Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

A CNN reporter found the woman who is the voice of Siri on your iPhone.

Sandy Springs, Georgia (CNN) — For the past two years, she’s been a pocket and purse accessory to millions of Americans. She’s starred alongside Samuel L. Jackson and Zooey Deschanel. She’s provided weather forecasts and restaurant tips, been mocked as useless and answered absurd questions about what she’s wearing.

She is Siri, Apple’s voice-activated virtual “assistant” introduced to the masses with the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011.

Behind this groundbreaking technology there is a real woman. While the ever-secretive Apple has never identified her, all signs indicate that the original voice of Siri in the United States is a voiceover actor who laid down recordings for a client eight years ago. She had no idea she’d someday be speaking to more than 100 million people through a not-yet-invented phone.

Her name is Susan Bennett and she lives in suburban Atlanta.

Apple won’t confirm it. But Bennett says she is Siri. Professionals who know her voice, have worked with her and represent her legally say she is Siri. And an audio-forensics expert with 30 years of experience has studied both voices and says he is “100%” certain the two are the same. …

What’s it like at the commanding heights of the legal profession? NY Times with an answer.

Anyone who wonders why law school applications are plunging and there’s widespread malaise in many big law firms might consider the case of Gregory M. Owens.

The silver-haired, distinguished-looking Mr. Owens would seem the embodiment of a successful Wall Street lawyer. A graduate of DenisonUniversity and VanderbiltLawSchool, Mr. Owens moved to New York City and was named a partner at the then old-line law firm of Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood, and after a merger, at Dewey & LeBoeuf.

Today, Mr. Owens, 55, is a partner at an even more eminent global law firm, White & Case. A partnership there or any of the major firms collectively known as “Big Law” was long regarded as the brass ring of the profession, a virtual guarantee of lifelong prosperity and job security.

But on New Year’s Eve, Mr. Owens filed for personal bankruptcy.

According to his petition, he had $400 in his checking account and $400 in savings. He lives in a rental apartment at 151st Street and Broadway. He owns clothing he estimated was worth $900 and his only jewelry is a Concord watch, which he described as “broken.”

Mr. Owens is an extreme but vivid illustration of the economic factors roiling the legal profession, although his straits are in some ways unique to his personal situation. …

Wired published an item from Mother Jones on the seriousness of this year’s flu.

You’ve probably heard by now that this year’s flu season is a bad one. Below is a guide to the viruses that are going around now, plus a refresher on flu basics.

Is the flu widespread where I live?
Probably:

How many people have died so far this year?
Twenty-eight children have died so far. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not keep track of adult deaths. That’s because states are not required to report flu deaths to the CDC. Older adults often die of flu complications or secondary infections rather than the flu itself, so tracking flu deaths is not an exact science. That said, in California, the death toll is currently at 146, including 95 people under the age of 65. At this time last year, just 9 Californians under 65 had died of the flu, and by the end of the season, a total of 106 people had died.

How does this year’s season compare to last year’s?
As the chart below shows, so far, this season is milder in terms of number of cases. However, CDC spokesperson Jason McDonald notes that more people between the ages of 18 and 64 have been hospitalized for flulike symptoms this year than in previous years. This season’s predominant virus strain is H1N1—which, when it originated in 2009, also sent an unusually high number people in the 18-to-64 age range to the hospital. Epidemiologists don’t know why H1N1 hits younger people hard, but one theory, says McDonald, is that older adults have built up more immunity to it. H1N1 is similar to the virus that caused the Spanish Flu of 1918, and also to strains that circulated in the ’60s and ’70s. Another possible factor: Only about 30 percent of younger adults get flu shots, compared to about 40 percent of older adults. …

The A-10 Warthog is our ugliest airplane, but it protects ground troops. Real Clear Defense makes the case for keeping the plane in our quiver.

As the FY15 defense budget is finalized and the fiscal pressure of sequestration endures, there has been informed speculation that the Air Force will seek to retire its A-10 Warthog fleet. Congress has already prevented such a move in the National Defense Authorization Act, but yet the fight continues. Last week, RCD featured a proposal to transfer the A-10 to the Army. This week, J. Furman Daniel, III offers ten good reasons to save the beloved A-10.  

1. It is proven

The A-10 is a tried and true design that has served our nation well.  In an era of increasingly complex, expensive, and troubled weapons procurement, it is essential to have some systems that are solid and reliable. With only modest changes to the original design, the A-10 has been upgraded to meet the challenges of the future and deliver its trademark firepower, durability, survivability, and persistence to battlefield hotspots for decades to come.

2. It is cheap

The A-10 is and will continue to be cheap. While it is ugly, slow, and old fashioned, it remains the most cost effective way of delivering aerial firepower to the battlefield. While it is possible todrop ordinance and provide suppressive fire with other fighter platforms few would consider the F-22, F-35, F-15, or F-16 as ideal ways of performing this essential mission. In fact, the F-22 has been excluded from such missions and is in danger of becoming a “force in being” for “big wars” rather than an asset that can actually be used in the conflicts we are currently fighting. A rational force structure would retain the A-10 as the unglamorous but necessary “low” component of a “high-low mix” and would thus free our more expensive platforms for missions such as air superiority and strategic bombing that demand higher performance.

3. It is survivable …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Ron Christie tries to understand the juxtaposition of the dictator and the democrat.

… There is a sense this White House moves from one news cycle to the next to shape public opinion – which brings us to Mr. Obama’s press availability just prior to his first Cabinet meeting of the year this past Tuesday morning. After noting that he was looking forward to working with Republicans and Democrats, President Obama made the following startling declaration:

“But one of the things that I’ll be emphasizing in this meeting is the fact that we’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need.  I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone—and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance to make sure that people are getting the skills that the need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.” …

… During a fundraising speech in San Francisco last November, President Obama responded to a heckler who interrupted his remarks by shouting “Executive Order” to overcome Republican opposition to his policies on Capitol Hill. First, Obama offered that there is “no short-cut to democracy” and that he could not utilize executive orders to bypass Congress.

More specifically, the president continued by saying: “A lot of people have been saying this lately on every problem, which is just, ‘Sign an executive order and we can pretty much do anything and nullify Congress’…That’s not how it works. We’ve got this Constitution, we’ve got this whole thing about separation of powers. So there is no short-cut to politics, and there’s no shortcut to democracy.”

So which President Obama are we supposed to believe? …

We circle back to the president’s racism remarks with Craig Pirrong.

… Race is such a divisive and polarizing issue that a president should do everything possible to downplay, rather than emphasize, racial divisions.  He should certainly not attempt to exploit race for petty political purposes, or to excuse his political and policy failures.  Racial appeals are more befitting a Jim Crow-era Southern politician than a Lincoln, to whom Obama has compared himself.

Racial appeals are the last refuge of the demagogic scoundrel.  They are the last thing we need now.  A man of honor who put the country’s interests above his own would eschew such appeals.  Indeed, he would chastise his supporters for making such arguments.

But we are talking about Obama, aren’t we?

Andrew McCarthy with a pitchfork president post.

A dour President Obama was in no mood to hear about Wall Street’s troubles. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” he warned a room full of the nation’s banking titans.

They’d been summoned to the White House woodshed over what Dear Leader had decided was excessive compensation for industry execs. The president had been on the job for less than three months, but his community-organizer roots were already showing: the fraudulent narrative — in this instance, “income inequality” — helped along by whatever arm-twisting the occasion required. The narrative camouflages execution of the statist game-plan: (1) government creates problem, (2) government locates scapegoat, and (3) government exploits scapegoat to juxtapose itself as savior — rationalizing more regulation and more power.

The pitchfork imagery leapt to mind this week because Timothy Geithner, Obama’s tax-challenged former Treasury secretary, was back in the news — specifically, the extortion news. Turbo Tim had been in the room back in 2009, absorbing the boss’s lesson in Alinsky-style government-corporate relations. Now we learn, at least according to Standard & Poor’s top honcho, that Geithner made the Obama method his own.

In an affidavit filed in a California federal court, S&P chairman Harold McGraw III alleges that on August 8, 2011 — i.e., when the Obama reelection campaign was gearing up — Geithner tracked him down by phone. The then-secretary was irate because, three days earlier, S&P had downgraded the credit rating of the United States to a notch below triple-A for the first time in history. McGraw had been forewarned by a Geithner associate that the secretary “was very angry at S&P.” When the two men finally spoke, Geithner ripped McGraw for having “done an enormous disservice to yourselves and to your country.” He further warned that S&P’s insolence — er, I mean, S&P’s decision — would “be looked at very carefully” and would prompt “a response from the government.”

That “response” came in the form of a punitive lawsuit, brought by the government against S&P. At least that’s the way S&P sees it, with what appears to be ample reason. …

Now that Jim Moran is leaving office, perhaps he can be honest. This will make him a Dem nightmare. Two weeks after announcing his retirement, Moran has warned the healthcare act might unravel. Fox News has the story.

Congressman Jim Moran (D-Va.) is voicing concern that the entirety Affordable Care Act could unravel because not enough young people are signing up.

More than 40,000 Virginians signed up for health insurance on the federal exchange last month. Only 27 percent of those were young adults — the group needed to fund the new system. Moran says he doesn’t think those numbers are going to get much better.

“I’m afraid that the millennials, if you will, are less likely to sign up. I think they feel more independent, I think they feel a little more invulnerable than prior generations,” Moran says. “But I don’t think we’re going to get enough young people signing up to make this bill work as it was intended to financially.”

Andrew Malcolm posts on the trash talk president.

In his compelling and revealing new memoir, “Duty,” former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates describes that tense evening in the White House situation room when the Obama crowd watched the assassination of Osama bin Laden real-time.

When the world’s most wanted man had been popped, bagged and was enroute to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, the in-crowd rose to disperse. Obama would soon announce the news, igniting spontaneous street celebrations.

Gates worried about leaks of operational details revealing how Special Ops conducts such raids nightly in the world’s deadliest corners. He asked everyone to promise to reveal nothing more of what they saw than the bare facts. We got him. He’s dead. All raiders are safe. Everyone agreed.

“That lasted about five hours,” Gates recalls sadly. …

… Now comes another stunning example of Obama’s Amateur Hour. He had a recent conversation with David Remnick of the New Yorker. Now Remnick, like Bob Woodward, is a master at getting subjects to talk.

But Obama has just begun the 62d month of his presidency as commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military. He didn’t just fall off the sweet-potato truck. Yes, the Super Bowl looms near, prompting all kinds of inappropriate sports metaphors and analogies.

However, as he sought to explain White House thinking to his journalist visitor, Obama should know better than to stoop to the inflammatory, trash-talking level of a Richard Sherman.

“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a J.V. team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”

Forget for a moment, Mr. President, the fact that the hobbled Bryant has been out since late last year with no return date set. So, right now in basketball warrior terms, Kobe Bryant is useless.

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has never controlled more territory. Thanks to Obama’s impulsive overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi with no replacement at hand, those terrorists now control most of Libya. They’re on the winning side of Obama’s vanished red line in Syria. …

More on the “jayvee” talk from Power Line.

… In his New Yorker interview, Obama argued that just because al Qaeda makes territorial gains in areas where a power vacuum exists doesn’t mean that its fighters have the desire or the capacity to attack our homeland. But where is the evidence that they lack this desire or capacity? According to Heritage, there have been at least 60 plots to attack the homeland since 9/11, and the number has risen in recent years.

Let’s also keep in mind that the pre-9/11 al Qaeda didn’t look like “Kobe Bryant” either. Neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration took it seriously enough, and this low regard helped pave the way for 9/11.

Let’s hope that Obama takes al Qaeda more seriously than his trash-talking interview with the New Yorker suggests. To take al Qaeda lightly would be the approach of a jayvee president. …

Late Night from Andrew Malcolm.

Leno: Obama is getting tough on the NSA scandal. Says the secret agency will never be used to suppress critics or dissenters. He said he has the IRS for that job.

Letterman: All these snowstorms make driving nightmarish. So be very careful while texting.

Conan: Justin Bieber was arrested in Florida for DUI. Police reports said Bieber’s blood contained large amounts of alcohol, pot and Flintstone’s Chewables.