As final voting in the 2016 US presidential election approaches, questions continue to swirl around Wikileaks and its release of an email archive copied from the personal files of John Podesta, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. It would be impossible, in the space of a single column, to fully consider the content and implications of those emails. There are, however, two relevant questions which those interested in the matter should carefully consider.

First, are the emails authentic and unaltered?

Clinton and her surrogates don’t want to answer that question. They stick to claiming that the mails haven’t been authenticated and hinting that they may have been altered.

The facts: Not all of the emails can be authenticated as to origin and content. But some can be, and some have been. As Bob Graham of Errata Security points out, many of the emails are digitally signed using the Domainkeys Identified Mail verification standard, which can be used to verify that email comes from the server it claims to come from and has not been modified since leaving that server. To date, no one has publicly demonstrated that the origin, or so much as a comma of the content, of any of the Podesta emails has been altered. So far as we can tell, they’re the genuine article.

Secondly, is the Podesta email hack an attempt by Vladimir Putin to affect the election?

Clinton, her campaign, and various media friends are working overtime to convince the public that the Russians are out to get her. In her final debate with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Clinton claimed that 17 US intelligence agencies say so. Fact-checking site Politifact confirms her claim … sort of.

Those 17 agencies (speaking as one through the Homeland Security Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence) don’t offer any EVIDENCE for their “confident” conclusion, just a broad claim that the email hacks “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian directed efforts.”

Could the Russian government be behind the leak? Sure.

Is there any particular reason to believe the Russian government is behind the leak? That comes down to who you find most credible.

The US intelligence community, which claims to know that the Russian government hacked John Podesta’s emails, has a record. That record includes missing the 9/11 hijackers and claiming that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons. Its claim on this matter should probably be taken with several grains of salt.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says that the Russian government is not linked to the Podesta emails. Assange and Wikileaks have a record, too. Ten years. Ten million documents released. Number of times caught faking or lying: Zero. Love them or hate them, Wikileaks has proven itself a reliable and believable source.

Conclusion: The emails are almost certainly authentic and unaltered, and the Russian government is probably not behind their disclosure. If your vote is going to be affected by the Podesta emails, it should hinge upon their content, not upon doubts as to their authenticity or provenance.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Wikileaks and the Podesta Emails: Two Things,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 11/03/16
• “Wikileaks and the Podesta Emails: Two Things,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 11/04/16
• “Wikileaks and the Podesta Emails: Two Things,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Santiago, Chile Times, 11/04/16
• “Wikileaks and the Podesta Emails: Two Things,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 11/07/16
• “Wikileaks and the Podesta Emails: Two Things,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sonoran News [Arizona], 11/07/16

I used to love Halloween. Not just as a kid, but also as an adult taking my own children out for church “trunk or treat” events and to selected neighborhood homes (we lived a few blocks from the house where the events The Exorcist was based on occurred; in fact, friends still live in that very house; spooky!). No store-bought costumes for my progeny — we spent weeks thinking about and designing and sewing and modifying theirs.

So much for that bygone era. These days I heave a sigh of relief when October 31 clicks over to November 1 and take a moment to mourn yet another holiday ruined by a bunch of sourpuss puritans with a grievance complex.

Piled on top of demands that all of us who haven’t received our perpetual victimhood certificates check our privilege and respect others’ pronouns and perhaps cough up reparations for things we didn’t do to people we didn’t do them to, comes now the burden of ensuring that our Halloween costumes include no elements drawn from societies (living or dead) for which we cannot produce personal affiliation credentials of some sort.

It’s not just a Halloween thing, of course. But Halloween seems to be ground zero for “cultural appropriation” butthurt.  Which I have to say pings the old irony meter in a big way: As philosophy professor Jason Brennan playfully points out at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, unless you’re of Irish extraction, celebrating Halloween (formerly Samhain) at all IS “cultural appropriation.”

News flash: Anything and everything you do, anything and everything you use, anything you have or own, originated in some culture, and for any given thing there’s a very good chance that said culture isn’t the one you call your own.

Every human being living in any modern society begins “culturally appropriating” when the alarm clock goes off in the morning and doesn’t stop doing so until the lights go out at bedtime. Actually, not even then (we don’t know who invented the bed, which has been around for at least 77,000 years, but chances are it came from a culture you have no affiliation with).

And that’s how it SHOULD be. Culture is not property. Copying is not stealing. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Instead of chewing each other out for it, we should learn from each other at every opportunity and celebrate when we create something others find worthy of adoption.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Halloween: Culture Isn’t Property — Copying Isn’t Stealing,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 11/01/16
• “Culture Isn’t Property. Copying Isn’t Stealing.” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 11/03/16
• “Culture Isn’t Property. Copying Isn’t Stealing.” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 11/04/16

CNN reports that protesters from around the world continue to congregate in North Dakota in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux and their struggle to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through (or placed so as to negatively affect) tribal lands.

The issues and the divide between sides seem to be fairly conventional: Promises of jobs and economic growth motivate the pipeline’s supporters. Its  opponents cite environmental concerns (especially the prospective damage to tribal lands) and allege violations of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 in Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners’ wheedling of land use permissions out of federal and state governments.

On balance, the opponents seem to have a good case; the supporters not much of a case at all.

For more than a century and a half the US government has selectively ignored its treaties with the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes whenever those treaties threaten to stymie the plans of corporations with friends in government. Successfully holding Washington to its word this time might give the politicians and their cronies pause next time.

And even if letting the US government use treaties as toilet paper just because it can wasn’t an incredibly corrosive idea, keep in mind that it’s not just the Sioux who are getting mugged. Private land owners all along the pipeline’s 1,100 mile route are feeling the pain, too. Like Keystone XL before it, ETP leverages government’s power of “eminent domain” — under the pretense that the pipeline is some kind of public service rather than the private for-profit enterprise  it actually is — to steal much of the land required to complete Dakota Access.

The go-to excuse among proponents of these “public/private partnership” type land thefts is always “jobs and economic development,” but even if that excuse flew (it doesn’t), it’s a pretty poor one in this case. The $3.7 billion pipeline is advertised as creating a whopping 40 permanent jobs. I’m not sure how many people work at the average Wal-Mart, but it looks like more than 40 to me. How many jobs in agriculture and other sectors would Dakota Access destroy along the way? We have no way of knowing.

For me, the bottom line is this: If the only way to do something you want to do involves stealing other people’s stuff, you shouldn’t do it. And you certainly shouldn’t get government help to do it. Dakota Access is the opposite of the American way.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Dakota Access versus the American Way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpedNews, 10/29/16
• “Op-Ed: Dakota Access vs. the American Way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, University of New Mexico Daily Lobo, 10/30/16
• “Dakota Access versus the American Way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Uintah Basin, Utah Standard, 10/30/16
• “Dakota Access vs. the American way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fayette, West Virginia Tribune, 11/03/16
• “Dakota Access Versus the American Way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 11/04/16
• “Dakota Access versus the American way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Montgomery, West Virginia Herald, 11/09/16
• “Dakota Access versus the American Way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Oshkosh, Wisconsin Northwestern, 11/09/16
• “Dakota Access versus the American Way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Springfield, Missouri News-Leader, 11/09/16
• “Dakota Access versus the American Way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, USA Today, 11/09/16
• “Dakota Access versus the American Way,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Platte County, Wyoming Record-Times, print edition, first week of November