As they so often do:
Tomorrow's cover: Weiner sext probe found dirt on Hillary https://t.co/6z0BJkr23s pic.twitter.com/hAk6D02j8y
— New York Post (@nypost) October 28, 2016
New York Post Wins Weiner Pun Sweepstakes
October 28th, 2016FBI Reopens EmailGate Probe—Did Hillary Get Weinered?
October 28th, 2016No sooner do I put up the latest Clinton Corruption update when all hell breaks lose:
FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers Friday the bureau is reviewing new information related to Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, a political bombshell that comes 11 days ahead of the election.
After recommending earlier this year that the Department of Justice not press charges against the former secretary of state, Comey said in a letter to eight congressional committee chairmen that investigators are examining newly discovered emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the email probe.“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote the chairmen. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
In an apparently paywalled story, the New York Times is claiming that the new emails came not from the zillions of WikiLeaks emails, but from Anthony Weiner’s personal electronic devices.
On top of that, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has now declined to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Iran money-for-hostages deal.
It appears as though people who claimed that Hillary had the election in the bag were a tad premature…
Pat Condell on Why Trump is a Necessary Evil
October 27th, 2016It looks like this week’s Clinton Corruption update is being pushed to Friday as well, so enjoy Pat Condell explaining why voting for Donald Trump is necessary to keep America America.
“One thing that the Trump campaign has already achieved in this election is that it has given the progressive media the chance to fully reveal just how contemptuous they are of the American people. There’s no attempt to provide them with balanced objective coverage on which to make an informed decision. It’s all about manipulating their opinion. CNN couldn’t be any more partisan if they had a ‘Stop Trump’ banner on the screen twenty-four seven.”
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
A Roundup of Texas Lawsuits of Note
October 26th, 2016A number of lawsuits related to local or federal overreach in Texas are working their way through the court system. Here’s a quick roundup of developments in a few notable cases.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won a sweeping victory in court Friday when Federal District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III dismissed a fraud case the Securities and Exchange Commission had brought against him.
Mazzant, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, found that even if all the facts the SEC alleged were true, they didn’t amount to any violation of securities law by Paxton.
The SEC had dogpiled on Paxton after Collin County special prosecutors got a local grand jury to indict Paxton under state securities law in August 2015.
Syria: Sometimes All the Options Are Bad
October 25th, 2016Certain factions of the Washington establishment (here’s a good example) are demanding that Obama “do something” to stop the fighting around Aleppo in Syria, the “something” in this case being the threat of force, or even actual use thereof, to stop Russian airstrikes and prevent a “humanitarian disaster.” And Hillary Clinton is calling for a no-fly zone.
To which I reply: Why?
We can’t back the good guys in the Syrian civil war because there are no good guys. Assad’s ruling faction are scumbags. The Russians backing Assad are scumbags. Hezbollah, fighting on Assad’s side, are scumbags. The Iranian mullahs backing Assad are scumbags. Turkey is currently ruled by Erdogan’s Islamist scumbags, and Turkey is more interested in attacking the Kurds than the Islamic State. The Free Syrian Army is riddled with Islamist scumbags. The al-Nusra front are scumbags. The Islamic State is made up of the very worst scumbags in the region (and world). The only notable faction that aren’t scumbags are the Kurds, who, as an ethnic and geographic minority, are in no position to rule Syria, or even a significant fraction of it.
To the extent that Obama’s imaginary red lines and desultory, ineffectual backing of Syrian rebel groups have harmed America’s reputation for competence in the region, the damage has already been done. (Indeed, the Obama/Clinton/Kerry strategy for fomenting regime change in the hope that things would turn out better, like a liberal funhouse mirror distorted reflection of George W. Bush’s far more limited regime change goals in Iraq, have made things worse across the region.) We have no pressing national interest at stake in the Syrian civil war, there’s not a contending faction (outside the peripherally-involved Kurds) worth backing, and it’s not apparent what such an intervention might reasonably achieve.
All of which makes me incredulous when I read pieces that suggest that Obama is considering military actions in Syria.
Even some on the right have been agitating for the United States to “do something” in Syria, and S. E. Cupp’s Twitter timeline has gone to an “all heart-tugging photos of Syrian children” format without saying why it is the United State’s interest to intervene in Syria or proposing anything concrete as to what form that intervention should take.
A large part of the current push to intervene in Syria seems to be coming from an interest group called The Syria Campaign. Who is behind it?
From that Zero Hedge piece:
A careful look at the origins and operation of The Syria Campaign raises doubts about the outfit’s image as an authentic voice for Syrian civilians, and should invite serious questions about the agenda of its partner organizations as well.
A creation of international PR firms
Best known for its work on liberal social issues with well-funded progressive clients like the ACLU and the police reform group, Campaign Zero, the New York- and London-based public relations firm Purpose promises to deliver creatively executed campaigns that produce either a “behavior change,” “perception change,” “policy change” or “infrastructure change.” As the Syrian conflict entered its third year, this company was ready to effect a regime change.
On Feb. 3, 2014, Anna Nolan, the senior strategist at Purpose, posted a job listing. According to Nolan’s listing, her firm was seeking “two interns to join the team at Purpose to help launch a new movement for Syria.”
At around the same time, another Purpose staffer named Ali Weiner posted a job listing seeking a paid intern for the PR firm’s new Syrian Voices project. “Together with Syrians in the diaspora and NGO partners,” Weiner wrote, “Purpose is building a movement that will amplify the voices of moderate, non-violent Syrians and mobilize people in the Middle East and around the world to call for specific changes in the political and humanitarian situation in the region.” She explained that the staffer would report “to a Strategist based primarily in London, but will work closely with the Purpose teams in both London and New York.”
On June 16, 2014, Purpose founder Jeremy Heimans drafted articles of association for The Syria Campaign’s parent company. Called the Voices Project, Heimans registered the company at 3 Bull Lane, St. Ives Cambridgeshire, England. It was one of 91 private limited companies listed at the address. Sadri would not explain why The Syria Campaign had chosen this location or why it was registered as a private company.
Along with Heimans, Purpose Europe director Tim Dixon was appointed to The Syria Campaign’s board of directors. So was John Jackson, a Purpose strategist who previously co-directed the Burma Campaign U.K. that lobbied the EU for sanctions against that country’s ruling regime. (Jackson claimed credit for The Syria Campaign’s successful push to remove Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad’s re-election campaign ads from Facebook.) Anna Nolan became The Syria Campaign’s project director, even as she remained listed as the strategy director at Purpose.
From The Syria Campaign’s own website:
The Syria Campaign is a non-profit organisation registered as a company in the United Kingdom as The Voices Project—company number 8825761. (You can’t be a registered charity in the UK if most of your work is campaigning.)
We have a Governing Board who are legally responsible for the organisation and oversee strategy and finance for The Syria Campaign. The board members are Daniel Gorman, Ben Stewart, Sawsan Asfari, Tim Dixon and Lina de Sergie.
– a large-scale initiative to help change hearts and minds on the global refugee crisis;
– The Syria Campaign, to move the world to action on the humanitarian crisis in Syria;
– Everytown, the movement to tackle gun violence in America
Etc.
So, to summarize: It’s run by international left-wing activists in favor of Europe accepting more “Syrian” “refugees”, soft jihadis, and gun banners.
These are not the sort of people I want driving American national security decisions.
The situation in Syria is horrible, but outside territory held by the Islamic State, it’s the same type of horrible that has plagued the Middle East pretty much constantly absent control by a ruling power with sufficient force to keep the endemic ethnic strife under wraps. Wars there are fought under Hama rules, not those of the Geneva Convention.
It is not in the best interests of the United States to intervene militarily in Syria. We have no compelling national security interest in Syria right now, there’s no faction worth backing, and trying to “create safe areas” or “establish no-fly zones” would be dangerous, cost-prohibitive and unlikely to succeed.
Sometimes the best choice is doing nothing at all.
LinkSwarm for October 24, 2016
October 24th, 2016The latest Clinton Corruption update pushed the LinkSwarm to Monday:
The poll with the best track record over the last three presidential elections gave Donald Trump a 2-percentage-point edge over Hillary Clinton on Saturday.
The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll has Trump with 42.1 percent and Clinton at 39.7 percent.
More than anything, I can’t sit idly by and allow these perpetrators of fraud to celebrate and leak tears of joy like they did when they helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. I have to know I weighed in not only in writing but in the voting booth. The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won’t do it, it’s something. Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don’t want me to, and I believe I must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The U.S. unemployment rate hit ten per cent for a single month in 2009 and is now below five per cent; the eurozone unemployment rate hit ten per cent around the same time, and is still in double digits. In some European countries, youth unemployment is more than forty per cent. America’s economy is bigger than it was when the crisis hit. The eurozone’s is smaller. To take just one example, Italy, the third-largest economy in the eurozone, has a per-capita G.D.P. that’s lower than it was at the end of the last century.
Also this:
Stiglitz observes that if the countries that committed to the single currency in 1992 had known what they know now, and if people had had the chance to vote on the proposal, “it is hard to see how they could have supported it.” That’s a hell of an indictment.
But if you’re not sure yet what you want to do, then take time to decide before you spend $30,000, $50,000, or $100,000 you don’t have for something you don’t need. In the meantime, start working. You’ll probably only find low-paying, hard-working jobs at first, but guess what? If you go to college, you’ll be working those same jobs when you get out, only you’ll be four years older and fifty grand poorer.
For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” – a technical term invented to describe the degree of numerical coincidence of a theory. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness because it’s a philosophical criterion, not a scientific one. But on that matter I got the last laugh: Nature, it turns out, doesn’t like to be told what’s presumably natural.
A Few Points on Yesterday’s Big DDos Attack
October 22nd, 2016If you had trouble getting to a various websites yesterday it was probably fallout from a huge distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack:
Criminals this morning massively attacked Dyn, a company that provides core Internet services for Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Reddit and a host of other sites, causing outages and slowness for many of Dyn’s customers.
In a statement, Dyn said that this morning, October 21, Dyn received a global distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on its DNS infrastructure on the east coast starting at around 7:10 a.m. ET (11:10 UTC).
More coverage of the attack here. “At the peak of the attack, average DNS connect times for 2,000 websites monitored by Dynatrace went to about 16 seconds from 500 milliseconds normally.”
Internet-of-Things-enabled devices appear to be at the heart of the DDoS attack:
According to Dan Drew, the chief security officer at Level 3 Communications, the attack is at least in part being mounted from a “botnet” of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices.
Drew explained the attack in a Periscope briefing this afternoon. “We’re seeing attacks coming from a number of different locations,” Drew said. “An Internet of Things botnet called Mirai that we identified is also involved in the attack.”
The botnet, made up of devices like home Wi-Fi routers and Internet protocol video cameras, is sending massive numbers of requests to Dyn’s DNS service. Those requests look legitimate, so it’s difficult for Dyn’s systems to screen them out from normal domain name lookup requests.
Earlier this month, the code for the Marai botnet was released publicly. It may have been used in the massive DDoS attack against security reporter Brian Krebs. Marai and another IoT botnet called Bashlight exploit a common vulnerability in BusyBox, a pared-down version of the Linux operating system used in embedded devices. Marai and Bashlight have recently been responsible for attacks of massive scale, including the attack on Krebs, which at one point reached a traffic volume of 620 gigabits per second.
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of the content delivery and DDoS protection service provider CloudFlare, said that the attack being used against Dyn is an increasingly common one. The attacks append random strings of text to the front of domain names, making them appear like new, legitimate requests for the addresses of systems with a domain. Caching the results to speed up responses is impossible.
At least some commenters have pointed to a possible connection between DDoS attacks and web services firm BackConnect Inc.:
The latest comes the day after Doug Madory, director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, gave a presentation at an industry conference about research he had done on questionable practices at BackConnect Inc., a firm that offers web services, including helping clients manage DDoS attacks. According to Madory, BackConnect had regularly spoofed Internet addresses through a technique known as a BGP hijack, an aggressive tactic that pushes the bounds of industry.
Madory’s research was conducted with Brian Krebs, a well-known writer on computer-security issues. Krebs also published an article based on the research last month. Within hours, his website was hit by a “extremely large and unusual” DDoS attack, he wrote.
Perhaps someone with more computer security knowledge than I (Dwight? Borepatch?) might comment on how best to defend from these attacks in the future. Spin up big on-demand cloud clustered DNS VMs when a DDoS attack is detected?
This Week in Clinton Corruption for October 21, 2016
October 21st, 2016It’s getting to the point that not only can I not keep up with the torrent of email leaks documenting Hillary Clinton corruption, I can’t even keep with the people keeping up with the leaks!
A top State Department official offered a “quid pro quo” to an FBI investigator to declassify an e-mail from Hillary Clinton’s private server in exchange for allowing the bureau to operate in countries where it was banned, stunning new documents revealed Monday.
The FBI documents show that Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy pitched the deal to the unnamed agent, allegedly as part of an effort to back up Clinton’s claim that she did not send or receive classified documents on the server in her Westchester home.
“[Redacted] indicated he had been contacted by [Kennedy], Undersecretary of State, who had asked his assistance in altering the e-mail’s classification in exchange for a ‘quid pro quo,’ ” according to the documents, which summarized interviews the feds conducted in the summer of 2015 while investigating Clinton’s e-mail practices.
“[Redacted] advised that in exchange for marking the e-mail unclassified, STATE would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more Agents in countries where they are presently forbidden,” the document added.
One State Department staffer described feeling “immense pressure” to complete the review quickly and to not label anything as classified.
“This is a textbook case where a grand jury should have convened but was not. That is appalling,” an FBI special agent who has worked public corruption and criminal cases said of the decision. “We talk about it in the office and don’t know how Comey can keep going.”
The agent was also surprised that the bureau did not bother to search Clinton’s house during the investigation.
“We didn’t search their house. We always search the house. The search should not just have been for private electronics, which contained classified material, but even for printouts of such material,” he said.
“There should have been a complete search of their residence,” the agent pointed out. “That the FBI did not seize devices is unbelievable. The FBI even seizes devices that have been set on fire.”
But most serious disclosure in the review was that donors expected a “quid pro quo” in return for their contributions. “Some interviewees reported conflicts of those raising funds or donors, some of whom may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gifts.”
“This was bright line illegal,” Wall Street analyst and philanthropy expert Charles Ortel told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “This is a rogue charity that was out of control for years. And the trustees elected to not correct them. We’re not talking about people with no knowledge of the laws. These are people who can’t claim ignorance.”
The email from Huma Abedin, Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department, was addressed to Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook. Hillary Clinton was a director of the foundation at the time.
Singapore and Hong Kong officials reportedly were also vying to convene the CGI meeting in their countries, but the North African nation ultimately hosted it in a five-star hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 2015. Abedin told Podesta and Mook that Morocco was not CGI’s “first choice.”
The actual meeting was paid for by OCP, the Moroccan-government-owned mining company that has been accused of serious human rights violations. Clinton vigorously supported the Moroccan King when she was Secretary of State and the U.S.-financed Export-Import Bank gave OCP a $92 million loan guarantee during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The mining company also contributed between $5 million to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to the charity’s web site.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
GTA 5 Mod Let’s You Use Samsung Galaxy Note 7s as Grenades
October 20th, 2016You’ve probably heard that Samsung has recalled and cancelled the Galaxy Note 7 phone after numerous incidents where the battery exploded.
You may not have heard that someone did a mod for the video game Grand Theft Auto 5 that lets you use Samsung Galaxy Note 7s as grenades.
Since Samsung has evidently forced YouTube to take down video of the mod in “arguably the worst misuse of the DMCA we have ever come across,” I thought I would share two other videos.