The New York Nerd

The House looks prepared to pass the 2007 Intelligence Authorization Bill. Section 423 grants the power for the CIA & NSA to arrest anyone who is commiting any felony, even if it has nothing to do with foreign intelligence. This is the pretext for creating a police state where big brother is always watching. The bill creates the potential for the CIA & NSA to have as much or more domestic law enforcement authority than the KGB had in Soviet Russia. OUTRAGEOUS!!!

Guy Kawasaki has a great business blog that I read regularly. He just posted a very interesting piece entitled The Top 10 Lies of Entrepreneurs, it is dead on accurate and entertaining.

The quality of political cartoons about Bush are starting to reach a crescendo, check out this fine example.

There was a recent article in the Economist about Nauru, an 8 square mile Island in the South Pacific about 400 miles off the coast of Australia. The island had a large natural supply of high grade phosphate, used to make fertilizer. The article tells quite a tale of extreme exploitability, corruption, and gluttony. It’s a much faster read than your average article in the Economist, very gripping.

Last night on 60 Minutes, Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister, who agreed to act as a spy for the United States, had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

Watch The Segment

If you have a few minutes to burn, take a trip through the history of McDonald’s TV commercials. It’s a highly bizarre and humorous journey. I especially like the Irish guy commercial… this guy would have to conclude the ad by car-bombing Wendy’s Dave Thomas.

Check out this color coded map that shows the price per gallon of regular unleaded gas in the country. The blue states are red and the red states are green, why?

If you were to make a strawberry milkshake at home it would probably include about 4 ingredients. Let’s see what the ingredients look like for a strawberry milkshake from a leading fastfood joint:

milkfat and nonfat milk, sugar, sweet whey, high-fructose corn syrup, guar gum, monoglycerides and diglycerides, cellulose gum, sodium phosphate, carrageenan, citric acid, E129 and artificial strawberry flavor.

What’s in the articfial strawberry flavor you ask? Good Question!!! Check it out:

amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphrenyl- 2-butanone (10% solution in alcohol), ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, undecalactone, vanillin and solvent.

Very bad things.

There’s a lot of talk about using preemptive strikes against Iran to destroy their nuclear capabilities. One big difference between the strike against in Iraq in 1981 that worked perfectly and this one is the B61-11 nuclear bunker buster bomb which has a 340 kiloton yield. Watch this dramatization of what would happen if we used one of these weapons in Iran.

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a … all » Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.