Blog Heap of Links for the day 30 June 2012

Links in this view: 16
1

Obamanation

On March 22, 2011, in an interview on Spanish-language television, President Obama, unbidden, brought up Fast and Furious in what were obviously considered remarks. He declared:
There have been problems, you know. I heard on the news about this story that — Fast and Furious, where allegedly guns were being run into Mexico, and ATF knew about it, but didn’t apprehend those who had sent it. Eric Holder has — the attorney general has been very clear that he knew nothing about this.
By the time the president volunteered these words, a cover-up was already well underway within his administration. … In particular, you’ll want to introduce yourself to “OCDETF" … unknown to the public — and boy, does the administration ever want to keep it that way. … Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. … Besides developing and exploiting informants, the agencies infiltrate criminal conspiracies with undercover agents, use the information gathered as the basis for wiretaps, and coordinate this eavesdropping with physical surveillance. It takes scores of agents to monitor bugs, conduct sometimes 24/7 spying on multiple subjects, and manage informants, who tend to be very high-maintenance. This costs money, lots of money. … investigative techniques for which federal law requires approval by the attorney general or his designee…. the Obama administration has offered a palpably false narrative about Fast and Furious. It is this: Acting on their own, recklessly irresponsible ATF agents in Arizona — under the ostensible direction of the local U.S. attorney, who was actually asleep at the switch — dreamed up the Fast and Furious investigation, with its rogue “gunwalking” tactic. … In fact, Fast and Furious was an OCDETF case. That made it a Main Justice case, not the orphan Arizona debacle of media portrayal. … the defining features of OCDETF are investigative coordination under the Justice Department’s leadership and the liberal sharing of information across the department’s array of agencies.
6:14pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW
Holder
According to the letter, the wiretap applications contained a startling amount of detail about the [Fast & Furious] operation, which would have tipped off anyone who read them closely about what tactics were being used. Holder and Cummings have both maintained that the wiretap applications did not contain such details and that the applications were reviewed narrowly for probable cause, not for whether any investigatory tactics contained followed Justice Department policy. The wiretap applications were signed by senior DOJ officials in the department’s criminal division, including Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco and another official who is now deceased.
h/t: Drudge
11:49am CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW
Scary O
The Justice Department moved Friday to shield Attorney General Eric Holder from prosecution after the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. The contempt vote technically opened the door for the House to call on the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to bring the case before a grand jury. But because U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen works for Holder and because President Obama has already asserted executive privilege over the documents in question, some expected Holder's Justice Department to balk. Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner that the department in fact would not pursue prosecution. The attorney general's withholding of documents pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious, he wrote, "does not constitute a crime."
h/t: Drudge
11:45am CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Wars and Rumors

Iran already today has enough enriched uranium to manufacture five atomic bombs. If Iran is not stopped, within a year it will have enough uranium for seven or eight atomic bombs. “In addition, the Iranians apparently possess a weapons development system which they are hiding from the international supervisory apparatus. The Iranians also have 400 missiles of different types, which can reach the whole area of Israel and certain parts of Europe. Those missiles were built from the outset with the ability to carry nuclear warheads. So the picture is clear. Five years ago, even three years ago, Iran was not within the zone of the nuclear threshold. Today it is. Before our eyes Iran is becoming a nuclear-threshold power. … Other developments are also feasible. But if the question is bomb or bombing, the answer is clear: bomb.… if Iran goes nuclear, four or five more countries in the Middle East are liable to go nuclear, too. … Iranian nuclearization will bring in its wake nuclear chaos. … A Western individual observing the fantastic ambitions of the Iranian leadership scoffs: ‘What do they think, that they will Islamize us?’ The surprising answer is: Yes… their rationality is completely different from our rationality. Their concepts are different and their considerations are different. They are completely unlike the former Soviet Union. They are not even like Pakistan or North Korea. If Iran enjoys a nuclear umbrella and the feeling of strength of a nuclear power, there is no knowing how it will behave.
6:35pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Infrastructure Failure

a
An outage of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia has taken down Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram, and other services. According to numerous Twitter updates and our own checks, all three services are unavailable as of Friday evening at 9:10 p.m. PT. Amazon’s service health dashboard indicates that there are power issues in its North Virginia data center, most likely caused by severe storms in the region. The outage underscores the vulnerabilities of depending on the public cloud versus using your own data centers. Independent checks by VentureBeat of Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and Heroku show each site not operating.
2:01pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Family Tragedy

She had just gotten her hair done for a trip to Disney World that had been planned for next month, and was outside with her mother as they sold lemonade, candy and snacks under a canopy set up in front of their home. Two men opened fire around 10:40 p.m. Wednesday, and Heaven was struck in the chest. “I had just called Heaven. She was sitting right next to me on my shoulder. Just laying on my shoulder,” Banks said Thursday. Banks described the horrific sight of seeing her young daughter lying dead. “For her to die like this – 7 years old, lying on a slab cold, her eyes just open, blood coming out her nose – I just want him to turn himself in. That’s all that I ask of him. And I’m asking for Chicago to help me,” she said.
h/t: Drudge
11:56am CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Big Brother

Goebbles
IBM calls it Intelligent Operations Center (IOC), and in the past three years has led over 2,000 projects to “monitor, measure, and manage city services such as water systems, public safety, transportation, hospitals, electricity grids, and buildings.” Just this past week, the company announced new projects in South Bend, Indiana, Davao, Philippines, and Lyon, France. In each of them, the company will be working to add sensors to everyday infrastructure, install software to integrate and manage the massive inflow of data, and provide city officials with the information and intelligence they need to run their cities better. Hopefully, the result will be better, more livable, and more sustainable urban environments.
5:55pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Socialized Medicine can be deadly

Medicaid patients face grave difficulties obtaining timely and essential care, and suffer worse health outcomes as a result. Occasionally, the ensuing tragedies play out in newspapers, as with this 2007 report from the Washington Post: A 12-year-old Maryland boy named Deamonte Driver complained of a headache, which ultimately stemmed from an abscessed tooth. His mother had not noticed the problem, partially because she was working frantically to find a Maryland dentist to treat her other son, who had six rotten teeth. But of the approximately 5,500 dentists in the entire state, only about 900 accepted Medicaid. None of the children received routine dental care. By the time Deamonte complained, the infection in his tooth had spread to his brain. He was rushed to Children’s Hospital for emergency surgery and spent more than two weeks there. Then one night, he called his mother from his hospital room and told her, “Make sure you pray before you go to sleep.” In the morning, he was dead.
h/t: Cuz BD
6:19pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Justice?

Roberts
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts joked that he'll spend some time on an "impregnable island fortress" now that the court has ended a session that featured him casting the decisive vote to uphold President Barack Obama's health care law. [Ha ha ha. Not.]
h/t: Drudge
11:54am CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW
2

Digital Future is Now

G
'Google Glasses will be great for point-of-view porn' [Well, duh. How did you think they'd be used?] …quite what Google will think of the idea is another doesn't matter… [FIFY]
h/t: Drudge
12:00pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Digital Theory of Education

If you aren’t convinced of the enormous potential technology can play in transforming education, be sure to watch Nicholas Negroponte’s ”One Tablet Per Child Project.” Earlier this year, he airdropped tablets into two remote villages in Ethiopia whose people are essentially illiterate. These were new tablets in boxes, loaded with education apps and powered by solar panels — and without any sort of instructions. In the first two weeks of this two-year experiment, over 57 of the apps were being used on a daily basis, and many of the children were reciting and competing over their knowledge of the alphabet. If this doesn’t convince you of the power and potential of these new platforms and applications, hand a 2-year-old your iPad and watch what happens. The gestural interface of tablets nurtures a child’s natural curiosity and learning capacity.
6:39pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Digital Business

Of all the confounding changes made in the latest Windows 8 consumer preview, few upset people quite as much as the removal of the Start button. But what hasn’t been clear is why Microsoft removed the feature, which has been a central pillar of Windows for over a 15 years. The answer might be obvious: People weren’t using it.
6:55pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Digital History

Bender
Alan Turing would have turned 100 this week, an event that would have, no doubt, been greeted with all manner of pomp -- the centennial of a man whose mid-century concepts would set the stage for modern computing. Turing, of course, never made it that far, found dead at age 41 from cyanide poisoning, possibly self-inflicted. His story is that of a brilliant mind cut down in its prime for sad and ultimately baffling reasons, a man who accomplished so much in a short time and almost certainly would have had far more to give, if not for a society that couldn't accept him for who he was.
7:50pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW
3

US Military

She called the Army's Family Advocacy program, an organization that supports families in crisis. After the counselor put her hand on Ashley's arm, told her she was in a safe place and to trust her, Ashley opened up. "I hadn't slept in over 24 hours," she told me on the phone. "It's the only reason she got me." What she meant was that as soon as she outlined the difficulties she and Rob had been going through, the session stopped, the advocacy worker got up and Rob was promptly picked up by the Military Police. Rob was now facing 72 hours confinement, domestic assault charges, and a dishonorable discharge that would cause the family to lose all the benefits they were entitled to. It didn't take Ashley long to realize Army officials were preparing to make her and Rob the "civilian sector's problem." None of this is unusual, but facing few options Ashley did something that's started a viral Facebook movement, garnered thousands of followers, and has so far saved her family. Without a voice and ignored, she wrote a pledge on her back, took a picture of it holding Rob's M4 assault rifle over her head and uploaded it. The response from other wives watching their husbands suffer post traumatic stress was immediate, and the sudden interest in her case from Rob's command soon followed. The Facebook Group Battling BARE was born and now receives pictures from military wives around the country silently screaming the same pledge on their naked backs.
7:15pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW
The Europeans simply can’t afford to spend more on defense without cutting back social welfare programs, which the political class cannot do because it sparks riots in the streets. This is where we are currently heading—and if ObamaCare survives political as well as legal challenges, with its estimated cost of more than a trillion dollars, we will arrive at this destination all the more quickly.
6:59pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW

Effective Communication

Stupid icon
Zlango, an app that enables users to communicate with images rather than words, just hit the 1.25 billion text mark. … “As consumers search for more ways to clearly communicate via texts, Zlango offers high-impact images to bring popular culture and visual expression straight to their phones.” The company has raised $22 million to date…
6:46pm CDT Sat 2012 Jun 30 :MW