The anticipated 2012 budget deficit will be $1,500,000 million ($1.5 trillion). This means we are borrowing that amount from our children to fund all of the Democrats’ Utopian spending programs.
Finally, the president has proposed “tough budget cuts” that total $775 million. No, that’s not a joke.
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It is generally recognized by just about all members of the commentariat with IQs higher than room temperature that America’s projected entitlement spending was unsustainable… before Obamacare was added. The federal deficit threatens this country’s current economic, political, and military capabilities and promises to undermine the prosperity of future generations.
The president’s response is disappointing even to people on the left. Andrew Sullivan was a particularly conspicuous bellwether today, departing from his customary role of flack and harshly criticizing Obama.
[T]his president is too weak, too cautious, too beholden to politics over policy to lead. In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bullshit it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road.
To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.
A&E’s cancellation of the high-budget historical drama “The Kennedys,” in response to protests from members of the Kennedy family, was bound to fail to keep the series off the air. It has probably already been shown in Europe, but American audiences will have an opportunity soon to see it, too. ReelzChannel purchased US broadcast rights, and will begin airing the series on April 3rd.
Cade Metz, in the Register, outlines the technological strategy that allows Wikileaks to use host-servers on US soil, while enjoying impunity from interference by federal authorities.
WikiLeaks is hosting its cache of confidential US Statement Department cables on US-based Amazon servers, just as it did with with the classified Iraq War documents it released last month.
According to NetCraft’s records, the whistle-blowing website is mirroring the diplomatic cables on Amazon’s US-based EC2 service and France-based servers operated by French ISP Octopuce. The main WikiLeaks site is mirrored on Ireland-based Amazon servers.
WikiLeaks also uses a US-based domain name registrar (Dynadot) and a US-based DNS service (EveryDNS).
In theory, if the US government decides that WikiLeaks has broken the law in publishing federal intelligence data, it could move to have WikiLeaks booted from such US-based servers. But WikiLeaks could simply fall back on its core servers — presumably still hosted by “bulletproof” Swedish hosting outfit PRQ — and the feds would take a PR hit.
Clearly, this is how WikiLeaks reads the situation, as it continues to use Amazon’s US-based “cloud” service to accomodate extra demand for its data.
In an added twist, the whistle-blower is also using software from Seattle-based outfit Tableau to visually map its trove of leaked diplomatic cables. Tableau grew out of a project run by the US Department of Defense.
First the liberal elites represented by the Kos himself and PBS anchor Glenn Ifill gleefully pounced on that bone-headed Sarah Palin for a tweet warning conservatives to continue working to win the upcoming election rather than partying “like its 1773.”
Obviously, thought the great big leftwing brains, she must mean 1776. After all, nothing of any significance happened in 1773. (Except the original Boston Tea Party, of course.)
Then, as William Jacobsen describes, liberal America was laughing itself sick over Christine O’Donnell ’s ignorance of the First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state.
[At] Widener Law School …as soon as O’Donnell questioned whether “separation of church and state” was in the First Amendment, the crowd erupted with gasps of disbelief and mocking laughter.
And if O’Donnell’s imperfect—or perhaps nuanced?—understanding of the First Amendment w[as] so outrageous, how about the inability of Chris Coons, a Yale Law School graduate, to identify the other freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and his misquoting the text of the First Amendment in his challenge to O’Donnell:
“Government shall make no establishment of religion,” Coons responded, reciting from memory the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Coons was off slightly: The first amendment actually reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”)
Ann Althouse has more on how Coons simply was wrong in his quotation of the First Amendment which led to O’Donnell’s supposed major gaffe about the Establishment Clause, and how the press has taken O’Donnell’s comments out of context:
O’Donnell reacts: “That’s in the First Amendment?” And, in fact, it’s not. The First Amendment doesn’t say “government.” It says “Congress.” And since the discussion is about what local school boards can do, the difference is highly significant.
Also, it isn’t “shall make no establishment of religion.” It’s “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” There’s a lot one could say about the difference between those 2 phrases, and I won’t belabor it here. Suffice it to say that it was not stupid for O’Donnell to say “That’s in the First Amendment?” — because it’s not. Coons was presenting a version of what’s in the cases interpreting the text, not the text itself.
A literal reading of O’Donnell’s comments reflects that she was correct, but of course, the press and the blogosphere don’t want a literal reading, they want a living, breathing reading which comports with their preconceived notions.
In an age of an increasingly sophisticated public in which alternative information channels, like Fox News, AM talk radio, and the blogosphere exist, it is becoming more and more difficult to succeed in winning debates on the basis of crude sloganeering and oversimplification of complex issues and the leftwing mob winds up looking stupider and stupider when it tries relying on its traditional tactics.
I missed the Antoine Dodson “Bed Intruder” meme, until it finally hit the New York Times and was forwarded by some classmates.
Viral videos tend to have a short lifespan online. The best ones might attract a few million views on YouTube and get a mention on a late-night talk show before fading into oblivion.
The Gregory Brothers used footage of Glenn Beck on Fox News in a Web video series called “Auto-Tune the News.”
But in one of the stranger twists in recent pop-music history, a musical remake of a local news clip transcended YouTube fame and reached the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August.
It was a rare case of a product of Web culture jumping the species barrier and becoming a pop hit.
The song’s source material could not have been more unlikely: A local TV news report from Huntsville, Ala., about an intruder who climbed into a woman’s bed and tried to assault her.
But with some clever editing and the use of software that can turn speech into singing, the Gregory Brothers, a quartet of musicians living in Brooklyn, transformed an animated and angry rant by the victim’s brother into something genuinely catchy.
The resulting track, “Bed Intruder Song,” has sold more than 91,000 copies on iTunes, and last week it was at No. 39 on the iTunes singles chart. Its video has been viewed more than 16 million times on YouTube.
And to top it off, the song was No. 89 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the week of Aug. 2.
The viral amusement item of the day is this dry erase board photo presentation by a cute young thing allegedly composed and sent to co-workers on the occasion of her quitting her job.
If the story really is on the up-and-up, I would guess that it will quickly attract new job offers. I have my doubts though. She is too pretty, and the storyline is too pat.
As predicted, it was a hoax. These perfect little gems that completely fit our expectations always are.
———————————————————— Another UPDATE, a few more minutes later.
But, wait! Prankster brother tells Media Memo, No, no, “Jenny’s very real.” An update is promised for tomorrow. “Jenny” may be appearing on Jay Leno and Good Morning, America.
The Pentagon is demanding that Wikileaks cease publishing and return immediately stolen US documents in its possession, hinting darkly at legal prosecution if the Internet news site does not comply. (Christian Science Monitor)
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Of course, it is always possible that Julian Assange and his merry band of pranksters may be less than intimidated by an adversary so clueless that its first response to the theft and publication of Top Secret military documents is to issue a directive prohibiting its own personnel from gazing at the offending web site.
This is the “Close the barn door from the inside when the horse got out” approach to security breaches. [Wired]
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Besides, Wikileaks has uploaded a password-protected file labeled “Insurance,” and believed to contain a massive collection of highly toxic State Department material, consisting of, according to a chat interview published by Wired:
260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”
“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.
Wikileaks has arranged, in the event that the US Government succeeds in shutting down its web site, to have the password released via Cryptome.
6 August 2010. If there is a takedown of Wikileaks, the insurance.aes256 file will be available through Cryptome along with the entire files of the Wikileaks website which have been archived.
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Even without Julian Assange’s blackmail threat, Some News Agency sees problems trying to stop Wikileaks legally.
[F]rom a legal standpoint, there is probably little the U.S. government can do to stop WikiLeaks from posting the files.
It is against federal law to knowingly and willfully disclose or transmit classified information. But Assange, an Australian who has no permanent address and travels frequently, is not a U.S. citizen.
Since Assange is a foreign citizen living in a foreign country, it’s not clear that U.S. law would apply, said Marc Zwillinger, a Washington lawyer and former federal cyber crimes prosecutor. He said prosecutors would have to figure out what crime to charge Assange with, and then face the daunting task of trying to indict him or persuade other authorities to extradite him.
It would be equally difficult, Zwillinger said, to effectively use an injunction to prevent access to the data.
“Could the U.S. get an injunction to force U.S. Internet providers to block traffic to and from WikiLeaks such that people couldn’t access the website?” Zwillinger said. “It’s an irrelevant question. There would be thousands of paths to get to it. So it wouldn’t really stop people from getting to the site. They would be pushing the legal envelope without any real benefit.”
And the technical approach is problematic, too.
WikiLeaks used state-of-the-art software requiring a sophisticated electronic sequence of numbers, called a 256-bit key [to protect its “Insurance” files].
The main way to break such an encrypted file is by what’s called a “brute force attack,” which means trying every possible key, or password, said Herbert Lin, a senior computer science and cryptology expert at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
Unlike a regular six- or eight-character password that most people use every day, a 256-bit key would equal a 40 to 50 character password, he said.
If it takes 0.1 nanosecond to test one possible key and you had 100 billion computers to test the possible number variations, “it would take this massive array of computers 10 to the 56th power seconds — the number 1, followed by 56 zeros” to plow through all the possibilities, said Lin.
How long is that?
“The age of the universe is 10 to the 17th power seconds,” explained Lin. “We will wait a long time for the U.S. government or anyone else to decrypt that file by brute force.”
Could the NSA, which is known for its supercomputing and massive electronic eavesdropping abilities abroad, crack such an impregnable code?
It depends on how much time and effort they want to put into it, said James Bamford, who has written two books on the NSA.
The NSA has the largest collection of supercomputers in the world. And officials have known for some time that WikiLeaks has classified files in its possession.
The agency, he speculated, has probably been looking for a vulnerability or gap in the code, or a backdoor into the commercial encryption program protecting the file.
At the more extreme end, the NSA, the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies — including the newly created Cyber Command — have probably reviewed options for using a cyber attack against the website, which could disrupt networks, files, electricity, and so on.
“This is the kind of thing that they are geared for,” said Bamford, “since this is the type of thing a terrorist organization might have — a website that has damaging information on it. They would want to break into it, see what’s there and then try to destroy it.”
The vast nature of the Internet, however, makes it essentially impossible to stop something, or take it down, once it has gone out over multiple servers.
In the end, U.S. officials will have to weigh whether a more aggressive response is worth the public outrage it would likely bring. Most experts predict that, despite the uproar, the government will probably do little other than bluster, and the documents will come out anyway.
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Mikael Viborg, owner of PRQ hosting company at its server location
Were the Department of Defense, the NSA, or the FBI actually inclined to do anything about Wikileaks, NYM would be glad to help.
Their web site, we find, is hosted by PRQ in Stockholm, Sweden. That hosting company’s abuse reporting email is: abuse@prq.se
Be aware, however, that PRQ is associated with the notorious Swedish Bit Torrent file sharing hub The Pirate Bay.
Antonio, with a Bay area native’s perspective, lists all the reasons why New York City will never be a tech center in a very amusing rant.
Thinking the New York tech scene will ever equal Silicon Valley is as foolish as thinking San Francisco’s puny theater district will one day take on Broadway. Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed. So far, no one’s managed to do it, and New York sure as hell won’t either. ...
$2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.
There, that’s how much my first apartment in New York cost (in 2005).
Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return. My career salary high-water mark is still working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk, and I lived worse, from a quality-of-life perspective, than I did as a Berkeley graduate student. ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere. If YCombinator existed in New York, they’d have to dish 5x more than their already slim initial funding to keep new startups in Cheetos for three months.
Basically, startups flourish in the Bay Area the same reason the homeless do: decent weather, relatively cheap living, and no stigma attached to your lifestyle.
I concluded that fixing the problem required using the kind of utility programs only PC repair shops have on hand to get in and eliminate that GRUB Linux boot-loader, so I hauled it down to Dok Klaus in Warrenton.
Klaus had it fixed the same day and only charged me for one hour of service.
As PC problems go, it was ultimately minor. Now I have my entire hard drive to play with.
It’s like this. I bought a Sony Vaio laptop a good while back. It was a bargain, but it came with Vista installed.
At that particular moment in history, I was feeling experimental. I felt like playing with Linux, and I had a hankering to see if I could possibly adapt to the MAC OS environment, one button mouse, all that. So I got a free copy of Ubuntu and bought a copy of Leopard on Ebay. I had been reading that it was possible to install Leopard on a Vaio with some fiddling.
None of this worked out for me.
Leopard could not relate to the notebook’s videocard, and I simply gave up and installed XP on the second hard drive partition. I wasted hours trying to use Linux, but it was just too much trouble to overcome the absence of a readily available driver for the wireless modem. Linux worked fine. It just could not contact the Internet.
So there I was with 80 gb of my hard drive devoted to a Linux installation I was not actually using. But, hey, I still had about 60 gb with Win XP on it, which was working fine.
But, over time, that 60 gb was beginning to fill up. I trashed the games I wasn’t actively playing and purged several large programs. Then, I started moving all the image files off the PC onto various backup drives. But, finally, I had just installed Lightroom and Visio, and C: was getting close to full again. There were getting to be fewer movable items. I got to thinking last night that I ought to do something about all this.
So I Googled on the phrase “eliminate partition” and, lo and behold, there was a link to a discussion explaining that you could do that by hitting START>Control Panel>Administration Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management, then all you had to do was right click on the offending 80 gb Linux Partition, and select Delete.
What could possibly go wrong? I thought to myself. Ubuntu goes bye bye. The 80 gb Linux Partition returns to being part of the ordinary C: drive. I have lots of disk, and everyone is happy. So I hit “delete.”
Then I looked at the properties of the C: drive, so I could admire all the great new space I had created.
Hmmm. No change. The only difference was that second partition was now unlabeled.
I guess I need to reboot before the change goes into effect, I concluded. This would be the moment of truth. If I had screwed the pooch, I would soon find out. But, how likely was that?
My keen mind, doubtless impacted by age and senility, had overlooked the obvious consideration that I had installed Ubuntu first, and Ubuntu had put itself in charge of the boot-up process.
So the PC turns off, starts to come up, and GRUB (Ubuntu’s Grand Unified Boot-Loader) starts looking for that now-unlabeled Linux Partition, can’t find it, and sits there… permanently, announcing Error 17.
Error 17 means that GRUB can’t find the partition it’s looking for. It then freezes and sulks.
So, this is how to disable your PC and create a fine opportunity to research sub-operating system levels of PC operation in both Windows and Linux lands.
Blogging will be less frequent for a few days. I’m using an older, slower machine.
When a tasty news item confirming one’s own prejudices and assumptions and wreaking injury upon one’s political adversaries comes along, it is only natural that the partisan blogger will seize upon it with a certain glee and give it prominent coverage in a major posting.
I almost simply referenced Andrew Breitbart’s video published yesterday of Shirley Sherrod apparently giving a tutorial on successful discrimination in federal program administration in a simple sarcastic posting, but it was short and I happened to watch it a second time, and then I began wondering about its editing.
A day later, everyone knows that all the wheels have come off of Andrew Breitbart’s discrimination story. (the Politico)
Breitbart was doing damage control, telling Talking Points Memo that he didn’t do the editing and was not even in possession of the full video when he launched the story. (sigh)
But the silver-lining in this unfortunate episode is that NYM was not alone in noticing the tricky editing. It was only to be expected that many blogs would be fooled. The truth is that everyone sometimes posts hastily without deep consideration of the material being passed along.
But the right-side of the blogosphere really does differ from the left with respect to honesty and responsibility.
The Anchoress was also paying attention yesterday, and her reservations received major attention because they were linked by Instapundit.
[Here’s] what is troubling me.
Doesn’t it seem like, after all of that sort of winking, “you and I know how they really are” racist crap wherein Sherrod–intentionally or not–indicts her own narrow focus, she was heading to a more edifying message? What did it open her eyes about? Was she about to say “I took him to one of his own, but it shouldn’t have mattered about that; my job was to serve all the farmers who needed help.”
Was she about to say, “I learned about myself and about how far we still have to go?”
Was she about to say “it’s not poor vs those who have, because we are not at war, we are just in the same human reality that ever was?”
Was she about to say, “poor is poor, hungry is hungry and the past is the past when a family can’t eat?”
I want to know. Because it seemed like Sherrod was heading somewhere with that story, and the edit does not let us get there. I want the rest of the story before I start passing judgment on it. ...
I want to see the rest of the tape. I cannot believe Sherrod ended on “I took him to one of his own.” Either she said something much worse after that (which we would have seen) or she said something much better.
If it was something “better” then we should have seen that, too.
Before long, her skepticism was being echoed throughout the right side of the blogosphere. So much for Andrew Sullivan’s “virulence of the far right.”
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James Taranto, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, also noticed that editing and he had no doubts.
It seems to us that Sherrod got a bum deal in all this. While her description of her attitude toward the white farmer is indeed appalling, even in Breitbart’s video it is clear by the end that the story was one of having learned the error of her ways.
Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.
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Congratulations to Shirley Sherrod on her vindication.
David Frum, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, recently proposed the parlor game of writing a one-sentence description of a “modernized, reformed conservatism.”
His own offering went as follows:
A reality-based, culturally modern, socially inclusive and environmentally responsible politics that supports free markets, limited government and a peaceful American-led world order.
In other words, “modernized, reformed” conservatism of the Frumish variety would be:
A conservatism subservient to the opinions of the journalistic and academic establishment (reality-based);
Committed to the aesthetics and favored causes of the community of fashion (culturally modern);
Supportive of the left’s program of conferring official status and special privileges to victim groups (socially inclusive);
And faithful to the Luddite dualist heresy which regards human life and productive activity as intrinsically transgressive, contaminative, and blameworthy (environmentally responsible);
Whenever possible, of course, when not obliged by its commitment to all of the contemporary left’s principal agenda items, MRC (Modern, Reformed Conservatism) would be in favor of free markets and limited government.
Those markets, of course, would inevitably not be all that free, since they would require all sorts of regulating for purposes of environmental protection, redistributivist social justice, socially-engineered diversity, and coercive tolerance, by a government which could hardly be very limited, considering all the matters it would necessarily need to supervise, control, regulate, and direct.
Foreign policy is treated as a rather vague afterthought, but it is similarly couched in oxymoronic, having your conservative cake, though applauding as the left eats your lunch, terms. Mr. Frum refers to a peaceful American-led world order. The “peaceful” reference is obviously intended as a subtle reproach to the policies of the previous Republican Administration which indulged in war.
America ought to lead the world, but it should be obliged to do so using pan-pipes rather than its military. This tag end of a single sentence fails to provide room for an explanation about how the US ought to go about peacefully leading countries which provide bases for terrorist activity directed at American civilians.
I’ll play. What Messrs. Sullivan and Frum would like would be:
A conservatism agreeable to unstable journalists of foreign nationality intent on promoting the homosexual subculture’s political agenda and cultivating personal careers within the media establishment.
