Hat tip to Reason for pointing to this CBS-2 exposé of illegal underground dinner parties in New York City: Clandestine dinner parties like the one Leitner attended have become more common in New York City. And insiders told Leitner they are completely unregulated. When asked at the dinner, “do you ever worry about getting caught?” […]
Via Michael Swaine (on Facebook) comes this Guardian story about the NSA apparently trying to silence a computer science professor blogging about possible encryption compromises: This actually happened yesterday: A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university’s […]
Lewis Amselem, who writes the always-entertaining-and-insightful blog the DiploMad, shares the likely answer: I asked about chemical weapons. He perked up. Abbas laughed. He claimed that Iraq managed to slip those into Syria, “Right under your noses!” He roared this line, letting his nationalist sentiment overwhelm his new putative role of American vassal. Abbas insisted […]
John O’Sullivan — whom I’ve had the pleasure of dining with more than once — once enunciated what’s become known as O’Sullivan’s Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” Kimberley Strassel’s article in the Wall Street Journal about the Federal Election Commission illustrates O’Sullivan’s Law all too well: …over […]
Benghazi (to the tune of “Ohio” as performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) The compound is under fire No place for them to flee No answer to their wire Four dead in Benghazi Gotta get weapons Gotta get boots on the ground Should have been done long ago Why were we sent here With […]
[Thanks to the links from Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds), Chaos Manor (Jerry Pournelle), and John C. Wright’s Journal (John C. Wright — what, you were expecting Karl Rove?). In fact, if you follow the link below to my 2008 post, you’ll see that I first read the poem over at Jerry Pournelle’s blog, Chaos Manor.] I posted this poem […]
From conservative-mole-within-State, Diplomad: In the late-1990s, I was working in State’s Political-Military Bureau in Washington. One of our duties was to work with the Pentagon planning and executing “noncombatant evacuation operations” (NEOs) in countries where the security situation had gone belly up. We had the job of getting our people out of harm’s way. This […]
Robert Vacca wrote his work The Coming Dark Age back in the eco-70s. His basic premise was that our technological and logistical infrastructure was becoming so complex and inter-dependent that a major failure somewhere would trigger a domino effect, causing civilization to grind to a halt. Vacca underestimated the ability of complex systems — particularly […]
Yeah, I’m back blogging, a bit at a time. The San Diego City Council, having passed one of those lame anti-Walmart superstore ordinances, is now having to backtrack after Walmart managed to get over 50,000 petition signatures in less that three weeks to put the ordinance to an actual public vote: The ordinance approved in […]
