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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

9 February - Notes

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of FacebookImage via Wikipedia
Some of Facebook's gifts, as displayed in the ...Image via Wikipedia
Dear FacebookDear Facebook (Photo credit: James…Campbell)
Image representing Dave Winer as depicted in C...Image by Wikipedia via CrunchBase

That jobs thing sure didn’t last long

Obama rejects Keystone XL jobs, promotes more wind and solar subsidies. What to do now?
It is hard for most Americans to understand how it is contrary to the national interest to create 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs, increase US gross domestic product by an estimated $350 billion, and bring 830,000 barrels of oil per day via pipeline from friend and neighbor Canada to Texas refineries. It’s hard for us to grasp how pipelining Canadian oil is worse than importing oil in much riskier tankers from unstable, unfriendly places like Venezuela and the Middle East – or how it’s better for the global environment to transport Canadian oil by tanker to China, where it will be burned under far less rigorous pollution laws and controls. Read the rest of this entry » 



Lifehacker
Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here’s How to Stop It
Over the weekend, Dave Winer wrote an article at Scripting.com explaining how Facebook keeps track of where you are on the web after logging in, without your consent. Nik Cubrilovic dug a little deeper, and discovered that Facebook can still track where you are, even if you log out.
For quite some time now, Facebook's user tracking hasn't been limited to your time on the site: any third-party web site or service that's connected to Facebook or that uses a Like button is sending over your information, without your explicit permission. However, Winer noticed something mostly overlooked in last week's Facebook changes: Facebook's new Open Graph-enabled social web apps all send information to Facebook and can post to your profile or share with your friends whether you want them to or not.

Essentially, by using these apps, just reading an article, listening to a song, or watching a video, you're sending information to Facebook which can then be automatically shared with your friends or added to your profile, and Facebook doesn't ask for your permission to do it. 
Nik Cubrilovic looked over Winer's piece, and discovered that logging out of Facebook, as Winer suggests, may deauthorize your browser from Facebook and its web applications, but it doesn't stop Facebook's cookies from sending information to Facebook about where you are and what you're doing there.

Writing at AppSpot, he discovered that Facebook's tracking cookies-which never expire, are only altered instead of deleted when a user logs out. This means that the tracking cookies still have your account number embedded in them and still know which user you are after you've logged out.

That also means that when you visit another site with Facebook-enabled social applications, from Like buttons to Open Graph apps, even though you're a logged out user, Facebook still knows you're there, and by "you," we mean specifically your account, not an anonymous Facebook user. Cubrilovic notes that the only way to really stop Facebook from knowing every site you visit and social application you use is to log out and summarily delete all Facebook cookies from your system.
If what Cubrilovic and Winer are saying is true, Facebook considers visiting a web site or service that's connected to Facebook the same thing as broadcasting it to your friends at worst, and permission for them to know you're there at best.

Facebook says that this has nothing to do with tracking movements, and that they have no desire to collect information about where you are on the web and what you're doing. They want to make sure that you can seamlessly log in at any time to Facebook and to sites and services that connect with it and share what you're doing.
 There's also some excellent discussion in this comment thread at Hacker News about the issue as well. Essentially, they say this is a feature, not a problem, so if you have an issue with it, it's up to you to do something about it.
( This article is edited down from the original - which contains quite a bit more information; including applications to control the situation )

Google privacy policy as of March 1

Google Talk works inside Gmail and is free for 2012

Energy Realities : a visual guide to energy needs

Libya oil: Back in the saddle
Libya's NOC and its foreign partners are restarting oil and gas operations.
Most of the work will be managed by the state-owned National Oil Corporation (NOC), with the help of oilfield service companies that will trickle back into the country and establish new work camps in the desert and on offshore platforms (most of the existing camps have been trashed).
Foreign oil companies with production-sharing agreements with the NOC will also be involved, but they will have to establish the commercial basis for any additional investment that they are required to make before committing fully to resumed operations. The pace and extent of the oil sector's recovery will depend on a number of factors, in particular the physical state of the production facilities, the effects on older fields of being left idle for more than six months and the ability of Libya's new political leaders to agree on how the oil sector is to be run.
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Economics Lesson 1
Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter.
Good news, right?
Wrong. If you want to know what is really happening, you must turn to John Williams at shadowstats.com.
What the presstitute media did not tell us is that almost the entire gain In GDP growth was due to "involuntary inventory build-up," that is, more goods were produced than were sold.
Net of the unsold goods, the annualized real growth rate was eight-tenths of one percent.
And even that tiny growth rate is an exaggeration, because it is deflated with a measure of inflation that understates inflation. The US government's measure of inflation no longer measures a constant standard of living. Instead, the government's inflation measure relies on substitution of cheaper goods for those that rise in price. In other words, the government holds the measure of inflation down by measuring a declining standard of living. This permits our rulers to divert cost-of-living-adjustments that should be paid to Social Security recipients to wars of aggression, police state, and banker bailouts.
When the methodology that measures a constant standard of living is used to deflate nominal GDP, the result is a shrinking US economy. It becomes clear that the US economy has had no recovery and has now been in deep recession for four years despite the proclamation by the National Bureau of Economic Research of a recovery based on the rigged official numbers.
A government can always produce the illusion of economic growth by underestimating the rate of inflation. There is no question that a substitution-based measure of inflation understates the inflation that people experience. More proof that there has been no economic recovery is available from those data series that are unaffected by inflation. If the economy were in fact recovering, these date series would be picking up. Instead, they are flat or declining...
For example, according to the government's own data, payroll employment in December 2011 is less than in 2001. Meanwhile, there has been a decade of population growth. The presstitute media calls the alleged economic recovery a "jobless recovery," which is a contradiction in terms. There can be no recovery without a growth in employment and consumer income.

Leo Full Moon, February 7, 2012: Neptune goes into Pisces by Cathy Lynn Pagano

Iran: A Manufactured Threat by Stephen Lendman

LENR Is Here, But Is It Real, and Has Its Time Come? by steve windisch

The Cancer in Occupy by Chris Hedges

What the Koch brothers say online but won't say under oath by Robert Greenwald

Is The USA The Only Nation in the World With Corporate Personhood? by Rob Kall

Clint Eastwood and Chrysler upset the "Hope America Fails" Republicans by Brent Budowsky

The Catholic Bishops' Religious Freedom/ Contraception Scam by Rob Kall

What Next With Iran: The News Dissector Report from Iran by Danny Schechter

An American Spring is in the Air by John Iacovelli


reader supported news


Bill Moyers makes Newt Gingrich look like an idiot

Obama’s Support for Natural Gas Drilling "A Painful Moment" for Communities Subjected to Fracking 

Matt Taibbi | Foreclosure Deal Could Land Half of Wall Street in Jail

Crony Capitalism and the History of Bailouts


Dr David Evans: “Global warming is a ruse to create a global bureaucracy that will rule the world with impunity”


Remember I said PEW had been rebranded ?

Pew, A Partisan Big Green Group Does "Payola" To Assure Loyal PhD's Advocacy

Read here and here. Left/liberal/progressive/Democrat oriented groups just can't leave the proven scientific process and methodologies alone. They literally have to "buy" their "science" by financially contributing to scientists who will then likely perform the left's advocacy work as "independent" scientists, gratis. The Pew Environmental Group is one of the Big Green organizations that lays out the dollars on PhDs to hopefully enhance the desired activist "science" outcome.
No Frakking Consensus has a list of the marine "experts" that have been bought off, lured, rewarded, bribed,.....hmmm....influenced in this manner.

Scientific consensus, leadership & Stephen Schneider
Bob Carter: a geological perspective
Proselytizing to toddlers
Pachauri pushes emissions reduction - again
What Pachauri means by 'sustainable'
Pachauri's 5-star sustainability summit
Medical journals spearhead climate lynch mob
Green energy: the auditor isn't impressed
IPCC scientists - guests of the EDF (lobbyists)
The pipeline, the jobs & the media

>> NEW TO MY BLOG? START HERE
>> RECOMMENDED READING
>> QUOTES OF THE WEEK
>> CLIMATE BIBLE GETS 21 Fs on REPORT CARD


Canadian Climate Paradox
The question of whether or not human emissions are responsible for enough climate change to worry about has never been decided by thousands of people. That decision was made by the few dozen individuals who happened to write one particular chapter (out of a total of 44) in the 2007 report.
At no time has the IPCC ever polled all of its participants with respect to this question. At no time have IPCC participants been asked wholesale to sign a statement agreeing with that particular conclusion.
In short, the reality of the IPCC is quite different from the marketing message that governments have swallowed whole and continue to repeat to their citizenry. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, therefore, to deduce that it’s unwise to trust the IPCC’s conclusions. To quote UK Lord Andrew Turnbull in the House of Lords last week:
Over the last two years, there have been three separate reports on the IPCC. They are: the report by the InterAcademy Council, a collective of the world’s leading scientific academies; the report written by Professor Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor of economics who for a time served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s fourth assessment report; and a book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, written by Donna Laframboise, a Canadian journalist. Although they write from three different perspectives, in different styles, the message is the same: there are serious flaws in the competence, operations and governance of the IPCC.
 Barbara Homrighaus
 At one point in the world, the concensus was that the world was flat, too.

Australian Climate Madness
The letter from Kevin Trenberth and his colleagues is straight out of the Saul Alinsky playbook: Marginalize your opponents by demeaning them ("dentists practicing cardiology"); state your position without definitive support ("observations show unequivocally" and computer models show); explain away statements that compromise your position by claiming they were taken out of context; restate your position in such a manner that it looks as if the issue is settled, even when it isn't ("the science is clear: The world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible") and then restate it again because if you say it often enough, people just might believe it ("climate change is real and human caused"); and, finally; call for federal funding to remedy the apparent impending crisis ("investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy . . . [is] just what the doctor ordered"). No thanks. I'm glad we got a second opinion, even if it was from a dentist.
The Trenberth letter is little more than an appeal to authority masquerading as a scientific argument. It casts no light, therefore, on the actual substance of the issues

 

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