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 is provided by Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials. Lil' Ed is the nephew and stylistic inheritor of J.B. Hutto, whose unique slide guitar style lives on in Lil' Ed's playing. Enjoy!
Lil' Ed and The Blue Imperials - She's Gone
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made - through disobedience and through rebellion.”
-- Oscar Wilde
News
Well, isn't this special, our forward-looking administration has decided to dump the idea of prosecuting war criminals:
Justice Department Ends Investigation Into Bush-Era Torture, With No Charges
The Justice Department has just formally ended their investigation into CIA “enhanced interrogations” without bringing any charges.
This was the investigation headed by John Durham, the federal prosecutor selected in August 2009 to look into charges of torture in CIA interrogations during the Bush Administration. We know plenty about those charges. The Justice Department released a previously classified document around the same time that they named Durham to lead the investigation, detailing the methods they used to interrogate suspects, including plenty of methods that a plain reading would consider to be torture. This included waterboarding, stress positions, mock executions, threatening with handguns and power drills, vowing to kill or rape members of a detainee’s family, and inducing vomiting.
Early in the Administration, President Obama said he would look forward and not backward, even though the entire purpose of the criminal justice system is to look backward and prosecute on past crimes. However, Eric Holder, to whom Obama delegated authority over accountability for the torture program, did inaugurate this investigation. Now, three years later, it has disbanded, having done nothing.
Software Meant to Fight Crime Is Used to Spy on Dissidents
Morgan Marquis-Boire works as a Google engineer and Bill Marczak is earning a Ph.D. in computer science. But this summer, the two men have been moonlighting as detectives, chasing an elusive surveillance tool from Bahrain across five continents.
What they found was the widespread use of sophisticated, off-the-shelf computer espionage software by governments with questionable records on human rights. While the software is supposedly sold for use only in criminal investigations, the two came across evidence that it was being used to target political dissidents. ...
The software has been identified as FinSpy, one of the more elusive spyware tools sold in the growing market of off-the-shelf computer surveillance technologies that give governments a sophisticated plug-in monitoring operation. Research now links it to servers in more than a dozen countries, including Turkmenistan, Brunei and Bahrain, although no government acknowledges using the software for surveillance purposes. ...
“This is dual-use equipment,” said Eva Galperin, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group. “If you sell it to a country that obeys the rule of law, they may use it for law enforcement. If you sell it to a country where the rule of law is not so strong, it will be used to monitor journalists and dissidents.”
Until Mr. Marquis-Boire and Mr. Marczak stumbled upon FinSpy last May, security researchers had tried, unsuccessfully, for a year to track it down. FinSpy gained notoriety in March 2011 after protesters raided Egypt’s state security headquarters and discovered a document that appeared to be a proposal by the Gamma Group to sell FinSpy to the government of President Hosni Mubarak for $353,000. It is unclear whether that transaction was ever completed.
Investors Seek To Profit From Privatizing Public Schools
Michael Moore: Get Used To Phrase "President Romney
Canada Orders Iraq War Resister to Be Deported Back to US
A war resister who has been living in Canada for the last five years has been ordered deported back to the U.S., an immigration board said Thursday.
Kimberly Rivera, reported to be the first female U.S. war resister, had served in Iraq in 2006 but sought refuge in Canada in 2007.
Rivera is the mother of four children, the two youngest born in Canada.
She must now leave the Canada by Sept. 20.
Quebec baffled by $30 million maple syrup heist
Maple syrup producers in Quebec found themselves in a sticky situation after thieves made off with millions of dollars worth of the breakfast sweetener that had been stored in a warehouse.
Empty barrels were found at a warehouse that had held some 10 million pounds of syrup worth an estimated $30 million, indicating that the thieves had emptied syrup into other containers to sell on the black market. ...
Quebec, the so-called Saudi Arabia of syrup, produces 70-80 percent of the world’s supply of the popular condiment and had been expected to help cover additional demand after a poor US harvest in 2012.
Oil companies desperately seek water amid Kansas drought
Oil companies drilling in the drought-ridden fields of southern Kansas are taking desperate measures to get the water they need to tap into the state's oil reserves.
Huge amounts of water are required to extract oil, especially when companies use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which requires millions of gallons of water to crack the shale rock and bring oil to the surface. But now that the entire state is in emergency drought status, with only 1.19 inches of rainfall last month -- the 10th driest July on record -- unprecedented water shortages are making it difficult for drillers to get the water they need.
Some companies are paying farmers for any remaining water they have left in their ponds, drilling their own water wells, digging ponds next to streams or trucking in water from as far away as Pennsylvania.
Obama Gives Shell Green Light to Start Risky Arctic Drilling
The Obama administration has given Royal Dutch Shell the green light to begin "preparatory activities" for oil drilling in Alaska's Chukchi Sea on Thursday to the outrage of environmental groups.
The U.S. Interior Department said the OK was for Shell to begin preparatory work but not tap into underground oil reserves at this point.
Shell is still waiting for Coast Guard approval of its oil-spill containment barge, the Arctic Challenger, which remains in a Bellingham, Wash., shipyard, and is waiting on modifications to its air-quality permits from the EPA.
Arctic wildlife at risk from climate change
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
For Julian Assange, Justice Foreclosed
We Are Writing the Epilogue to the World We Knew
A father joins his child
A Little Night Music
Lil' Ed & The Blues Imperials - Check My Baby's Oil
Lil' Ed & The Blues Imperials - Never Miss Your Water
Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials - New Payment Plan
Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials - Black Night
Lil´ Ed and the imperials - Pride & Joy
Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials - Baby What You Want Me To Do
Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials - Chicken, Gravy & Biscuits
Lil´ Ed and the imperials and Guitar Shorty - Ain't It A Pity (Garbage Man)
Lil´ Ed and the imperials and Guitar Shorty - Too Much Alcohol
Lil' Ed and The Blue Imperials - Hold That Train
Lil' Ed & The Blues Imperials - Icicles In My Meatloaf
Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials — Don't Call Me
Lil' Ed & The Blues Imperials - It's Alright
Lil' Ed & The Blues Imperials - Golden Rule
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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