When Vases And Shoelaces Collide

Somewhere around 350 years ago, some skilled artisan was making these wonderful Qing dynasty vases. Who knew that they would be the victim of an untied shoelace some day?

"A museum visitor shattered three Qing dynasty Chinese vases when he tripped on his shoelace, stumbled down a stairway and brought the vases crashing to the floor, officials said Monday."

By the way, how did you just pronounce "vase"?

How Bad Is RedBull For You?

Yep, the title to this entry is a tad misleading. But I really had no idea that people thought this stuff was bad for you. Obviously in large quantities it's probably a bad idea. Anyway, someone asked about it on one of the tech forums I frequent, ArsTechnica.com. How would I describe the response? Hmmm. Dogpiling really doesn't begin to describe it. I couldn't read all of it, but for the most part it had me rolling in my seat. The original post seems harmless enough:

Lately I haven't been getting enough sleep, so tomorrow I've thought about drinking a Red Bull in the morning. My question is, is it really detrimental to my health?I've read up, and I want a verdict. You see, tonight I will only get around 6 hours of sleep and then I have class for an hour, and after that I have to workout for about two hours. Naturally, some energy would be nice because I will be up til 11 tomorrow night with classes, studying, and meetings.Any advice?

The response is not so warm, a precursor for what is to come:

Let me get this straight... you're asking about drinking one Red Bull tomorrow morning? If I hadn't read some of your past threads, I would be utterly incredulous.Yes, you will be fine. Or, you could drink a cup of coffee. Or, a Mountain Dew. Whatever. Seriously, I was expecting someone who was drinking like a case of Red Bull a day, and I probably still would have had the same advice for them.

It gets soooo much worse, but I'd rather let you read it for yourself:
How Bad Is Red Bull For You?

Oprah Book Club Part III

Read my previous posts for the background on this story.

Looks like this saga hasn't ended, or maybe this is the end, I don't know. Last week, Oprah called in to the Larry King show to reinforce her support of the author, the book, and the selection for the book club. Her basic stance was that for the "thousands of people that were helped by the book", whether it was a true story or not really didn't matter and that if it helped those readers, well, that's all that counts, truth be damned.

Apparently Oprah's fanbase didn't like that too much. They sent email after email expressing their concern for the truth and how easily Oprah had dismissed the allegations.

Oprah did a one-eighty, invited Frey back to her show where she summarily grilled him in front of an unsympathetic studio audience.

Ouch. Seems Oprah holds all the power. I have a feeling Frey really doesn't care though because according to CNN, the book is still in the top 5. As the old adage goes, "there's no such thing as bad press."

Let's Make A Deal

While watching Numb3rs, a scene where the math wiz was explaining something caught my attention. He was explaining the 'Let's Make A Deal' phenomenon. Basically it goes like this:

The contestant is given 3 doors, behind one of which is a prize. The other two have donkeys or goats or whatever. The contestant picks one of the doors. The host then reveals a losing door from the remaining two. The contestant is now given the option to switch their pick to the remaining door.

Should they switch? Should they stick with their original pick? Most people's intuition says it doesn't matter if they switch, either way they will have a 1/2 chance of winning because there are two doors left and you pick one of them.

WRONG. According to the show anyway. According to Numb3rs, you should switch your pick.

This didn't sit right with me, so I decided to do an experiment. My girlfriend and I used three cards from a deck and used an Ace as the 'winner'. First, we did a series where she stayed with her pick, and somewhat surprisingly her winning ratio was approximately 1/3.

Then, we did a series where she switched her pick, and sure enough, she won 2/3 times (or so). So how did this happen? Why didn't she get 50/50 odds?

It's rather difficult for me to explain because I am still trying to get over the hump myself. It's something along these lines:

There are really two rounds of odds involved, the first with 3 cards, and the second with two cards. Picking from the first round nets you a 1/3 chance of winning. Sticking with the VERY same card during the second round guarantees that you retain a 1/3 chance of winning. On the other side of things, by removing a losing card for the second round, the remaining unpicked card now embodies a 2/3 chance of winning by combining the odds for both the unpicked cards into one.

Once you try the experiment that my girlfriend and I tried, it becomes obvious that sticking with your original pick is a bad idea. You essentially relegate yourself to a 1/3 chance of winning. While that remaining card in the second round embodies the remaining 2/3 chance of winning.

While browsing around the web, I was surprised to find all the talk surrounding this apparent 'paradox'. This was addressed in statistics journals as early as 1975, mostly due to the popularity of the show. One of the sites I found has this neat Java applet that will do the experiment for you:

http://www.stat.sc.edu/~west/javahtml/LetsMakeaDeal.html

Even more interesting to note is that Monty Hall himself responded to the question himself on the Let's Make A Deal homepage:

May 12, 1975

Mr. Steve Selvin
Asst. Professor of Biostatistics
University of California, Berkeley

Dear Steve:

Thank you for sending me the problem from "The American Statistician."

Although I am not a student of a statistics problems, I do know that these figures can always be used to one's advantage, if I wished to manipulate same. The big hole in your argument of problems is that once the first box is seen to be empty, the contestant cannot exchange his box. So the problems still remain the same, don't they. . . one out of three. Oh, and incidentally, after one is seen to be empty, his chances are no longer 50/50 but remain what they were in the first place, one out of three. It just seems to the contestant that one box having been eliminated, he stands a better chance. Not so. It was always two to one against him. And if you ever get on my show, the rules hold fast for you -- no trading boxes after the selection.

Next time let's play on my home grounds. I graduated in chemistry and zoology. You want to know your chances of surviving with our polluted air and water?

Sincerely,
Monty

So, according to Monty Hall himself, the contestant was never allowed to switch their pick after the first door was revealed. I don't remember the show well enough to remember if that is true, but it's funny how all this talk might be about a situation that never even occurred on the show!

Alberto Gonzales As Peacemaker?

I wish I didn't feel like I'm harping on this subject, but alas, this just grates my nerves. The Bush administration has so much gall, it's absolutely insulting to the American people.

Al Gore said in his speech, and I concur 100%:

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles ready to be launched on a moment’s notice to completely annihilate the country? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when the last generation had to fight and win two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it’s up to us to do the very same thing!

Preaching to the frickin' choir here!! I mean, seriously! Do we think that we are in more danger than we were during all those times of crisis? It is an absolute INSULT to those who came before us, who stood up to the tests our country faced, and shone brightly in the face of adversity! These were true examples to be followed, not examples to be forgotten.

This is the kind of thing that we as the freedom-loving peoples of the United States, can't just let go by. Here, the students at Georgetown University put actions where words were:



How dare Alberto Gonzales make a visit to a law school, where level-headed, logical experts in constitutional law wander the halls in study every day. This isn't the capitol building, where everyone is a politician first, and lawyer second. The nerve of this guy and this administration is just unending.

Al Gore's MLK Day Speech

On January 16, 2006, Al Gore made an impassioned speech regarding freedoms and the degradation of rights under the current administration. This irritates me for a couple reasons. First, he was so wooden in the 2000 election and only now does he come up with the passion, the emotion. Second, because he is viewed as a crackpot by so many Americans, he will never run again.

That's too bad, because I really think that with this speech, he hit the nail on the head.

It's a long speech. But because I think it would be a travesty to chop it up, I am posting the speech in it's entirety.

Again, here is the full text of Al Gore's speech in Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C. on January 16, 2006, Martin Luther King, Jr Day:

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress precisely to prevent such abuses. It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored in our country.

And that is why many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences insofar as it is possible to do so and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all of our people.

And on this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during that period.

The FBI privately labeled King the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted this long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, was instrumental in helping to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

And one result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there was indeed a sufficient cause for the surveillance. It included ample flexibility and an ability for the executive to move with as much speed as the executive desired. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of affording a level of protection for American citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue whenever it is necessary.

And yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on, and I quote the report, "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that would permit domestic intelligence collection."

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President seemed to go out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but in the next breath declared that he has no intention stopping or of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. They recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense" ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that, in his phrase, "the law is king."

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law actually strengthens our democracy, of course, and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint, under the rule of law.

And make no mistake, the rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed, and examined through the normal processes of government that are designed to improve policy, and avoid error. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion to power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness, and accountability helps our country avoid many serious mistakes, that we would otherwise make. Recently, for example, we learned from just declassified documents, after almost forty years, that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. And we now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. Now the point is that America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. And that is the reason why following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is on the proposition that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government in order to protect Americans from terrorism. When in fact, doing so would make us weaker and more vulnerable.

And remember that once violated, the rule of law is itself in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its mistakes and reveal errors, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police its activities. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

The President's men have minced words about America's laws. The Attorney General, for example, openly conceded that the "kind of surveillance" we now know they have been conducting does require a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration claims, instead, that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th.

But, this argument simply does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that is why they consulted with some members of Congress about the possibility of changing the statute. Genl. Gonzalez says that they were told by the members of congress consulted that this would probably not be possible. And so they decided not to make the request. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the use of military force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Indeed, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically - and the Congress refused to agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made clear statements during the debate on the floor of the house and the senate, respectively, clearly stating that that Authorization did not operate domestically. And there is no assertion to the contrary.

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him the power he wanted when this measure was passed, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: "To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between the President and the Congress."

This is precisely the "disrespect" for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case during the Korean War.

It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

For example, as you know the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, that person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even if he wants to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person. The President claims that he can imprison that American citizen -- any American Citizen he chooses -- indefinitely for the rest of his live without an even arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, without even informing their families that they have been imprisoned. No such right exists in the America that you and I know and love. It is foreign to our constitution. It must be rejected.

At the same time, the Executive branch has also claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture and have plainly constituted torture in a widespread pattern that has been extensively documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. And, in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were completely innocent of any criminal charges whatsoever. This is a shameful exercise of power that overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General George Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War. They have been observed by every president since then - until now. They violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, and our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals on the streets of foreign cities and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture. Some of our traditional allies have been deeply shocked by these new, and uncharacteristic patterns on the part of Americans. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home office about the cruelty and senselessness of the new U.S. practice that he witnessed: "This material we’re getting is useless,” he wrote and then he continued with this – “we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful."

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's extravagant claims of these previously unrecognized powers: "If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

The fact that our normal American safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is, itself, deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore a healthy constitutional balance.

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it. Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. And when the Supreme Court disagreed, the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing any meaningful content to the rights of the citizens affected.

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Executive branch's handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle, and I quote him, "at substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts."

As a result of this unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America's democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been preserved in large part by our founders' wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which, as you know, serves to check and balance the power of the other two.

On more than a few occasions, in our history, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled "constitutional crises." These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live together under the rule of law.

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has, of course, been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or small group who exercise that power without the informed consent of the governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was, in his memorable phrase, "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure," he was not only saving our union, he was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime.

There have of course been other periods in American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents. And when his successor, President Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses, in his first inaugural he said: "[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation... [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety."

President Lincoln, of course, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a shameful low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, of course, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of those abuses experienced by Dr. King and so many thousands of others.

But in each of these cases throughout American history, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, our nation recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

But, there are reasons for concern this time around, that conditions may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a globe where there are nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter- intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. But, as Justice Frankfurter wrote in that famous Steel Seizure Case, "The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority."

A second reason to that believe we may be experiencing something new -- outside that historical cycle -- is that we are, after all, told by this Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to "last” in their phrase, “for the rest of our lives." And so, we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will, in this case, persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be keenly aware of the startling advances in the sophistication of eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to easily sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and then mine it for intelligence. And this adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies grows. Those technologies do have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways that are both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is real and the concerted efforts by terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction does indeed create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power conferred by the Constitution to the any President to take unilateral action when necessary to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat. And it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not. But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for many years and producing a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

And there is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential power is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which ought to be more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary, cannot be checked by Congress. And President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, both domestic and foreign. And when added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and subservient judiciary is ironically accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish a form of dominance in the world.

And the common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the Executive branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive branch employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to the FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's assertion that Martin Luther King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division testified that his effort to tell the truth about King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated within the FBI and pressured. And I quote: "It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street.... The men and I (he continued) discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These men (he continued) were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. ... so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in."

The Constitution's framers who studied human nature so closely understood this dilemma quite well. As Alexander Hamilton put it, "a power over a man's support is a power over his will." (Federalist No. 73)

In any case, quite soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. And the false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: "We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that, sooner or later, a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." 2,200 American soldiers have lost their lives as this false belief bumped into a solid reality.

And indeed, whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to gross mistakes and abuses. That is part of human nature. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded. It is human nature -- whether for Republicans or Democrats or people of any set of views.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the Administration's eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still does not know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have led to the identification of most of the others. One of them was in the phonebook. And yet, because of incompetence, unaccountable incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case, again, regardless of which party might be in power, that an Executive branch, beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power, responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. That’s why many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And that is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If his attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, then our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have imagined possible.

This same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance has characterized the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties, adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands - notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process -- by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch.

The President's decision, for example, to ignore the FISA law was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. And yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not even let the court know that it was being bypassed.

The President's judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive - a supporter of that so-called unitary executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not - and I respect the fact that some of the co-sponsors of this event do. I do not – but whatever your view, we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has also supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President's nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated a contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage in our constitutional framework has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive to attain this massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to the Congress in 1976, served eight years in the house, 8 years in the Senate, presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate after I had graduated from college.

The Congress we have today is structurally unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished and outstanding Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored to know them and to have worked with them. But the legislative branch of government, as a whole, under its current leadership now operates as if it were entirely subservient to the Executive branch. It is astonishing to me, and so foreign to what the Congress is supposed to be.

Moreover, too many members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate on the issues, but instead raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

Moreover, there have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive branch to the fire - no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

The role of the authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed as bills, anymore. Everything is lumped into a familiar single giant measure that is not even available for members of Congress to read before they vote on it. Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely disallowed during floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the "greatest deliberative body in the world," meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: "Why is this chamber empty?" In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Executive branch is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Administration. The Executive branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress' role, and too often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in "overseeing" this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and sometimes the leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to the vice-president.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking sufficient action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program. Many did.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole-both House and Senate-the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption that some have fallen vulnerable to.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg threatening the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by the Executive Branch now threatening a radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of American government you are supposed to be under the Constitution of our country. But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must also be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has accompanied these efforts by the Executive branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We-must examine ourselves. We - as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here"-must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and hollowing out and degradation of American democracy! It is time to stand up for the American system that we know and love! It is time to breathe new life back into America’s democracy!

Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will" America’s based on the belief that we can govern ourselves. And exercise the power of self-government. The American idea proceeded from the bedrock principle that all just power is derived from the consent of the governed.

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

And when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification.

And it is "We the people" who must now find, once again, the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. And here there is cause for both concern and for great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is now applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. And its dominance has now become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements, and they’re not the Federalist Papers.

The political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive branch to believe it can and should control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain secrecy in its operations. After all, if the other branches don’t know what is happening they can't be a check or a balance.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and actively prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it had sought from the principal administration expert who had the information showing in advance of the vote that, indeed, the true cost estimates were far beyond the numbers given to Congress by the President. And the workings of the program would play out very differently than Congress had been told.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. And tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing- all over the country- with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out. But the American people, who have the right to believe that its elected representatives will learn the truth and act on the basis of knowledge and utilize the rule of reason, have been let down.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training, whatsoever. Today, one of the leading scientific experts in the world on global warming in NASA, has been ordered not to talk to members of the press, ordered to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive branch can monitor and control what he shares of his knowledge of global warming. This is a planetary crisis – we owe ourselves a truthful and reasoned discussion.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information has been by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. President Eisenhower said this: "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the full Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles ready to be launched on a moment’s notice to completely annihilate the country? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when the last generation had to fight and win two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it’s up to us to do the very same thing!

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive branch and the President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, and I quote: "The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will."

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We’ve had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of this special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by the warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President, and it should be a political issue in any race -- regardless of party, section of the country, house of congress for anyone who opposes the appointment of a special counsel under these dangerous circumstances when our Constitution is at risk. Secondly, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive branch who report evidence of wrongdoing -- especially where it involves the abuse of authority in these sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should, of course, hold comprehensive-and not just superficial-hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

In closing, I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established by the people and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, "Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us."

Thank you, very much.

Micromanager Chronicles - 01/19/2006

Well, MM-Boss ran the meeting this morning. That wouldn't be so bad if she had called the meeting, and not me.

Actually, she didn't show up to the meeting at first and it was me running the show. We were doing fine. Then she walked in and sat at the back and observed. The sudden increase in tension was felt by most people in the room.

She couldn't hack sitting in the back, so she moved up closer and immediately started taking over the meeting. She asked me why the work breakdown wasn't like we discussed (in front of everyone). I explained that the way we originally wanted to do the schedule wasn't going to work. Of course she doesn't understand spreadsheets in the first place and couldn't understand why it wasn't all nice and pretty like the ones she had seen before. The ones she had seen before were for much smaller projects, with less involved parties, only a few tasks to accomplish, and fewer task dependencies.

Anyway, she wouldn't drop it until other people in the room confirmed that the way I was doing it was the correct way. *shrug*

Later in the meeting, someone asked a question. MM-Boss was visibly irritated when I answered the question over her. It was my meeting. The question was directed to me. She wanted to answer it.

After the meeting, she again asked me why the spreadsheet wasn't like we previously discussed. I showed her the ones she was using as an example and there were only two people involved in the project, a programmer and a tester, how the tasks could be accomplished one after the other without any further dependencies. Then I compared it to ours which has no less than nine people working on it with a web of dependencies between the tasks and involved parties. Not fully satisfied with the answer she said "Well I guess we'll keep it this way and see how it goes". In other words, if anything goes wrong we'll blame it on the work breakdown you made and if Big Boss doesn't like it we'll know why, now won't we?

Micromanagement summary: Even though MM-Boss doesn't even understand spreadsheets, she tried to force me to make it the way she wanted it. Even though she doesn't understand work breakdowns, she tried to dictate how to do it. Even though she didn't call the meeting, she showed up and ran it.

Now some of you may be wondering why I haven't tried to address her or go over her head. Right? First, I have tried addressing her directly, but her excuse for the level of control is that I don't know everything and that I have a lot to learn. On top of that, she is best buds with Big Boss, so I can't go to Big Boss either, at least not if I expect positive results. When I say they are best buds, what I mean by that is if I say anything to Big Boss, it will go straight to MM-Boss unedited and unabridged.

Oprah's Book Club Under Fire...Again

Ha! You may remember my post about Oprah's Book Club non-fiction pick that was heavy on fiction. Inversely, as a pre-emptive strike, it looks like Amazon and Barnes & Noble don't like the fiction label on the latest pick Night by Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Apparently it is somewhat autobiographical and not much fiction at all.

I'm pretty split on this whole author/book issue. Putting your own experiences in your writing is inevitable as an author. In some ways it seems these people are picking on Oprah and her book club. Obviously Oprah isn't the only one to pick this book as the selection of the month, her club just happens to be really, really famous. At the same time, I really don't understand how people gobble this stuff up just because it's on Oprah's Book Club list anyway.

Hell Has Frozen Over, or... Intel Powered Macs

If you are into tech and have been living under a rock for the past 7 months, you may be surprised to find out that Apple is moving to Intel to power their computers.

Otherwise, you probably know that Steve Jobs has said that these new Intel processors make the Mac "4 times faster" than their predecessors.

These new Macs feature the Intel Core Duo processors fabbed at 65nm. In laymen's terms, sorta, these are dual core processors with reduced power consumption due to new architecture AND the small process size.

Arstechnica.com has a great review on the Apple 17" iMac Core Duo:

"The Big Switch has been publicly underway for a mere seven months, and it has borne fruit in the form of a new iMac and laptop, the MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro is due to hit store shelves at some point in February. The iMac is available now, and we've had a 17" Core Duo iMac up and running at the Ars Orbiting HQ since we were able to get our hands on one."

I think this brings Apple as a company into a whole different light. They still have complete control over their hardware, but this hardware is no longer exclusively used by Apple. These Intel processors are used in PCs as well. Does this bring Apple closer to being a software company, ala Microsoft? If so, their market positioning has changed dramatically.

Micromanager Chronicles - 01/17/2006

We had a meeting today with our department to go over my project. Sounds great, right? I'm the project lead and I called meeting during a previous meeting last week. I'm getting the department people together to work as a team, etc, etc.

Well, that's how it seemed if you were on the outside looking in. But you know, because everyone knows that I'm not actually running the show, and that my boss is running the show, it doesn't really matter if I call a meeting. I'm not the one in charge. My boss is the one in charge.

My boss didn't show up for the meeting when it started. She really didn't have anything to contribute anyway so she didn't need to be there. We were gathered to ferret out the timelines for the schedule and each contributor in our department needed to come up with their own work breakdowns and we would make one big project timeline from each of the contributors' tasks.

One comment heard before the meeting started: "MM-Boss isn't here? Well I guess I don't need to be here either." That might sound benign, but what this person was pointing out for everyone in the room was that MM-Boss was the one that mattered and the one that was actually running the show, not me, the project lead. On top of that, NOBODY came prepared. NOBODY had reviewed the project requirements. NOBODY brought a breakdown of their contribution.

Why? I'll tell you why.

I called the meeting.

But because I'm not running the show, nobody cared. Nobody thought the meeting was important enough to actually prepare for or do work for.

See what micromanagement does? It removes the impetus for the department.

I Love You Gary!

Imagine a lovely evening with your woman, nestled on the couch, when suddenly your pet parrot blurts out "I love you, Gary!".

Wouldn't be so bad if your name was actually Gary.

Well, according to CNN, this particular parrot blew the lady's cover when he repeated her lover's name over and over, even mimicing her voice as if she were answering the telephone:

The African grey parrot kept squawking "I love you, Gary" as his owner, Chris Taylor, sat with girlfriend Suzy Collins on the sofa of their shared flat in Leeds, northern England.

But when Taylor saw Collins's embarrassed reaction, he realized she had been having an affair -- meeting her lover in the flat whilst Ziggy looked on, the UK's Press Association reported.

What a crappy way to find out. Well, I guess ANY way of finding out would be crappy.

Micromanager Chronicles - 01/16/2006

Ever been micromanaged? Well, let me tell you, it is a real initiative killer.

I've never understood all the complaining about micromanagement. Usually I've assumed that people are being micromanaged because they can't do anything on their own and their boss is trying to find ways to motivate them by being more involved and thereby enforcing production.

What I have found out first-hand though is that micromanagement is primarily a way for overzealous managers to feel comfortable that things are progressing the way they want in the workplace, not a way to maximize production. That may seem like a very thin line, but in the workplace, there is a world of difference.

Here is an example of how micromanagement is an initiative killer:

I'm working on a big project, a project that would formerly be worked on by my manager. Now that I am in this position though, it is my duty. I worked diligently at the beginning of the project. However, it became obvious very quickly that unless things were done exactly as my manager wished (which she was VERY passive about... "We might want to... Maybe we ought to...", etc, etc), that I would end up trashing my work and doing things the way my manager not-so-obviously wanted it. After several weeks of not being able to do anything without my manager's input, I am reduced to not doing anything at all unless it came directly from my manager's mouth or emails.

This has slowed the project to a crawl because nothing is getting done unless my manager is directly involved in doing it. This begs the question of why I am even working under this person in the first place and why they are managing instead of directly doing the project.

At this point, I have no interest in doing the project because of all the project issues that have happened as a result of micromanagement. The project is written poorly and the execution plan is very poor. It has no innovative solutions and is "the same as we have always done". Unless I have a detailed list of things to accomplish directly from my manager, nothing is happening on the project. I am also required to give my manager HOURLY updates on the progress being made.

It's a running joke at work that my manager has her head so far up my ass, she has ring around the collar.

When I Was A Kid... Ants On July 4th

When I was a kid, my cousin and I blew up thousands of ants during July 4th every year. Should I feel guilty?

Astrology Is For Lamers, Yo!

Today, I offer irrefutable proof that astrology is a gyp!

Today's birthdays:
Rush Limbaugh
Howard Stern

A Million Little Lies

Apparently James Frey's non-fiction memoir A Million Little Pieces about alcohol and drugs is light on 'non' and heavy on 'fiction' according to this Smoking Gun article:

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states.

Even though the publisher has backed their author on the authenticity of the story, they're giving refunds anyway. Not sure if this is a statement or not.

I think it's funny really. True or not, these sap stories that get selected for Oprah's Book Club are just lesser versions of voyeurism. It's just beautified in a glossy cover and sold at legitimate outlets worldwide.

To me, it's like organized mayhem when someone does this. You never know. It might actually open people's eyes. Fact of the matter is that people are being marketed to and those people are gobbling every morsel without thinking for themselves. I have NOTHING against marketing. I'm just amazed at how guillable people can be.

Yeah, But Can You Cook Fries In It?

I'm sure you've heard of watercooled computers, and even ones submerged in mineral oil. But how about a computer cooled by submerging it in vegetable oil?

I know that not everyone is a fan of Tom's Hardware, but this is a fascinating article. They explain exactly how to make this crazy PC come to life:

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil - but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.

Read more here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_the_fans/

Spelling Rules Are Evil

To whoever made up this rule, I hate you:

'I' before 'E' except after 'C'

Before I heard that stupid rule, I was a natural "IEC" speller. I knew what words did and didn't have I before E. For years now I have been afflicted with the "IEC" disease because some dolt decided I needed to hear it.

So now, I have passed this disease on to you! Good luck. There is no known cure.

Chuck Responds To The "Facts"

Just in case you didn't know, Chuck Norris is the current Internet Badass. Here is a list of facts about Chuck that you might or might not already know...

Top 30 Chuck Norris Facts:

1. Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
2. Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.
3. Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.
4. Chuck Norris counted to infinity - twice.
5. Chuck Norris has already been to Mars; that's why there are no signs of life there.
6. Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn't stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.
7. If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.
8. When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.
9. Chuck Norris has a word for a person he puts into a coma; that word is "lucky".
10. Chuck Norris was going to spend a relaxing day watching television when one of those commercials for Trix cereal came on. Angered by what he saw, Chuck Norris spent the rest of his, what was supposed to be a relaxing day, punching every child he came across. He would then shout at them, “Trix are for Chuck Norris.”
11. Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.
12. They once made a Chuck Norris toilet paper, but it wouldn't take shit from anybody.
13. Chuck Norris built a time machine and went back in time to stop the JFK assassination. As Oswald shot, Chuck met all three bullets with his beard, deflecting them. JFK's head exploded out of sheer amazement.
14. The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.
15. When Chuck Norris sends in his taxes, he sends blank forms and includes only a picture of himself, crouched and ready to attack. Chuck Norris has not had to pay taxes ever.
16. Achilles was supposedly the greatest warrior of all time, but he died because of his weak spot, the Achilles tendon. There is no Chuck Norris tendon.
17. To prove it isn't that big of a deal to beat cancer. Chuck Norris smoked 15 cartons of cigarettes a day for 2 years and aquired 7 different kinds of cancer only to rid them from his body by flexing for 30 minutes. Beat that, Lance Armstrong.
18. Chuck Norris won 3 Grammy Awards for the sound of his foot making contact with someone's face.
19. Chuck Norris ordered a Big Mac at Burger King, and got one.
20. Chuck Norris can touch MC Hammer.
21. A blind man once stepped on Chuck Norris' shoe. Chuck replied, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Chuck Norris!" The mere mention of his name cured this man blindness. Sadly the first, last, and only thing this man ever saw, was a fatal roundhouse delivered by Chuck Norris.
22. Chuck Norris sleeps with a night light. Not because Chuck Norris is afraid of the dark, but the dark is afraid of Chuck Norris
23. Chuck Norris once ate three 72 oz. steaks in one hour. He spent the first 45 minutes having sex with his waitress.
24. Chuck Norris doesn't apologize. He just stares at them till they realize it was indeed their own fucking fault for whatever happened and they apologize.
25. As a teen Chuck Norris impregnated every nun in a convent tucked away in the hills of Tuscany. Nine months later the nuns gave birth to the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated and untied team in professional football history.
26. Chuck Norris appeared in the "Street Fighter II" video game, but was removed by Beta Testers because every button caused him to do a roundhouse kick. When asked bout this "glitch," Norris replied, "That's no glitch."
27. Chuck Norris is not hung like a horse... horses are hung like Chuck Norris
28. A Handicap parking sign does not signify that this spot is for handicapped people. It is actually in fact a warning, that the spot belongs to Chuck Norris and that you will be handicapped if you park there.
29. Chuck Norris likes to knit sweaters in his free time. And by "knit", I mean "kick", and by "sweaters", I mean "babies".
30. Chuck Norris always has sex on the first date. Always.

From: http://www.4q.cc/chuck/index.php?topthirty

Well, it looks like Chuck has taken notice and can neither confirm nor deny the "Facts":

IN RESPONSE TO THE "RANDOM FACTS" THAT ARE BEING GENERATED ON THE INTERNET

I'm aware of the made up declarations about me that have recently begun to appear on the Internet and in emails as "Chuck Norris facts." I've seen some of them. Some are funny. Some are pretty far out. Being more a student of the Wild West than the wild world of the Internet, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's quite surprising. I do know that boys will be boys, and I neither take offense nor take these things too seriously. Who knows, maybe these made up one-liners will prompt young people to seek out the real facts as found in my recent autobiographical book, "Against All Odds?" They may even be interested enough to check out my novels set in the Old West, "The Justice Riders," released this month. I'm very proud of these literary efforts.

~ Chuck Norris

From: http://www.chucknorris.com/html/events.aspx

The Best Investment Scheme Ebar!

I have an investment proposition for you. No, this isn't some scam so just hear me out! I think it's a great idea and I think you will too. This investment program is completely legal right now. Believe me, even the federal government wouldn't try to put a stop to this.

This is how it works:
1. Your investment comes directly out of your paycheck and is put into a large fund with millions of other people. Every quarter you will receive a statement showing your total contribution and the progress of your investments.

2. The money is being invested in several programs and services that will never run out of demand and are recession free, namely, health care, prescription drugs, and retirement administration.

3. As an investor, you will also have the benefit of those services.

Here are the catches (you knew there would be some!):
1. You can never cash your investment out in whole. You will get monthly payments.

2. You can't actually start benefitting from your investment until age 67, even if you stop working before then.

3. If you die, only your spouse can claim the funds, and even then only partially. Your children or normal heirs can't get any of this money.

4. The rate of return is really low. As a matter of fact it might not have a yield at all, other than inflation.

5. Other investment participants can continue to receive payments until they die, even if the total is more than their contribution plus yield. This means others may take more than their 'fair share'.

6. There is no money actually left in the investment fund. All the money going into the fund is being spent to pay previous investors. I know that sounds like a pyramid or ponzi scheme. But it's not. Really.

What do you mean this doesn't sound good to you? I'm incredulous! No really...

By now you might have figured out that I have just described the United States Social Security system.

I'm not opposed to Social Security. I'm just opposed to Social Security as it is now. Nobody would invest in this kind of scheme. Not voluntarily anyway.

Anti-Spyware is Spyware?

In the famous words of Gomer Pyle...

"Surprise, surprise, surprise!"

Could it be that some anti-spyware programs are actually spyware? I know, I know. Some of you are probably stunned by this turn of events, but it's true.

OK, I'm turning off the sarcasm-matic. Most people who know anything about technology won't be surprised by this report, but sometimes things just have to be investigated and put down on paper, err, blog.

This report does a little legwork to uncover some companies behind some so-called "anti-spyware" programs...

Mark Russinovich's Antispyware Conspiracy