Friday's HOT MIC

Here is the last HOT MIC of 2017!

Hamas prevents aid from reaching Gaza.

Israel is trying to maintain the flow of basic foodstuffs into the Gaza Strip, where more than 1 million Palestinians are dependent on aid, the government said. Rockets fired by Hamas have impeded that vital humanitarian mission, however.

Reuters reports:




The violence has lasted for seven days.



In relatively normal times about 130 truckloads of aid -- mainly bulk staples -- go through the Kerem Shalom crossing daily.

Hamas did not return Reuters' request for comment.

You've gotta feel for the State Department tech experts who had to go through that hard drive with a fine tooth comb.

A friendly reminder from the PJM 2014 vault:

Your IT guy knows a lot more about you than you think (or may be comfortable with). If you take your computer to him for repairs, he's likely going to spend hours and hours cleaning unnecessary garbage off of your system. That means he could possibly stumble across things you might not want anyone to see, like the hundreds of thousands of porn images you thought you deleted but were still on your hard drive or the 200 selfies you took in your bathroom mirror. Or, God help you, if you're doing something illegal and harming someone, your tech guy could feel morally compelled to contact the authorities. The NSA may have your metadata, but your IT guy knows what you did last summer.

Read the rest here: 10 Secrets Your IT Guy Won't Tell You



I caught this episode of "The Profit' on CNBC last night. Fascinating:

I think they sugarcoated the lives of Cuban citizens a bit, but the show did expose the difficulty of starting and expanding a business there. One recurring theme was that Cubans were adamant about not discussing finances. While that may just be the result of a cultural distaste for avoiding such topics, I suspect it had more to do with their fear of government reprisals if the success of their private enterprises were to reflect badly on the failed communist economy.

What say you, dear readers?

You knew this was coming:

From the article, which manages to combine the Times's twin bugbears of Trump and "climate change" in one neat, year-ending package:

Indeed, parts of the East Coast are bracing for record-breaking New Year’s Eve temperatures. New York City is forecast to experience its coldest New Year’s temperatures since the 1960s. But Mr. Trump’s tweet made the common mistake of looking at local weather and making broader assumptions about the climate at large.



Not only are they stupid, they're pedantically stupid. It never seems to occur to the Left that one of the things we most loathe about them is their unctuous, smug, hectoring sense of superiority.