The way things are going, the gun industry might need to develop its own financial infrastructure. That won't be easy. But the thing is, once you've done it? You're free, and they have no hold on you any more.

If he did, as claimed here, putting him in charge of the National Rifle Association may be a big mistake. On the other hand, people do change their minds. This is the sort of thing it's good to know about before holding a vote.

Now that he has the position, we'll have to wait and see, I suppose.

American Thinker details the payments and the timing.

Instapundit

The German team copied the NASA experiment exactly, piping microwaves into the cavity, using lasers to monitor movement and a spring to measure thrust. The setup did indeed produce thrust, as indicated by the spring. But when the researchers positioned the microwaves so they definitely could ­not produce thrust in the direction of the spring, the drive pushed just as hard. Furthermore, the same degree of thrust remained even after power was cut in half. So clearly, there are other factors at play.

The team suggests that the thrust may actually be produced by an interaction between the cables that power the microwave amplifier and Earth’s magnetic field. If this is the case, it won’t work in space.

This doesn't read like a failure to replicate to me. It seems more like they did replicate the effect, but don't think it's caused by the experimental inputs, and propose an alternative hypothesis. Previous experiments reported the odd behavior with power levels and direction. The only thing new about this experiment (aside from yet another location replicating the basic results) is that they have a new possible explanation for why it does what it does.

Fair enough. If they are right, we understand it a bit more, and it won't work in space. But I'd like to see more experiments conducted to verify their explanation. Because, to borrow a phrase, it still moves.

News 9

A mother and daughter were shot Thursday night at a popular restaurant on Lake Hefner in northwest Oklahoma City, police said.

The shooting occurred at Louie’s Grill & Bar at 9401 Lake Hefner Parkway around 6:30 p.m.

According to Captain Bo Mathews with the Oklahoma City Police Department, the suspect described as an 18 to 20-year-old white male entered the restaurant and opened fire.

Capt. Mathews says when the suspect exited the restaurant, he was confronted by a citizen who took out his own firearm, shooting and killing the suspect.

Want to stop school shootings? Put a few of these in every school.

UPDATE: Some reports are saying two armed citizens!

Daily Caller

Page told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Halper rolled his eyes during an encounter in late Summer 2016 when a letter that then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent to then-FBI Director James Comey was brought up in conversation. Reid accused Page in the letter of possibly being a Russian agent.

Remember, the FBI doesn't need to actually prosecute the person they put surveillance on. All they need to do is convince a court he might be a Russian agent, and then tell him to get in contact with the people (or someone close to the people) they want to listen to. And the FBI has used Page as an informant before. If they don't mention that to the court, they can use his associations with Russians to suggest he should be spied on. And he then becomes a walking wiretap without even the need to wear a physical wire. If you want to listen to someone's phone calls, just have your patsy Page give their secretary a call. The two-hop rule means you can then evesdrop on the principal.

American Thinker

Again, the name is Stefan Halper, who, as I wrote here last week, was paid a substantial sum by the Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment.

If it was for this work – and it suspiciously looks like it because the payments were made in July and September of 2016 when he was weaseling his way into the campaign – then we know we have the DNI, CIA, DOJ, FBI, Dept. of State and the Defense Department working for Hillary's election and to smear and create a basis for further spying on Trump and his campaign.

That adds the DNI to the list of confirmed agencies involved. And it means that there is going to be a paper trail at the other agencies. How did they justify paying him? What was the work product? Was it accurate, or fraudulent? Who at the CIA (besides, obviously, the person at the top) was involved? Who at the State Department authorized this?

The list of people to question about this just got a lot longer.

The Land Down Under demonstrates what you get from gun control.

James "The Weasel" Comey on Twitter

Facts matter. The FBI’s use of Confidential Human Sources (the actual term) is tightly regulated and essential to protecting the country. Attacks on the FBI and lying about its work will do lasting damage to our country. How will Republicans explain this to their grandchildren?

I figure it will go something like this:

"Not so long ago, and not so far away, the Democrats -- some of whom are still alive in prison to this day! -- used the intelligence agencies of the United States in a coup attempt against the legitimately elected President Trump. The agencies involved were the FBI, CIA, NSA, DOJ, and many others. I can see you are puzzled, you don't recognize those names from your civics class? Those agencies are no longer around today; they were disbanded, their buildings demolished, and the earth upon which they had stood was salted, so that nothing would ever grow from their poisoned trees again..."

Guns.com

A 70-year-old Vietnam War veteran recently spoke with reporters about an incident earlier this year in which six of his guns were confiscated by authorities in Taberg, New York, after he was incorrectly flagged as “mentally defective.”

“I was guilty until I could prove myself innocent,” Don Hall told The Post Standard. “They don’t tell you why or what you supposedly did.”

Hall called the ordeal “a bad screw-up.”

After several months, Hall finally got back his guns, but not before a great deal of legal battles and red tape that left him feeling frustrated.

Mistakes happen. Police are notoriously unwilling to give people their guns back after a mistake.

Investors Business Daily

More troubling are Halper's extensive intelligence links. As a dual U.S.-British citizen and his close ties to both British and U.S. intelligence, did he task British assets to spy on Trump?

Was Britain's government a party to this? Did it know about Crossfire Hurricane? Or that Halper was spying on the Trump campaign? If so, it would not be the act of an ally.

We already know British intelligence was involved to some degree, without having any details. We know the head of one of their intelligence agencies resigned shortly after Trump's election, after only a few months on the job. It would be too much of a coincidence for that to not be related.

The House Intel committee is now investigating former SecState Kerry's role in the dossier. Were any of Obama's cabinet officials not involved?

Judicial Watch

Before resigning to run for Congress, the mayor of America’s fifth-largest city gave a political open-borders ally millions of taxpayer dollars to complete a job in an area it suspiciously has zero experience in. Under the shady deal, the radical La Raza group Promise Arizona (PAZ) will receive $2.4 million from the city of Phoenix to conduct “Business Assistance” during construction of a light rail extension. Some Phoenix City Hall insiders believe it’s a payoff by the outgoing mayor, Greg Stanton, to support his upcoming congressional run.

$2.4 million to a racial grievance group ("La Raza" = "The Race") for "business assistance" on a construction project? Yeah, it's a payoff.

But he's only the chief. He's appointed by politicians. Has anyone asked the Indians?

Conservative Treehouse

For those who don’t read it, a quick summary would be: We don’t actually have control over how this massive amount of meta-data is being used, searched, queried, and how the information within it is being filtered, minimized or extracted.

The NSA is essentially admitting to being overwhelmed with the scale of the data being collected, and they are similarly overwhelmed by the number of people who have access to this data....

In short: There’s a ton of activity that we know is taking place that is not supposed to be happening; and we really don’t know the full scale of the abuse we know to be happening -but can’t get our arms around- because, well, there’s just so damn much of it.

This is the problem with having massive government agencies that collect everything. Once they've got it, they can't keep it safe, and privacy is inevitably violated.

This is why the 4th Amendment should be read to mandate that they do not get access to it, at all, until they specifically go to a court and get specific permission for a specific person based on specific probable cause of a crime.

If he's right, it's not the first time Halper engaged in a little election meddling on both sides. And there are some very large payments from government accounts to him. It looks very much like the intelligence community is for hire and willingly takes money to help decide elections. That's a bigger scandal than even I expected.

Yes, elections. He apparently has close ties to the Bush family, which has surprisingly amiable relations with the Clintons. There are indications he meddled in the Reagan-Carter race, in the other direction, perhaps explained by his connection to the Bushes (George Bush Sr was Reagan's VP candidate). And if he'll do it twice, why wouldn't he or others do it much more often than that?

The claims from the intelligence community that revealing his name would jeopardize his life seems absurd and self-serving. Unless, you know, they think someone would object to him fixing elections for the intelligence community rather violently.

Daily Express

HOODED gunmen have opened fire with automatic rifles, kalachnikovs, in Marseille, in south France – with one person reportedly injured.
The men opened fire on a group of young people not far from the cultural space known as ‘La Busserine’, local media Corse-Matin reports.
Three vehicles with the masked individuals arrived in the city’s district of Busserine at 5pm local time, France’s ACTU17 said.
As police arrived on the scene they were blocked by some of the suspects in a Renault Megane, France Bleu reports.
There was then a shoot-out with police before the attackers fled the scene.
At this time it is unclear if any arrests have been made, but police are investigating and a cordon has been set up.
Investigators have so far found 9mm and 7.62 shells at the scene which correspond to Kalashnikov bullets
…
Mr Reynaud also ruled out terrorism as a motive, adding the shooting probably was drug-related.

They ruled out terrorism as a motive already? Smells like bullshit to me. Not to mention media censorship; have there been any reports in major US media about this attack? No?

Oh, and remind me again how this doesn't happen in the Europe?

And note how these are "automatic" rifles, not semiautomatic. That's the full military scary version that the gun control crowd likes to imply are heavily used in the United States. They aren't, but terrorists can get them even in gun control friendly Europe.

None of these companies can be trusted to remain neutral arbiters of speech. The early success of the Internet was based on the use of open protocols that allowed many sites and systems to communicate via the agreed-upon standards like HTML and HTTP. What we have now are huge walled islands controlled by large companies with distinct political biases.

Since when are these scouting organizations supposed to be political?

Lifezette

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was hoping his Republican colleagues would be embarrassed by their vote to jack up federal spending earlier this year and support his plan to phase in a balanced budget. Few were.

Paul got 20 other Republican senators on Thursday — less than half of the Senate GOP caucus — to vote for his “penny plan,” which would balance the federal budget over five years by cutting spending except for Social Security by 1 percent every year. No Democrats back the proposal.

Both of my state's Senators voted for Paul's plan.

Since Cornyn is in leadership, his vote is bullshit; he could control spending himself if he chose to.

Esquire

Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I now actually do want to take your guns.

All of your guns.

Right now.

So, Dave, you've got your bloody shirt and you're waving it around trying to stir people up to come to my home and my family's homes and my friend's homes to take our guns. We have a saying that's apropos to this situation, just so you know, but before we get to that, I have a question for you.

There are millions of peaceful, law-abiding gun owners in America.

How many of us are you willing to kill to get our guns?

Will you stop at murdering ten times the number of people who die in school shootings?

Will you stop at one hundred times that number? One thousand times?

If you kill one million gun owners for every student who died in a school shooting this year, you'll still have millions of formerly peaceful, law-abiding gun owners left over who will not be very happy with you. And the blood of their friends, their family, their children, their parents... all of it will be on your hands, Dave, because you said you were going to come and take our guns, right now. You're not going to wait to change the law or allow for due process, so when we respond, it will be self-defense against felony home invasion and theft.

At least, I assume you meant you, personally, right? You'll be on the front lines going door to door, right? Taking the risk yourself?

Oh, and while you're on the front lines to confiscate guns from peaceful, law-abiding Americans, will you be threatening them with a gun?

Oh, you say you won't be doing it personally? You'll send the police? Well, Dave, fuck you anyway.

Molon Labe, bitch.

Sebastian seems to agree. So does Saysuncle.

UPDATE: He added a followup article, in which he claims his original article was "moderate" and that he just wants to "compromise". Sorry, no. We've compromised how many times over the past few decades? And every time you want something more as soon as the next inevitable tragedy rolls around. So, no. No more one-sided compromise. If you want something, at least consider giving us something we want in return. Because taking half of what we have left isn't compromise just because you left of half of what we started with.

Nunes seems to think so. They've already tried to sideline him once with a BS ethics investigation.

Law and Crime

In light of new reporting on the leaks of Michael Cohen‘s bank records, there are several indications, in my opinion, that the law enforcement official who came forward may have been paranoid about the threat Donald Trump and his associates represent when they expressed concern to the New Yorker about “missing” suspicious activity reports (SAR) and a possible cover-up.

NBC News reporter Tom Winter, who by his own admission got it wrong recently on a story about Cohen being wiretapped before the feds raided his home, office and hotel room, said that an official familiar with the workings of U.S. Department of the Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said that the SARs the source described as “missing” are actually just “unavailable for viewing.”

It sounds like there are reporters out there who know the identity of the source who leaked those records. Find them and prosecute them. This bullshit has to stop.

Breitbart

A new report suggests an imminent Inspector General (IG) report may rule that FBI and Justice Department officials broke the law in their handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Investigative reporter Paul Sperry said Thursday that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has “found ‘reasonable grounds’ for believing there has been a violation of federal criminal law in the FBI/DOJ’s handling of the Clinton investigation/s,” adding that the top watchdog official has “referred his findings of potential criminal misconduct to Huber for possible criminal prosecution.”

If it's just one, we're probably looking at McCabe, for interfering and delaying before finally recusing himself after taking a huge payoff in campaign cash for his wife.

Another report says no criminal referrals. Not sure who I believe there. I would hope it's as simple as the decision hasn't been made yet. The final version is still outstanding.

President Trump

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein asked the Department of Justice Inspector General to review the matter.

Trump is also demanding the FBI and DOJ release the documents requested by Congress.

President Trump

If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal. Only the release or review of documents that the House Intelligence Committee (also, Senate Judiciary) is asking for can give the conclusive answers. Drain the Swamp!

And it looks like there will be an order to DOJ/FBI to release the documents to Congressional oversight, too. Personally, at this point, I'm curious who was making the decision to try to keep those documents held back, because it seems likely they have a vastly personal stake in hiding what those documents contain.

Yale scientists have brought a pig's brain back to life.