All Talk, No Action
In the first part of this podcast, listen to Adam Carolla and Drew Pinsky completely mock the “bleeding heart liberal” mindset. Mild language warning but thoroughly hilarious!
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.
Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
But wait,there’s more!
The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal. […]
The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.
Lots more at Drudge, as you might expect.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Via Andrew Stuttaford;
Might it be that it was Ronald Reagan and not Barack Obama who began to slow the rise of the seas? That is one conclusion that could be drawn from a new paper by Canadian physicist Qing-Bin Lu of Ontario’s University of Waterloo. Instead of carbon dioxide emissions, Mr. Lu argues that ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other halocarbons caused global warming. Thanks to the Reagan administration and the 1987 Montreal Protocol, CFCs have been phased out by developed countries. After a lag, Mr. Lu argues that global temperatures peaked around 2002 and predicts they are set to gradually fall over the next five to seven decades.
Y2Kyoto: Follow That Model!
We Don’t Need No Stinking Sparky Cars
56% Of Carmakers Who Asked For Government ‘Green’ Loans Are Dead. (via)
I Amuse Myself
Q. Why are there trees in Saskatchewan?
A. Because we don’t have to burn them to stay alive.
Reader Tips
In tonight’s Tips music, which falls in the genre of “old songs that will never again be recorded by an artist living in a First World country”, we listen to “apple-pie likeable” American broadcasting legend Arthur Godfrey’s “aw, shucks!” musical exhortation Slap ‘er Down Again, Pa!.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
More Pavilions At Folkfest
James Taranto: “Moral responsibility is the essence of humanity. It is what sets Homo sapiens apart from other animals. Assigning moral responsibility to whites while denying it to nonwhites is therefore a way of dehumanizing the latter. Multiculturalism turns out to be a disguised form of white supremacy.”
Via.
D-Day Remembered
69 years ago today, Canadians and other Allied forces invaded France in what was the start of a long march to Berlin to crush Hitler and his Nazi regime. More here.
MP Rathgeber
Respect.
PMO? Not so much.
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
Hear my prayer.
h/t Ed S
Improving The Lives Of Third World Workers
One unemployment notice at a time. (h/t Bob)
Hold The Phone
To no one’s surprise: USA Today affirms NSA also seizing records from AT&T, Bellsouth
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors
European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht is convinced that China systematically manipulates its prices to drive European manufacturers of solar cells and panels out of business. But ever since he announced that he would soon be issuing his decision, China has been openly threatening a trade war with Europe.
De Gucht is undeterred. On Tuesday, he announced that the European Commission is introducing a two-month period of low-level tariffs for all solar panels from China at a level of 11.8 percent. In August, however, the penalties will skyrocket — to between 32.2 percent and 67.9 percent depending on individual companies’ willingness to cooperate. He said the two months of low tariffs provide “a window of opportunity for the Chinese to negotiate.”
h/t peterj
4 Year Recovery Watch Remains On High Alert
The report, which analyzed long-term trends of past recoveries, found that the long-anticipated “Great Recovery” has not yet materialized.
Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast. More robust growth will be necessary to bring this recovery in line with previous ones.
“It’s not a recovery,” he wrote. “It’s not even normal growth. It’s bad.”
Related: demand for US gold and silver bullion remains at “unprecedented” high levels almost two months after the historical sell-off.
Oh, Shiny Pony!
Julian Fantino, who’s riding is over 4-hours to Ottawa spends almost $40,000 less in expenditures than Justin Trudeau, who’s riding is less than an hour from Ottawa.
The Sound Of Settled Science
In an extraordinary editorial and feature article, Nature, one of the world’s pre-eminent scientific journals, has effectively admonished the chair of the Harvard School of Public Health’s nutrition department, Walter Willett, for promoting over-simplification of scientific results in the name of public health and engaging in unseemly behavior towards those who venture conclusions that differ to his.
Willett, who is one of the most frequently quoted academic sources on nutrition in the news media…
h/t Rob H
Hold The Phone
Guardian Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
[…]
The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.
Read the court order.
Wonder if this is related — NSA building new $2 bn communications data-mining center in Utah set to open Sept. 2013: wired.com/threatlevel/20…
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) June 6, 2013
Reader Tips
In tonight’s amusement en route to the Tips we watch a remarkable high-tech balancing act.
Those who lack a Y chromosome may not find it quite as amusing.
h/t
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.