More Benghazi

• Obama Didn't Convene Terrorism Response Task Force During Attack - Ace
• 'Troubling' Surveillance Before Benghazi Attack - Harald Doornbos, Jenan Moussa
• Documents found in Benghazi consulate claimed “troubling” surveillance by Libyan guards; Update: Obama not participating in investigation; Report: State never requested military back-up during attack - Allahpundit
• Sources: Key task force not convened during Benghazi consulate attack - Sharyl Attkisson
• Report: Key task force not convened during Benghazi attack - Paul Mirengoff
• Scandal Deepens With New Benghazi Documents: At a Minimum, Hillary Clinton Must Go - John Hinderaker
• The facts about Benghazi are known; the only thing that remains is to disclose them - Paul Mirengoff 
• So What Were The Assets Available For Benghazi? - Herschel Smith 
• The Benghazi Terror Attack: Hard Facts and Fair Questions - Austin Bay
• What Did He Know and When Did He Know It? The Shadow Knows… - Michael Ledeen

A Theory on Bengazi

A lightly defended consulate in flames, an ambassador and three security personnel dead, orders to security personnel to "stand down", pleas for assistance ignored, bogus claims of video outrage, shifting story lines: What to make of it?

The Obama administration is obviously hiding something, but what? The possible answers to that question have boiled down to either (a) disloyalty or (b) stupidity. And while we continue to see some accusations of disloyalty, I frankly doubt it. Sure Barack Obama is a duplicitous leftist who would like to fundamentally transform America, and he would like to ratchet back the U.S. military in a major way, but disloyal? I don't think so. In order to pull off something like that he would have to con a lot of people around him; people like Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, CIA Director David Petraeus, Sec. of Defense Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He might be a decent con-artist when it comes to people who are willing to believe, but he's not that good.

So at this point I'm leaning toward an explanation that boils down to stupidity. But it isn't the low-IQ kind of stupidity, it's this kind of stupidity:

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/81895_Page2.html

The Benghazi Narrative

• Questions for White House Over Benghazi Just Beginning - Bob Owens
• Early briefings on Libya strike focused on Al Qaeda, before story changed - Catherine Herridge
• Ten Questions for the White House - William Kristol
• Benghazi: A Reader Assesses the Evidence - John Hinderaker
• First, Aid the Living - Bing West
• AC-130U Gunship was On-Scene in Benghazi, Obama Admin Refused to Let It Fire - Bob Owens
• EXCLUSIVE: CIA operators were denied request for help during Benghazi attack, sources say - Jennifer Griffin
• Podcast: Kristol on Benghazi - Hosted by Michael Graham
• Mark Steyn: Benghazi bungle requires act of urgent political hygiene - Mark Steyn
• White House told of militant claim two hours after Libya attack: emails - Mark Hosenball
• A South Park Flashback - Scott Johnson
• Benghazi, cont’d - Scott Johnson
• Krauthammer: Obama Contradicting Himself - Fox News
• Tracking the administration's changing narrative on Benghazi - Fox News
• What Happened In Benghazi - John Hinderaker

VP Debate Fallout

Dr. Strangelaugh - James Taranto

"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength," the longshoreman cum philosopher Eric Hoffer once observed. Hoffer died in 1983, so he probably wasn't referring specifically to Joe Biden's performance in last night's debate. Still, the observation is fitting.

More on Eric Hoffer:

• The Legacy of Eric Hoffer - Thomas Sowell
• Eric Hoffer Books

The Russian Diamond Mine

Russia reveals shiny state secret: It's awash in diamonds - Fred Weir

Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing "trillions of carats," enough to supply global markets for another 3,000 years.

The Soviets discovered the bonanza back in the 1970s beneath a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem.

They decided to keep it secret, and not to exploit it, apparently because the USSR's huge diamond operations at Mirny, in Yakutia, were already producing immense profits in what was then a tightly controlled world market.

D-Wave Systems

The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing - Tom Simonite

The processor in every computer you've used is made from silicon and patterned with transistors that create logic gates—switches that are either on (represented by a 1 in the computer's programming) or off (a 0).  D-Wave's processors are also made up of elements that switch between 1 and 0, but they are loops of niobium alloy—there are 512 of them in the newest processor. These loops are known as qubits and can trap electrical current, which circles inside the loops either clockwise (signified by a 0) or counterclockwise (1). Smaller superconducting loops called couplers link the qubits so they can interact and even influence one another to flip between 1 and 0.

This delicate setup is designed so that the layout of qubits conforms to an algorithm that solves a particular kind of optimization problem at the core of many tasks difficult to solve on a conventional processor. It's like a specialized machine in a factory able to do one thing really well, on a particular kind of raw material. Performing a calculation on D-Wave's chip requires providing that raw material, in the form of the numbers to be fed into its hard-coded algorithm. It's done by setting the qubits into a pattern of 1s and 0s, and fine-tuning how the couplers allow the qubits to interact. After a wait of less than a second, the qubits settle into new values that represent a lower state of energy for the processor, and reveal a potential solution to the original problem.

What happens during that crucial wait is a kind of quantum mechanical argument. The qubits enter a strange quantum state where they are simultaneously both 1 and 0, like Schrodinger's cat being both dead and alive, and lock into a strange synchronicity known as entanglement, a phenomenon once described by Einstein as "spooky." That allows the system of qubits to explore every possible final configuration in an instant, before settling into on the one that is simplest or very close to it.

At least, that's what D-Wave's scientists say. Many questions remain about what actually happens inside the company's chips, not least in the heads of the company's own physicists, engineers, and computer scientists.

Khan Academy

The Tech-Driven Teacher - Slate

When you hear Salman Khan’s story, it sounds like an Internet-age fairy tale, one that goes something like this. Once upon a time, a brainy MIT graduate working as a hedge-fund analyst started tutoring his cousin in math and science online. He decided to make YouTube videos of his tutorials. The videos racked up millions of views and reached audiences around the world, and appreciative students offered stirring testimonials. After three years, the hedge-fund analyst quit his day job to set up an educational nonprofit called The Khan Academy. The mission: provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere for free.

Debate Fallout

A Fantasy Election, an Imaginary Man - Andrew Klavan

The mystery Obama—the hollow receptacle of out-sized fantasies left and right—is not a creation of his own making, political chameleon though he may well be. It emanates instead from a journalistic community that no longer in any way fulfills its designated function, that no longer even attempts the fair presentation of facts and current events aimed at helping the American electorate make up its mind according to its own lights. Rather, left-wing outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and the like have now devoted themselves to fashioning an image of the world they think their audiences ought to believe in—that they may guide us toward voting as they think we should. They have fallen prey to that ideological corruption that sees lies as a kind of virtue, as a noble deception in service to a greater good.

The Real Debate: The Good Father vs. The Abandoned Son - Roger L. Simon

Now I admit I have been making my living most of my life as a novelist and a screenwriter, so I may be no more than “creating characters” here, but consider this:

What we have before us in these debates is an almost archetypal confrontation – between a man who was and is an exceptionally good father and a man who was deserted by his.

Good fathering is the story of Mitt Romney’s life. He has five sons who are, by all accounts, devoted to him and vice-versa. These boys grew up with a father who, although wealthy and successful, worked like a demon, doted on them, and apparently devoted an extraordinary amount of time to charitable work, in which he also involved them. Indeed, I’ve never heard of a politician who did anything quite like it.

Almost the polar opposite, Barack Obama’s father abandoned him twice and then ended up an irresponsible drunken victim of multiple car crashes. This sad behavior precipitated a search by Obama that brought him in contact with several father surrogates, notably Frank Marshall Davis and Jeremiah Wright, that it would be hard to brand as anywhere near satisfactory. (Davis was a pornographer and about Wright the less said the better.) No Mitt Romneys there.

If you think this is lost on Barack Obama when he stands opposite Romney, then you think the president is stupid, which he is obviously not. But it’s worse for him yet, because he is standing opposite a father who has worked harder, has more experience, and is more knowledgeable and charitable than he and he, on some level at least, must know it.

Not only that, most of what Mitt Romney has done, including graduating simultaneously from Harvard Law and Harvard Business, is an open book, while almost everything about Obama remains purposefully hidden. (He knows this too, obviously.) Obama lives in fear of exposure – and thus in fear of Romney who, although rich, is much more the self-made man of the two, the ultimate father figure.

The face-to-face clash of these two men is almost out of Greek drama. Obama must rage against or embrace the man who represents what he most dearly needed and never had.

The Taranto Principle - R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. (09/25/2008)

According to the Taranto Principle, the media's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans. According to Taranto, in 2004 the media quietly went along with Senator Jean-Francois Kerry's exaggerated claims to heroism and military prowess, thus encouraging his braggadocio and leaving him utterly unprepared when his fellow vets stepped forward and demonstrated that he had been a dreadful showoff in Vietnam.

...

Meanwhile the press continues to treat the inexperienced and gaffe-prone Senator Barack Obama as though he is the next JFK. Among the howlers is the presumption that he is an orator of great gifts as JFK was an orator of great gifts. In truth, the Prophet Obama suffers one of the strangest oratorical disabilities I have ever seen in a presidential candidate, to wit: his dependence on the teleprompter. We know of politicians who depend on the teleprompter for fluency. Senator Obama, however, relies on a teleprompter so that he will not be heard talking down to the electorate. If he is not lecturing with his nose in the air he is all uhhs and ahhs. Perhaps if he had served as mayor in a small town he would have gotten over this revealing disorder.

SECRET ROMNEY CHEAT SHEET REVEALED! MUST CREDIT MOE LANE! - Moe Lane

The New Yorker Cover - Ed Driscoll

The referenced cover is below, but click the above link and follow the additional links.

JOE BIDEN DEBATE PREPARATION - Day By Day via Sarah Hoyt and Instapundit

Comet Watch

C/2012 S1 comet heading toward Earth could outshine Moon in 2013 - JohnThomas Didymus

According to National Geographic, predictions of its orbital trajectory indicate that if it survives its close approach to the Sun, the comet will be brightest in the sky in November 28, 2013 as it moves away from the Sun. It will be visible during December after sunset and in the morning sky before sunrise. New Scientist reports that scientists at the Remanzacco Observatory say that by December 9 it should be about as bright as Polaris, the North Star, and should remain visible to the naked eye until mid-January 2014. According to Astronomy Now, the comet could become brighter than the full moon around its closest approach to the Sun.

Astronomers say that the orbit of C/2012 S1 is similar to that of the Great Comet of 1680, one of the brightest in history. Space.com reports that the Great Comet of 1680 was very bright in the sky and was visible even in daylight, throwing off a bright tail that spanned the western twilight sky. Some astronomers say that given the close orbital relationship between C/2012 S1 and the Great Comet of 1680, the objects may be the same.