FOUR YEARS AGO, Ed Snowden thought leakers should be ‘shot ’.

SNOWDEN, Through the Eyes of a Spy Novelist

THE PARADOX OF POLYGAMY: Why most women benefit from polygamy and most men benefit from monogamy.

YET MORE SCIENTIFIC 'CONSENSUS':

To the ever-growing list of ways humanity seems to have altered the earth, add another candidate: Air pollution may have had a major soothing influence on storm cycles in the North Atlantic.

That is the finding of a paper published this week, suggesting that industrial pollution from North America and Europe through much of the 20th century may have altered clouds in ways that cooled the ocean surface. That, in turn, may have suppressed storms, and particularly major hurricanes, below the level that would have existed in a purely natural environment.

If the authors are right, the upturn in storms over the last couple of decades may be no accident. It could, instead, be at least partly a consequence of the clean air acts that have reduced pollution around the North Atlantic basin, thus returning the storm cycles to their more natural state.

SEVEN THINGS Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About If Bush Had Done Them.

BRILLIANT: The house in London that is a 3D illusion.

FASCINATING: Map the iPhone Users In Any City, And You Know Where the Rich Live

SCIENCE IS SETTLED on CO2 causing global warming? Really?:

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week.

CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now shows that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

"Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” said Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry in Waterloo’s Faculty of Science. “In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming.”

 

SILVER Makes Antibiotics Thousands of Times More Effective.

365 REASONS to party everyday.

ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE: The 10 Most Annoying Rock Star Behaviors

THE SUPERMOON, supposedly visible today: a myth.

IRONY OR CHEEK? Former judge Baltasar Garzón will join the legal defense team of Edward Snowden, who is accusing the US government of illegal wiretapping. Yes, the same Baltasar Garzón, whose reason for being formerly and not currently a judge is that he was convicted... for illegallly wiretapping the confidential communications in jail between defendants and their attorneys.

Regardless of what you think about the case itself, this is almost as odd as escaping from the US govenment prosecution and sheltering in Russia, Cuba, and ultimately Venezuela. Oh, wait...

FROM HERO TO VILLAIN:

He has been called the Italian Schindler, credited with helping to save 5,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Giovanni Palatucci, a wartime police official, has been honored in Israel, in New York and in Italy, where squares and promenades have been named in his honor, and in the Vatican, where Pope John Paul II declared him a martyr, a step toward potential sainthood.

But at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the tale of his heroic exploits is being removed from an exhibition after officials there learned of new evidence suggesting that, far from being a hero, he was an enthusiastic Nazi collaborator involved in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz.

EIGHT REASONS Straight Men Don't Want To Get Married.

TESLA shows off a 90-second battery swap system, which looks pretty cool on the video. The only problem: isn't this precisely what Better Place did and didn't end precisely well?

THE STRANGE STORY of a picture allegedly showing atrocities during the Spanish Civil War.

BUT BUSH WAS THE DUMB ONE: "US President Barack Obama repeatedly addressed Chancellor George Osborne as Jeffrey during the recent G8 summit."

TAKEN FROM AN AIRSHIP: 34 Amazing Photos of American Cities From 100 Years Ago

IT STARTED back in 1945: The history of NSA spying, from telegrams to email.

GANGSTERS always cover each other's asses, so if the NSA & FBI want us to think what they do is legit they shouldn't do what gangsters do: 'Tell your boss I owe him another friggin' beer:' Hot mic catches NSA boss praising FBI chiefs for supportive testimony on surveillance programs

SPAIN'S OBSESSION with high-speed trains runs into budget reality:

A one-track dirt road used by local farmers is the main access to a magnificent glass-and-steel train station in the small city of Villena, on Spain's latest high-speed rail route.

It is a spanking new 4,500 square meter building - essentially in the middle of nowhere.

The central government financed the rail route, inaugurated on Monday, between Madrid and Alicante on the Costa Blanca. The Valencia regional government was supposed to fund works to connect it to the nearby motorway and Villena, home to 35,000.

But it ran out of money, leaving the station high and dry.

The disconnect says a lot about both Spain and its current finances, about a love affair with grand projects to showcase its modernity and a diminishing ability to pay for them.

SPEECHLESS: 15 Hyper-Realistic Tattoos You Won't Believe.

THIS SOUNDS like a fun way to spend a few hours on a weekend:

A cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.

The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other offshore hideaways.

They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.

The database is here.

JONAH GOLDBERG on why the libertarian idea is the only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years. I like this bit, because it answers a usual — and superficial — objection:

It’s true, no ideal libertarian state has ever existed outside a table for one. And no such state will ever exist. But here’s an important caveat: No ideal state of any other kind will be created either. America’s great, but it ain’t perfect. Sweden’s social democracy is all right, but if it were perfect, I suspect fewer cars would be on fire over there.

Ideals are called ideals for a reason: They’re ideals. They’re goals, aspirations, abstract straight rules we use as measuring sticks against the crooked timber of humanity.

In the old Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and today’s North Korea, they tried to move toward the ideal Communist system. Combined, they killed about 100 million of their own people. That’s a hefty moral distinction right there: When freedom-lovers move society toward their ideal, mistakes may be made, but people tend to flourish. When the hard Left is given free rein, millions are murdered and enslaved. Which ideal would you like to move toward?

Keep reading.

CAN'T. STOP. LAUGHING. The 30 Most Hilarious Autocorrect Struggles Ever.

WHY GENIUSES don't have jobs.

LADIES, START YOUR "AWWWWWWs": video of a bunny taking a bath, and apparently enjoying it as much as we do after a long day of work:

SALIVATING OVER GOOGLE GLASS: how old-fashioned. How about computers in contact lenses?

ACCORDING TO A STUDY, smarter people drink more than the dull. Unless smart people take this too far, then both groups are equally stupid...

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if all satellites stopped working?

WAS QUEEN ELIZABETH I a man in a drag?

TOP TEN surprising Spanish inventions.

GOOD THING the guy has a Nobel, eh? CIA often doesn’t know who it kills with drones.

THANK YOU.

YES, WE CAN!

Today, the Guardian newspaper confirmed what EFF (and many others) have long claimed: the NSA is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans. This revelation should end, once and for all, the government's long-discredited secrecy claims about its dragnet domestic surveillance programs. It should spur Congress and the American people to make the President finally tell the truth about the government's spying on innocent Americans.

 

TRANSPARENCY:

Some of President Barack Obama's political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press.

The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.

 

SOME SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS, HUH?

Carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere recently hit the 400 parts-per-million mark. So is all that CO2 scorching the planet? No. But it does seem to be making our deserts greener.

Listening to the global warming alarmists, one would think that man-made CO2 emissions are threatening the globe. But that's speculation. Let's deal in reality. And the reality, according to Australian research, is that in this era of higher carbon concentrations, plant life in dry regions has grown lush.

The greening of the deserts is due to the "fertilization effect" — the impact carbon dioxide has on plant life.

FUKUSHIMA RADIATION DISASTER TOLL: none dead, none sick.

Heard much about Fukushima lately? You know, the disaster that spread deadly contamination across Japan and spelt the end for the nuclear industry.
You should have, because recent authoritative reports have reached a remarkable conclusion about a supposedly "deadly" disaster. No one died, nor is likely to die, according to the most comprehensive assessments since the Fukushima nuclear plant was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The accident competed for media space with the deaths of nearly 20,000 people in the magnitude 9.0 quake – 1000 times worse than the Christchurch quake – and tsunami, which wholly or partly destroyed more than a million buildings.

The nuclear workers were the living dead, we were told; hundreds of thousands would die if the plant exploded; even if that didn't happen, affected areas would be uninhabitable and residents' health would suffer for generations.

Instead, two independent international reports conclude that radiative material released from Fukushima's four damaged reactors, three of which melted down, has had negligible health impacts.

In February, the World Health Organisation reported there would be no noticeable increases in cancer rates for the overall population. A third of emergency workers were at some increased risk.

(via)

WAY TOO EARLY to say the worst is over, but still it's good news on the labor front in Spain:

Spain's unemployment queues shrank by almost 100,000 in May in line with the positive predictions offered by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Saturday.

There were 98.265 fewer people out of work in May than a month earlier, new figures from Spain's employment ministry show.

This comprised a drop in total unemployment of 1.97 percent on April's jobless figures.

At the same time, 134.660 more people started paying more into Spain's social security system.

The numbers show that there was "a continued trend towards slowing unemployment," said the Secretary of State for Employment Engracia Hidalgo in a statement.

May was the third month in a row that Spain's unemployment figures have fallen.

May and June are traditionally the best months for new employment in Spain but the month just gone saw the highest fall in unemployment since 1997.

The average drop in unemployment in May has been around 54,000 in the last 15 years, El País reported on Tuesday.

Plus this from Bloomberg: Spain’s Crisis Fades as Exports Transform Country

HOW BEER SAVED THE WORLD.

IT WAS A WAR FOR OIL!!! BUSH WANTED TO STEAL IF FROM SADDAM!!!

Oh, wait: China Is Reaping Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom.

ARE CONTACTLESS CREDIT CARDS REALLY SAFE? How 30million 'wi-fi' credit cards can be plundered by cyber identity thieves exploiting contactless payment technology.

BEST SPANISH manufacturing PMI in two years: "Much better than expected manufacturing data for Spain has just been released, offering hopes that the country's long recession could be easing."

Let's hope.

KEY STRESS POINTS in the Arab world — there's stuff going on beyond Syria and Turkey.

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT, central planning --if well intended-- meant to change people's lifes but end up having the opposite effect than intended, actually made things worse. Who'd've thought?

THE DARK SIDE of Silicon Valley.

(via)

SPAIN Recovered 65% of Lost Competitiveness, Central Bank Says

Unit labor costs in the Spanish private sector have fallen by 7 percentage points since they peaked in 2009, the Madrid-based Bank of Spain said in its annual report today.

That’s two thirds of the competitiveness lost compared with the euro region average since the beginning of monetary union. Including public sector pay cuts, the economy has eliminated all the accumulated losses of competitiveness, according to the report.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is counting on exports to haul the fourth-largest economy out of a sixth year of slump as the deepest budget cuts in the Iberian nation’s democratic history have undermined domestic demand amid a 27 unemployment rate.