This is great:

The Memory Hole > The Justice Dept's Attorney Workforce Diversity Study--Uncensored: "With no notice, the Justice Department recently posted to its Website a long-awaited report. Justice spent $2 million for a study on the racial and gender diversity of its attorney workforce. The report has been complete for almost two years, but the Department stalled its release, despite numerous Freedom of Information Act requests. The report appeared on one of the FOIA sections of the Department's Website sometime in October. It's one of the most heavily-redacted government documents in recent memory. Even Congress' report on 9/11 had a smaller percentage of its contents blacked out. The Memory Hole has posted a version with no redactions; instead, those sections are highlighted in yellow, so you can easily zoom in on the parts originally deemed too embarassing for us to see."

What bothers me about this is the triviality of the material censored by the DOJ. I've looked over the de-censored report. Apparently the DOJ didn't feel Americans should see the following:

• "Attorneys across demographic groups believe that the Department is a good place to work." [Good thing they cut that out -- wouldn't want to associate DOJ with lawyers, whom everyone hates].
• "In particular, the Attorney General's Honors Program is an important tool for increasing diversity." [Does Ashcroft want to avoid being associated with something that might look like affirmative action? I can see no other reason to block out this sentence].
• All -- or nearly all -- proposals for improvement were blocked out. Even the section titles were blocked out. If one were to read the blacked-out version, one might conclude that the report made no suggestions for improvement at all.
• Bold-faced summaries were blacked out if they contained negative adjectives. They were left in if they contained positive adjectives. Often, the data was not blacked out. Only the summary statement, as if to make the reader work slightly harder.
• "We define upper management as the Senior Executive Service (SES)..." [of course it would be dangerous if the public knew how the report defines terms such as "upper management." Christ.]
• "Note the particularly high spikes in female and minority representation in grades 11 and 12. Attorneys in these grades fall into one category: recent Attorney General's Honors Program hires." [Somebody really doesn't like this Honors Program thing, whatever it is...]

There's a lot of stuff blacked out. The last third of the report is pretty much blacked out. A lot of this material just doesn't make any sense. I, Joe Public, am thoroughly insulted by some of the trifling bits and pieces that they decided I shouldn't see. I'm not that upset by what the report says. I am extremely upset that they went through all that trouble to censor such stupid little sentences.

Toxic grasshoppers?

CNN.com - Sudan grasshopper swarm 'kills 11' - Nov. 1, 2003: "The authorities also said 11 people had died from the breathing difficulties. 'The appearance of the epidemic is linked to the unprecedented increase in the grasshopper insects,' the daily quoted the health authorities as saying. Resident Joseph Mogum in Wad Medani, about 110 miles (176 km) southeast of the capital Khartoum, said the grasshoppers gave off a strong smell which caused breathing problems."

Hmmm, Fox News executives claim they never threatened to sue the Simpsons, and add that they found it funny. I'm skeptical that that anyone at Fox News has a non-sociopathic sense of humor...

Names & Faces (washingtonpost.com): "'Fox fought against it and said that they would sue the show,' Groening told Gross. 'And we called their bluff because we didn't think that Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. So we got away with it,' he said, proud of the accomplishment. Fox News, however, denies reports that they ever threatened to sue. 'We were all scratching our heads and thought it was hysterical,' spokesman Rob Zimmerman told us yesterday. 'It's not the first time we've been spoofed, you know.'"

The Diebold debacle is expanding (albeit slowly). Where is the mainstream press on this issue? This is from Diebold's web site:

Diebold in the News - Diebold Executive to Keep Lower Profile: "An Ohio voting-machine executive pummeled with national criticism for his close ties to the Bush re-election campaign said yesterday he wants to make amends. Walden O'Dell, chief executive of North Canton-based Diebold Inc., confirmed in an interview with Plain Dealer editors that he has been a top fund-raiser for the Republican president, but said he intends to lower his political profile and 'try to be more sensitive' in light of the national criticism he has faced. ...In an invitation to a Republican fund-raiser at his suburban Columbus mansion, O'Dell said he was 'committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year.' The letter closely followed a visit by O'Dell to a fund-raising powwow at Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch for six-figure fund-raisers known as 'Pioneers and Rangers.'"

Here's an article on Diebold from Newsweek:

Listen, for example, to Avi Rubin, a computer-security expert and professor at Johns Hopkins University who was slipped a copy of Diebold’s source code earlier this year. After he and his students examined it, he concluded that the protections against fraud and tampering were strictly amateur hour. “Anyone in my basic security classes would have done better,” he says. The cryptography was weak and poorly implemented, and the smart-card system that supposedly increased security actually created new vulnerabilities. Rubin’s paper concluded that the Diebold system was “far below even the most minimal security standards.” Naturally, Diebold disagrees with Rubin. “We’re very confident of accuracy and security in our system,” says director of Diebold Election Systems Mark Radke.

And, of course, Tom Tomorrow is on top of the issue.

Okay, so my corner of the country has been burning to the ground. And, although I have not been directly affected by the fires, I have been slightly inconvenienced by the smoke and ash that's been falling on the city for days. If we Americans are nothing else, we are always mad about being slightly inconvenienced. The most fun thing about all this fire is the local news coverage. For several years, I have questioned the conservative mantra that the news media has a "liberal bias". Since the evidence for such a claim is just not there, I would wonder if the complainers were using a different definition of "liberal", i.e., "having the qualities of not wholeheartedly agreeing with me personally on extremely radical and divisive issues", or something to that effect. The converse argument, presented by left-leaning persons, is that, indeed, contrary to a liberal bias, the major news networks, being owned by huge corporations that depend upon conservatives for massive tax breaks and congressional support, actually have a conservative bias. I wasn't fully sold on that one, either. However, after watching local coverage of the San Diego county fires, I have finally become convinced that the major news media outlets do have a bias. And it's the stupidity bias. Every station felt the need to provide round-the-clock coverage (which led to them killing lots of time saying very stupid things), but KUSI seems to be the biggest offender. A couple of examples, if I may: The day the fires chose to start raging totally out of control was a poor choice, because, at that point, lots of San Diego County fire fighting resources had been sent to help fight the fires in San Bernardino and Ventura Counties that had started the week before. The statewide Mutual Assistance Program works like this: the fire that starts first gets the resources -- from all over the state, if necessary. If a San Diego fire engine goes to fight a fire in Ventura, and a new fire starts in San Diego, the SD engine stays in Ventura until released by the local authorities -- usually when the fire is out. That's how the system works. It makes sense, and it seems to work just fine. SD Fire Chief Jeff Bowman explained this system when asked by reporters about his strained resources at a press conference the day the fire started. "Oh, I get it," we all said. But not KUSI. Before a press conference the next day, the KUSI anchors were jabbering about how "so many of San Diego's fire fighting resources are up in Ventura and San Bernardino counties. Some people have suggested that this is a failure on the part of city and county officials, and several of our residents are outraged that this could be the case, when they are so badly needed down here." Which people suggested this? What residents are outraged? Everyone I talked to had heard the thing about the Mutual Assistance Program, and understood. KUSI must have been asleep behind the dumpster in the alley when the previous day's press conference was taking place, because the anchors asked their on-site correspondent to ask Chief Bowman about the "missing resources". Which she did (paraphrasing):

KUSI: Chief Bowman, I wonder if you could comment on why so many of San Diego's fire fighting resources are currently being used on other fires in Ventura and San Bernardino counties, and why they weren't immediately called back to San Diego upon the start of these fires? Bowman (doing his best not to roll his eyes): Well, under the statewide Mutual Assistance Program...[see above]. KUSI: Yes, but you can see how so many of our citizens and viewers would be frustrated with having so many of our resources diverted such a long way away when they're needed so badly down here. Bowman (doing his best not to punch the woman): Well, [another patient explanation of the above MAP thing].

What's the purpose of such continued, willfully ignorant questioning? Is KUSI trying to paint itself as the fearless truth-seeker, unwilling to kowtow to conventional wisdom? Or does it just like to start some shit? The next morning, they tried to start some more shit. A city school official was saying something about how the area middle schools, which were previously going to stay open as emergency child care facilities, were instead going to close for the time being. The reasons cited were poor air quality and limited resources, among others. The KUSI guy said that he had heard that they were going to be closed because the teachers' union had refused to staff them. The school official got that "Are you kidding?" look on his face and assured him that that wasn't the case. I turned away from KUSI and haven't been back since.

Big Foot researchers debunk BBC's report of Yeti discovery:

Altay Leg - Preliminary Comments: "A few anatomy experts in the BFRO examined photos and x-ray images. They are all fairly certain that it is a bear leg."

Why-war.com is tracking a collection of pilfered internal memos from Diebold concerning their election equipment. The memos include this one, dated January 17, 2001:

RE: Memory card checksum errors (was: 2000 November Election): "I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here 'looking dumb'. I would appreciate an explanation on why the memory cards start giving check sum messages. We had this happen in several precincts and one of these precincts managed to get her memory card out of election mode and then back in it, continued to read ballots, not realizing that the 300 ballots she had read earlier were no longer stored in her memory card . Needless to say when we did our hand count this was discovered. "

Apparently DieBold is trying to stop the spread of these memos, but they are in a legal catch-22: if they claim DMCA violations, then they acknowledge the documents as authentic. They haven't yet suggested that the documents are libelous, which would be the case if they were false. Some have alleged a relationship between the Diebold machines and the California elections results. See here. The Associated Press added the following:

Diebold refused to discuss the documents' contents. Company spokesman Mike Jacobsen said the fact that the company sent the cease-and-desist letters does not mean the documents are authentic — or give credence to advocates who claim lax Diebold security could allow hackers to rig machines. "We're cautioning anyone from drawing wrong or incomplete conclusions about any of those documents or files purporting to be authentic," Jacobsen said. But the activists say the mere fact that Diebold was hacked shows that the company's technology cannot be trusted.

Classic parties for the ages: Former Tyco Chairman Dennis Kozlowski spent $2.1 million on a birthday party for his wife. From the NYTimes article:

Tyco footed about half the bill for the party in Sardinia, which featured an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David spewing vodka from his penis and a birthday cake in the shape of a woman's breasts with sparklers mounted on top.

Something strange is afoot at whitehouse.gov...

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - White House Website and History: "# Democratic National Committee Blog: Enabling historical revisionism. Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them."

A comment further down on the page adds:

In an effort to shed some light on this I analyzed the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov using a simple script. Of the 1562 total "Disallow" lines: 700 end with "iraq" 855 do not end with "iraq" The interesting part is that of those that end with "iraq" ALL of them match another "Disallow" line except the matching line has something other than "iraq" -- in other words, it looks like a systematic effort to add "iraq" to existing exclusion directories. A rough glance did not make it clear what the pattern is for the 155 entries that don't have an "iraq" partner on the list. Although it does show a systematic effort, it also DOES NOT show an attempt to exclude any particular content from a directory with "iraq" (or, perhaps it's even more elaborate than we think and most of them are a smokescreen) in it's URL..

The blocked pages apparently include this page, which has the statement "U.N. inspectors believe that Iraq could have produce enough biological and chemical agent to kill millions of people. The regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons, and is seeking the materials needed to do so." Here's my version of the conspiracy theory:

It is possible that this is some kind of odd mistake. It is also possible that they are deliberately attempting to obscure one or two particular pieces of information. It may be something that is public information (i.e. they can't really make it secret). Burying it in a long list of strange entries would be a good way to obfuscate. This isn't a very high-tech trick (in fact it is probably more effective than some high-tech tricks). I'm sure no one at the White House is a stranger to the art of obfuscation. But, like I said, it could also be a wierd coincidence. It is tantalizing though.

A somewhat less sinister theory is presented here.

Apparently a portion of SCO's case files against IBM refers to a page on Eric Raymond's "Hacker's Dictionary" web site (Eric Raymond is a big Open Source guy who is not fond of SCO). I find it amusing that they linked, as an authoritative document, a web page with the following expression on it:

FUD: "fuck me harder"

ICv2 News - Fox News Threatened to Sue The Simpsons: "During an interview broadcast today on NPR's Fresh Air, Simpsons creator Matt Groening revealed that the Fox News Network had threatened to sue The Simpsons over a parody of the right-leaning news channel. The highly sensitive news organization, which is headed by Roger Ailes, made headlines this summer with an ill-starred lawsuit against humorist Al Franken's book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. "

I just read a very strang article in the NYT about the relationship between the White House and evangelical groups. They only mention one or two policy issues -- international human slave trade and sex trafficing -- and I suppose I agree with the evangelicals on those particular issues. The article is disturbing in part because the cast of characters includes such notable crooks as Chuck Colson (of Watergate fame) and Elliott Abrams (of Iran-Contra fame). These are people who were convicted of subverting the democratic process in America and abroad. And they chat with the President on a regular basis. And we know that everything is good because evangelism is involved.

Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad"Evangelicals today are more interested in making a difference than in making a statement," said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 43,000 congregations. "We made a lot of statements in the 1980's and got zip." ... "There was no movement under Clinton," said Mr. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, who once Mr. Gerson's boss. "We couldn't get anyone to talk to us." Other religious leaders say that this White House far surpasses the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Mr. Bush's father in its attentiveness. "Under previous Republican administrations, they would take our calls and often return them," Dr. Land said. "In this administration, they call us. They say, you know, `What do you think about this?' " ... The groups were also influential in the development of the president's commitment to fight global AIDS, particularly the part of the policy based on Uganda's A.B.C. campaign, which promotes, in order, abstinence, being faithful and condoms. Mr. Colson, who has enormous influence among evangelicals because of his books, lectures and radio program, said President Bush personally told religious leaders that he was supporting them on the A.B.C. campaign in a meeting at the White House this spring. After the meeting, Mr. Colson said he went up to Mr. Bush and said emphatically that faith-based policy worked. "He said, `You don't have to tell me,' " Mr. Colson said the president replied. "He said, `I'd still be drinking if it weren't for what Christ did in my life. I know faith-based works.' "