The Great Leap Forward

Wake up, it's 1984.

And the Bush Adminstration has been snooping through your financial transactions to help fight the war on terra. Without a warrant, of course. But don't worry, I'm sure you're clean.

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

[snip]

The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.

The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues.

The Plimsouls - The Plimsouls...plus - Tracks 4-6.

4. The Plimsouls - Zero hour (the song I contributed to Contrast podcast episode #12)

5. The Plimsouls - Women

6. The Plimsouls - Hush hush

It's getting hot in herre.

But don't take off all of your clothes just yet, since global warming is a just a myth perpetrated by America-hating tree-hugging faggoty Democrats like the National Science Foundation.

Earth hottest it's been in 2,000 years

The Earth is running a slight fever from greenhouse gases, after enjoying relatively stable temperatures for 2,000 years. National Academy of Sciences, after reconstructing global average surface temperatures for the past two millennia, said Thursday the data are "additional supporting evidence ... that human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming."

Other new research showed that global warming produced about half of the extra hurricane-fueled warmth in the North Atlantic in 2005, and natural cycles were a minor factor, according to Kevin Trenberth and Dennis Shea of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a research lab sponsored by the National Science Foundation and universities.

The academy had been asked to report to Congress on how researchers drew conclusions about the Earth's climate going back thousands of years, before data was available from modern scientific instruments. The academy convened a panel of 12 climate experts, chaired by Gerald North, a geosciences professor at Texas A&M University, to look at the "proxy" evidence before then, such as tree rings, corals, marine and lake sediments, ice cores, boreholes and glaciers.

Combining that information gave the panel "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years," the panel wrote. It said the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia," though it was relatively warm around the year 1000 followed by a "Little Ice Age" from about 1500 to 1850.

Their conclusions were meant to address, and they lent credibility to, a well-known graphic among climate researchers — a "hockey-stick" chart that climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes created in the late 1990s to show the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years.

It had compared the sharp curve of the hockey blade to the recent uptick in temperatures — a 1 degree rise in global average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere during the 20th century — and the stick's long shaft to centuries of previous climate stability.

Al Gore is fat. And his movie sucks.

Meanwhile, in Iraq.

Things are going just great:

Iraqi government declares state of emergency

The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew Friday after insurgents set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and opened fire on U.S. and Iraqi troops just north of the heavily fortified Green Zone.

The prime minister ordered everyone off the streets of the capital from 2 p.m. Friday until 6 a.m. Saturday. The order came at around noon, when many residents were in prayer, and sent many rushing home to beat the curfew.

In other violence, a bomb struck a Sunni mosque in a town northeast of Baghdad, killing 10 worshippers and wounding 15 in the same town where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was slain earlier this month, police said.

Remember, they hate us for our freedoms.

The Futureheads.

I'm weak on posting, so here are some Futureheads videos you should see.

"A to B":

"Meantime":

"Decent days and nights":

"Area":

"First day":

"Skip to the end":

"Hounds of love":

Kyle...

keeps me busy. It's unlikely that I'll return to regular posting until July 7, but I'll try. Things should improve once Kim gets back from Prague.

The Plimsouls - The Plimsouls...plus - Tracks 2 and 3.

2. The Plimsouls - Now

3. The Plimsouls - In this town

Contrast podcast.

Episode #12 is up (with my contribution). Go here to listen.

Back.

Busy with Kyle - flew out to Minneapolis and back. mostly uneventful except for his screaming fit 30 minutes into the flight. Kyle has problems with his ears and couldn't adjust to the changing pressure (won't/can't chew gum). Thank you, portable DVD player. I don't know what we would do without modern technology. Louis CK was on our flight. At least it looked like him. A lot. In first class - rumpled windbreaker, brown cords, ratty sneakers. Looked tired. I would have said hello, but I didn't care for his new HBO sitcom. It's about as funny as The Honeymooners, which is to say not very. The swearing doesn't make it any funnier.

I was informed by Tim at contrast podcast hat TGLF's submission made the cut. When it's up, I'll let you know.

Father's day.

Time to be a part-time dad again as I fly out to Minneapolis and back to get Kyle tomorrow. He'll be staying with us for a couple of weeks. The first few days will be tough because Kim is going to Prague this week on business. Might be a little busy to post.