Marc Ambinder

President Barack Obama is going to get his blackberry.

On Monday, a government agency that the Obama administration — but that is probably the National Security Agency — added to a standard blackberry a super-encryption package…. and Obama WILL be able to use it … still for routine and personal messages.

It’s not clear whether he yet has the device.

With few exceptions, government Blackberries aren’t designed for encryption that protects messages above the “SECRET” status, so it’s not clear whether Obama is getting something new and special. The exception: the Sectera Edge from General Dynamics, which allows for TOP SECRET voice conversations.

Perhaps the NSA and US telecommunications companies have created a special, more secure digital pathway for Obama’s messages to travel on, one that would resist the inevitable penetration attempts by foreign governments.

A General Dynamics spokesperson declined to comment; the NSA did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment, neither did two Obama spokespeople.

The messages, like other White House communications, will kept from the public for the duration of his presidency, if not longer.

Obama and other officials won’t be able to use Instant Messaging in the White House.

Earlier in the transition, there was a plan to give select officials access to a Blackberry owned by the Democratic National Committee; the devices would be able to be used for political communication but would be subject to different disclosure rules.

I believe this is a National Security issue because the messages sent and received by other phones and Blackberry’s with Obama’s messages will not be protected by National Security Agency technology.

However, any messages that become public knowledge will be posted on Scoop This.

Hat Tip: Hot Air Headlines

CAIR (The Council of American-Islamic Relations) has paid the counties of Broward and Miami-Dade in Florida $60,000 to place inflammatory advertising on public city buses that read:

Islam: The Way of Life of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.

Click Here for a larger view of the bus.

Miami Herald

Campaign to debunk fallacies about Islam in full swing: A two-county advertising campaign asks those who have questions about Islam to call a toll-free number. The aim is to educate.

City buses in Broward and Miami-Dade counties have been advertising information on a religious topic that some people have found surprising — Islam.

The advertisement reads ”Islam: Got Questions? Get answers,” and gives this telephone phone number: 1-888-ISLAM-55. It is an effort to educate Americans about a faith that has been villainized in the media, said Dr. Sabeel Ahmed, a physician from Chicago who is director of the effort.

Well, if this advertising is a call to “educate”, then CAIR should know that Abraham, Moses, and Jesus did not practice Islam.

Also, radical Muslims in Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups have villianized Islam, not the media.

UPDATE 1: Scoop This first reported this story on January 8th.

The Jawa Report has picked up on it, so the story will now garner much more attention (since the Jawas have about a billion readers.)

The Australian

A DEEP sea submarine exploration off Australia’s southern coast has discovered new species of animals and more evidence of the destructive impact of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide on deep-sea corals.

The scientific voyage by U.S. and Australian researchers explored a near vertical slice in the earth’s crust known as the Tasman Fracture Zone, which drops from approximately 2 km to more than 4 km deep.

“We set out to search for life deeper than any previous voyage in Australian waters,” said Ron Thresher from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

“Our sampling documented the deepest known Australian fauna, including a bizarre carnivorous sea squirt, sea spiders and giant sponges, and previously unknown marine communities dominated by gooseneck barnacles and millions of round, purple-spotted sea anemones,” Thresher said.

Vast fields of deep-sea fossil corals were also discovered below 1.4 km and dated more than 10,000 years old.

Sweet.

For more stories about new species of plants and animals found right here on Earth, check out the Scoop This blog entitled The Global Warming Hoax.

Hat Tip: JammieWearingFool

I thought Jackie Collins novels proved this?

Times Online

Women’s sexual pleasure is directly linked to their partner’s wealth, says new research.

Cassie is unrepentant about dating rich men. “Of course it is much better to sleep with men with lots of money,” said the 27-year-old lawyer from London.

“Any girl who tells you different is lying. Rich men are powerful and successful and confident and charismatic. They know what they want, and they go out and get it. That translates to being fantastic in bed.”

Cassie is living proof of the latest scientific discovery about human sexuality: that the number and frequency of a woman’s orgasms is directly related to her partner’s wealth.

Her explanation is simple. “Women don’t want to lie back and think of the gas bill,” she said. “It’s a lot more fun to have sex in the Ritz than the Swindon Travelodge. And to be ripping off Rigby & Peller underwear than M&S knickers.”

Cassie’s story of being attracted to rich and powerful men is, of course, as old as the hills. It was famously expressed in the question put by the spoof chat-show host Mrs Merton to one of her guests: “So, Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”.

Examples abound. Even in his eighties, Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, has a succession of young girlfriends. Ronnie Wood has recently shown that it’s not only Mick Jagger among the sixty-something Rolling Stones who can attract much younger women, and Donald Trump, the portly American businessman, has a wife 24 years his junior.

Until now some of us may have taken consolation in the idea that the beautiful women involved in such relationships were just doing it for the lifestyle - and enduring the sex.

Now, however, science is showing that a rich man’s money has aphrodisiac qualities as well as purchasing power. Their partners really can have it all.

Many will object to the idea that women are hardwired to be gold-diggers. Perhaps, however, they will be appeased by the revelation that the same kinds of primitive forces are at work in men too. They may operate in different ways and produce different behaviour - but they come from exactly the same source: a genetic code fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution to make us seek out whoever offers us the best deal in life.

Well, I better win the Florida lottery if I may have any type of chance of banging 20-year-old girls when I am 60.

Or someone could buy Scoop This for $50 million.

Whichever comes first.

Hat Tip: Hot Air Headlines

Heartache, though. The XV7H will not travel to mach speed.

breitbart.tv

Are there any venture capitalists willing to help out Alfie Carrington?

It is only $70,000.

Australian IT

THE Swiss Army knife, one of the hottest buys of the past century, is keeping pace with the new millennium and moving from campground to boardroom.

Manufacturer Victorinox, celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, unveiled the latest version of the ubiquitous multi-purpose tool last week at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The company has been adding hi-tech features to its knives since 2004 but the latest model, the Presentation Pro, furthers the trend by incorporating Bluetooth and fingerprint recognition technology.

Instead of a saw and a corkscrew, the Presentation Pro comes with a laser pointer and an integrated Bluetooth remote control that can be used to direct a slide show or a Powerpoint presentation.

It also has a USB flashdrive with up to 32GB of storage and a biometric sensor that grants access through fingerprint recognition. The Presentation Pro is not just hi-tech but keeps a knife, a pair of scissors and a nail file with a screwdriver head.

There is a “plane-friendly” version, the blade-free Presentation Pro Flight, which should cause no problems with airport security.

The Presentation Pro is available from May and costs $US169.95 to $US329.95, depending on the memory capacity of the USB drive.

Laser pointers are cool. I wonder if the Presentation Pro comes with different laser lights?

Thanks to Scoop This reader JCresanto for this story.

Next Autos.com

Mark Jacobson, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, recently conducted a study that ranked alternate energies from best to worst.

Ethanol was put to the test against, “Solar-photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.”

After looking at reports of air pollutants from energy types on climate and air quality, and comparing how well each energy type was able to power vehicles, the study showed that Ethanol came in dead last.

It seems that the report found that wind-powered battery electric vehicles as well as wind-powered hydrogen fuel cells were the greenest ways to go.

The immediate problem now, is the fact that driving a wind-powered battery electric vehicle is horrendously expensive, let alone impractical.

And for its part, Ethanol has already received huge support from the automotive industry and the U.S. government.

Finding an appropriately sized role for ethanol, with adequate support for the greener of the new green-tech is easier said than done.

I always knew that ethanol was a worthless technology, and now I have backing from a professor at Stanford University.

Ethanol has a carbon footprint, has less energy in it than either gasoline or diesel, is expensive to produce, and the production of ethanol creates pollution.

Solution? Drill, baby, drill! Yes, American oil companies should drill in America and drill in America’s territorial waters (such as off the coast of Florida and California) for our own oil. Oil will most likely see America through its energy needs for at least the next 200 years. No time like the present to start drilling for our future.

Check out Professor Mark Jacobson’s paper at RSC.org.

UPDATE 1: Auto Blog Green reports that an ethanol-powered Mustang reached 252.78-miles-per-hour!

Many corn-starved children died for this ethanol breakthrough.

The Guardian

They are highly social, adhere to a rigid class system and are intensely house-proud. And now it emerges that bees resemble human beings in one more, previously overlooked, respect: they behave just like us under the influence of cocaine.

Australian researchers found that bees which had been given a dose of cocaine threw themselves into unusually energetic dance routines, felt compelled to “talk” to their nest mates - and even went “cold turkey” when the drugs ran out.

The research, carried out at Macquarie University in Sydney, examined the behavior of the bees after returning from a trip looking for food.

“When foraging honeybees discover a particularly good source of pollen or nectar, they fly back to the hive and perform a symbolic dance for their nest mates,” said Dr Andrew Barron. “This is a specialized form of communication to tell their nest mates about the rewards they have found.”

But after dabbing low doses of cocaine on the bees’ backs before they went out, the researchers observed that when they returned they were more likely to dance for their nest mates, and performed particularly vigorous routines explaining where the food was located.

The dance language gave Barron and his colleagues an indication of what was going on in the bees’ brains. Rather like a coke head in a crowded nightclub, cocaine made the bees much more enthusiastic communicators. This was not simply because they were generally more energetic: the extra enthusiasm was in order to communicate with nest mates.

The results are reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Next, Barron’s team investigated whether the bees suffered withdrawal symptoms when the drug was removed. This involved giving the bees a cocaine diet for a week, then testing their ability to learn how to distinguish between two different smells. “The poor little buggers had to drink cocaine for a week. Then we just stopped it dead and we gave them a learning test,” said Barron. “Their performance absolutely crashed.”

The finding is the first time scientists have shown that bees are affected by cocaine in a similar way to humans.

Addiction is much more complex in humans than in honeybees, said Barron, but he believes bees can provide a tool for looking at some aspects of the phenomenon, such as which genes are activated when the bee’s brain goes cold turkey.

Where did the scientists get cocaine in Sydney, Australia?

Is it legal there?

I know someone that might want to snort a few lines.

Hat Tip: Hot Air Headlines

CBS News

CBS) Jordan Taylor is being called a medical miracle.

The nine-year-old Hillsboro, Texas boy was nearly decapitated in a car crash three months ago, but doctors reattached his head to his neck and now he’s made virtually a full recovery.

Doctors said Jordan had a one -to-two percent chance of surviving his horrific injury.

“I just kept screaming,” his mom, Stacey Perez, recalls. “I just wanted him to wake up.”

She was behind the wheel when, authorities say, a dump truck ran a stop sign, plowing into her car.

Jordan was buckled up in the back seat, but the impact caused an unthinkable injury.

“The energy basically made his head lift up off of his neck, and then move forward,” explains the pediatric neurosurgeon who saved Jordan’s life, Dr. Richard Roberts of Cook Childrens’ Medical Center in Fort Worth.

It’s called orthopedic decapitation. Jordan’s spinal cord remained intact, but his skull separated from his neck.

“All of the connective tissue that essentially keeps your head connected to your neck was destroyed,” Roberts says.

“I do remember seeing him in the car and his head was just kinda just hanging down,” Perez noted.

Doctors were able to reattach his skull with a metal plate and titanium rods, enabling Jordan to start defying overwhelming odds.

Jordan Taylor is walking, talking, and will not suffer any brain damage.

This is truly a Christmas miracle.

Hat Tip: Hot Air Headlines

New Scientist

It has evaded lovers for centuries, but in February we learned that the elusive and semi-mythical G spot had been captured on ultrasound for the first time.

Emmanuele Jannini at the University of L’Aquila in Italy discovered clear anatomical differences between women who claim to have vaginal orgasms - triggered by stimulation of the front vaginal wall without any simultaneous stimulation of the clitoris - and those that don’t. Apparently, the key is that women who orgasm during penetrative sex have a thicker area of tissue in the region between the vagina and urethra, meaning a simple scan could separate out the lucky “haves” from the “have-nots”.

Even better, Jannini now has evidence that women who have this thicker tissue can be “taught” to have vaginal orgasms. Ultrasound scans on 30 women uncovered G spots in just eight of them and when these women were asked if they had vaginal orgasms during sex, only five of them said yes. However, when the remaining three were shown their G spots on the scan and given advice on how to stimulate it, two of them subsequently “discovered” the joy of vaginal orgasms. “This demonstrated, although in a small sample, the use of [vaginal ultrasound] in teaching the vaginal orgasm,” Jannini says.

Sadly, none of the have-nots had vaginal orgasms either before or after the scans, so they’ll just have to make do with the old-fashioned clitoral kind. The results were presented at the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine in Rome in November.

Jannini is now investigating whether hirsute women are more likely to have G spots since they have higher levels of testosterone and both the clitoris and the G spot are thought to respond to the hormone.

The burning question is whether women with a small G spot can “grow” it with practice. Jannini is optimistic. “I fully agree that the use makes the organ. I do expect an increase with frequent use.” So perhaps the only way to make the most of your G spot, if you have one, is to get practicing.

It’s science.

Pay attention.

Hat Tip: Hot Air Headlines