Categories
Political

Hillary Clinton: You’ve got Mail

update

And then there’s this.

Earlier

There was a great deal of noise about the State Department’s release of Hillary Clinton emails yesterday, including the fact that 22 were kept back because they’re now deemed “Top Secret”.The timing couldn’t be worse because of the Iowa caucus on Monday, but in defense of the State Department, much of that is because of a schedule demanded by the Judge presiding over the FOIA request.

I find it unlikely this will have an impact on Clinton’s chances. One day later, the story has dropped from the headlines, probably because there’s been so many email releases, so many exclamations about “confidential information”, yet most of the “confidential” information has been so much ado about nothing.

As an example of that faux confidentiality, the Daily Caller posted an article yesterday about four emails that, rather than undermining Clinton’s credibility, actually provides some of the best evidence supporting Clinton’s claims that she never divulged classified or secret information. In its article, Four Sid Blumenthal Emails in Latest Clinton Release are COMPLETELY Classified, they breathlessly write.

The email is redacted in full, save for the names “Hillary” and “Sid.” The emails are classified as confidential and redacted in full because they contain foreign government information and information related to foreign relations and foreign activities.

When we look at the emails, what we find in each is that Blumenthal sent information to Clinton’s attention. Unless Blumenthal had a higher security clearance than Clinton, we can assume that Blumenthal discovered whatever information he found using either his own sources, or various publications of the day, and he then passed the information on to Clinton.

At no time, did Clinton respond with information back. In fact, other than forwarding a couple of the emails, her only response was to ask a State Department employee when a 100 meters finale was going to be.

I decided to take a look through the other released emails. What I discovered is a) Clinton doesn’t communicate much via email, and b) she really doesn’t know email etiquette. Frequently, someone would send her an email and CC Jacob Sullivan, in the State Department. Clinton would get the email, and then forward it on to Sullivan.

Even more humorous, many of the so-called “classified” emails Clinton received, were sent by the very departments who, I suspect, newly classified them in the recent releases.

In his writing for Politico Magazine, Matthew Miller, a former Department of Justice official, writes:

As a former Department of Justice official who regularly dealt with classified information, I am glad a team of officials from the FBI, the intelligence community and other agencies is not currently reviewing every email I sent and received while I worked in government. If they did, they would likely find arguably classified information that was transmitted over unclassified networks—and the same thing is undoubtedly true for other senior officials at the White House, the State Department and other top national security agencies.

The same would probably be true for most, if not all, of Congress.  I suspect many of our tweets on Twitter, and posts on Facebook, would also fail the intelligence community‘s interpretation of what is classified, secret, and even top-secret.

Yesterday’s top story on the emails has died out today, because you can’t keep crying “wolf” without people demanding  to see some actual teeth, and this story is toothless.

Now, let’s get back to discussing the issues.

Photo by Sam Javanrouth, used under CC License, modified by cropping

Categories
Technology

Smart Home, Older House, Cold House

Update:

Several publications have come out today, including one from the New York Times, about a software update being responsible for the battery drain. That’s one bad bug, and Nest is going to take a major credibility hit because of it.

We also had problems with our Nest Protects (smoke/carbon monoxide detection) a few weeks prior, with none of them being able to access the cloud. However, they work without wireless access, including the ability to connect and communicate with each other, so it was more of a nuisance than a problem. I do wonder, though, if the same bug didn’t get introduced into all Nest products.

In the meantime, adding a C wire didn’t work for us. It would have required too many holes being drilled, and damage to floor and wall. We’re going with the add-a-wire feature, instead.

Earlier:

Our home was built in 1986, which means it’s on the border between modern, new standards and the old way of doing things.

When we tried to add new GE smart light switches, we found that most of the switches don’t have a neutral wire needed to power the switches. The old, unintelligent switches didn’t need power—they’re just on or off. The new ones, need power to communicate with the controlling hub and other compatible devices.

The same applies to our thermostat: we don’t have a ‘C’ or common wire that runs from the heating/cooling system to the thermostat.

We have a second generation Nest thermostat, and not having a ‘C’ wire is supposed to not be an issue with this thermostat—at least with most HVAC systems. The device gets its power from the “red” wire (the power line) by “power stealing” a little bit of the power that comes through the line. The problem with this approach is if the system is very active, the device doesn’t have a chance to charge the battery as frequently and you can lose thermostat functionality, or even drain the battery.

The other issue is if the HVAC equipment isn’t running, at all, and the device needs power. What the Nest thermostat does is “pulse” the equipment to get a bit of juice, but supposedly very quickly, so that the equipment doesn’t come on. If this doesn’t sound like something you would want to do,  you’ll get agreement from many HVAC manufacturers.

Then there’s the situation that happened last night. It was very cold, so the system was running intermittently  through the night. In addition, I suspect from chatter in the Nest forum, the thermostat received a software update in the night. I also suspect that the software update drained what little power the battery had, to the point where I was faced with a completely black device this morning. I couldn’t even run it manually.

When the temperatures are below freezing, you don’t want a thermostat that doesn’t work. At this point, you’d settle for a dumb thermostat, as long as it turns on the heat.

I knew I could power the device using a micro-USB cord, connected to my computer. I connected it for about a half hour, charging the battery enough that I could connect it to the wall plate and turn on the heat. Of course, while the heat is running, the device isn’t charging, but it should have enough juice to take the chill edge off the house.

If we weren’t at home, I’m not sure if the device would have even been able to start charging without my assistance. Normally, the Nest thermostat shows a blinking red light when the battery is very low and charging, but it wasn’t showing this light this morning. It was completely drained.  We could have come home to frozen pipes and damaged walls.

Assurances from Nest aside, it’s time to update our wiring. We have a couple of options. One is we could attach a Venstar Add-a-Wire Adapter, which turns a 4-wire setup into the 5-wire setup needed for smart thermostats. Or we can run a ‘C’ wire from the HVAC to the thermostat. Though the latter approach is more expensive, we decided if we were going to fix the problem, we’d do so without a hack and we’d fix it once and for all.

Tomorrow morning our HVAC company is coming out to run the new ‘C’ wire to the thermostat, and hopefully we’ll never again wake up to a freezing cold house. If we do, than the Nest thermostat is being replaced by an Ecobee.

 

Categories
Environment Legal, Laws, and Regs Political

Cato: Neither the Bundys Nor the Hammonds are Poster Children for Land Use

During a Twitter exchange with Jonathan Wood, from the Pacific Legal Foundation, Jonathan sent me a link to a Cato Institute article on the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.  The Cato article condemns the Bundy actions, even as it deplores what it views as an overly harsh penalty for the ranchers (Dwight and Steven Hammond) at the center of the dispute.

The article notes that neither the Bundys nor the Hammonds are exactly poster children for the land use movement:

Property rights advocates who want to change public views need to find ranchers more appealing than the Bundys, who want to overgraze other people’s land without paying for the right to do so, or the Hammonds, whose unauthorized fire on federal lands threatened firefighters’ lives. Without better representatives–preferably ones willing to pay their own way and not rely on taxpayer subsidies–they won’t be able to capture the hearts and minds of the American people, which means the future of ranchers who depend on federal lands is dim.

The article also mentions Section 8 of the Constitution, which property and states rights people continually use to demand that the federal government turn over land to state control.

I can agree with the author, Randal O’Toole in his assessment of the Bundys and Hammonds, but disagree with him about the severity of the punishment the Hammonds received. And I disagree with his reference to Section 8, without mentioning the Property Clause, which does give the government right to own land:

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.

However, even without mentioning the Property Clause, O’Toole does note that the only way to battle federal land ownership is via Congressional action:

The Supreme Court has heard hundreds of cases involving federal land and has never ruled that the Constitution does not allow the federal government to own land in the West. So any battle against federal ownership would have to be fought politically, not in the courts.

Supreme Court decisions have upheld the federal government’s right to own and maintain land, until and unless, Congress revokes this right. And even attempts by President Reagan to sell off all federal land failed. Why? As a Washington Post article notes, private ownership of the land didn’t suit ranchers because they would lose the free ride they’ve had from the government. In addition, environmentalists rose in one body to demand the government stop its actions. And it wasn’t just environmentalists who were alarmed: something about paving over Yellowstone, and putting McDs in the Grand Canyon just doesn’t quite suit the majority of people in this country.

Returning to O’Toole’s criticism of the sentence the Hammonds received,  was the punishment unjust?

It’s unfortunate that the law the Hammonds were charged under is named The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, because everyone focused on “terrorism” in defense of the Hammonds. The Hammonds aren’t terrorists, the critics scoffed.

Of course they aren’t terrorists. To call them terrorists is to lessen acts such as the recent shootings in California and Paris. But the Hammonds were tried and convicted, by a jury of their peers, for the following:

Whoever maliciously damages or destroys, or attempts to damage or destroy, by means of fire or an explosive, any building, vehicle, or other personal or real property in whole or in part owned or possessed by, or leased to, the United States, or any department or agency thereof, or any institution or organization receiving Federal financial assistance, shall be imprisoned for not less than 5 years and not more than 20 years, fined under this title, or both.

Dwight and Steven Hammond were convicted of deliberately setting a fire on federal land in 2001 that burned 139 acres. In addition, Steven Hammond was convicted of setting fire to federal land in 2006. They both claimed to be burning invasive species, or in the latter fire, protecting a crop of winter wheat. However, it was not their call to make—not only to set fire to federal land, but to their neighbor’s land, when the fire spread; particularly when it comes to a wildlife refuge, where incorrectly set fires could prove detrimental to not individual birds, but an entire species if endangered birds are threatened.

In addition, the 2001 fire was created not to burn invasive species, as the Hammonds imply, but to cover up an illegal deer hunt, according to a relative of the Hammonds who testified against them. They also endangered a three-person fire crew during the 2006 fire, almost trapping them behind a fire line. All of the Hammond fires, not just the two related to the criminal case, ended up costing the government over $600,000. The government sued the pair after the fires, and was able to recover $200,000, but we tax payers ended up footing the bill for the rest. The Oregonian noted the Hammonds paid $200,000 in 2014, and the rest, recently. That still leaves at least $200,000, or more, firefighting costs and damages to the tax payers.

The judge who originally sentenced them claimed that the mandatory five year sentence shouldn’t apply, because the fire was a “wilderness” fire, and in his opinion, that wasn’t what Congress intended for this law. However, I think we’ve all seen enough of “wilderness” fires this last year to know they are deadly, they are dangerous, they destroy homes, pets, people…they can even destroy entire towns. The appeals courts, rightfully, dismissed the unlawful sentencing and imposed the five year minimum.

Here, we need not progress beyond the first step.
Congress has “broad authority” to determine the appropriate
sentence for a crime and may justifiably consider arson,
regardless of where it occurs, to be a serious crime. Solem v.
Helm, 463 U.S. 277, 290 (1983). Even a fire in a remote area
has the potential to spread to more populated areas, threaten
local property and residents, or endanger the firefighters
called to battle the blaze. The September 2001 fire here,
which nearly burned a teenager and damaged grazing land,
illustrates this very point.
Given the seriousness of arson, a five-year sentence is not
grossly disproportionate to the offense.

This wasn’t the Hammonds’ first act of arrogant disregard for the welfare or concerns of others, either. When FWS attempted to build a fence to keep the Hammonds’ cattle out of the Refuge land around a watering spot, Steven Hammond parked a 25-ton Caterpillar earth mover on the fence line and refused to move it. Not only refused to move it, forcibly dropped the earth mover’s shovel near one of the federal employees in an act of intimidation.

The Hammonds were arrested for their actions,  but pressure from land-use groups, and Representative Wes Cooley, most likely kept them from being prosecuted.

arrest photo of Dwight Hammond

Cooley would later testify in a budget hearing for the Fish & Wildlife Service that the Hammonds had a successful injunction against the FWS, which would then allow them access to the land, but I can find no record in PACER to corroborate this statement. However, I did find an agreement between the Hammonds and various other organizations, including FWS, related to water rights in the region. This agreement did not specify that the Hammonds had the right to drive their cattle into the FWS land, only that they may divert water during the spring to another reservoir.

The Hammonds also refused to allow federal firefighting crews access to their land so they could fight fires, and tried to get the local Sheriff to arrest the crew for doing so.

As part of the sentencing deal the Hammonds made with the government, they agreed to give FWS first rights to purchase a parcel of Hammond property, but only if the Hammonds had to sell it in order to pay their fines. The Hammonds were able to pay their fines without selling the land, so the new adherence to the minimum sentence had nothing to do with a government attempt to get the Hammond land, contrary to what the land-use fanatics are proclaiming.

Misdirection and misinformation is a hallmark of any of the activities associated with the Hammonds. It is difficult to find the truth, among all the misrepresentations. Enforcing laws against people like the Hammonds isn’t all peaches and cream, either. In the article, Peril in the West: Enforcing Environment Laws Gets Scary, the author begins with:

Someone has threatened to kill Forrest Cameron, and to harm his wife and children.

Cameron, the manager of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, knows who threatened to kill him, and why. He doesn’t know who called his home in Princeton, Ore., to harass his wife and daughters. But he assumes it’s for the same reason he says Dwight Hammond threatened to shoot him: because Cameron was enforcing the law.

At least Hammond is consistent, he also threatened refuge managers in 1986 and 1988. No, I don’t find a sentence of five years to be disproportionate, at all.

As for Bundy boys, rather than piss in their own pond, they went to Oregon to piss in someone else’s. And that’s the least negative thing I can say about them.

Photo compilation:

Photos of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
Sandhill Crane: Roger Baker, USFWS
Mule Deer: Barbara Wheeler, USFWS
Prescribed Burn: Carla Burnside, USFWS
Owl: Jim Maloney, USFWS

Arrest photo of Dwight Hammond from article about the arrest in the Burns Times-Herald, August 10, 1994.