Thursday, February 15, 2018

Miss Cellania's Links

Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy. It wasn't a typical Jerry Lewis movie, but it worked.

Making Artificial Earthquakes with a Four-Ton Steel Ball. Get out of the way when it's dropped in the name of science!

The Mysterious Murder Case That's Captivated Iceland for Nearly 200 Years.

Why a simple, lifesaving rabies shot can cost $10,000 in America.

These Gender-Nonconforming People Are Building a Safe Haven on an Appalachian Farm. (via The Week)

The Incinerator House. Artist Ron Fleming turned an abandoned industrial structure into a home and a work of art. (Thanks, hearsetrax!)

Why Adam Rippon Didn’t Win. He finished behind two competitors who fell because of the complicated math of figure skating.

Was Young Luke Skywalker a Selfless Hero or a Freeloader? Luke took advantage of the Rebel Alliance in using an X-wing or two as his personal vehicle, but a commenter refutes that argument in style.

How Many Calories Winter Olympians Consume. The events of the Winter Games vary widely in how much energy they require.

Over 130 Top White House Officials Didn't Have Full Security Clearance. And they thought a private email server was risky. 

4 comments:

gwdMaine said...

Hmmm. 130 people out of approximately 2,000 in policy
making positions? In 1975 it took around 10 months for
my White House TS/SCI clearance to process. And I was
just 17 years old with not much of a history to research.
And I had already received a basic TS clearance because
of the job I was in. Fast forward 40 years and I imagine
things are a bit slower. And I suspect the overwhelming
majority are adults with no prior service in a position
that required a clearance; so you're starting from scratch.
One of the drawbacks of what happens when you bring
business people in to run government.

This is just another example of running with anything
negative about the current Administration and blowing it
completely out of proportion.

And the e-mail server? When the Secretary of State, who
has more access to stuff then any of the 130 people in
the article, uses a private system to conduct government
business - and that system was most certainly compromised
by one or more foreign governments whose interests are
hostile to those of the U.S.; that's a big deal. A really
big deal.

Miss Cellania said...

For at least some of these people, it's not that the clearance is "incomplete," it's that the FBI has completed their process and won't grant security clearance. The president can override that. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/porter-security-clearance/553214/ No one is about to tell us which people those are.

xoxoxoBruce said...

" The FBI expressly says that there’s no proof that any attempted hack on Hillary Clinton’s personal email account was successful."

https://www.vox.com/2016/9/6/12774948/fbi-hillary-clinton-report

gwdMaine said...

Yeah, well, the FBI had no choice and said what it had to. So
now we're in the realm of conspiracy theories and proving this
or that. There's plenty of intelligent and unbiased writing
available that will make a case for or against. I'm not going
there, but having lived the life, the best I can say is that
various organizations within the Government are treating
everything found on that server as compromised. And again -
that's a big deal.

Pretty much everyone involved will have to be dead for a
number of years before the whole truth comes out; if it ever
does.