How To Use A Semicolon Correctly
An evening pause: Time for some lessons in sentence structure and the history of an obscure bit of punctuation.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Year: 2018
Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign
Confirmed: The Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign, using a variety of illicit methods, from monitoring phonecalls to inserting spies within the campaign.
The article outlines the entire range of abuse of power by the Obama FBI and Justice Department, but two actions stand out to me as most egregious, both outlined in this quote:
The F.B.I. investigated four unidentified Trump campaign aides in those early months, congressional investigators revealed in February. The four men were Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said…
The F.B.I. obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters — a secret type of subpoena — officials said. And at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos, current and former officials said.
First, the Obama administration went after the campaign of their opponent, based not on any reasonable suspicion of a crime but merely because they were participating in an opposition campaign.
Second, much of this spying was instigated using these national security letters, which do not require a judge’s warrant and on their face are completely unconstitutional.
Read it all. This behavior was a direct attack on our American democracy. If no one gets punished expect far worse from future administrations, from both the left and the right, all intent on maintaining their power regardless of the wishes of the American electorate.
I must add one more detail. This information comes from a badly written New York Times propaganda piece designed to support the actions of the Obama FBI. Yet, buried in that report was this quote:
A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts.
Let that sink in. After two years of open-ended investigation using unlimited resources, these petty tyrants have yet to find any evidence of Russian collusion. The time has come to shut this kangaroo court down.
Update: This article does an excellent job of outlining the outright abuse of power by the Obama administration. As the author notes succinctly,
The scandal is that the FBI, lacking the incriminating evidence needed to justify opening a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, decided to open a counterintelligence investigation. With the blessing of the Obama White House, they took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans — Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries. [emphasis in original]
This is Watergate times infinity, and if there is anything left of our Constitutional government, it should put a lot of people from the Obama administration in jail.
Boulder bans assault weapons, gun owners sue
Fascists: The city council in Boulder, Colorado, this week passed a local law banning “assault weapons” and other gun accessories.
Its city council unanimously passed an ordinance on Tuesday to ban the sale and possession of assault weapons, bump stocks and high-capacity magazines — becoming one of a handful of cities nationwide that has taken action to change its gun laws in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, shooting massacre.
…The new law requires people who own bump stock devices and magazines that hold 10 or more rounds of ammunition to dispose of or sell the firearm accessories by July 15, according to Colorado Public Radio.
A lawsuit against the law was immediately filed.
I think however that this quote by the city councilwoman who proposed the law illustrates best its stupidity.
“It felt like a no-brainer to propose this.”
That’s right, it is very clear that the council and this councilwoman used no brains at all in writing and approving the law. It not only is vague, unenforceable, and oppressive, it puts the blame for past murders on innocent law-abiding citizens.
The problem however is that this might very well be constitutional. As long as this local ordinance does not violate Colorado state law, it would be permissible under the Constitution, as the second amendment was designed to limit federal authority, not state or local authorities. As such, it illustrates the growing rise of fascism in some communities within the U.S., places where the majority sees nothing wrong with oppressing a minority, merely because they disagree about public policy. Expect more of this in the coming years. Expect also that these fascist localities to become havens of poverty, crime, oppression, and economic collapse.
Astronomers detect oxygen only 250 million years after Big Bang
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have detected oxygen in a galaxy formed only 250 million years after Big Bang, suggesting that star formation started much sooner than expected.
As we look deeper and deeper, the onset of stellar formation keeps getting pushed back closer and closer to the Big Bang, and always sooner than the theories and computer models predicted.
All charges dropped against ARCA CEO
After a grand jury refused to issue an indictment, all charges have been dropped against Dumitru Popescu, the CEO of the smallsat rocket company ARCA.
I am reminded of the Emily Latila character from the early days of Saturday night life.
Even though he has been entirely cleared, the prosecution served to seriously delay the company’s plans.
At the time the charges were filed last fall, ARCA had been about two weeks from launching a test rocket from Spaceport America, according to Popescu. The criminal case stalled progress. Now, the company plans to carry out the rocket test in Europe. After that, it’s likely the company will launch a test of a second rocket system from NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
It is also possible the company will now exit either New Mexico or the U.S., since it appears the state government here is hostile to it.
“Private” Chinese company successfully completes 1st suborbital launch
A Chinese company has successfully completed its 1st suborbital launch of a test rocket aimed at the smallsat market.
The news reports from China tout this company as private and commercial, and that might be so, but then there’s this:
China opened its space sector to private capital around 2015 and encouraged technology sharing through a civil-military integration reform policy, and the impacts are now becoming apparent.
OneSpace itself has received support from the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND), and has raised 500 million yuan (US$77.6m) through finance rounds, according to Tencent Technology.
The company might be called private, but it is also under the thumb of the Chinese government, which at any time can take it over or shut it down. At the moment the government is supporting its development, probably in the hope that China can grab some of the market of the smallsat boom expected in the next decade.
May 15, 2018 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
» Read more
Diane Keaton – It Seems Like Old Times
An evening pause: From the movie Annie Hall (1977).
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
NASA inspector general weighs in on ISS’s future
The inspector general for NASA, Paul Martin, is testifying today before Congress on ISS. His prepared statement [pdf] includes several blunt assessements concerning the station’s future.
First and most important, he has doubts that transitioning the station to private ownership will work.
» Read more
Evergreen State College: 20% enrollment drop and $6 million budget cut
Evergreen State College, where bigoted riots occurred last year, has been forced to institute $6 million in budget cuts due to a 20% enrollment drop.
The cuts were outlined by President George Bridges in a May 8 memo to the Board of Trustees, and are accompanied by plans to raise various student fees by hundreds of dollars, The Olympian reported last week. “The most likely explanation, indeed, the only viable explanation to my mind, is that the impact of last year’s events are playing out in the enrollment numbers.”
Has the college learned anything from this experience? It appears not. Though the administration has officially ended its annual “Days of Absence” event, where students were divided by race with some events excluding whites, the students have decided to organize the event themselves. Their self-segregated “People of Color” event (POC) will include gatherings where either whites are excluded, or “antiracist workshops” where only whites can attend so that they may be properly chastised for the evils of their race.
The university is meanwhile running something it calls “an equity symposium.” I guarantee there has been some covert coordination between the two.
The problem here continues to be the leftist-dominated culture that controls most academic institutions. For example, a professor at the University of Akron thought it perfectly reasonable to give higher grades to his female students, merely because they were female. He claimed this was part of a “national movement to encourage female students to go [in]to information sciences” and added that this national movement
…was a “conglomerate of discussions, initiatives, and cals for action to address gender imbalance issue in the IT field.” He referred to Facebook’s “Annual Leadership Day for female employees around the world” and to Google’s training program for “women to establish links with men in coding.” Liu said he was also following a plan of action by Microsoft to close the gap between men and women in STEM and IT fields.
I have no doubt, from his leftist perspective, surrounded by leftist professors and leftist administrators and reading only the leftist news outlets and journals, that he truly believes there is a “national movement” to favor women over men in his IT field. The problem is that he is trapped in a bubble of leftism that has no connection with the real world.
While there is evidence that some universities are attempting to change, be prepared for much worse behavior from this academic community. They really don’t wish to change, and the leftist bubble is very well entrenched there. To really institute change in many of these places will literally require them to go bankrupt and go out of business.
Socialists win four Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania
At least they’re honest about who they are: Four socialist candidates won the Democratic Party primaries in Pennsylvania yesterday.
Two were in Philadelphia, and two were in Pittsburgh. Three of the four face no Republican opposition in the general election, which means there will be in increased polarization in the Pennsylvania state government. This also likely means that the governments of both cities will shift leftward. We can therefore reliably predict, as has happened in every place where socialists take power, that the quality of life in both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh will go down, even as both experience ballooning budgets and deficits.
Russian government audit finds $20 billion in “spending violations”
An audit by the Russian equivalent of the GAO has found more than $20 billion in “spending violations” within the government, most of which occurred in the defense and space sectors.
Other words for describing these “spending violations” might be “theft,” “embezzlement,” “misuse of funds,” or any number of more honest direct terms. The Russian government is simply very corrupt, and its culture includes the assumption by administrators and everyone else that it is their right to skim off as much as they can, for themselves.
Sadly, I do not see any reform occurring in the near future. This corruption is deeply ingrained, and the Putin government, also deeply entrenched, apparently likes it, as long as the thefts don’t become so obvious that nothing gets done, as happened at the new Vostochny spaceport during its construction.