Dvorak News Blog

It was Cheney! Anyone surprised?

By Eideard Sunday July 12, 2009

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter have said.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort…

One intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity, said there was no resistance inside the C.I.A. to Mr. Panetta’s decision to end the program last month…

In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush administration’s most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy, and won.

Well of course, he won. The majority of court members are gutless wonders who are at least 70 or 80 years in arrears of advancements in science, law and knowledge in general.

Iowa asks: Is butter an art?

By Eideard Sunday July 12, 2009

23 Comments

Don’t laugh. You’re not somebody until you have referred
to yourself in the third person AND been made into butter sculpture.

Plans to erect a giant statue of Michael Jackson made from butter at the Iowa State Fair are being put to the vote.

Fair organisers announced their intention to create the butter tribute to the King of Pop just days after Jackson’s death.

But the idea has proved so controversial that they are now to hold an online poll to decide whether or not to go ahead with it.

Spokeswoman Lori Chappell says Jackson was to be part of a sculpture commemorating the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing.

You can vote here: Poll: Should Michael Jackson be turned into butter?

Thanks, K B

Recovery.gov Tells You Where Your Money Went — After A Mere $9-18 Million Makeover!

By Uncle Dave Sunday July 12, 2009

53 Comments

How in the hell does a website cost that kind of money? Are they using the Microsoft model of product development?

Well, Recovery.gov (or is it Recvoery.gov?) needs more than nifty diagrams of money that may or may not have already been spent, so the tech-savviest administration ever went looking for a vendor. It succeeded in getting one to redesign the site for a mere $18 million:

The new Web site promises to give taxpayers more information about where their money is going than the current version of the site.

“Recovery.gov 2.0 will use innovative and interactive technologies to help taxpayers see where their dollars are being spent,” James A. Williams, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, says in a press release announcing the contract awarded to Maryland-based Smartronix Inc. “Armed with easy access to this information, taxpayers can make government more accountable for its decisions.”

The contract calls for spending $9.5 million through January, and as much as $18 million through 2014, according to the GSA press release. […]Maybe someday we can pay $13 million for a site that will track the $18 million-dollar tracking site redesign, a year after the fact.
[…]The changes to the site are necessary to live up to the promises Obama made about transparency when passing the stimulus.
[…]Of course, because the necessary changes will be taking place after more than $100 billion has been spent, and during a summer when the administration has promised to increase the speed of spending (Although who knows by how much? Not the White House!), there’s no way to tell how much of that money has been lost to waste or fraud and how much has been spent wisely.

Or, is there? At Recovery.org, a site run by a private company whose job it is to track government spending and contract processes, there’s real-time tracking of stimulus spending. They normally collect and sell such information to businesses looking for government contracts, but decided to chart the stimulus because they realized they could deliver what Obama had promised.

So the government isn’t buying Recovery.org because…?

Oblivious Girl Falls Into Sewage Manhole While Texting

By McCullough Saturday July 11, 2009

40 Comments

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TRAVIS, N.Y. (WABC) — A teenager is recovering after falling several feet into an open manhole. She was texting and walking when it happened.

“I fell in a hole,” Alexa Longueira said. The Travis resident laughs about it now, but when the accident happened, it was a shock. She was walking along Victory Boulevard about to read a text message on her girlfriend’s cell phone when the sidewalk was suddenly gone. “Like, there was no warning about a big, open hole,” she said.

It was a big, open manhole. Alexa tumbled six feet underground and landed in four inches of raw sewage. “A manhole. My kid falls down a manhole,” Kim Longueira, said. In a word, Alexa’s mother says it was horrible. “She was smelly,” she said.

Alexa also had cuts across her arms and down her back. They know it could have been worse if the sewer had been full or if Alexa had hit her head.

Workers on the scene told kim they had left the manhole unattended in order to get cones to mark it off. “DEP is conducting a full investigation of what happened during a manhole incident on Victory Blvd. where workers were flushing a high-pressure sewer on Wednesday evening. We regret that this happened and wish the young woman a speedy recovery,” said DEP spokesperson Mercedes Padilla.

Meep Meep… Har!

Pope simplifies life for Obama, gives him FREE bioethics answer book!

By Eideard Saturday July 11, 2009

32 Comments

Obama and Benedict held private talks for about 40 minutes in the pope’s frescoed study in the Vatican’s apostolic palace and the Vatican said bioethics and life issues were a central part of the discussion.

In a surprise move, the pontiff gave Obama a booklet explaining Vatican opposition to practices such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research, which Obama supports….

“Dignitas Personae” (dignity of a person) condemns artificial fertilization and other techniques used by many couples and also says human cloning, “designer babies” and embryonic stem-cell research are immoral.

The document defends life from conception to natural death and a Vatican statement issued after the meeting said the topics discussed included “the defense and promotion of life and the right to abide by one’s conscience.”

The pope’s private secretary told reporters after the meeting: “This reading can help the president better understand the Church’s position on these issues.”

The pope also gave the president a copy of his latest encyclical, “Charity in Truth,” which called for a “world political authority” to manage the global economy and for more government regulation of national economies to pull the world out of the current crisis and avoid a repeat.

Obama, who was going to the airport from the Vatican, joked to the pope when he gave him the two documents: “I’ll have something to read on the plane.”

This should be a great relief to Obama. Now he will know what GOD wants him to do.

Modern church high-level philosophy/science debate:
“The glass is half-full.”
“I say half-empty.”
“Half Full!”
“Half Empty!”

Thanks, K B

Bill Gates — Hurricane Wrangler

By Uncle Dave Saturday July 11, 2009

30 Comments

Best known as the former chairman of Microsoft, billionaire Bill Gates now has reportedly filed several patents aiming to help one day be able to stop hurricanes that plague the Gulf of Mexico each year.

“Theodp,” a well-known patent watcher, discovered the patent and then passed on the news to TechFlash. In the patent filings, Gates and several other inventors plan to use large fleets of vessels to mix warm Gulf of Mexico surface water with colder water under the surface.

Conduits would extend from one vessel beyond the ocean’s thermocline, which is an invisible line separating the warmer, mixed layer of water closer to the surface from the cooler and calmer water that is seen further below the ocean’s surface. Sunlight routinely is captured by the surface layer of ocean water, and a different vessel would be used as a heat/energy sink for water at deeper depths.

The following is an excerpt from one of the patent filings:

Below this mixed layer, however, the temperature decreases rapidly with depth, for example, as much as 20 degrees Celsius with an additional 150 m (500 ft) of depth. This area of rapid transition is called the thermocline. Below it, the temperature continues to decrease with depth, but far more gradually. In the Earth’s oceans, approximately 90% of the mass of water is below the thermocline. This deep ocean consists of layers of substantially equal density, being poorly mixed, and may be as cold as -2 to 3.degree. C.

Dvorak Poll: Will YOU Submit to a Mandatory Flu Shot This Fall?

By McCullough Saturday July 11, 2009

44 Comments

Time-In February 1976, an outbreak of swine flu struck Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey, killing a 19-year-old private and infecting hundreds of soldiers. Concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a devastating epidemic, President Gerald Ford ordered a nationwide vaccination program at a cost of $135 million (some $500 million in today’s money). Within weeks, reports surfaced of people developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease that can be caused by the vaccine. By April, more than 30 people had died of the condition. Facing protests, federal officials abruptly canceled the program on Dec. 16. The epidemic failed to materialize.

Suppressed 60 Minutes Report from 1977-1978 on Swine Flu Fiasco

By John C Dvorak Saturday July 11, 2009

39 Comments

I do not expect this to remain up for long.

Found by Bruce Lee.

Americans respect science – they just don’t understand any of it

By Eideard Saturday July 11, 2009

61 Comments

According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of Americans think science has had a mostly positive effect on society, and scientists are held in high regard – more so than any other professions apart from the military and teaching, and way ahead of the clergy (or journalists, for that matter).

But along with all this adulation comes a shaky grasp of science – fewer than half those surveyed knew that electrons are smaller than atoms, for example.

And there’s a widespread refusal to believe ideas that are generally accepted by the scientific community. While 84 percent of scientists agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, for example, more than half the general public thinks we’ve had no effect at all…

But if you want the prime example of the public’s fundamental disagreement with basic scientific tenets, then – you’ve guessed it – it’s the question of human and animal origins.

According to the survey, an extraordinary 68 percent of Americans don’t believe in evolution through natural selection – a state of affairs that is surely unparalleled elsewhere in the western world. Less surprisingly, the figure is just 13 percent for scientists, who understand that the word “theory” in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution doesn’t actually mean “random guess”.

As you might expect, this situation creates a touch of cognitive dissonance. Over a third of the public said that science sometimes conflicted with their religious beliefs. This doesn’t put them off, mind you, as a full 63 percent of these creationists reckoned that scientists contributed “a lot” to society’s wellbeing. So perhaps there’s hope…

We could try making the creationists breed fruit flies, and actually see evolution in action. But a better way might be to make them put their money where their mouth is. Presumably, if you don’t believe in evolution, you don’t believe in newly-emergent strains of flu or other diseases, either. Just deny the latest vaccines to the creationists, and they’ll weed themselves out in the next hundred years or so. By natural selection.

“Believing” in crap is always so much easier than studying.

Bush Surveillance Program Goes Beyond Congress And 4th Amendment

By KD Martin Friday July 10, 2009

49 Comments

This is just now coming out?

The Bush Administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they’re still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to “unprecedented collection activities” by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be “carefully monitored.”

The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.

“The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president’s office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling,” Harman said.

House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.

Let’s see what Obama has to say about this mess.

No Agenda #111 Now On Cage Match

By KD Martin Friday July 10, 2009

5 Comments

Episode #111

Click image to go to No Agenda.

John and Adam discuss the news of the day from an International Perspective

Queue / Cue / Q the closing credits — We hope you enjoy the show!

Running time: approx. 90 mins.

Need A Reason To Get Thin? How About Swine Flu Kills Fat People?

By Uncle Dave Friday July 10, 2009

17 Comments

I can’t wait to hear Adam Curry’s reaction to this one.

An unexpected characteristic has emerged among many swine flu victims who become severely ill: They are fat.

Doctors tracking the pandemic say they see a pattern in hospital reports from Glasgow to Melbourne and from Santiago to New York. People infected with the bug who have a body mass index greater than 40, deemed morbidly obese, suffer respiratory complications that are harder to treat and can be fatal.

With the new virus on a collision course with the obesity epidemic, the World Health Organization says it’s gathering statistics to confirm and understand this development. Drugmaker Roche Holding AG is combing through studies to determine whether heavier people should get bigger doses of its Tamiflu antiviral.

“Morbid obesity is one of the most common findings turning up in severely ill patients,” said Nikki Shindo, who is leading the investigation of swine flu patients at the WHO in Geneva. “It’s a huge problem.”

It couldn’t be that fat people are more prone to health and associated problems, could it, rather than swine flu itself? Or am I not taking swine flu seriously enough?

Scientists don’t yet know whether extremely overweight people get sicker because of associated conditions like heart disease and asthma, or whether the excess fat itself makes them more vulnerable. Both may be to blame.

Fat cells secrete chemicals that cause chronic, low-level inflammation that can hamper the body’s immune response and narrow the airways, says Tim Armstrong, a doctor working in the WHO’s chronic diseases department in Geneva.

Here are Chrome OS’s sins, laid out one-by-one:

1. Chrome OS will include proprietary technologies. Linux still lacks a high-quality open source Flash plugin. Practically the only choice for 100% site compatibility is to use Adobe’s proprietary plugin, so Chrome OS will need to license and include it out of the box…

Then there are multimedia codecs. People are gonna want to play their tunes and watch their movies…Google will have to license the patents covering them. This will offend the open source community, who see the software patenting system as broken and corrupt…

2. Chrome OS was created to take away your privacy. Chrome OS exists to give Google access to your data. All of it. Chrome OS might be free of charge but you’ll pay for it with your online soul.

3. Google is big, ergo Google is evil. Open source people are suspicious of corporations, especially ones that are big. I have open source friends who won’t even shop at major supermarket chains, simply because of their size.