April 9, 2015 archive

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More lies your government tells you.

Ex-F.B.I. Agent Claims Retaliation for Dissent in Anthrax Inquiry

By SCOTT SHANE, The New York Times

APRIL 8, 2015

(A) former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax mailer, but he does not think prosecutors could have convicted him had he lived to face criminal charges.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tennessee last Thursday, Mr. Lambert accused the bureau of trying “to railroad the prosecution of Ivins” and, after his suicide, creating “an elaborate perception management campaign” to bolster its claim that he was guilty. Mr. Lambert’s lawsuit accuses the bureau and the Justice Department of forcing his dismissal from a job as senior counterintelligence officer at the Department of Energy’s lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in retaliation for his dissent on the anthrax case.



Mr. Lambert says the bureau also gathered a large amount of evidence pointing away from Dr. Ivins’s guilt that was never shared with the public or the news media. Had the case come to trial, “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.

Everything that is wrong and bad about “Access” “Journalism”.

Review: Judith Miller’s ‘The Story: A Reporter’s Journey’

by Terry McDermott, The New York Times

APRIL 7, 2015

In late 2002 and through 2003, Judith Miller, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, wrote a series of articles about the presumed presence of chemical and biological weapons and possible nuclear matériel in Iraq. Critics thought the articles too bellicose and in lock step with the George W. Bush administration’s march to war. They all included careful qualifiers, but their overwhelming message was that Saddam Hussein posed a threat.

Ms. Miller’s defense of her work then was straightforward: She reported what her sources told her. She has now written a book-length elaboration of that defense, “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.” The defense is no better now than it was then.



The string of exclusive articles she produced before the Iraq war had the effect of buttressing the Bush administration’s case for invasion.

She had built her career on access. She describes finding, cultivating and tending to powerfully situated sources. She writes that she did not, as some critics of her prewar reporting supposed, sit in her office and wait for the phone to ring. She pounded the pavement. And an ambitious reporter with the power, prestige and resources of a large news organization behind her can cover a lot of road.

Opponents of the Iraq invasion and media critics of her reporting accused her of being a secret neoconservative thirsting for war. Whatever her actual politics, though, the agenda that comes through most strongly here is a desire to land on the front page. She rarely mentions an article she wrote without noting that it appeared on the front page or complaining that it did not.



(S)he was the sole reporter embedded with the military team charged with finding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It failed, meaning so had she. Ms. Miller concedes that the Bush administration’s case for war was built largely on Iraq’s presumably ambitious weapons program. In describing what went wrong with one particular claim, she offers a defense that is repeated throughout the book: “The earlier stories had been wrong because the initial intelligence assessments we reported were themselves mistaken – not lies or exaggerations.”

Ms. Miller’s main defense is that the experts she relied upon – intelligence officials, weapons experts, members of the Bush administration and others – were wrong about Mr. Hussein’s weapons. She acknowledges being wrong but not making any mistakes. She quotes herself telling another reporter: “If your sources were wrong, you are wrong.” This is where she gets stuck.

And this is where Terry McDermott ends his Rand Paul 5 minutes of lucidity.

Journalists, especially those who have a talent for investigative work, are taught early to write big, to push the story as far as possible. Be careful; nail the facts; be fair, but push hard. Nobody pushed harder than Ms. Miller. In this case, she wound up implicitly pushing for war.

A deeper critique of her own reporting, and through that example a critique of the entire enterprise of investigative reporting, would examine its inherently prosecutorial nature. Investigators – journalistic or otherwise – are constantly trying to build a case, to make things fit even when they don’t obviously do so. In the process, the rough edges of the world can be whittled away, nuance can become muddled in the reporter’s head, in the writing, or in the editing.

Investigative Reporting?!  INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING?!

Let’s try whoring your soul, bootlicking sychophancy, shilling for war criminals.

What Judith Miller did has nothing to do with investigative reporting.  It was “access journalism.”

And as excited as I am to be here with the President, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of FOX News. FOX News gives you both sides of every story: the President’s side, and the Vice President’s side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking? Reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they’re super-depressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished.

Over the last five years you people were so good, over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

The Breakfast Club (Rebellion)

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

breakfast beers photo breakfastbeers.jpgWelcome back to Science Thursday.  This particular film was shot by CERN interns during some downtime, of which they have quite a lot actually since it’s broken more often than it’s working.

Science!

What a lot of people don’t know about the Large Hadron Collider is that it’s basically been operating at half capacity since an accident during the test phase blew out a large section.  Now, after two years of re-building, it is poised again to create that Black Hole Apocalypse that swallows the Earth into it’s singularity (not to worry, as it turns out micro Black Holes are unstable and loose mass (energy) through Hawking Radiation at a rate too great to sustain themselves indefinitely, so you can rest assured that we’re far more likely to die of Global Climate Change).

Anyway it’s been down for two years (much like Shell’s Arctic drilling scheme) and started it’s run up to full capacity next week.  Beyond nailing down the Higgs Boson, a lot of what they expect to find is nothing.

Huh?

Scientific method.  A Theory is not a Theory unless it makes predictions that are experimentally disprovable-

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?

To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

The dog did nothing in the night-time.

That was the curious incident.

A lot of the work for CERN from here on out is testing some of the predictions of various Theories and seeing if the experimental results match.  The fuzzyness of the Higgs Boson for instance could indicate Supersymmetry which predicts up to 5 types of Higgs Bosons.

If the Standard Model is in fact correct, it covers only 4% of the observed Universe.  27% is “Dark Matter” that is currently undetectable but exerts a huge Gravitational influence (umm… Black Holes are detectable so it ain’t that).  “Dark Energy” even less so, but this is the force that observationally inflates the Universe beyond a size where Gravity can ever collapse it.

The Large Hadron Collider might, might produce energy levels sufficient to detect Dark Matter.  Nobody is talking about Dark Energy yet.

Oh, and ‘Dark’ in this context means undetectable by current means, might as well call it Rebellion.

So how to do you detect the undetectable?  Why, by it’s absence.  The hope for Dark Matter is that certain types of collisions will, instead of producing results that conform with the Standard Model, lose detectable energy (mass) in a replicatible way that advances the math describing it’s nature.

Or not.

Cern restarts Large Hadron Collider with mission to make scientific history

by Ian Sample, The Guardian

Sunday 5 April 2015 15.48 EDT

The pat on the back and call to arms marked the restart on Sunday morning of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. More than two years after it handed researchers the Higgs boson, and was closed down for crucial upgrade work, the machine is ready to make scientific history for a second time.

How that history will be written is unknown. High on the wishlist for discoveries are dark matter, the invisible material that appears to hang around galaxies and makes up more than 25% of the universe; hidden extra dimensions that would explain why gravity is so puny compared to other forces of nature; and an explanation for why the world around us is not made from antimatter.

But there is another history that keeps scientists awake at night: the possibility that the LHC’s discoveries begin and end with the Higgs boson, that it finds nothing else over the next 20 years it is due to run. As Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and professor at the University of Texas in Austin, told the Guardian: “My thoughts on the possibility of the LHC telling us nothing new don’t go beyond hopeless fear.”



Until now, the Large Hadron Collider has run at only half its design energy. The machine was restricted to 7TeV collisions after a weak connection led to a short circuit that caused an explosion less than two weeks after it was first switched on in September 2008. The blast covered half a kilometre of the machine with a thin layer of soot and closed the collider for more than a year. The repairs cost the lab £24m.

The machine was switched back on in 2009, but Cern took the precaution of running at half energy to slash the risk of another accident. The gamble paid off. On 4 July 2012, the lab’s Atlas and CMS detector teams declared they had discovered the Higgs boson months before the machine was shut down. A year later, Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh-based physicist, and François Englert from Brussels, won the Nobel prize for their work on the particle, which is thought to give mass to others.



The Higgs boson was the last piece of what physicists call the Standard Model, a series of equations that describe how all the known particles interact with one another. Though successful, the model is woefully incomplete, accounting for only 4% of the known universe. With the LHC, scientists hope to find physics beyond the Standard Model, a first step to explaining the majority of the cosmos that lies beyond our comprehension.

“The LHC will be running day and night. When we will get results we don’t know. What is important is that we will have collisions at energies we’ve never had before,” said Arnaud Marsollier, a Cern spokesman.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

On This Day In History April 9

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

April 9 is the 99th day of the year (100th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 266 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia at the McLean House in the village of Appomattox Court House. In an untraditional gesture and as a sign of Grant’s respect and anticipation of peacefully restoring Confederate states to the Union, Lee was permitted to keep his sword and his horse, Traveller.

At Appomattox, Virginia, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders his 28,000 troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. Forced to abandon the Confederate capital of Richmond, blocked from joining the surviving Confederate force in North Carolina, and harassed constantly by Union cavalry, Lee had no other option.

In retreating from the Union army’s Appomattox Campaign, the Army of Northern Virginia had stumbled through the Virginia countryside stripped of food and supplies. At one point, Union cavalry forces under General Philip Sheridan had actually outrun Lee’s army, blocking their retreat and taking 6,000 prisoners at Sayler’s Creek. Desertions were mounting daily, and by April 8 the Confederates were surrounded with no possibility of escape. On April 9, Lee sent a message to Grant announcing his willingness to surrender. The two generals met in the parlor of the Wilmer McLean home at one o’clock in the afternoon.

Lee and Grant, both holding the highest rank in their respective armies, had known each other slightly during the Mexican War and exchanged awkward personal inquiries. Characteristically, Grant arrived in his muddy field uniform while Lee had turned out in full dress attire, complete with sash and sword. Lee asked for the terms, and Grant hurriedly wrote them out. All officers and men were to be pardoned, and they would be sent home with their private property–most important, the horses, which could be used for a late spring planting. Officers would keep their side arms, and Lee’s starving men would be given Union rations.

Shushing a band that had begun to play in celebration, General Grant told his officers, “The war is over. The Rebels are our countrymen again.” Although scattered resistance continued for several weeks, for all practical purposes the Civil War had come to an end

Ear Bugs (You Know The Words)

Gloomy Don McLean reveals meaning of ‘American Pie’ – and sells lyrics for $1.2 million

By Justin Wm. Moyer, Washington Post

April 8 at 2:52 AM

“I thought it would be interesting as I reach age 70 to release this work product on the song American Pie so that anyone who might be interested will learn that this song was not a parlor game,” McLean said in a Christie’s catalogue ahead of the sale. “It was an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music.”



“People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity,” McLean said in an early interview, as the Guardian reported. “Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.”



“Basically in ‘American Pie,’ things are heading in the wrong direction,” he told Christie’s, as the Newcastle Herald reported. “It is becoming less idyllic. I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right but it is a morality song in a sense.”

As ideals of the 1960s turned into the cynicism of the 1970s, this feeling was widespread enough to send the song to No. 1 in 1972.



Forty-four years after “American Pie’s” release, McLean, 69, wasn’t much more positive about the state of the world than he was a generation ago.

“I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015,” McLean said, as People Magazine reported. “There is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of ‘American Pie.’ “

Ear Bugs (You Know The Words)

Gloomy Don McLean reveals meaning of ‘American Pie’ – and sells lyrics for $1.2 million

By Justin Wm. Moyer, Washington Post

April 8 at 2:52 AM

“I thought it would be interesting as I reach age 70 to release this work product on the song American Pie so that anyone who might be interested will learn that this song was not a parlor game,” McLean said in a Christie’s catalogue ahead of the sale. “It was an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music.”



“People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity,” McLean said in an early interview, as the Guardian reported. “Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.”



“Basically in ‘American Pie,’ things are heading in the wrong direction,” he told Christie’s, as the Newcastle Herald reported. “It is becoming less idyllic. I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right but it is a morality song in a sense.”

As ideals of the 1960s turned into the cynicism of the 1970s, this feeling was widespread enough to send the song to No. 1 in 1972.



Forty-four years after “American Pie’s” release, McLean, 69, wasn’t much more positive about the state of the world than he was a generation ago.

“I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015,” McLean said, as People Magazine reported. “There is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of ‘American Pie.’ “

The Daily/Nightly Show (Trevor Noah)

There is of course only one topic tonight as our attention turns from College Basketball (told you the Lady Huskies would win) to other subjects and that is Trevor Noah.

I’ll spare you the tribalism of his ancestry except to note that as a South African with mixed parentage of a type forbidden under apartheid he certainly brings a different global perspective to The Daily Show

Feeling the exceptionalism?  I’m sure that’s one of the things that attracted Jon to the idea of Trevor Noah as a host.

Initial reaction was generally positive-

To over the top ecstatic-

There were some quibbles, one of which was his general lack of experience as a Daily Show correspondent (he only has 3 appearances).  Another reservation was under representation of females as Late Night TV hosts-

And whether he had the background knowledge to handle the 2016 election (frankly I’m surprised Jon didn’t wait until after, but maybe he was tired of interviewing empty chairs)-

But we were also warned that a more serious backlash might be coming-

And sure enough, there were the tweets- all 8 out of 8000 or so for a percentage of 0.01 (for the record I’ve tweeted exactly once and while I thought it was screamingly funny at the time I can’t remember what I said).

(To be continued…)