The Evening Blues - Weekend Edition" is a casual community diary (published Saturday & Sunday, 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!
This evening's music features Galactic. Enjoy!
Galactic - Go Go
Note: We here at the Evening Blues Weekend Edition often step beyond the boundries of traditional blues music. Joe shikspack so adeptly covers the blues genre in his weekday series that we at the Weekend Edition would find most trad blues offerings we could serve up as being redundant. Therefore Joe, in magnanimous manner has allowed us to color outside of the lines and we appreciate and thank him for that. Almost all modern American music has it's roots in traditional blues music anyway, so ultimately we do not stray far from the mother language. As Muddy Waters sang:
The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll, let us add to that list (jazz, country, bluegrass, ragtime, folk, gospel, soul, swing and rhythm and blues) and all subsets thereof. -- JtC
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. ~Carl Sagan~
News and Opinion
The Evening Blues
We dig up what the MSM buries.
Contributors: enhydra lutris
In 'Win for Public Schools,' Wash. Supreme Court Rules Charter Schools Unconstitutional
Public education advocates are welcoming the Washington State Supreme Court's ruling late Friday that the state's charter school law is unconstitutional.
The Seattle Times reports that
The ruling — believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country — overturns the law [I-1240] voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.
How One Chicago High School Became Ground Zero For School Privatization
Thailand constitution: Military's council rejects draft
Contributed by: enhydra lutris
A council appointed by Thailand's military rulers has rejected a controversial new constitution drafted after last year's coup.
A new committee must now be appointed to write another draft, further setting back elections.
The draft has been widely criticised, in particular a clause which enables a 23-member panel to take over government during a "national crisis".
Why Evangelicals have flocked to Donald Trump
The Rev. James Linzey, a retired Army chaplain and vocal leader among some conservative Evangelicals, sums up his ardent support for Donald Trump with a simple observation:
“Because he tells it like it is, and he exudes honesty and transparency, and that he’s the kind of person who is not going to deceive us,” says Reverend Linzey, who now heads the Military Bible Association in Escondido, Calif., and who publicly endorsed the Manhattan billionaire on Thursday. “Evangelicals are tired of being deceived by wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
The pastor seems a bit naive.
Here's why Donald Trump won't win the Republican presidential nomination
Donald Trump’s authoritative lead in early polling in the 2016 Republican race for the presidential nomination has left Americans excited, confused and afraid.
Trump hasn’t been out of first place in national polling since he filed as a candidate with the Federal Election Commission in mid-July. Most polls have him leading in the double digits.
He is not only ahead on paper. He draws the biggest crowds, too. A rally for the candidate in Mobile, Alabama, on Friday night had to be moved to a larger stadium to accommodate a horde of thousands – although the estimated crowd of 20,000 fell short of the 40,000 the Trump campaign said had RSVP’d.
“We could make a call for an expedited election,” Trump told those at the rally. “I would like to have the election tomorrow – I don’t want to wait.”
Anger as Guatemala votes amid graft scandals
Contributed by: enhydra lutris
The wave of political turmoil that toppled Guatemala's president has overshadowed Sunday's vote to elect a new leader — an election many fear could put a lid on the anti-corruption drive.
Tens of thousands who demonstrated for the ouster of President Otto Molina Perez got part of their wishes when the president resigned to face possible corruption charges in a customs fraud scheme. He was spending the weekend in a military lockup.
But a second major demand wasn't met: the postponement of the election that many said offered little alternative to the old guard.
Banana Republic graft has nothing on Oligarchy graft.
Walls of the world aim to keep unwanted foreigners out, hold prosperity in
More than 25 years after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, even bigger barriers today separate countries from one another. Walls in 2015 snake through many thousands of miles in efforts to monitor and control the movement of people with fences, watchtowers and border patrols.
Contrary to a widely held notion that the 21st century is defined by the erosion of boundaries among nation-states, fresh barriers continue to be erected on the southern border of the U.S., on the southeastern periphery of Europe, and between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. From India and Uzbekistan to Botswana and Bulgaria, governments are raising barriers on their borders.
Retirement is good for you, says German study
Retired people are using their leisure time to become healthier than when they were working, research suggests.
A study presented at the annual congress of the European Economic Association in Mannheim, Germany, provides a corrective to the conventional view that retirement is the first stage in a person’s declining health.
After studying data on German retirees, drawn from the country’s Socio-Economic Panel Study, Peter Eibich, an economist at the Health Economics Research Centre at Oxford, concluded that retirement improves people’s health because they take more exercise, sleep longer and have more time to recover from work-related strain.
I endeavor to make my current care giver job, my last job. Wish me luck.
WHEN BLACK LIVES DIDN’T MATTER IN NEW ORLEANS
TWO WEEKS AGO, prominent Black Lives Matter activists released Campaign Zero, a 10-point plan to reduce police violence against black Americans. The manifesto demands, among other things, an end to for-profit and broken windows policing. Point seven on the list concerns police training: “The current training regime for police officers fails to effectively teach them how to interact with our communities in a way that protects and preserves life.”
Protect and preserve life. That phrase was all I could think about as I read Shots on the Bridge: Police Violence and Cover-Up in the Wake of Katrina, by Ronnie Greene.
New Orleans: Ten Years Later
Photos: ‘Ninth at Night’ Revisits New Orleans a Decade After Katrina
Ten years ago, Jane Fulton Alt followed the coverage from Chicago as Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and said she was struck with a “profound sense of helplessness.” Six weeks later, the photographer and clinical social worker left for New Orleans to volunteer her skills on a team of mental-health professionals.
She was assigned to a program created to serve people from the city’s poverty-stricken Lower Ninth Ward in which mental-health professionals accompanied evacuated residents on their first, and sometimes last, visits to their homes in the aftermath of the storm. The experience was both physically and mentally taxing, leaving Ms. Fulton Alt wondering what more she could do to help.
“Within an hour of returning to the hotel room, something within me shifted and I knew I needed to do more,” she said. “I decided to photograph what I was seeing, with the hope of helping in a more concrete way by giving others visual access to my experience.”
10 Years After Katrina, Test Scores Tell One Story, Residents Tell Another
New 'Crusader' Assault Rifle Comes Engraved With A Cross And Bible Verse
Florida gunmaker, Spike’s Tactical in Apopka, Florida, introduced a new assault rifle this week that is every evangelical NRA member's wet dream. The $1,395 AR-15 is engraved with with a Bible verse:
"Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle."
No union mines left in Kentucky, where labor wars once raged
Kentucky coal miners bled and died to unionize.
Their workplaces became war zones, and gun battles once punctuated union protests. In past decades, organizers have been beaten, stabbed and shot while seeking better pay and safer conditions deep underground.
But more recently the United Mine Workers in Kentucky have been in retreat, dwindling like the black seams of coal in the Appalachian mountains.
And now the last union mine in Kentucky has been shut down.
Unemployment Rate Under Obama Is Now Lower Than Ronald Reagan Ever Achieved
The labor department released some excellent news on Friday, just as the nation begins to head into the Labor Day weekend.
The latest job figures, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), show that the unemployment rate is now lower than Ronald Reagan ever achieved during his entire eight years in office – currently at 5.1%.
Sanders Finds Picket Line, Grabs Sign And Starts Marching: Standing With Workers ‘Is What I Do’
Many other presidential candidates returned home after the Iowa State Fair, but Senator Bernie Sanders is still in the state building, which is the ground game for his campaign. If there were any questions about whether Sanders was serious about running for president, they are being put to rest. Sanders is polling strong, bringing in record-sized crowds to his rallies, and stubbornly continuing to talk about the issues and not, say, his haircut.
So he’s serious about running, but does he mean what he says? The skepticism towards any candidate is well-founded. Politicians have never had a great track record of honesty on the campaign trail, but even more so in the Age of Trump where bloviating and soundbites can often grab headlines and boost poll numbers better than substance. However, in Sanders’ case, it appears that he’s “worker’s rights” all the way to the core. In Cedar Rapids, he even put his money where his mouth is.
In a gesture that is sure to enrage the CEO-loving Republican Party, Sanders literally stood with union workers. At what was meant to be a campaign rally, Sanders ended up engaging in a little civil disobedience himself by joining in on a pro-labor picket line. Walking up to the 100 or so Cedar Rapids-area union workers, Sanders grabbed a nearby picket sign and marched with the crowd.
Not Just for Better Pay: Seattle Teachers Vote to Strike for Social Justice
The Evening Greens
The Evening Greens Weekend Editor: enhydra lutris
Satellite Study Calculates Earth's Tree Count
A new satellite study has calculated that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, around 422 trees for every person, although the number is believed to have dropped by 46 percent since the start of human civilisation.
The Yale-led international research found the result of the tree count is around seven and a half times more than some previous estimates.
Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level.
Climate change mitigation needs more ambitious emissions reductions
The collective climate targets submitted by Governments to the UN will lead to global emissions far above the levels needed to hold warming to below 2°C, researchers at the Climate Action Tracker warned today.
The analysis by the consortium of four research organisations was released today in Bonn where Governments are meeting for the second to last week of negotiations ahead of the Paris summit on climate action.
Around 65% of global emissions are covered by the “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDCs) submitted by 29 Governments as of 1 September 2015. The CAT has assessed 15 of these INDCs, covering64.5% of global emissions, and has rated seven as “inadequate,” six “medium” and only two - Ethiopia and Morocco - as “sufficient”.
Trees improve pollution dispersion in cities
Trees in cities throughout the UK could be significantly improving the quality of the air we breathe by decreasing pollution levels for pedestrians, researchers from the University of Leicester have revealed.
The team from the University of Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy found that trees have a regionally beneficial impact by increasing turbulence and reducing ambient concentrations of road traffic emissions – by seven per cent in Leicester City at pedestrian height on average.
While previous studies have suggested that trees trap pollution by constructing wind flow in street canyons, the new study focuses on the effectiveness of trees at dispersing road traffic emissions on a city scale.
Labor Day visitors advised to keep pets out of Russian River
On the eve of one of the busiest weekends of the year, visitors to the Russian River are being advised by Sonoma County health officials to keep their pets out of the water.
The unusual move Friday came after health officials confirmed that a dog had died after ingesting toxic blue-green algae while swimming in the river last weekend. Blue-green algae are naturally occurring bacteria that can produce toxins that are potentially lethal to animals and humans.
County health officials had weighed urging people to stay out of the water but opted to limit the advisory to pets because they believed animals are much more at risk from the toxins because of their behavior than humans. The beaches will stay open to the public the entire weekend.
Coastal management strategies in the age of climate change
Coastal decision-makers must move away from considering physical and economic forces in isolation to fully recognise and explain changes to coastlines, according to new research from Cardiff University.
The coastlines where we live, work and play have long been altered by people, but now researchers have investigated why developed coastlines change over time in ways that are fundamentally different from their undeveloped, natural counterparts.
Published in the journal Geomorphology, the research sets the scene for a new approach to understanding these changes in the context of climate change.
Solar water-splitting technology developed
Rice University researchers have demonstrated an efficient new way to capture the energy from sunlight and convert it into clean, renewable energy by splitting water molecules.
Towards a Green Economy: How Urgent is It? - Robert Pollin on Reality Asserts Itself
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal, which will feature from The Masses: "The Gods of War," a drawing by Art Young, and "The Uninteresting War" by Max Eastman illustrated by K. R. Chamberlain..
Tune in at 2pm!
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Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
Hellraisers Journal: Joe Hill Seeks Clemency, 30,000 Australian Unionist Rally & Petition Governor
A Little Night Music
Galactic - Church
Galactic - Crazyhorse Mongoose
Galactic - The Moil
Galactic - As Big As Your Face
Galactic - Funky Bird
Galactic - Hamp's Hump
Galactic - Double Wide
Galactic - Baker's Dozen
Galactic - Everybody Wants Some (Part 2)
Galactic - Tighten Your Wig
Galactic - Doo Rag
Galactic - Out In The Street
Galactic & Macy Gray - I Try
Galactic - Sweet Leaf
Galactic - Running Man
Galactic 5/4/2013 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival