Strikes On Syria

Question asked and answered.

The United States carried out a missile attack in Syria on Thursday night in response to the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack this week that killed more than 80 civilians, American officials said.
Dozens of Tomahawk missiles were fired at an air base in Syria, military officials said.
[…] The speed with which the Trump administration responded — and remarks earlier in the day by American officials who said that options were still being considered — appeared intended to maximize the element of surprise and sharply contrasted with the methodical scrutiny of the use of force by the Obama administration.

Broader commentary from Michael Ledeen and Glenn Reynolds: THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY

Wynneing!

Once boasting one of the continent’s lowest electricity rates, Ontario today has some of the highest and that has many industrial companies planning to move at least some operations to the United States.
“The government treats us like bourgeois sweatshop operators who have to be stopped,” said Bamford, who has organized dozens of medium-sized companies into the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers of Ontario. “All the businesses are terrified of the government. My husband said, ‘Well, do you just want to pick up and go?’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess I gotta just stay and fight.’ I feel like I’m the Norma Rae of manufacturing.”
Automatic Coating’s electricity bill has more than doubled in the past decade. Its bill for last November was $49,209.68. The first line is for electricity: $6,577.93. The second line is much harder to explain: it is the euphemistic Global Adjustment charge: 217,165 kWh at 11.6 cents each for a total of $25,223.73.
The Global Adjustment contains many different costs, including Ontario’s payments to solar and wind energy makers at far more than the market rate, the cost to sell excess power to U.S. states at a loss, and even the cost of replacing light bulbs with LED bulbs.

These people are nuts. And so is any government that follows in their footsteps.

It’s Not Wiretapping When The Democrats Do It

Those names were leaked by a hateful internet video;

After the revelations these last couple of days about the “incidental” unmaskings, Rice made another television appearance, this time in an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. Asked about allegations that she had been been involved in disseminating the names of people swept up by the intelligence investigations, she insisted that they were “absolutely false.”

Did the Obama Administration’s Abuse of Foreign-Intelligence Collection Start Before Trump?

In a December 31, 2016, Tablet article on the controversy, “Why the White House Wanted Congress to Think It Was Being Spied on By the NSA,” I argued that the Obama administration had merely used the appearance of spying on American lawmakers to corner opponents of the Iran Deal. Spying on U.S. citizens would be a clear abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance system. It would be a felony offense to leak the names of U.S. citizens to the press.
Increasingly, I believe that my conclusion in that piece was wrong. I believe the spying was real and that it was done not in an effort to keep the country safe from threats–but in order to help the White House fight their domestic political opponents.
“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism–activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

And…“President Obama, of course, got his start in national politics when sealed divorce records became public.”

What’s The Opposite of Diversity?

The Last Emperor, a 1989 film, depicts the life of Puyi, Imperial China’s final Manchu leader. As a youth, he presided over a court peopled by thousands of servants, cooks, advisors, concubines, eunuchs, guards, and other attendants. He was abruptly deposed after World War II by the Communist Chinese and brainwashed for years in one of Mao’s notorious “re-education camps.” Puyi ended as a nondescript gardener babbling Maoist aphorisms, a symbol of China’s decadent past.
The ex-emperor would have difficulty adjusting to most of contemporary North America. But in Regina, Saskatchewan he would feel right at home.

h/t Frank

I, Napoleon

Bill 89.

…imagine my or your 8 year old announces they are the opposite gender. Is it far fetched to suggest that anything short of my full and complete concurrence, support, and celebration of this declaration by my 8 year old, could be construed abuse….really, that’s where we are at in Ontario today?

Pretty much.
(h/t Bill)

Navigation