Colin Powell's Leaked Emails

I expressed disappointment with Colin Powell in an earlier post for explaining to HRC how to use email to get around records laws, so I thought I would cover his leaked emails where he defended himself, and provided tasty soundbites, as well.

According to an Intercept story on them, Powell's defense is that he viewed email more like a phone call than a cable machine, so the written record was not important. He used an AOL account for non-classified communication and the State Department computers for classified, so he didn't violate security rules. He also claims he discusses the situation in greater detail in a chapter of his book, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership.

In one of his email, he also added, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.” And then, “I told you about the gig I lost at a University because she so overcharged them they came under heat and couldn’t any fees for awhile. I should send her a bill.”

Update: Richard Wolff's Guardian article on the topic doesn't add much that's new, but he shows a remarkable self-awareness as he writes:

To be clear: hacking personal emails is reprehensible, and those behind the hack are scumbags who are trying to manipulate American voters.

To be doubly clear: the news media (including this column) have no principles and no shame in exploiting the ill-gotten product of those scumbags. Guilty, as charged.

And yet the Powell emails are so insightful and direct, it seems a shame – even if we have no sense of shame to let them pass by without comment.

The Gatlin Brothers

...demur.

My wife found this on YouTube.

Eric Hines

Who's Buying?

I have decided that while "The Deplorables" would be a great name for a Punk Rock band, "The Irredeemables" is a better fit for a Metal band.

A protester against the DNC in Philadelphia
The fact is that this plays in so nicely with Hillary Clinton's rhetoric. Here's NPR annotating her stump speech:

[I]n almost every speech these days, she talks about how Donald Trump's rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims is out of sync with American values. It's a theme that came into full relief at the Democratic convention. There the unstated message was that this wasn't a campaign between Trump and Clinton but between Trump and America, American values. Clinton has always had American flags at her events, but since the convention they have been even more prominent as a backdrop at her events.

It's even more obvious in last Friday's speech, in which not Trump himself but his supporters were said to be "irredeemable" and "not America." Her move is the authoritarian one, appropriate for someone on the verge of taking over not only the Presidency but the Supreme Court: from now on, she and hers will tell us what is America, and what is not. The unfit, by her standards, will be excluded.

A good Metal anthem could be written against that. Maybe one has been already.

What do you mean, "I don't believe in God"?
I talk to him everyday.
What do you mean, "I don't support your system"?
I go to court when I have to
What do you mean, "I can't get to work on time"?
I got nothing better to do.
And, what do you mean, "I don't pay my bills"?
Why do you think I'm broke?...

What do you mean, "I hurt your feelings"?
I didn't know you had any feelings.
What do you mean, "I ain't kind"?
Just not your kind.
What do you mean, "I couldn't be the President
Of the United States of America"?
Tell me something, it's still "We the people, " right?

Speaking of being broke because you pay your bills, don't forget that today is quarterly tax day for those of you who are self-employed, contracting, or otherwise responsible for both halves of your FICA taxes plus also your own health insurance. You may not be America, but you're still on the hook for funding her.

Zeiss Z1 F133 Lenses

Those were some pretty cool sunglasses Clinton was wearing this last weekend, weren't they? Well, she wears designer clothes worth lots of money, so fancy sunglasses aren't too surprising.

Except...

My readers want to know what type of space age eyewear Clinton was wearing when she collapsed. According to an expert on Reddit.com, the sunshades are Zeiss F133 blue protective lenses.

The prescription lenses are designed specifically to help prevent seizures by filtering out light and the color red, the most seizure-provoking color, according to Videgameseizures blog.

We should probably take "an expert on Reddit.com" with a grain of salt, but it's a plausible claim that's worth investigating further. It sounds like these lenses aren't hideously expensive, but they are specifically about cutting down on the risk of seizures. Given a fair amount of evidence that Clinton suffers from periodic seizures, if indeed these are sunglasses of that type, it would seem to be a kind of confirmation from Herself that seizures are a problem she's thinking about. That's something her doctor hasn't copped to, not yet.

The DNC Leak and the Health Stories Must Not Be Silenced

The DNC leak reveals a spreadsheet tracking donations from potential ambassadors or other public officials, along with what they've been assigned in return for the money they've brought to the table. There's an email chain in which they themselves call this "pay for play." It also contains details on a plot to gerrymander House districts, bamboozle the Republican party with a series of frivolous lawsuits to prevent them from responding, and a cynical plan to label Republican opposition as racism.

To read the big media, however, you'd think the whole content was ' mean things Colin Powell said about people.' That's the only story they're even trying to tell.

It's not the main story.



Hillary Clinton collapsed last Sunday and has retreated to a concrete-barricaded compound, from which she has not emerged all week. As the New York Post points out, if it weren't for an amateur who happened to video the collapse, we'd know nothing about her health conditions. I haven't seen any outlet in America comment on the barricades -- that's just the UK press.

These stories aren't going to get in front of many American voters unless there's a way to get past this wall of silence.

The DNC Leak

It's massive and brutal. Here are some highlights.

The corruption revealed should be a scandal. Will it?

UPDATE: They actually used the phrase "pay for play" in their own emails. They weren't even slightly kidding themselves about what they were doing.

UPDATE: It's just a constant stream of lies, bribery, and bad news about the state of our government.

DB: 2000 Sailors on USS Eisenhower Request Paternity Leave

In what was an originally exciting, if not unexpected situation, the Eisenhower’s administration department has become “flooded with a deluge of paternity leave requests,” said Master Chief Yeoman Reginald “Reggie” Frank.

“It’s an admin nightmare, but I can’t blame these guys. The mother and baby were airlifted to Bahrain, so... that means two weeks shore leave in Manama, whether or not she’s actually your baby-mama,” Frank added.

According to other sources, the carrier has convened a panel of officers and senior enlisted to sort through the ream of paternity requests, in an attempt to determine the most probable candidate.

Not quite. Paternity leave is ten days in the Navy, not two weeks.

Maternity leave? Four and a half months.

My Guess Is It's the "Prime Directive"

Heat Street asks a question: why don't Social Justice Warriors try to ruin Hip-Hop?

Just look at this 2012 2 Chainz video, “Birthday Song,” with the chorus “All I want for my birthday is a big booty hoe.” The video has enough problematic elements to make a purple-haired Tumblrina’s head explode....

There could be a few reasons for this. First of all, gamers and geek culture in general are seen as easy targets. They are perceived as indoorsy nerds who were bullied in high school. Perfect subjects to put up little resistance to those seeking to browbeat their hobby into submission (of course, the events of Gamergate proved that not to be the case). But compared to the hyper-masculine hip hop culture, geeks are certainly the easier victim.

Another aspect is race. Hip hop is inextricably black, born out of a resistance to authority, namely the police. Many prominent rappers today are staunch advocates of Black Lives Matter and their songs contain lyrics protesting police brutality. So does that give the entire genre a pass? For every “To Pimp a Butterfly” there are still dozens of songs about big booty women.

So, my theory about this is that the young women who make up the feminist arm of the SJW community all grew up in the 1990s. Every one I have ever met is a Sci-Fi fan -- especially Dr. Who -- which means that they cut their teeth on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG).

Now if you remember, TNG was an insufferable departure from the original Star Trek in its constant fulminating about the Prime Directive and the importance of not interfering in another culture's development. The Prime Directive in the original series was just a plot device: Kirk violated it at will, really, and it never caused bad results to do so. TNG took this idea very seriously, though, and I'd wager that growing up listening to important-sounding lectures from Captain Picard made way more impression on these young women than they are prepared to admit to themselves.

So what does that mean? It means that hip-hop comes from another culture, implicitly a lesser culture, and non-interference is the right response to it. The same is true, I think, of their view of Islam. The reason they view it as racist and xenophobic to criticize Islam's treatment of women is that, in so doing, we're trying to force a (again, implicitly in this view lesser) culture to adapt to our preferences.

White male geeks, however, are very much from these feminists' culture. They like Star Trek and comic books just as much as you do! Of course they have every right to tell you what to think and how to behave.

There's an implicit racism, maybe, in deciding which cultures merit protection from the Prime Directive. In the show, it's something like non-spacefaring cultures if I remember correctly. In this application of the concept to the real world, deciding to "respect" these cultures' right to non-interference is in fact a form of disrespect. I don't think these young women would admit to themselves that they think this, or that they are doing this. The last thing they would want to do, consciously, is 'colonize' these cultures or set up a hierarchy in which some cultures were superior. The mental pose is that they're respecting these cultures by leaving them to develop independently.

I think they probably really believe that "respecting you" is what they are doing, rather than "babying you" or "isolating you" or "looking down on you." They would probably be highly insulted at the suggestion that they had any such intentions.

HMS Terror

Now, there's a name that indicates a Navy that knew what a navy was all about. One of you anonymously mentioned that we should look at this story about the apparent discovery of the Terror, which was found in pristine condition. It can be explored by drones -- video at the link.

“We have successfully entered the mess hall, worked our way into a few cabins and found the food storage room with plates and one can on the shelves,” Adrian Schimnowski, the foundation’s operations director, told the Guardian by email from the research vessel Martin Bergmann.

“We spotted two wine bottles, tables and empty shelving. Found a desk with open drawers with something in the back corner of the drawer.”

The well-preserved wreck matches the Terror in several key aspects, but it lies 60 miles (96km) south of where experts have long believed the ship was crushed by ice, and the discovery may force historians to rewrite a chapter in the history of exploration.

VCDL Are Fighters

The Virginia Citizens' Defense League is one of my favorite gun rights groups. They really impressed me when I lived in Virginia, more than ten years ago now, and they're still going strong. Someone picked the wrong organization to mess around with in her little forgery.

Second Amendment rights advocacy organization the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), along with two of its members, today filed a $12 million defamation lawsuit against Katie Couric, director Stephanie Soechtig, Atlas Films, and Studio 3 Partners LLC d/b/a Epix for false and defamatory footage featured in the 2016 documentary film Under the Gun.

They have a solid case, but making her fight is an end in itself.

The Personal is Political. So Are Team Sports

No more enjoying yourselves without ritual cleansing. Everyone must acknowledge the sins of their nation before the kickoff, and states that have bad politics must not be allowed to host sporting events.

We'll all be much happier when every single space in our lives is brought under the control of the political. Won't we?

"White People Should Stop Doing Yoga"

This guy identifies himself as an "Idea Capital grant recipient," which I suppose means someone is paying him for his thoughts.

The way Westerners have reduced yoga to a trendy form of exercise is just another example of how colonialism continues to plague us. Yoga is a centuries old tradition of mindfulness, with physical practice only one part of the system. Unless you grew up Indian, learning these ancient traditions of your own people, using the sacred objects in their intended manner, you should not be allowed to practice “yoga” as trendy yuppie moms call it....

My soul weeps every time I smell the waft of mall food court Chinese. A noble an ancient culinary practice has been raped by American food engineering to become nothing but a foul simulacrum of Chinese cuisine.

Welcome to America, pal. We have this little thing we used to call "the melting pot." Get used to it, because there's no fixing it. People learn things from rubbing up against each other, and when you bring people from all over the world, they're going to rub up against each other. Not every part of what they encounter will be useful or interesting to them, but they'll take what they want.

That's not racism or violence. It's actually a kind of cooperation and openness to new ideas.

Or maybe this is satire. Who can tell anymore?

A Lesson in Trust

Yesterday, the Daily Mail out of the UK ran a story asking whether Hillary Clinton had brought a personal doctor to the 9/11 memorial. There were lots of photos of this woman with her right before her collapse, and doing things that were plausibly field diagnostic tests such as checking her pulse or having Clinton squeeze her fingers.

Turns out, she was a PR aide (and former State Department employee), so it's not what it looked like.

The New York Post describes this as the Mail "mistakenly" describing her as a nurse, but the Mail headline is explicitly asking whether or not she is a doctor. She apparently looks somewhat like Hillary's actual doctor, the one who later gave the statement about her pneumonia.

In any case, the reason outlets like the Mail are quite right to ask these questions is just that the Clinton campaign has proven it can't be trusted to provide answers. Clinton supporters will want to say, "See? This is how conspiracy theories start!" Well, yes, it is, but not with journalists asking questions. They start with powerful people who hide truths. If you don't want conspiracy theories, try transparency.

Chesterton's Paradox of the Wall

Did you know what it was for, before you wanted to replace it? Here's some folks who did know.

Clinton's Chappaqua Home Barricaded

This is not the expected behavior of someone who claims she might return to the campaign trail any day now. You don't put up concrete barricades around your house if you're planning on being out and about again by the weekend.

Something more is going on than we've been told, as usual. It must be something interesting.

An Extended Tolkien Analogy

Wretchard, noting the fear with which the DNC is waiting for Wikileaks to drop another hammer on the dying Hillary campaign, compares the situation to an earlier Middle Earth:

Now America could beat Bolshevism the Original Recipe, because they fought these master conspirators asymmetrically. The Cold War proved that.

Then a bunch of "activists" bloated with their own pride, thought they could dispense with America, form an imitation Communist Party and go up against the real thing on their own. The EU, the World Order. All they managed to do, like Saruman was to play into Sauron's hands. They turned DC into a kind of Kremlin on the Potomac, complete with its version of Izvestia and Tass.

"A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful [...]. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived - for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength."

The Bolshevists are showing that they may not have been able to beat America, but they can beat Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman. Washington was better before Obama improved it. Now the Dark Lord has come, with his Nazgul Assange.

It's an interesting formulation. I've been thinking about something similar since Hillary Clinton's comments on Friday that half of her opponents were "deplorables," 'racists and xenophobes,' "irredeemable" who were "not America." I think she means people like many of the people who live around here in rural Georgia, many of whom are doubtless racists and xenophobes by her standards and perhaps often even by ordinary standards. These may be deplorable traits, but the people are not: they are probably as good as most people anywhere, as racism and xenophobia are quite common traits among all people worldwide. These traits are to be struggled against, like sins; but they are also very common things, like sins. They may make a man damnable, but not irredeemable.

Yet how odd to say that they are not America, they, who are most obviously America. They're the ones who fly the flag, not just outside their office but outside their homes. They're the ones who would refuse to hyphenate "American" even if asked to do so in order to illuminate their heritage. They're the ones who tear up at the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," while Hillary's team debates how vigorously to protest it.

If they're not America, nobody is. To recognize the evils of racism is fair and right, for it has been a terrible evil. To read these people out of America, though, is to render America empty and without content. Without them, there is nothing that is just America, un-hyphenated. America becomes nothing more than a substrate for all the hyphens.

To read them out of America is to make America a blank slate on which anything else might be written. Something new. Something different. But how, then, to avoid the trap that Wretchard identifies? Are they writing something new, like Jefferson and the Founders did? Or are they making a copy of something else? A little copy, a child's model, a slave's flattery?

Standards Change Over Time

This video is making the rounds right now.

Distinctions Lost

An important one here: is the desired end result to also boycott Israel, or to stop boycotting North Carolina?

Could someone explain why it’s noble, enlightened, justifiable, and progressive to boycott an American state, but hateful, bigoted, retrograde, and evil to support a boycott of a foreign country that has been imposing a brutal, discriminatory, and illegal occupation for many decades, a boycott that is led by people with virtually no political rights?

Oh, ok. I see where you're going with this now.

The "fake because"

Scott Adams originally predicted the hamfisted "deplorables" comment would have no real effect on voters.  After Clinton's collapse from "pneumonia," he's less sure:

In our rational minds, we are good people who use data and reason to arrive at our decisions. We need to maintain that untrue self-image to stay happy. Clinton’s collapse at the 9-11 event creates an uncomfortable dissonance in us. On one hand, we don’t think anyone should be penalized for a minor illness. And we don’t wish harm on anyone. Our rational minds want to NOT care that Clinton collapsed on the 9-11 anniversary. That’s who we are. We’re rational people who can put stuff like this in context.

But in our irrational minds – the part that actually makes decisions – we really, really don’t want a commander-in-chief who is so frail that she might sneeze-fart herself to death in the Situation Room. Realistically, and rationally, we know that isn’t a real problem.

But…it…feels…like one.

Minus the implicit moaning about how we're probably being unfair, this strikes me as a fairly realistic assessment.  On the other hand, I suspect a lot of voters may be looking for a more concrete and comprehensible reason to reject, not the sickly old lady, but the steaming eruption of lies that issues continually from Clinton's mouth, so numerous and varied that it's gotten hard to keep track.  Many voters may be deciding that, however they feel about Trump, he's not bad enough to make them swallow Clinton.

Of Course

This is how things are done now, is it not?