Posts from — March 2007

Cat In The Yard Interview

You’re kidding, not even a puppy would agree to that.

[Editor: Ms. Lone Ranger responds to the suggestion that White House officials should testify in private, unsworn, and no transcript.]

Friday Ark

All during the debates over the various provisions of the USA PATRIOT act, and other attacks on the Constitutional protections of Americans in the furtherance of the re-election of the Shrubbery War on Terror™, the constant refrain from the so-called conservatives was “if you are innocent you have nothing to fear.”

Now Congress wants to ask questions about some dodgy personal practices at the Department of Justice and the involvement of the White House, and there are no voices on the right wondering why the White House won’t comply with Congressional requests. Hey, “if you are innocent you have nothing to fear.”

What’s the problem? Congress still recognizes the Constitutional protections. They aren’t going to tap the White House phones without a warrant. No one’s going to be subjected to isolation or water boarding. They are not going to be kidnapped and sent to countries that believe boiling improves the memory. Witnesses get to have counsel; they can claim the right against self incrimination; all of those archaic notions are in full effect.

What is the problem with public employees being required to answer questions from the elected representatives of the public on the record and under penalty of perjury? It happens to everyone who shows up for jury duty.

Cute Overload has Knut on The Colbert Report.

Badtux does food reviews of Meals Ready to Eat [MRE].

Culture Ghost is running a series of Postage of The Damned.

While Karen of Peripetia is getting over foot surgery, Der Verrückte Philosoph is filling in with features like Surf Mice.

PZ Myers of Pharyngula points to an amazing video of a single man building Stonehenge. This guy demonstrates how simply it could have been accomplished as he single handedly moves around huge blocks of concrete.

Dr. Cole will bring you down from the levity with Bush’s Top Ten Mistakes in Iraq during the Past 4 Years.

Looking at the recent history of the Justice Department, any one with a law enforcement background knows that this is going to result in an Internal Affairs referral, and it will be targeting the upper levels of the Department because the problems are so wide-spread that the root problem has to be at the management level.

Consider the massive abuse of National Security Letters. Who believes that dozens of agents were struck with the idea of abusing NSLs, all at the same time? Someone at the top, implicitly or explicitly, indicated to agents that such conduct was acceptable, if not recommended. I’ve interacted with FBI agents, and they don’t improvise. They have procedures and the procedures are followed. This is like Abu Ghraib – the people at the bottom don’t do these things for an extended period without an okay from further up the chain of command. All large organizations work like this – if the problem is widespread, management approved it.

Then there is the current flare-up over the firing of US Attorneys. The first thing to remember is that Alberto Gonzales has no experience or training that qualifies him to manage a large organization. For much of his professional career he had only one client, the Shrubbery. He is a figurehead, not an administrator. He is dependent on his staff to get anything done, and the first loyalty of his staff would appear to be to Karl Rove, not Alberto Gonzales.

I don’t think Gonzales is going to leave quietly because of what happened when Gates replaced Rumsfeld. Gates started firing people and investigating problems, and I seriously doubt the White House wants anyone looking under carpets at the Justice Department.

We are going to find out eventually that things are much worse than most of us imagine at the Department of Justice. People like William Jefferson [D-LA] are going to get off because of this. Many corruption probes are going to be lost based on the actions of the Justice Department rather than the evidence. People who should be in jail are going to be free to plunder because everything is political in this administration. Once that is established, every defense attorney has a head start on “reasonable doubt.”

The recent spam attacks are certainly driving up my stats.  The extra 500 comments today are really spiking Sitemeter.

If this keeps up I could turn to the “Dark Side” and use some network knowledge to backtrack and convince these people not to annoy me.  This garbage bogs down ‘Net performance.  The reason not to do it is that the most effective techniques will bog down the performance even more.

It is a total waste of time.  They are never going to get the link they want.

John McKay of archy: I don’t get animal rights radicals.

Of course, Cute Overload has video of Knut.

“Knut, who recently posed for a photo shoot with star-photographer Annie Leibovitz for an environmental protection campaign, is scheduled to make his public debut at the zoo later this week or early next week…”

Frank Albrecht is out of his mind suggesting: Cuddly polar bear cub better off dead.

Before this is over, Albrecht is going to end up a bloody spot on a middle school playground when a mob led by the Olsen twins beats him up with their Hello Kitty lunch pails. You mess with “cute” at your own risk.

CBS has the Shrubbery’s response to the call for White House officials to testify.

Mr. Bush, in a late-afternoon statement at the White House, said, “We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants. … I have proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse.”

He added that federal prosecutors work for him, and it is natural to consider replacing them. “There is no indication that anybody did anything improper,” the president said.

[snip]

Bush said his White House counsel, Fred Fielding, told lawmakers they could interview presidential counselor Karl Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and their deputies – but only on the president’s terms: in private, “without the need for an oath” and without a transcript.

The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented and a reasonable way for Congress to get all the information it needs about the matter.

[snip]

“He said he wanted this to be a conversation rather than a hearing,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who is leading the Senate probe into the firings. “A conversation is fine, but let’s have the conversation under oath, with a transcript.”

The only “honorable public servants” involved in this mess are the US Attorneys who were labeled incompetent and fired for political reasons. Congress doesn’t want to talk to “honorable public servants,” they want to talk to Rove and Meirs. Someone should remind the Shrubbery that he was going to investigate the Plame leak, and a lot of other things, but it never happened. He and his officials lie. It is time to document the lies and prosecute the liars.

UPDATE: House panel authorizes subpoenas for Rove, Miers, and their deputies.

As a public service for the US Marshals Service: it’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest – big white house, you can’t miss it. Don’t forget to take pictures.

John Warner Backus while working for IBM lead development of FORTRAN, the first of the high level languages, and then the Backus-Naur form, the standard method for describing computer languages.

Wikipedia has a nice article and CNN has a reasonable obituary.

His work was familiar to all of the people who came afterwards as he was truly a pioneer of programming which enabled the wider adoption of computers.

These days, people don’t appreciate what John Backus and Grace Hopper did with their work on FORTRAN and COBOL. While I understand the joke, “Computer Science without FORTRAN and COBOL is like birthday cake without ketchup and mustard“, the reality is that if we had not moved forward to the upper level languages, it is unlikely that computers, other than mainframes would have ever been built.

WordPress has sent word about the Google Summer of Code™.

It is a paid job working on open source software but you have to apply by to Google at the link by March 24^th. I have no idea why the window for applications is so short, but the WordPress notice mentioned $4,500 for the summer job.

From the BBC: three guys highjacked a truck in Straffordshire containing £70,000 of Cadbury Easter eggs.

There is no information as to whether there were Creme Eggs in the truck.

Oh, I can prove I was in Florida at the time.

CBS reports: Pet Food Co. Knew Of Problem Last Month

Menu Foods told the FDA it received the first complaints of kidney failure and deaths among cats and dogs from pet owners on Feb. 20. It began new tests on Feb. 27.

During those tests, the company fed its product to 40 to 50 dogs and cats and seven animals — the mix of species was not immediately known — died, Sundlof said. The contamination appeared more deadly to cats than to dogs, he said.

I have a certain knowledge about kidney problems in people, and that tells me that the problem is more likely chemical than biological. The kidneys are filters, as is the liver, and tend to be affected by specific minerals. Most people have never heard of a calcium overdose, but it can land you in a hospital bed for a week. If they look only for toxins they might be missing the obvious – a massive overdose of a mineral that is actually required. Sodium, potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, etc. are all necessary, but an excess of any of them throws off your blood chemistry and overworks the “filters” in your body.

They only way to find out what’s going on, and how to prevent it from happening again is by testing. The company mentioned the change in the source of the gluten, because that was the variation they were aware of when they became aware that there was a problem.

It’s that time of year. Spring arrives at 7:07PM CDT tonight. You can watch it come at Archæoastronomy.

The air is already filled with pollen and the live oaks are starting to drop last year’s leaves.

Norbizness’s version of the Shrubbery’s speech reads better than the Washington Post transcript.

I found the first paragraph interesting:

Four years ago today coalition forces launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to remove Saddam Hussein from power. They did so to eliminate the threat his regime posed to the Middle East and to the world.

We know now, that there was no threat to anyone outside of Iraq because of the containment put in place after Gulf War I, but the Shrubbery keeps trying to convince people that invading another country and throwing it into turmoil was the right thing to do.

Apparently our current goal is to pacify Baghdad. Four years and we don’t even control the capital city is a pretty sad state of affairs. You would think that we would have been able to restore electricity, water, and sewer, but that is apparently beyond the scope of no-bid contracts. [Natasha at Pacific Views wonders the same thing – four years and we need more time to control Baghdad?]

In other news in the Washington Post, Ann Scott Tyson writes that the U.S. military ill-prepared for other conflicts. We are running out of everything and Rummy wasn’t buying replacements for the equipment that was being blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If Robert Gates is an honest man, I hope he will issue a report at some point explaining where in hell all of the money that Congress gave to the Department of Defense went, because we know it wasn’t used to buy equipment, repair buildings, or pay light bills.

The Republans keep talking about running government like a business, but they don’t seem to believe in accounting. Accounting is not a barrel of laughs, but no matter how large or small a business is accounting is the only real way of knowing how things are going.

The BBC reports that the E8 Lie Group has been mapped. Professor David Vogan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the feat in a lecture titled: The Character Table for E8, or How We Wrote Down a 453,060 x 453,060 Matrix and Found Happiness.

Almost no one is interested that 19 mathematician spent fours years doing this and it took three days to calculate the final computation on a supercomputer. Working in 248 dimensions isn’t even conceivable for most of the world, but it is a very good thing and will help us understand basic scientific interactions. It will also allow us to do things with a computer simulation that would have required spending hundred of millions or billions of dollars if we tried to construct the equipment needed for experiments.

Think about all of the time and effort expended in producing 3D images, now add the other 245 dimensions.