In the wake of the Fukushima meltdowns, Germany's Angela Merkel pledged to shut down the 17 nukes in her country that together provided about a quarter of their electricity. She's making good on that promise - but forget about wind and solar as replacements:
When a nuclear power plant closes, a coal plant opens. At least, that’s the way things are shaping up in Germany, where the move away from nuclear energy appears to have backfired. For the second consecutive year, according to Bloomberg, the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions are set to increase.
Golly - it's looking more and more as though Portland and California are going to have to Save The Planet™ all by ourselves!
Things you generally don't even think about become issues in a weightless environment, such as the ISS. Kind of reminds you of the old Karly Simon song, "Exfoliation", doesn't it?
It may sound like a videogame, but it's deadly serious; it collects and aggregates virtually everything a user does on the Internet and by telephone. The NSA is very proud of it, although they admit that sometimes, on very rare occasion...well, mistakes can be made. But they're totally unintentionals.
In a letter this week to senator Ron Wyden, director of national intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that NSA analysts have exceeded even legal limits as interpreted by the NSA in domestic surveillance.
Acknowledging what he called "a number of compliance problems", Clapper attributed them to "human error" or "highly sophisticated technology issues" rather than "bad faith".
However, Wyden said on the Senate floor on Tuesday: "These violations are more serious than those stated by the intelligence community, and are troubling."
XKeyscore stores between 1 and 2 billion call events and internet transactions each day, and renders them accessible to a variety of proprietary search techniques including wildcard and partial queries. It collects so much data that they're broken into smaller, more manageable blocks and stored in the Marina and Pinwale subsystems for later examination. If you've been wondering why they're building that massive set of server farms outside Salt Lake City (now almost operational), wonder no more:
"At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours."
Clearly, they want to retain it for longer; preferably on the order of five or more years.
And don't think that switching to an "incognito" window in your browser's going to afford you any privacy or anonyminity; they'll still grab your data. In point of fact, about the only way to obtain some degree of either involves installing IP spoofing software on your home system/network. That's not as difficult to accomplish today as it was half a dozen years ago, but you can still screw it up without even half trying. Which means: you think you have private and secure transmission, but you don't.
So what's the big deal? You're not uploading/downloading child porn, so hey. Well, no - but if you have labored on plans for, say, a new business paradigm and want to send it to your partners over VPN, NSA will snag it before they receive it. Oh, probably harmless enough - until you go to patent or trademark and find that an Edward Snowden type's beat you to it.
He did a rather extensive interview with a New Republic writer, published yesterday, and as he's done throughout his Senate career, he bounces around a lot. Now he's back to palling around with the Democratics and hating on the TEA Party types like Senator Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, among others. He views them as obstructionists, while he, of course, is only there to do important work.
It seems he'd rather hang out with the faux Cherokee Indian, Elizabeth Warren, than work with a new generation of Republicans. As a long-time, card-carrying member of the old Republican establishment, he apparently feels threatened by the upstarts. Likely with good reason.
Having convinced the gullible "geen&sustainable" Portland City Council to enact a city-wide ban on horrible "plastic" bags, the eco-nazis hope to do the same in suburban Beaverton, Tigard, and Lake Oswego. They're also shooting for Bend, in central Oregon. Like all good nazis, they don't want the issue to go to a vote of the citizens - they want the various city councils to preemptively enact a bag ban. It worked really well in Portland; why bother with letting the plebes have a say?
I find it interesting that the professional environmeddlists initially hailed "plastic" bags as environmentally friendly and the ultimate in recyclability: the bags are made from a waste product derived from natural gas drilling, and can be recycled at most grocery stores. The recycled bags are turned into decking, benches, and other useful items.
They also require 70% less energy to manufacture than paper bags, and 96% less water. Paper bags are also heavier and bulkier; it requires seven trucks to deliver the same number of paper bags that one truck delivers in "plastic bags". Moreover, some 90% of Americans reuse "plastic" bags.
Oh, and those "reuseable" cloth bags are imported by ship. It's far more energy-efficient to manufacture and transport "plastic" bags in the USA.
Oddly, folks favoring banning such bags have resorted to claiming that they're made from petrochemicals, in China - both claims are patently false. The "reuseable" cloth bags that they advocate, by contrast, are made in China, shipped here by freighter - and unlike "plastic" bags, are not recyclable.
So, the plastic bags that do-gooders so hate are produced from waste, are generally reused by American consumers, and can be conveniently recycled into other useful products. Why do they hate recycling and energy-efficiency so much?
On Friday, New Jersey Democratic operative James Devine was arrested for attempting to snatch $22 worth of merchandise from a local ShopRite pharmacy. Devine tried to smuggle lettuce, shampoo and protein powder out of the store, perhaps trying to hide the fact that he was about to make the world’s most disgusting salad. To avoid detection, he stashed the goods in a reusable grocery bag.
What seems to be just another edition of Democrats doing dumb deeds actually represents a nationwide problem. Thanks to laws in several major cities banning the use of plastic carryout bags in retail stores, there has been a spike in shoplifting incidents over the past couple years, a trend that business owners, law enforcement officials and customers have duly noted.
“Moving consumers away from plastic bags only pushes people to less environmentally friendly options such as paper bags, which require more energy to produce and transport, and reusable bags, which are not recyclable,” environmental policy expert Mark Daniels said in a 2011 New York Times interview.
You've probably seen the images of the lake at the north pole by now, or at least what's been widely represented as our melted northern pole. Of course, things are often somewhat different than media portrayals would have us believe, and this is but the latest example. As the researcher who floated the buoy in the "lake", not only is it not a sign of "man-made global warming", it's not at the pole; it's 300 miles south. Nor is it a "lake" - it was a melt pond, which he notes is a faily common occurrence during the arctic summer. Worse yet for the professional alarmists: the melt pond has refrozen.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—One day after his campaign manager quit, the mayoral candidate Anthony D. Weiner named his penis to the post, telling reporters, “He was already making most of the major decisions, anyway.”
In announcing the new appointment, Mr. Weiner lavished praise upon his penis, calling him “a tough hombre” who “cares about the struggles of ordinary, middle-class New Yorkers.”
After one reporter questioned the wisdom of naming his penis to such an important role in the campaign, Mr. Weiner dismissed that concern, saying, “Look, he’s gotten me this far.”
In recognition of a phenomenon that is occurring at an exponential pace across the Western world, congratulations upon your appointment to the position of Manager of Unimportant Decisions. You are empowered to proclaim today Green Ink Day, should you so desire.
Obama's actually proposing a reduction in corporate tax rates of 7% to as much as 9%, if the money generated is tied to creating "middle class" jobs. What the heck is going on, here? Obama has never believed that businesses can creat jobs if they're allowed to do so; that's a function of government, or at least, he's always acted and spoken as though it was. Did somebody get close enough to him to slap him upside the head with a smart stick?
There's got to be a catch. Probably another attention-diverter here, so that folks won't pay attention to his many "phony scancals".
It's come to this; your hot dog represents a choking hazard for younger children, according to a couple of doctors who did a study. Therefore, the only sensible thing to do is to require warning labels on weenie packages, and maybe a "public awareness" campaign to "educate" the idiot parents.
As it is, warning labels are plastered on darn near everything you can find in a typical American home. Does anybody bother to read them, anymore? There's such a thing as overload, and we've probably already passed that point.
