Reuters is full of interesting news this morning.  They have the article Florida bans use of ‘climate change’ by state agency: report.

Former employees of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) detailed the unwritten policy in interviews to the non-profit news agency, which reported the ban on Sunday in an article published by the Miami Herald and other state media.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” attorney Christopher Byrd, who worked with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013, told the Florida investigative reporting outlet.

According to Wikipedia, an aide to Karl Rove issued this now well known explanation.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The War in Iraq and other events in the Middle East and elsewhere proved the aide to be wrong.  At least in human affairs, what the aide said has some sense of plausibility.  However, Florida seems to have taken this thought to new levels of implausibility. Do they really think that the laws of physics are changed by what politicians allow people to say?  Could anybody be that stupid?

Reuters has the story Republicans warn Iran against nuclear deal with Obama.

(Reuters) – Republican senators warned Iran on Monday that any nuclear deal made with U.S. President Barack Obama could last only as long as he remains in office, in an unusual intervention into U.S. foreign policy-making.

The letter, signed by 47 U.S. senators, says Congress plays a role in ratifying international agreements and points out that Obama will leave office in January 2017, while many in Congress will remain in Washington long after that.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about The Logan Act.

The Logan Act (1 Stat. 613, 30 January 1799, currently codified at 18 U.S.C. § 953) is a United States federal law that forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. It was passed in 1799 and last amended in 1994. Violation of the Logan Act is a felony, punishable under federal law with imprisonment of up to three years.

The Act was intended to prohibit United States citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments.

I hereby charge these Senators with violating this act.  If Obama won’t take action, then I guess it is left up to me to make the charge.  Other violations have been more surreptitious than this blatant act.  One example would be Ronald Reagan’s interference to prevent the Iranian hostages from being released during Jimmy Carter’s term in office.  Since Reagan took office as President before the hostages were released and this egregious interference was discovered, there was little chance that he would be prosecuted.  When Speaker Boner colluded with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu  for Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress without even informing President Obama, perhaps there could have been some wiggle room that would have allowed Boner to escape conviction under the Logan Act.

It seems like this latest incident is an escalation of tactics by the Republicans.  This blatant violation of the Logan Act is a direct challenge to President Obama. I don’t know how much plainer the Republicans can make this. If Obama doesn’t put a stop to this, what will they do next?

I would like to see Obama have FBI agents record interviews with each one of these Senators to verify that they approved adding their names to the letter.  If they did approve, then they can be charged.  If they say they didn’t approve, but it can be proved that they did, then they can also be charged with lying to the FBI.  It would be fun to see if Mitch McConnell can maintain his position of majority leader in the Senate if 47 of his Senators are taken away to jail.

March 10, 2015

On his Facebook page, Bruce Taub posted the article Lawfare › The Error in the Senators’ Letter to the Leaders of Iran:

But as the Senate’s own web page makes clear: “The Senate does not ratify treaties. Instead, the Senate takes up a resolution of ratification, by which the Senate formally gives its advice and consent, empowering the president to proceed with ratification”

Perhaps this is just a technicality, but it shows that besides being treasonous, the Republicans are stupid. quelle surprise!

March 10, 2015

If you want to take action, sign the Whitehouse petition as described in my subsequent post Senator Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran is a direct violation of the Logan Act and should be prosecuted.

The Daily Kos has the article and videos Jon Stewart offers awesome smackdown of Fox News in only 6 seconds.

Below is the 6 second part.  To stop the video on a particular item, click on the video and then move your cursor away to see the whole item.

The rest of The Daily Kos article has the video of the whole Daily Show segment.

Remember this post if anyone ever asks you to prove to them that Faux Noise ever told a lie, just one single lie. I have been challenged that way.

The Daily Kos has the story ‘I’m white, call them twice bitch’.  I am not sure you can imagine what this story is from its headline.  But the story and the thoughts of the commenters are a sad commentary on

Just another day in post-racial America.

Something else about the story occurred to me.  If you were white and the recipient of this tirade, would you have thought twice about calling the police?  Has it ever occurred to you wonder what it says about what non-white people in this country have to live with? Think about the impression some white people have of what the police will let them get away with. Think about the evidence you have heard recently that gives credence to that impression.

I post the link to my problem report, youtube-nocookie domain has problems in Firefox, but not in Google Chrome,  because I use the “youtube-nocookie” domain when I embed YouTube videos in this blog.  I do that at the suggestion of YouTube because I presume that avoids putting cookies on your computer when you watch the video.  That presumption may be false, but that is a matter for another post.

I have reported the problem to Mozilla the owners of Firefox.  It seems that Mozilla and YouTube just point the finger at each other.  Since the problem is as yet unsolved, I gave you the link so you can follow the back and forth until the problem gets resolved.  You may also find this entertaining and educational if you have experienced this problem on your own, and have been wondering what the issue is.

I have also replied to a YouTube support forum question.  I have had a response from someone who wants to look into the problem.

March 9, 2015

My Final response is https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/youtube/6JmM2mr_r10/Cr4L0HvM1McJ

I should have pointed out that the file http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLT2nV3sWtw does exist, but the file http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=TLT2nV3sWtw does not. The file is on the www.youtube.com server but not on the www.youtube-nocookie.com. You’d think that would be an easy oversight to fix. You wouldn’t think it would take YouTube this long to notice the problem, or that I would have to be the one to point it out. I think YouTube should send me a cookie for finding the problem for them 🙂

If you click on the link of the file that doesn’t exist, it appears to be blank. If your browser shows URL titles in tabs, then you will see the title “404 file not found.” You have to be wide awake to notice that this is how YouTube is trying to deliver the message to you. Would you normally look to the title of the file that surprisingly shows up empty?

Remember, this is a problem that shows up in Firefox and some other browsers, but not in all browsers.

The file that does not exist, does not exist for all browsers. The issue is that YouTube only tries to use the non-existent file for some browsers. So it is not the browser’s fault that YouTube does this to them.

I found out exactly how YouTube screws things up for other browsers. When I insert a YouTube video in this blog, I use code that accesses a file like https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/TLT2nV3sWtw in an iframe.

When YouTube constructs the contents of the iframe for Firefox, it sets up a video player and gives the player the URL https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TLT2nV3sWtw. When YouTube sets up the same player in the Google Chrome browser, it give the player the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLT2nV3sWtw. It is smart enough to take out the “-nocookie” in the domain name. In other words when it sets up Google Chrome, it gives it a URL that exists. When YouTube (owned by Google) sets up Firefox, it gives it a URL that it knows does not exist.

Of course Google wouldn’t sabotage browsers from other companies. It just made sure that the setup worked for its own browser, and didn’t bother to do the same for the other browsers. I am sure it was just an oversight. Google’s motto is “Do no harm”, right?

March 11, 2015

There is now a reply on the Google Product forums.

ytcrschmidt 9:36 AM (50 minutes ago)

Hi all,

YouTube developers are aware of the problem, and are working on a solution. I apologize for the inconvenience.

March 12, 2015

I have verified that YouTube has fixed the problem. I checked one of the many videos that requests no cookies be used and it is now playing again.

However, if you click on the YouTube icon at the bottom right corner of the video, you still do not get to a working version of the video on YouTube. You get what looks like a blank page. The title of that blank page is “404 Not Found”. Google developers are still working to fix that and whatever other problems continue to lurk.

If You Only News has the article Fox News In A Panic: Google Researches Ranking Websites By Accuracy Of Facts (VIDEO).

Imagine an Internet search engine that shows you top results not based on how many links to it there are, not how many hits it has, but how accurate its facts are. A search engine like that would certainly not benefit organizations like Foxnews.com or dozens of others who refuse to post the truth.

Now imagine that search engine is Google, the choice of nearly 70 percent of all searches in America.

Unfortunately for Fox “News,” Google just may be developing that very system.

The last link in the above excerpt takes you to The Daily Mail article Google to rank search results based on accuracy of web pages.

The video in the original article credited to Media Matters is from the article Merchant Of Doubt Marc Morano Deeply Concerned Google Won’t Promote His Website’s Climate Denial.

It is somewhat amusing how the three articles focus on three different aspects of the story.  It is also quite amusing how little self-awareness that Faux Noise has. The video clip is pure comedy.  Jon Stewart of the Daily show could just play the clip without any commentary.

It may be difficult to determine what the absolute truth is, but it would be a truly sad commentary if there no objective way to judge the truth of anything at all.  Admittedly there are many examples of things we thought for sure were true that later we find were not true.  However, it would be utterly disturbing to find that the case for everything we have ever thought was true.

One of the three headlines shown above is about what is truly news.  I wonder if the readers of this blog post can even agree on which one that is.

The Los Angeles Times has the story Don’t believe the light: Supernova in ‘Einstein Cross’ is a cosmic trick.

An international team has discovered four separate images of the same distant supernova arranged in the shape of a cross — and this unusual trick of the light could help scientists test the structure of the cosmos. They reported their find in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

Every time I read a story that demonstrates some non-intuitive phenomenon of physics, I think of all those people who are arguing for biblical interpretations of the universe, let alone classical physical interpretations.  They seem to have no idea how many generations of physics that they are behind in what they think they understand.

Ready For Warren has a Facebook post highlighting the Occupy Democrats‘ article House Democrat Introduces Bill to End All Government Shutdowns — Forever.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has a solution, and he is currently seeking co-sponsors for a bill that would “shut down the shutdowns.” Grayson’s bill would “automatically extend existing appropriations levels for another fiscal year whenever Congress fails to fund agencies before their money expires,” according to the Washington Post.

The Washington Post article is Tired of shutdown battles? This bill would end them for good.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) said this week that he is seeking co-sponsors for a “Shut Down the Shutdowns Act” that would automatically extend existing appropriations levels for another fiscal year whenever Congress fails to fund agencies before their money expires.

Some people complain about what can’t be done, while others file legislation that tries to get those things done. Less complaining, and more doing might actually change something. Occupy Democrats only asked us to spread the word.

Naked Capitalism has the article Look Who is Selling the TransPacific Partnership by Yves Smith.  Her email introduction to this article said:

Some Serious Economists have signed a letter supporting the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The missive says a lot about the discipline, and not in a good way.

The article is a call to action to counter this letter with calls to your Congress people.

By the way “serious economists” is meant, in this case, as a pejorative.  These are economists that the Lame Stream Media treats as knowledgeable, but in fact are just paid shills for the oligarchy.

I read through the list of signatories to come up with the following classification:

Not surprising
Alan Greenspan
Charles L. Schultz
Martin Feldstein
R. Glenn Hubbard
N. Gregory Mankiw
Ben S. Bernanke
Austan D. Goolsbee

Astonishing
Christina D. Romer

I’ll let you read the letter to see what organizations these people claim to be from.

The Washington Post has the article Netanyahu enters never-never land by Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria brings up some history as a way to judge whether or not even tougher sanctions would work to get Iran to capitulate.  Here is some of what he said.

We have some history that can inform us on the more likely course. Between 2003 and 2005, under another practical president, Mohammad Khatami, Iran negotiated with three European Union powers a possible deal to place its nuclear program under constraints and inspections. The chief nuclear negotiator at the time was Hassan Rouhani, now Iran’s president.

Iran proposed to cap its centrifuges at very low levels, keep enrichment levels well below those that could be used for weapons and convert its existing enriched uranium into fuel rods (which could not be put to military use). Peter Jenkins, the British representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Inter Press Service , “All of us were impressed by the proposal.” But the talks collapsed because the Bush administration, acting through the British government, vetoed it. It was certain, Jenkins explained, that if the West could “scare” the Iranians, “they would give in.”

What was the result? Did Iran return to the table and capitulate? No, the country withstood the sanctions and, unimpeded by any inspections, massively expanded its nuclear infrastructure. Iran went from 164 centrifuges to 19,000, accumulated more than 17,000 pounds of enriched uranium gas and ramped up construction of a heavy water reactor at Arak that could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Now, I don’t think of Fareed Zakaria as an infallible interpreter of the Middle East, but his repetition of history matches what I remember of that history.  Most people seem to think the history shows Iran to be intractable and irrational.  However, I read about what the Bush administration was up to at the time it was happening.  Clearly, the Bush administration made nice on the surface, but made sure to slap Iran with the backs of their hands in private to make sure no agreement ever could be reached.  If I could read about it in the news at the time, it always mystified me how so many other people could pretend that this wasn’t happening.  When people couldn’t get it right at the time, there would be no hope that they would remember it correctly years later.