Homeland Security is concerned about an upcoming threat to national security — winter.  Add a new color to the rainbow-schemed Security Advisory System -WHITE.  Read all about it at “Ready America“.  This and many other chilling publications are available to authorized subscribers to the Homeland Security Digital Library. My personal favorite is from the arctic experts at University of Florida–Extreme Cold and Winter Storms: The Disaster Handbook.

Web 2.0 has taken hold at Whitehouse.gov as the web site moves to reliance on Drupal (?) open source code for the underpinnings.

Considering the 1000+ page  length of the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 and America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 bills currently being considered by Congress it is interesting that the Executive branch is now spinning an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder explanation…

From Whitehouse.gov

Got four minutes? Watch a quick video that sums up the President’s plan to provide security and stability to those who have insurance and coverage for those who don’t.

With all the hot air circulating in the corridors of Gov Doc land, it is sad to see the big daddy of wind tunnels take a tumble. But alas, the LFST is no longer serviceable.

Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster, The Lost Symbol, drones on for 528 pages but has nothing on one of the latest incarnations from the US Weapons Lab at Los Alamos, MaRIE, (Matter-Radiation Interactions in Extremes).

From the LANL website:

MaRIE will provide three essential capabilities: creating extreme radiation fluxes through a Fission and Fusion Materials Facility and enhancements to the Weapons Neutron Research Facility; providing unprecedented probes of matter through the Multi-Probe Diagnostic Hall and enhancements to the Lujan Center; and translating discovery to solution through M4, a facility dedicated to making, measuring, modeling materials.  MaRIE  is designed to deliver  “game-changing advances in national security, energy security, and discovery science…”

More on Professor Searls:

Searls Hall
A pioneer at the Saint Louis University School of Law, Eileen Searls was the first woman to be promoted to full professor and the first to receive tenure. Ms. Searls was granted emerita status in 2000 after 48 years as the director of the Omer Poos Law Library and professor of law. In 1987, the Women’s Commission of Saint Louis University named Ms. Searls “Woman of the Year.” In 1991, the Mid-America Association of Law Libraries named her “Distinguished Service Law Librarian.” She has been president of the Mid-America Association of Law Libraries and the Mid-America Law School Library Consortium, and she is chair of the Conference of Law Libraries of the ASCU.

Seems like just yesterday it was 2005.  And if you visit the National Archives via GPO it is only 2005 in George Bush years.  Indeed, the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States series is stuck in time, awaiting the “codification” of the last the Bush years.  But then I guess we already know how the story ends.

Need the “scoop” on the latest Presidential flap (or pseudo flap)?   Media Resources is the place to go.    Although it is reminiscent of 43’s   “Setting the Record Straight“  it appears to be somewhat less defensive.

An Internet blackout may be the news that ends the annual August news lull (forces the reporters back to work from vacation). A report by Homeland Security implies that the “internets” are at risk…  Summary here at the Financial Times.

So much about the bureaucracy that I will never understand — here is a little gem from FedBizOpps.gov:

Under the authority of FAR 6.302 1, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) intends to award purchase orders to Professor Frank E. Vecchio, Dr. Gene Corley, Professor Jerome F. Hajjar, and Professor James Jirsa to allow them to become members of a peer-review group being formed by the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). This peer-review group will inform the NRC staff with respect to their confirmatory review of the sufficiency and adequacy, from the point of view of safety, of the technical bases for the design and analysis methodology, construction method, and inspection method being proposed for a seismic Category I structure of composite modular construction that has been proposed for plants of a new reactor design. The title of this project is “Review of Design Methodology for Safety-Related Nuclear Power Plant Structures of Modular Composite Construction.”