December 2009 archive

Break-In, Thieves Target Another Top Climate Scientist

In the wake of the illegal hacking of a leading climate scientist’s computers, to concoct a false scandal compared to which the birther absurdity is merely amusing, someone is criminally targeting another leading climate scientist.

The Observer:

Attempts have been made to break into the offices of one of Canada’s leading climate scientists, it was revealed yesterday. The victim was Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and a key contributor to the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In one incident, an old computer was stolen and papers were disturbed.

In addition, individuals have attempted to impersonate technicians in a bid to access data from his office, said Weaver. The attempted breaches, on top of the hacking of files from British climate researcher Phil Jones, have heightened fears that climate-change deniers are mounting a campaign to discredit the work of leading meteorologists before the start of the Copenhagen climate summit tomorrow.

“The key thing is to try to find anybody who’s involved in any aspect of the IPCC and find something that you can … take out of context,” said Weaver. The prospect of more break-ins and hacking has forced researchers to step up computer security.

Someone is getting desperate. And it appears to be becoming a pattern. For more on Weaver, this is his homepage.

For those who don’t know about the literally criminal first false scandal, DarkSyde at Daily Kos made two superb posts:

Open Heart

Photobucket

Words cannot express my love and gratitude

Obama DOJ: Civil and Human Rights now #4 priority

The Justice Department’s OIG released its semiannual report recently. Curiously, only Raw Story had anything much to say about it.  Their story is here: http://rawstory.com/2009/12/ju…

Their story focused on Bush era wrongs being why the DOJ’s image is tarnished.  That WAS true, but if you want to reverse counrse on something, you should first on the brakes.  

Top Management and Performance Challenges

The OIG has created a list of top management and performance challenges in the Department annually since 1998, initially in response to congressional requests but in recent years as part of the Department’s annual Performance and Accountability Report.

The OIG’s top challenges for this year are listed below. Many of the challenges from last year’s list remain and are long-standing, difficult challenges that will not be solved quickly or easily. However, we removed the challenges of “Violent Crime” and “Cyber Crime” from the 2008 list, and added the new challenges of “Recovery Act Funding and Oversight” and “Financial Crimes.”

Top Management and Performance Challenges in the Department of Justice – 2009

  1. Counterterrorism

  2. Restoring Confidence in the Department of Justice

  3. Recovery Act Funding and Oversight

  4. Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

  5. Financial Crimes

  6. Sharing of Intelligence and Law Enforcement Information

  7. Grant Management

  8. Detention and Incarceration

  9. Information Technology Systems Planning, Implementation, and Security

 10. Financial Management

Raw Story noted that the DOJ rocketed “restoring confidence in the DOJ” to #2 over all, and its multiple problems with Bush era holdovers and corruption.  

But all I saw was the irony between challenge # 2 and challenge #4.  

A Date Which Will Live in Ignorance

This, the sixty-eighth anniversary of the date which will live in infamy, is rarely circled in calendars or noted in any wholesale fashion as it once was.  Humans are finite beings with finite memories and as one generation marches to the grave, so too generations ahead of it do not and cannot keep alive the same memory in the same way.  We respect those who have borne the battle and for their widow and their orphan, as Lincoln put it, but struggle though we might, no matter how frequently we invoke the phrase “never again” as a means of supreme deterrent, “again” always manages to arrive once more.  Those who have taught history know the frustration of attempting to grab the attention of students whose impression of that which came before them often has the unfortunate caveat of a yawn attached.  It has been my own personal experience that making parallel examples to the current day is the best means of making the subject both real and current, so upon that framework I state my case.        

Much of the sting of that tragic day has subsided, as those who fought and died in World War II have become increasingly fewer with the progression of time.  Indeed, the very mention of “Pearl Harbor” no longer carries with it the gut-punch sting and the tragedy that it did to those who lived in those times.  Provided subsequent terrorist attacks on American soil are foiled, the phrase “September 11” will in another generation or so begin to lose its collective horror.  Much to the frustration of those that would teach the lessons of the past and those that would wish to be remembered beyond the immediate for reasons either noble, selfish, or some combination thereof it would be unnatural to expect otherwise.  Some of us wish to forget and some of us wish that those who would exploit tragedies for their own gain would disappear from the face of the earth, never to return.    

One hastens a bit to make the 11 September/Pearl Harbor comparison (aside from not wishing to embrace neo-con artist sales jobs) because in many ways they were very different, but in some ways they were not.  Pearl Harbor was the slow culmination of clandestine and backstage interference with Japanese affairs and war goals.  There was, believe it or not, once a time where this country produced a significant amount of crude oil for export, particularly a vast majority of the aviation gasoline and raw materials that then-President Roosevelt denied to the Empire of Japan as a punitive measure.  What is often not mentioned is that due to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and Mainland China, the United States embargoed essential goods necessary for the island nation’s continued military success.  This fact has led to many to believe in a conspiracy theory, asserting that Pearl Harbor had been sniffed out weeks, if not months before, and was allowed to transpire as exactly planned to draw the U.S. into its second World War.  I personally don’t ascribe to this view, instead believing that any nation can be easily lulled into a false sense of security, particularly when it has been blessed with the ability to have two oceans separating it from foreign invasion and no immediate enemies within easy striking distance.            

What I do find compelling is that, according to one poll, we have been recently returning to our isolationist roots, increasingly reluctant to engage in foreign policy conflicts or exercises in imperialism.  In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, many a story is told of men who when informed of the attack went directly to the nearest recruiting station and volunteered immediately for service.  Likewise, there were many patriots eager to pick up a gun and vanquish the terrorist threat eight years ago.  Now, however, a majority of Americans are skeptical of continued involvement in Afghanistan and still uncertain of where we intend to end up by the end of our latest expanded containment exercise.  It was Pearl Harbor which set into play the strength and scope of our hand in world leadership.  In plainest irony, however, by the end of the war, it placed into motion the Post-War boom that, we know now was but an ephemeral, gauzy dream that obscured larger realities and subsequent challenges yet to arrive.    

A recent pro-Obama column in Newsweek written by Fareed Zakaria notes how the cowboy diplomacy and shoot-from-the-hip impulsiveness of the previous President has been replaced with a thoughtful wartime strategy.  

This first year of his presidency has been a window into Barack Obama’s world view. Most presidents, once they get hold of the bully pulpit, cannot resist the temptation to become Winston Churchill. They gravitate to grand rhetoric about freedom and tyranny, and embrace the moral drama of their role as leaders of the free world. Even the elder Bush, a pragmatist if there ever was one, lapsed into dreamy language about “a new world order” once he stood in front of the United Nations. Not Obama. He has been cool and calculating, whether dealing with Russia, Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan. A great orator, he has, in this arena, kept his eloquence in check. Obama is a realist, by temperament, learning, and instinct. More than any president since Richard Nixon, he has focused on defining American interests carefully, providing the resources to achieve them, and keeping his eyes on the prize.  

 

Franklin Roosevelt’s speech given the day after the ignominy of Pearl Harbor shows this same sort of cautious realism and resistance to forcibly implant sweeping drama deep into the historical record, where it presumably would never be overlooked in the future.

The wording of Roosevelt’s speech was intended to have a strong emotional impact, appealing to the anger felt by Americans at the nature of the Japanese attack…He deliberately avoided the Churchillian approach of an appeal to history. Indeed, the most famous line of the speech originally read “a date which will live in world history”; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and replaced it with “infamy”, as seen in the annotated copy of the original typewritten speech from the National Archives.

In this address before a joint session of Congress which served as America’s formal entrance into World War II, Roosevelt sought a nuanced approach, careful not to seem too Wilsonian, a President whose attitude towards the first World War and American objectives was based around sweeping idealism and open-ended commitment.

Roosevelt consciously sought to avoid making the sort of more abstract appeal that had been issued by President Woodrow Wilson in his own speech to Congress[8] in April 1917, when the United States entered World War I. Wilson had laid out the strategic threat posed by Germany and stressed the idealistic goals behind America’s participation in the war. During the 1930s, however, American public opinion had turned strongly against such themes and was wary of-if not actively hostile to-idealistic visions of remaking the world through a “just war”. Roosevelt therefore chose to make an appeal aimed much more at the gut level-in effect, an appeal to patriotism rather than to idealism.

Returning to Zakaria’s synopsis,

Obama’s realism is sure to be caricatured as bloodless and indifferent to human rights, democracy, and other virtues. In fact, Obama probably understands the immense moral value of an engaged and effective superpower. As he said in his speech, “More than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades-a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, markets open, billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress, and advancing frontiers of human liberty.”

It is this approach that may be exactly what is needed to carry us forward.  Granted, this is not a strategy that lends itself easily to thundering applause and edge-of-your-seat thrills, but changing times require changing tactics.  With the end of World War II may have come the end of the nation/state war whereby one can easily identify the enemy by observing the flag it flies and by taking care to note the well-established boundaries, firmly drawn that separate it from others.  Whomever chose to denote terrorist groups as “cells” provided a very helpful metaphor to explain our current threat.  As cancer spreads from one part of the body to others as it metastasizes, so does our Al-Qaeda or The Taliban.  Members of terrorists groups are linked together by a belief in radical Islam, not by allegiance to country.  One cannot emphasize this fact enough because we are collectively having a very difficult time wrapping our brains around the true New World Order, a task which is further garbled by years of war movies and oversimplified fictionalized struggles between combatants who always manage to be either purely good or purely evil.          

Zakaria again asserts,

As for the broader problem of great-power support, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are largely isolated, with a massive international coalition arrayed against them. That does not mean that they cannot prevail in a local struggle over some parts of Afghanistan, but they will be hard pressed to achieve their ultimate goal of ruling Afghanistan. It might be difficult for the United States to “win” in Afghanistan, but it will be impossible for the Taliban to do so. And finally, America has not abandoned Iraq and will not abandon Afghanistan.

Resounding victory ending up in panicked retreat by our opponents is something we should cease to expect in our current conflict.  There will be no moment of triumph, no statue toppled in the city square, no flag hoisted over the land of the defeated enemy, no Mission Accomplished banner forming the backdrop of a photo-op disguised as a victory speech.  Nor will there be any V-E Day or V-J Day upon which to ring the church bells and observe the medals pinned to the chests of those who served, suffered, and sacrificed.  The only thing the least bit instantly emotional, powerful, and potent about war with extremist groups are in the massive attacks successfully launched by unseen cells which distressingly manage somehow to slide through the cracks.  The actual street-by-street, cave-by-cave, and village-by-village tactics employed by our forces and those of our allies are not especially grandiose nor easily included into the record of noble deeds accomplished by massive invasion with years of hype and build up to the act itself.

Pausing once more to reference Zakaria,

The history of great powers suggests that maintaining their position requires, most crucially, tending to the sources of their power: economic growth and technological innovation. It also means concentrating on the centers of global power, not the periphery…It’s important to remember that in the coming century it will be America’s dominant position in Asia-its role as the balancer in the Pacific-that will be pivotal to its role as a global superpower, not whatever happens in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Futurists and those who follow existing trends denote the Age of Terrorism as having a relatively short lifespan.  Thirty to forty years maximum is the number floated by any number of reputable scholars who make their living by of making educated guesses regarding events yet before us.  This is, of course, not to denigrate or refuse to grant 11 September 2001 its rightful place in the American house of horrors, but to say instead that inevitably and eventually some other national crisis will be superimposed on top of it and as it does, generational memory will grow shorter and shorter.  With the rise of Asia, particularly China, will come new challenges to the world and with them a new economic coalition with greatly conflicting interests.  That will be a struggle requiring the leadership dexterity of a seal balancing a ball on top of its nose.  As the Bible says,

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

 

Docudharma Times Monday December 7




Monday’s Headlines:

U.S. Forecasts Smaller Loss From Bailout of Banks

Copenhagen emissions targets ‘not enough to avert catastrophic warming’

Millions’ worth of gear left in Iraq

U.S. sees homegrown Muslim extremism as rising threat

Was Russian secret service behind leak of climate-change emails?

Turkey’s moves towards Iran concerning United States

New Tamil group People’s Liberation Army vows to start a fresh war

Ahead of Copenhagen climate talks, India softens its carbon stance

Boy who survived 1988 Halabja chemical attack reunited with mother

New Iraqi election law approved

The secrets of Tutankhamun’s decaying tomb

Southern Sudan politicians arrested in Khartoum

Evo Morales routs rivals to win second term in Bolivian elections

Good Lord, what a bunch of jackasses

What a bunch of jackasses.  

These people are not only incredibly stupid, they think we’re even more stupid than they are.

And they might be right.

Check this shit out:

US says bin Laden sometimes slips into Afghanistan

Oh REEEEEAAALLY?  

Let’s see how this is working here.  The Pentagon crook Robert Gates has decided that in spite of a majority of Americans “lacking the resolve” to “perservere” and “win at all costs” in Afghanistan, has decided to have some stupid lackey tell us that hey, you know, sometimes Osama bin Laden actually crosses the border and ENTERS Afghanistan.

He could be there right now!   He could be!  I mean, prove that he’s not!  I’ll bet you five bucks he’s there right now!   And and and if he does, and we’re bombing Afghanistan when he walks into it, he might walk into one of our bombs and and and then he’d be, like, dead!  ‘Cause we’d blow him up!  

What a childish bunch of douchebags.

Do they have any evidence of this?

No.

Is there any intelligence that might actually support such speculation?

No.

Is this anything other than a wild guess?

No.

Is it pure unadulterated bullshit?

Yes.

I could just as easily get up on a podium in front of the press and swear that I’m pretty sure Ken Lay is alive and well and living in a Penthouse suite in Reno.  Have I actually seen him?  No.   Do I have any evidnece he’s there?   No.   Then why would I say such a thing?   Because he could be there.   It’s possible!


Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether the administration has reliable intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts, Jones replied, “The best estimate is that he is somewhere in North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border.”

Yeah, and sometimes he’s at the Taco Bell in Kandahar.  I mean, why not?  He could be.   That’s a “guess”, too, right up there with his “best guess”.   What makes one “guess” better than another “guess?”

Jones did not comment on the intelligence behind that estimate, nor did he cite a time period or describe more specifically bin Laden’s apparent border crossings.

That’s because he doesn’t have any intelligence.  Of any kind.  The kind in your brain that makes you smart, or the kind that gives you information.

Gates told ABC’s “This Week” that “we don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is,” although he agreed that his likely location is North Waziristan.

Yeah, and who told you that, Gates?  The Osama fairy?  

Obama administration officials have often asserted, as did the Bush administration, that they believe bin Laden is being sheltered on the Pakistani side of the border, along with other senior al-Qaida leaders. But Jones broke new ground by saying publicly that the al-Qaida chief may at times have slipped back into Afghanistan.

Oh good, they believe it.   Well my son believes that Santa Claus lives on the North Pole, and I think that both are about as likely.

I quit believing in Santa Claus when I was eight years old, and I quit believing in the Osama Bin Boogeyman a few years ago, too.  Both are myths designed to manipulate people into behaving certain ways.  My son will jump through all KINDS of hoops when I tell him stories about Santa Claus.   It feel kinda guilty, but we do it to everybody, right?

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., made a somewhat similar, if less specific, remark Sunday about bin Laden’s movements. He told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that knowledgeable people have told him that bin Laden “moves back and forth.”

Yeah, and he does pilates every morning, too.  And brushes his teeth with the bones of a dead secretary from 9/11.  

Have you seen that movie “Idiocracy”?   This country is actually turning into that.

“Squirrel!!”

What to do?

A Stars Hollow Gazette

Recently I’ve had a lot of people ask me what course of action I would take.

Most of them are hopelessly compromised sellouts looking to justify craven capitulation because, frankly, they can’t stand to look at their own cowardly face in the morning mirror.

You do what you need to do to eat and provide for your family.  Please don’t bother trying to convince me your shit sandwich is anything but two slices of bread wrapped around a turd.

I’m not Navin Johnson.  I know a hole in the ground when I see one.

“But that’s not constructive criticism ek”, you whine.

Why do you care for my approval anyway?

Oh, I get it.  You want something from me.  My money.  My vote.  The ability to walk among decent people without having them spit on you like the soul-whore liar you are.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being an honest sex worker.  Most of them are decent people who provide the service they sell.  They should have a union.

But there is something different about being a confidence man, a professional betrayer.

One of the reasons I got out of journalism at a young age is professors at J-school telling me that any lie was acceptable to get a source to talk.

Yet I am a proud and successful politician because I deliver what I promise and I’m not afraid of fights because I know what’s right and have the people behind me.

In a local way of course, but it’s all the Village Number Six.

Are you a Number or a Free Man?

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

The Change; Hope

CdPnkHplss

copyright © 2009 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

It is said, as individuals, we can achieve all we conceive, if only we truly believe.  President Barack Obama once knew this.  He lived this veracity.  Indeed, candidate Obama’s audacity and accomplishments gave Americans hope.  When Barack Obama reached for the sky he realized what no one thought he could. The electorate was energized.  People came to expect the country was in for a change.   Now, it seems Mister Obama is bogged down by what Eisenhower understood, concerns of the Military Industrial Complex.  

The intricacy of the Armed Forces mission does not confine itself to forceful martial escalation.  Nothing escapes the wide reach of combative nation building.  Lives are lost.  Limbs crushed.  With bullets ablaze, brains are battered or blown to smithereens.  Hope suffers.  Hearts are hurt.

CRU Frauds Destroy Environental Movement Credibility

The Globe and Mail reports that the cover-up is usually worse than the crime. University of East Anglia CRU climate scientist Mike Hulme worries that denying the academic dishonesty and shabby efforts of fellow climate scientists to destroy CRU data will “set back climate science back twenty years”. Phee-yew! And that’s criticism from inside the tent.

The first thing I did this morning was grab a bucket and scoop the water out of the bathtub and pour it by hand in the washing machine. My wife ordinarily does this and has, cheerfully, for years. She’s the heavy-lifter environmentalist chez kidneystones. The temperature inside our new home in Tokyo right now in December is about 55 degrees. The windows are open to let in the sunshine. I’m wearing a turtleneck and a warm-up jacket as I type. We don’t own a car, don’t own an air-conditioner and turn on the electric heat in winter only when a hat and extra sweater won’t suffice. We recycle assiduously whenever we can. In short: we’re into environmentalism.

We defend environmentalism easily. The savings from recycling water appear on our water bill. We have hard data we share willingly with neighbors. The work I do in the social sciences includes history of science. That, too, I publish and share. Good work withstands scrutiny. A few people I respect, however, are currently making the case that science cannot withstand scrutiny and that breaking into computers to get access to data matters more than what is discovered.

The break-ins are very likely part of a larger effort to discredit climate science. Why? Because climate science appears to be pure bullshit and there appears to be clear evidence of collusion to control access to core data. For years, climate science skeptics, critics, deniers: call them what you will, have petitioned the CRU for access to the raw data. They were stone-walled at every turn. Fact or fiction?

Prof. Jones wrote that climate skeptics “have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone.”

How can anyone defend Jones? We shouldn’t need to remind anyone of the Bush efforts to conceal WH email, or the challenges critics of the war have faced trying to get information about who knew what and when. Real questions exist about the core samples and the methodology underpinning climate science claims.

Rather than bring the data to the light of day, climate scientists threatened to destroy or delete their work. Had Jones and company simply allowed all-comers access to the core data underpinning their claims there would have been no ‘criminal’ hack. Why wouldn’t Jones and company let others see their core work? The only plausible explanation, IMHO, is Jones et al knew their work would not stand up to aggressive examination.

When so-called ‘progressives’ defend stonewalling, data-deletion, and academic dis-honesty, environmentalists know that there’s even more reason to bring the facts, all of them, to the public. The cover-up and the CRU fraud both stink.  

Which is it

I mean you are after all uncounted secret US “intelligence” agencies.  The NSA, the CIA, Naval, Marine, Army, Air Force, NSO supposedly all under the umbrella of Homeboy Stupidity.  You all suck apparently.

Pique the Geek 20091206: Botulinum Toxin (Botox)

Botox is in the news all of the time because of its use as wrinkle reducer, but it has many more uses than that, and a very long history.  The proper name is botulinum toxin, and is a neurotoxin produced by the common soil bacterium Clostridium botulinum.  This bacterium is an obligate anaerobe, meaning that it is poisoned by oxygen.

As a matter of fact, many bacteria of this genus are obligate anaerobes, and more than one are causes of human and animal disease.  In addition, they are also spore formers, which is the mechanism that they use to survive times when they are exposed to oxygen.

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