civil Rights Commission have argued that freedom of speech and religious freedom must give way to social justice. There is an almost universal move on our college campuses to shut down dissent — among students, who must be afforded “safe spaces,” and, of course, in the classroom as well. There, academic freedom is a dead letter.... If you do not think that a discussion of [forbidden] matters is off limits, you are, as the Democratic nominee put it not long ago, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.” You are “deplorable and irredeemable.” You are, as she said this week, “negative, dark, and divisive with a dangerous vision.” It is a short distance from demonization to suppression. And, let’s face it, the suppression has begun — in our newspapers, on television, on our campuses, on Facebook, on Reddit, in Google searches.
Let's suppose I had an array of email stores that were going to be the subject of investigation. I know this because someone in the investigative agency tells me so.AVI has some Lord of the Rings thoughts, too.
In order to protect the organization(s) I first back up the array of email databases and put them on removable media. I can then screen the original databases for inappropriate entries and delete them as private secure in the knowledge that all past deals and correspondence can be referenced by very careful and surreptitious restores from the hidden archive.
I will have lost no data, just put them where it cannot be found. This archive, to have any relevance, must be close at hand and airgapped from the other computers. Could work right?
But suppose the person consulting the archive is observed by a third party, whose is ignorant of the arrangement and is probably ignorant period. Neverthless his sly nature leads him to suspect that data on the removable media is important owing to the secrecy with which it is consulted.
So he watches silently with his curiosity piqued.
At a moment of opportunity said ignorant person copies the contents of the removable media, still oblivious to its important. There it lies, unremarked, until one day it is discovered by a serious of fortuitous events by someone investigating an unrelated matter.
He has the Ring of Power in his possession but to him it is just a bauble.
What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees Up, up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?
What Bilbo? What?
It probably says nothing good about my character that I can't stop laughing at this.The bite of a huntsman isn't dangerous to humans – it’s their fearsome appearance that’s the real concern.The spiders are notorious for popping out of car dashboards at unexpected times, with disastrous consequences.On Tuesday a man crashed his car into Lake Cathie in NSW after a huntsman fell on his lap, causing him to accidentally slam his foot on the accelerator.
“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” said Hairston.No, it is not the place of law enforcement to serve as the dedicated killers of American citizens. We all have a duty to uphold the common peace and lawful order. If your son violated it to the degree that it placed others in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm, then any of us has a right to stop him by any means necessary.
We should be grateful for exactly these sorts of decisions that God sends to us. The November election is a practice version of a decision that has real consequences. Jesus is letting us have a sandbox to play in every election, where we can try out the various lessons and build our little castles for practice. Because your answer is going to have no effect on anything. This is a test. Rejoice! Most lessons in the Christian faith are expensive, considered worth it only in retrospect. This one is cheap. Use this opportunity with joy.Alas, I am not yet wise enough to be joyful. But I suppose I know what I have to do.
In a study of white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences, we found that Trump’s success reflects the rise of “white identity politics”—an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box. Whereas racial prejudice refers to animosity toward other racial groups, white identity reflects a sense of connection to fellow white Americans.Fair enough, I guess, but what are those interests? A defense of mores, of home, of culture? Aren't we usually told that having that interest is per se racist, as it suggests that one prefers (or worse, thinks superior) one's own versus another's culture or mores?
The Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, posted today on Facebook a link to an “Open Letter from the Social Media Director of the Stein/Baraka Campaign,” by someone whose name was given only as “Jillian.” The message reads:The Greens are pretty radical -- I spent a lot of time with them up in Philadelphia during the DNC. Fun folks, to be sure. A lot of them were willing to come on board the Democrats for Bernie, but have the (quite accurate) sense that the DNC was rigging its process to make sure he never had a chance. A Trump protest vote would be natural for them, in a way.
…A Clinton presidency is D A N G E R O U S … If a Trump presidency would mean that we have to fight ignorants in the streets—I’m ready for that. “
Stein commented “I couldn’t have said it better.”
Not even the “we have to fight ignorants in the street” part, Jill? Is that a call to a gang fight or a misspelling?
Literary criticism aside, I consider this sufficiently official. Journalists have been pushing Stein to answer this question throughout the campaign; it has now been answered.
Stein has been increasingly preparing her followers and the public for this idea over the last few weeks. She tweeted on Oct. 14:
Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy is much scarier than Donald Trump’s, who does not want to go to war with Russia. #PeaceOffensive
She retweeted an article by her running mate Ajamu Baraka on Oct 15 titled “Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump,” which states:
The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton.
and on Oct. 16 retweeted Baraka’s tweet:
Expecting people of color to fear Donald Trump after all we’ve been through the last 200 years, is absurd.
On Oct. 21 she posted on Facebook an article titled:
What’s scarier than Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton’s plans to gut Social Security
Greens have been spreading this message heavily on social media and in articles like this that state “Donald Trump as president will do ‘less damage‘.”
These days, many people, including (alas!) many of my fellow science-fiction writers, seem to feel it is somehow vaguely immoral to read purely for pleasure. A story, say these wise men, should really come to grips with something critical and important, like the oil slick on Laguna Beach, or the vanishing Yellowcrested Sandpiper. At very least, such persons advise, the hero should be a Negro striving to free his people, a homosexual gaily battling for social recognition, a concerned college youth protesting the iniquities of the Pentagon by blowing up his English Lit class, or an Amerindian getting back at the paleskins by seizing control of Alcatraz.He goes on to say that he doesn't think this is necessary, and that in any case he doubts that his generation or the next one will solve any of the social problems afflicting society. I suspect his contemporaries, looking back on recent history, would say that they are justified by the subsequent progress on social recognition for gays at least; perhaps in other ways.
Researchers have continued their investigation into the site where the body of Jesus Christ is traditionally believed to have been buried, and their preliminary findings appear to confirm that portions of the tomb are still present today, having survived centuries of damage, destruction, and reconstruction of the surrounding Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City....
When the marble cladding was first removed on the night of October 26, an initial inspection by the conservation team from the National Technical University of Athens showed only a layer of fill material underneath. However, as researchers continued their nonstop work over the course of 60 hours, another marble slab with a cross carved into its surface was exposed. By the night of October 28, just hours before the tomb was to be resealed, the original limestone burial bed was revealed intact.
"I'm absolutely amazed. My knees are shaking a little bit because I wasn't expecting this,” said Fredrik Hiebert, National Geographic's archaeologist-in-residence. "We can't say 100 percent, but it appears to be visible proof that the location of the tomb has not shifted through time, something that scientists and historians have wondered for decades."
This is a problem that government can help with, but it can’t be the only solution to a number of these issues. So where I would like to think it leaves us is that each individual actor in a community is going to have a different view on how to address some of these problems.There's also a diagnosis of what he thinks the left, and the right, get wrong about culture.
An individual parent should pick up the book and think maybe the way I’m interacting with my kid is causing a lot of problems down the road and maybe I should try to do it a little bit better. Maybe a social worker picks up the book and says, this is the reality of how these folks are living, maybe this changes how I approach my work. Maybe a church pastor picks up the book and says look, it’s really problematic that there are so few poor kids in our churches, but there are a ton of upper- and middle-income kids in our churches — maybe I need to go out and minister to the least of these as Christ said.
Everything that came out seemed to confirm the worst suspicions.
Her paranoid opponents said she was a part of the elite globalist cabal secretly plotting to impose one-world government by surrendering national sovereignty. And there she was, according to emails between her advisers hacked and released by Wikileaks, telling a Brazilian bank in 2013, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” She was paid $225,000 for the speech. (The campaign has not confirmed that the emails from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta are authentic, but many of them have been corroborated by third parties.)
Her critics had long charged that she said whatever people wanted to hear, and there she was saying behind closed doors that when it comes to policymaking, “You need both a public and a private position.” They said she was a member of the out-of-touch elite, and there she was saying she was “kind of far removed” from regular people’s struggles. They said she was too cozy with wealthy donors, and there she was telling the CEO of Goldman Sachs that she feels sorry for rich people, because “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.”
In a Democratic debate in April, Bernie Sanders charged that while he was introducing legislation to break up the banks that caused the financial crisis, “Secretary Clinton was busy giving speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech.” And sure enough, the hacked emails showed...
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves....Emphasis added.
In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery)....
Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.
This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.
'It's not about emails; it's about public communication by a woman’Well, sort of: it's about the communication of classified secrets in a way that was entirely too public. People have given their lives to protect classified information, and for good reason: other lives frequently depend on it.
FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.”With all due respect, she was delighted to receive that scolding in place of the prosecution she deserved. Far from an act of bullying, this was an act of intense protection of her interests by a man whose duty pointed in the other direction. If you've misunderstood the context that badly, I'm not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to publish an article from you on the subject of this case.
And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. We will invoke the terminology of criminal law to account for our feelings. She’s getting away with treason! Put her in jail! We can’t quite put our fingers on it, but the words sure do make a lot of people feel better, so they must be right.I'm pretty sure we can put our fingers on it. She treated classified information in a way that violated the law, endangered America's national interests and the lives of Americans charged with protecting it, and she did so for no better reason than that it was convenient for her. That's the kind and generous reading of why she did it. The more likely reason is that she was trying to dodge public records laws, which is a separate crime, in order to conceal the degree to which she was treating her office as a source of income through influence peddling.
We can’t be required to even display a license plate that says “Live Free or Die” on our car, if we object to the message; that’s what the court held in Wooley v. Maynard (1978). But New York is requiring people to actually say words that convey a message of approval of the view that gender is a matter of self-perception rather than anatomy, and that, as to “ze,” were deliberately created to convey that a message.
What’s more, according to the City, “refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment.” The label “harassment” is important here because harassment law requires employers and businesses to prevent harassment by co-workers and patrons and not just by themselves or their own employees ...
And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak. Nor is this likely to stay in New York City ... the federal government is taking the view that existing federal bans on sex discrimination also in effect ban gender identity discrimination, and the New York analysis would equally apply to that view; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already taken the view that it is illegal under federal law to persistently call employees by pronouns that correspond to their anatomical sex but not their gender identity, though it has not yet had occasion to opine about “ze.”
If you listen to America’s pessimistic populists, America is so over. We are all in the position of Emperor Honorius watching the Visigoths come over the seventh hill as the sack of Rome begins. (Guess who the Visigoths are in this analogy. Some, I assume, were good people.)
Or to update things a bit, this is the “Flight 93” election, at least according to a recent viral essay. This argument, as I recently described it, posits America’s doom “unless those who value an isolationist, protectionist, and perhaps paler America ‘charge the cockpit’ in Washington and seize control from the open borders–loving, free trading, perpetually warfighting ‘Davoisie oligarchy.’”
That’s not how I see things. My views are more in sync with this notion put forward recently in by Jonathan Margolis in the Financial Times:But he misses the point. The pessimists are not arguing that America is the Roman empire ready to fall. We are arguing that America is the Roman republic about to be destroyed and replaced by the empire. It's not the Visigoths we worry about, it is Julius Caeser and his army. The consuls and senate are about to be replaced by an emperor, or maybe already have been.
So for all its failings and warnings that the US is “over”, in reality, it is not just the new Roman empire, but a reincarnation of the Roman empire at the height of its power, perhaps around 117AD — 170 years before it began to fall apart.
Mumford got into a heated argument that ultimately led to the attorney being led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. Our reporters say Mumford started repeatedly yelling to Judge Brown that his client was free to go.
"When you get acquitted, you get released. That's how I understand it," said Mumford.
He said he asked the U.S. Marshals to see their paperwork that gave them authority to keep his client in custody.
