Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
Tonight's music features piedmont bluesman Barbecue Bob. Enjoy!
Barbecue Bob - Mississippi Heavy Water Blues
"We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens."
-- Emma Goldman, What is Patriotism? (1908)
News and Opinion
Homeland Security Wants to More Than Double Its Predator Drone Fleet Inside the US, Despite Safety and Privacy Concerns
Despite renewed criticism from both parties in Congress that domestic drones pose a privacy danger to US citizens—and a report from its own Inspector General recommending to stop buying them—the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has indicated it wants to more than double its fleet of Predator drones used to fly surveillance missions inside the United States.
Yesterday, California Watch reported that DHS signed a contract that could be worth as much as $443 million with General Atomics for the purchase up to fourteen additional Predator drones to fly near the border of Mexico and Canada. Congress would still need to appropriate the funds, but if they did, DHS' drone fleet woud increase to twenty-four.
While many people may think the US only flies Predator drones overseas, DHS has already spent $250 million over the last six years on ten surveillance Predators of its own. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—a division of DHS—uses the unmanned drones inside the U.S. to patrol the borders with surveillance equipment like video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar.
They say the drones are vital in the fight to stop illegal immigrants, but as EFF reported in June, the DHS Inspector General issued a report faulting DHS for wasting time, money, and resources using drones that were ineffective and lacked oversight. The Inspector General chastised the agency for buying two drones last year despite knowing these problems and recommended they cease buying them until the problems could be fixed.
Obama’s drone assassination rules decried by rights groups
President Barack Obama’s administration is in the process of drawing up a formal rulebook that will set out the circumstances in which targeted assassination by unmanned drones is justified, according to reports.
The New York Times, citing two unnamed sources, said explicit guidelines were being drawn up amid disagreement between the CIA and the departments of defense, justice and state over when lethal action is acceptable. ...
“To say they are rewriting the rulebook implies that there is already a rulebook” said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Center for Democracy. “But what they are already doing is rejecting a rulebook – of international law – that has been in place since [the second world war].”
He said the news was “frustrating”, because it relied on “self-serving sources”. The New York Times piece was written by one of the journalists who first exposed the existence of a White House “kill list”, in May.
Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Gaza’s "Severe Damage" and Why Truce Won’t Stop the Violence of Occupation
The Coming Intifada
Chris Hayes: U.S. helps terrorism ‘brings strategic benefits’ in Middle East
Catalonia independence movement reels after sovereignty vote fails
Catalonia’s fight for statehood and a historic divorce from Spain floundered Monday after a snap election left no single party in command.
Pro-sovereignty parties from right and left emerged with a clear combined majority, but the prospects of them joining in battle for a new nation were deeply uncertain.
That could be good news for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who has vowed to block any break-up of Spain, saying it flouts the constitution and flies in the face of common sense.
Wal-Mart Worker Uprising: Protests Held At 1,000 Stores on Black Friday
Poor management, not union intransigence, killed Hostess
Let's get a few things clear. Hostess didn't fail for any of the reasons you've been fed. It didn't fail because Americans demanded more healthful food than its Twinkies and Ho-Hos snack cakes. It didn't fail because its unions wanted it to die.
It failed because the people that ran it had no idea what they were doing. Every other excuse is just an attempt by the guilty to blame someone else. ...
The company had known for a decade or more that its market was changing, but had done nothing to modernize its product line or distribution system. Its trucks were breaking down. It was keeping unprofitable stores open and having trouble figuring out how to move inventory to customers and when. It had cut back advertising and marketing to the point where it was barely communicating with customers. It had gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions from its unions, and spent none of it on these essential improvements. ...
The record shows that Hostess' unions were willing to talk with management at virtually every stage to keep the firm alive. There are plenty of companies and industries in which such talks have been fruitful, including the auto industry. But they can succeed only when everyone is confident that the guys at the other side of the table are committed to the same goals.
In this case, the unions finally realized that the Hostess strategic plan started and ended with extracting yet another round of cutbacks from employees. To argue that capitulating might at least save thousands of jobs is to accept the corrosive mind-set that manufacturing workers should be glad they've got any job at all and take what they're offered.
First Amendment Win: Supreme Court Rejects Attempt to Block Recording of Police Officers
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Illinois that allows the enforcement of a law that blocks recording of police officers on duty.
Harvey Grossman, Legal Director of the ACLU of Illinois, stated in response to the Court's decision:
We are pleased that the Supreme Court has refused to take this appeal. Now, we can focus on the on-going proceedings in the federal district court. We now hope to obtain a permanent injunction in this case, so that the ACLU’s program of monitoring police activity in public can move forward in the future without any threat of prosecution. The ACLU of Illinois continues to believe that in order to make the rights of free expression and petition effective, individuals and organizations must be able to freely gather and record information about the conduct of government and their agents – especially the police. The advent and widespread accessibility of new technologies make the recording and dissemination of pictures and sound inexpensive, efficient and easy to accomplish.
While a final ruling in this case will only address the work of the ACLU of Illinois to monitor police activity, we believe that it will have a ripple effect throughout the entire state. We are hopeful that we are moving closer to a day when no one in Illinois will risk prosecution when they audio record public officials performing their duties. Empowering individuals and organizations in this fashion will ensure additional transparency and oversight of public officials across the State.
The Top Secret Deal Between 11 Countries That Will Affect Your Life
Stand Still For the Apocalypse
Humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe’s inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank. The continued failure to respond aggressively to climate change, the report warns, will mean that the planet will inevitably warm by at least 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, ushering in an apocalypse.
The 84-page document,“Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” was written for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and published last week. The picture it paints of a world convulsed by rising temperatures is a mixture of mass chaos, systems collapse and medical suffering like that of the worst of the Black Plague, which in the 14th century killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population.
A planetwide temperature rise of 4 degrees C—and the report notes that the tepidness of the emission pledges and commitments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will make such an increase almost inevitable—will cause a precipitous drop in crop yields, along with the loss of many fish species, resulting in widespread hunger and starvation. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to abandon their homes in coastal areas and on islands that will be submerged as the sea rises. There will be an explosion in diseases such as malaria, cholera and dengue fever. Devastating heat waves and droughts, as well as floods, especially in the tropics, will render parts of the Earth uninhabitable. The rain forest covering the Amazon basin will disappear. Coral reefs will vanish. Numerous animal and plant species, many of which are vital to sustaining human populations, will become extinct. Monstrous storms will eradicate biodiversity, along with whole cities and communities. And as these extreme events begin to occur simultaneously in different regions of the world, the report finds, there will be “unprecedented stresses on human systems.” Global agricultural production will eventually not be able to compensate. Health and emergency systems, as well as institutions designed to maintain social cohesion and law and order, will crumble. The world’s poor, at first, will suffer the most. But we all will succumb in the end to the folly and hubris of the Industrial Age. And yet, we do nothing.
Rise of acid ocean eats away base of food chain
Rising amounts of carbon dioxide dissolving in the ocean is causing the acid corrosion of tiny sea creatures that form the base of the marine food chain, scientists have discovered.
Ocean acidification caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is eating away at the shells of marine snails known as “sea butterflies”, the researchers said.
It is the first time that scientists have discovered the visibly acid-damaged shells of critically-important organisms living in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica. The researchers believe it could be a harbinger of worse things to come.
The sea butterflies, also known as pteropod snails, live in the surface layers of the open ocean, grow no bigger than a centimetre across and are part of the floating plankton on which all other fish and marine animals ultimately depend for their survival.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Lawyers: Bradley Manning Already Punished for Unproven Crimes
Is the Drone “Rule Book” an Effort to Force Kill-Not-Capture?
To Shell Oil: "The World is Watching You."
"Drone Rule Book": It Doesn't Exist, Except on the New York Times' Front Page
The Goldman Sachs Project to take over Europe nearly complete
Time to End the War in Afghanistan
A Little Night Music
Barbecue Bob - Barbecue Blues
Barbecue Bob - Motherless Chile Blues
Barbecue Bob - I'm On My Way Down Home
Barbecue Bob - Poor Boy A Long Ways From Home
Barbecue Bob - Chocolate to the Bone
Barbecue Bob - Yo Yo Blues
Barbecue Bob - Untitled Song
Barbecue Bob - Red Hot Mama
Barbecue Bob - She's Coming Back Some Cold Rainy Day
Barbecue Bob - Easy Rider Don't You Deny My Name
Barbecue Bob - Honey You Don't Know My Mind
Barbecue Bob - She Shook Her Gin
Remember when progressive debate was about our values and not about a "progressive" candidate? Remember when progressive websites championed progressive values and didn't tell progressives to shut up about values so that "progressive" candidates can get elected?
Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
Come to where the pie is served in a variety of flavors.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ~ Noam Chomsky
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