Blog Heap of Links for the day 20 March 2012

He says that Mary Ayers told him the student’s name, but that it was a “strange name” that he could not remember, even though at the time it sounded African to him.

“I was taken aback by how enthusiastic she was about him,” Hulton says. “And I believe she said he was from either Kenya or Indonesia, and I favor Indonesia in my recollection.”

March 20, 2012 at 1:26 am

I will say it now, I will say it again. And I’ve been saying it for years.

Bill Ayers met Obama at Occidental College in 1980.

Prove me wrong.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were on the run in 1980 (she was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List), and OXY was the SDS West Coast hangout.

Obama gave his first college speech at the behest of the OXY on-campus SDS in 1980. Everyone important in the SDS would have been there.

I say Ayers attended and met Obama.

Fast forward a couple of years.

Ayers receives his MED (Early Childhood Education) from Bank Street College in NYC in 1984.

Obama graduates from Columbia in Poly-Sci in 1983.

Bank Street College and Columbia basically share (in New York City terms) the same parking lot.

They lived in the same general area, they walked the same campus, and they undoubtedly attended the same like-minded political soirees, and sipped espresso at the same bourgeois jazz salons.

After college, both ended back in Chicago in 1985 or so, moving into homes only three blocks apart in Morningside Heights.

Within months Bernardine Dorhn (Ayer’s wife) joins the Chicago Sidley and Austin Law firm, whose board Tom Ayer’s (Bill’s dad) controls.

Obama’s soon-to-be wife, Michelle Robinson, gets a job at Sidley at that time, and is tutored by Dohrn. Shortly thereafter, Obama begins a summer internmanship at Sidley and Austin.

I could go on, and on, and f**king on, but the sheep sleep.

It is a fantasy story to those Canadian cretins who mistake their little finger for their dick, and for the rest of the lie-berals who don’t trust anything more relevant than Oprah’s diet.

Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family. He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.” (In a classy move, he did this while his producers put up the cover of my book, which tells about the forgiveness and redemption I’ve found in God after my past – very public — mistakes.)

If Maher talked about Malia and Sasha that way, you’d return his dirty money and the Secret Service would probably have to restrain you....

[That last part makes some assumptions about our Angry Narcissist in Chief that I don't think necessarily are as true as one might want for his children. h/t The Blaze]

According to Hulton, he encountered the fellow on the sidewalk on the front of the Ayers home. In that it was extremely rare to see a black man in this tony neighborhood, Hulton believes that the man felt the need to explain his visit to the Ayers household. Hulton describes him as friendly and neatly, although casually, dressed. Hulton tells Corsi, "I am absolutely positive that it was Barack Obama." ... Obama explained to Hulton that he had taken the train out from Chicago to Glen Ellyn in order "to thank the Ayers family personally for helping him with his education." What shocked Hulton was that when casually inquiring into the young man's plans for the future, Obama answered, "I am going to be president of the United States." As Hulton tells Corsi, "[i]t came across like this was something that's already been determined." Adds Hulton, "I was speechless."

* Claims come a month after government announced plans to monitor all online communications
* Players reportedly choose realistic war games to mask their plotting as harmless gamers' chatter
* Jihadis may even be using the ultra-realistic violent simulations as training for planned atrocities

A classified war simulation held this month to assess the repercussions of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts that the strike would lead to a wider regional war, which could draw in the United States and leave hundreds of Americans dead

Extraordinary images merge images of European city streets in war and peace

one officer, who argued with reporters in the road’s median, telling them that they must move. When they refused, he insisted: “Your First Amendment right can be terminated if you’re creating a scene or whatever.”

Challenged by reporters that they had not created a scene, the officer replied: “Your presence is creating a scene.”

One of the reporters’ responds: “But this is what we do for a living! What we do for a living is creating a scene?” Another reporter adds: “You’ve got a lawsuit coming.”

“I don’t care about no damn lawsuit!” the officer answers. “F*ck a lawsuit. Just ’cause you sue doesn’t mean you’re going to win.”

Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.... secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.... Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
[h/t The Blaze]

Agency director says it will 'transform' surveillance

• Devices connected to internet leak information
• CIA director says these gadgets will 'transform clandestine tradecraft'
• Spies could watch thousands via supercomputers
• People 'bug' their own homes with web-connected devices

[h/t War News Update]

For anyone who doesn’t get it yet, Scientific American spells it out in words of one syllable. Environmentalist ideology boils down to the ultimate dream of progressives: one-world totalitarian government from which no human can escape.

STEPHEN LERNER SEIU EXECUTIVE BOARD MEMBER AND LABOR ORGANIZER: "...In California yesterday, a community group, ACCE, and the longshoremen reoccupied the home of a longshoreman that had been evicted from his home.... I think there’s never been a more exciting time in my 30 years of organizing to imagine building the kind of movement that can transform the country, that can really talk about redistributing wealth and power. [emphasis added]
[h/t Weasel Zippers]

Funny comparison pictures

"It wasn't in your arm.It's moved into your vascular system. It may be in your heart, or elsewhere. We are prepping you immediately to have the Interventional Radiologist attempt to use a catheter to find and extract the lost tubing, but if that fails, and it is still in your heart, we will have to perform open heart surgery on you."

Modern technology allows prospective parents to learn the sex of a fetus, and many of them use that knowledge to exercise a preference for sons. Absent such intervention, about 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But as Mara Hvistendahl reports in her 2011 book "Unnatural Selection," the number for boys per 100 girls has risen to 112 in India and 121 in China.

It was once assumed that the general preference for male offspring would subside as countries became richer and women became more educated. But in country after country, that has proved false. … "female feticide" is so common in Canada that he believes "doctors should be allowed to disclose this information only after about 30 weeks of pregnancy — in other words, when an unquestioned abortion is all but impossible…."

Selective abortion, however, does not target only girls. Recent screening advances now make it easier and safer to detect Down syndrome in the womb… A survey reported in the American Journal of Medical Genetics found that only 4 percent of parents with Down syndrome children regret having them — and nearly 99 percent of the people with the disorder said they are happy with their lives&hellip.

It's a terrifying way to get a temporary tattoo. To get the feathery looking, fern-like pattern running down this man's left arm, he first needed to be struck by lightning.

Real Programmers write in Fortran.

Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him Mel, because that was his name. ...

I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers.

"If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?" [emphasis added — I loved Mel from this sentence!]

“It’s not shocking to me,” said Kevin Baker, a former staff sergeant with Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. “There are hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers who are screaming for help, but they aren’t getting it. And this was what, his fourth deployment? That’s pretty ridiculous.”

David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute: Being philosophically minded, what scares me most about Rick Santorum is not his specific policy mistakes but his fundamental objection to the American idea of freedom. He criticizes the pursuit of happiness! He says, “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness . . . and it is harming America.” And then he says that what the Founders meant by happiness was “to do the morally right thing.” He really doesn’t like the idea of America as a free society, where adults make their own decisions and sometimes make choices that Santorum disapproves. In practice, I worry that he would continue and intensify Bush’s big-government conservatism, a federal government committed to reshaping individuals according to a religious-conservative blueprint.
[h/t Matt Welch, Reason]