True tale of computer crime

Albert Gonzales and Shadowcrew stole millions of credit and debit card numbers, intercepted millions of transactions, and saw "profits in the millions of dollars." James Verini has the story: The Great Cyberheist. From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Also in the Chaos Manor mail: a TSA screener just can't stop touching a three-year old girl. Following orders, you know. Update: That video has been taken down. As of midnight Nov. 16, Nerve dot com has a working version. Another update: Nerve's video is down, too. Eyeblast has it now.

What to do if accounts are hacked

A friend had this happen last week. So, possibly a useful resource:
What to Do If Hackers Steal Your Online Accounts.

Tattoo news

At Reason. Katherine Mangu-Ward seems to have a series going on about

underworld tattoos—those useful inkblots that indicate to those in the know who you were in prison with, and why, and what kind of employment you might be seeking, all without the trouble of taking out an ad in the classified section.

Follow up with mad scientists.

Franken-Coleman recount continues

Sort of. Fox News:

The six-month election recount that turned former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota's Twin Cities.

That's the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes -- fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority's newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records.

Via Althouse.

That whole thing was so transparently crooked ... The Democrats are utterly without shame at this point. Cash in the freezer, ballots in the trunk of the car, who cares.

Not opposed to immigration ...

... opposed to crime. Illegal immigration is illegal. Even LOLcats can do tautologies. Sneaky cat is sneaky:



Illegal alien is illegal. It's not hard to understand. I'm old enough to remember when legal aliens were required to register at the Post Office annually.

Jan Brewer tells Obama that it's no laughing matter:



We are unwilling to enforce our own immigration laws. The Mexican government has much stricter immigration laws, which they enforce. J. Michael Waller in 2006: Mexico's Immigration Law: Let's Try It Here at Home.

Waco, Reno, Clinton

So the Waco massacre of the Branch Davidian children was not entirely Janet Reno's doing, after all. She ran the notion past President Bill Clinton, first. There's a fairly vigorous discussion going on at Althouse.

Acorn is back

Back in the black. Here is proof that the Obama administration can do more than one thing at a time. In the midst of the Obamacare battle, they have re-funded Acorn.

In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.

Ya gotta have goons … lots and lots and lots of goons. (To the tune of "You've Gotta Have Heart," of course.)

Update: re-organizing and changing names. Much more about ACORN (or whatever its names are now) from Anita MonCrief. Both of those links come from a comment by freedom4me at this over-optimistic article: ACORN Folds! Will Cease All Operations Within Months.

Paul Watson picks a fight, gets his name in the paper

Andrew Revkin put up a short post at Dot Earth on the collision between a Japanese whaler and a Sea Shepherd speedboat. It has garnered over 200 comments at this posting, many of them illuminating. Speaking of illumination, what are the Sea Shepherds doing with these green lasers?

Revkin seems to think that the Japanese ship was responsible for the collision. Some commenters wiser in the ways of the sea have endeavored to, ah, illuminate his thinking, but the main post still says "Sea Shepherd has released video from a distant vantage point that clearly shows the Japanese ship veering to starboard to close with the smaller protest craft."

Here's a video of a Sea Shepherd ship veering to starboard to close with another craft. What are they doing? Trying to capsize it?



That video comes from Sea Shepherd. They are proud of that. Sea Shepherd's tactics are reprehensible and criminal. But what could one expect from a group that uses this as an emblem?


I don't like whaling, but I like Paul Watson (and by extension his group, Sea Shepherd) even less. "We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion." That's going to leave a lot of corpses.

A newish site on the subject: Lies of the Sea Shepherd.

At The New Yorker: Street Fight on the High Seas. The comments are better than the article, which is mostly an interview with Watson.

Climategate, still growing

Lots of Real Life^TM to deal with, lately, so I am just trying to follow developments, not doing much blogging. As you might have noticed.

Watts Up With That is staying on top of it, with a big accumulator page, and plenty of regular posting.

Such as: Lord Monckton’s summary of Climategate and its issues: "The Whistle Blows for Truth." Most recently: Now it’s serious, Daily Show’s Jon Stewart mocks Gore and Global Warming. As I said quite a while ago, more jokes, please!

Climategate goes on

I have not mentioned the Minnesotans for Global Warming for a while. They have not been hibernating, however. Here's a new song to go with the new scandal.

Don Surber has this, with the original, and some other items.

At Hillbuzz, The Global Warming fraud is an excellent chance to drive a wedge between the MSM and American public. "We tend to view everything that happens in terms of how it could impact the 2010 and 2012 races, in which we want to see as many Liberals driven from office as possible. So, today we’re thinking less about the Cap & Tax measures (which were going to fail before these emails were released) and more about what needs to be done to convince regular, non-political Americans that they were victims of an enormous scam the MSM helped facilitate."

Lorrie Goldstein at the Toronto Sun: Why 'climategate' won't stop greens. "This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power." (via Reynolds.)

Aj Strata has been on a roll with this, lots of posts, starting on Nov 20.

At the WSJ, How to Forge a Consensus. "The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start." Nice pun in the title. (via Reynolds.)

Climategate, continued

Still looking for mainstream media to notice that there is a scandal revealed here. In the NYT:

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, says he believes the release of the CRU data will ultimately do little to influence public opinion.

"Based on what we have here, I don't believe it's going to affect public opinion at all," he said. "Most people will never hear about this. Within a month, probably within a couple of weeks, this story will have basically died as a mainstream media story, unless it turns out to be the beginning of some grander, bigger scandal."

Under the rug, or the bus, is where the Powers That Be would like this to go.

WSJ is better, in Global Warming With the Lid Off:

we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.

Meanwhile, at PJ Media, Iain Murray offers Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate. "First, the scientists discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results.… Secondly, scientists on several occasions discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication.… Finally, the scientists worked to circumvent the Freedom of Information process of the United Kingdom."

Also at PJ Media, Charlie Martin says that the Climategate Computer Codes Are the Real Story. This one is not just infuriating, but close to funny, as Charlie looks through a read_me file describing the frustration of a programmer trying to make sense of chaotic stuff that does not deserve to be called "data," and code that works just as well upside down — or was it the other way round?

Declan McCullagh says that Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails. Sen. Inhofe appears to see the problem.

Glenn Reynolds and a reader discuss the False Claims Act. Discovery would be interesting.

Climategate: AGW conspiracy exposed, or so it would appear

Updated and bumped.

This could be

Huge!

if it gets coverage.

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has been keeping up with this. I'll post some links here, for reference.

ClimateDepot has a roundup post that's being updated.

Bishop Hill's concise list of summaries of emails is also available at Watts Up With That.

Slashdot: Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked.

Searchable database of the emails. Does not appear to include code or data.

Another searchable database that does include documents other than mail.

James Delingpole at the Telegraph: Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

Andrew Bolt: Warmist conspiracy exposed? And: The warmist conspiracy: the emails that most damn Jones.

Andrew C. Revkin at NYT: Hacked E-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics. (Revkin has changed the title since I posted this; I do not know if he has also changed the text.) No comments on this one. But Revkin has blogged it, and comments are there: Private Climate Conversations on Display. He seems more offended by the hacking than by the conspiracy. Whistleblowing is a great thing when one agrees with the whistleblower. If not, then not so much.

Watts Up With That: Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

Follow-up at Watts Up With That (mirrored from ClimateAudit.org): Mike's Nature Trick

Luboš Motl: Hacked: Hadley CRU FOI2009 Files

John Hinderaker: a lawyer examines some evidence. The Alarmists Do "Science": A Case Study. Revkin is mentioned.

Richard Fernandez at PJ Media: The CRU Hack.

Big roundup and a nifty graphic (ad for "Al Gore's Corn Ethanol Based Global Warming Vodka: Preferred drink of progressive elites") at American Power: Global Warming Hoax Breaks Wide Open as Hackers Target East Anglia Climate Research Unit!

Gotta link Althouse, just because: Climategate. And: "Fellow scientists who disagreed with orthodox views on climate change were variously referred to as 'prats' and 'utter prats.'"

Charlie Martin, at PJ Media, lines out the big picture of three different scandals at the same time: Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean?

Another piece at PJ Media, by Rand Simberg: Global WarmingGate: When Scientists Become Politicians, has a comment linking to someone looking at the code, who says, "This isn't science, it's gradeschool for people with big data sets."

Monckton weighs in: Viscount Monckton on Global WarmingGate: ‘They Are Criminals’

From way back in August, but related, Frank J. Tipler at PJ Media: Climate Data: Top Secret!

Here earlier: Climate Money.

More to come, no doubt.

The Columbia way

So the professor of community organizing at one of Obama's old schools (almae matres?) was discussing race relations with a woman in a bar. (It's not a joke.) His eloquence failed to persuade her to his point of view, so he gave her a poke in the eye.

The NY Post story calls McIntyre an "architecture professor." They jumped to a conclusion. He is "Nancy and George Rupp Associate Professor in the Practice of Community Development and the Founding Director of the Urban Technical Assistance Project at Columbia University." Not an architect or architecture professor, but a community organizer. Columbia, Chicago, they both start with "C" and Obama spent time in both places. I wonder if McIntyre was one of the President's teachers?

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, who credits JammieWearingFool, whose post I should have read before writing this one, as it covers the same ground and a little more.

A little more on the Ft. Hood killer

Jim Hoft: Nidal Hasan’s Imam Praises Fort Hood Massacre

Dorothy Rabinowitz: Dr. Phil and the Fort Hood Killer

ACORN connection to election fraud in New York

We keep hearing in defense of ACORN that the fraudulent registrations did not produce fraudulent votes. Here are some fraudulent votes, in Troy, N.Y., that look to have made the difference in a local election. Fraudulent registrations were not involved, just(!) identity theft.

Note that this alleged fraud has only come to light because of an internal dispute within the Working Families Party. If Republicans had the stomach to look more closely at elections nationwide, what might they find?

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

When you list them all in one place ...

… it seems like there are an awful lot of female teachers getting in trouble for sexual contact with students.

I wonder how long a similar list of offending male teachers would be?

Since it's Politically Correct now to treat any man who comes near a child as a potential sex offender, a comparison of the lists could be instructive. Maybe it's the women who need watching.

The article was linked in a comment at Belmont Club, on a thread which will inspire another post, in a few minutes.