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 Percy Mayfield, composer of a number of R&B standards including, "Hit the Road Jack," "Please Send Me Someone To Love" and many others.
Percy Mayfield - Hit the Road Jack
'It is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency.'
-- Barney Frank
News
Spain's Robin Hood Mayor and Landless Peasants Battle Bankers
Protesters march in Charlotte ahead of Democratic Convention
Around 800 protesters marched through downtown Charlotte, North Carolina on Sunday ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
Like the “Occupy Wall Street” protests that have occurred around the country, the demonstration in Charlotte attracted a wide variety of causes. Protesters decried the deregulated financial system, corporate corruption, overseas wars and use of targeted drone strikes, union busting, and the crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
The demonstration was organized by the Coalition to March on Wall Street South.
White House Disavows Obama’s Pledge for 2014 Afghan Withdrawal - Blasts Press for Reporting Public Comments
After months of vague comments about 2014 being a transition date and the beginning of the end of the Afghan War, President Obama went majorly off-script in a campaign speech Sunday, vowing that he would have all troops out of Afghanistan by 2014:
“I put forward a specific plan to bring our troops home from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. We are in the process of doing that right now. And when I say I’m going to bring ‘em home, you know they’re gonna come home."
While that may have been what they hoped voters would infer from past comments, it of course wasn’t true, and Obama himself should know that very well, since he was in Afghanistan earlier this year to sign the deal to keep US troops there through 2024.
Now they’re on damage control, with Press Secretary Jay Carney loudly disavowing the comments:
"He never said that all the troops would be out," the press secretary declared. "What we’ve said, as we did in Iraq -- and I think this is a good way to look at it —is in Iraq, there were steps of—sort of milestones where troops began to come home, more and more authorities transferred over to Iraqi security forces. The U.S. forces that remained as that process took place moved out of the cities and on to bases. And then the full transfer took place and combat mission ended, after which remaining U.S. forces eventually came home and the last U.S. soldier left, with the exception obviously of those who are at the embassy."
Anonymous claims hack caught FBI spying on millions of Apple customers
Hackers with the amorphous protest movement “Anonymous” and “AntiSec” said Monday night they caught the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) red-handed spying on Apple customers, and published over 1 million unique device identification numbers they allegedly pulled out of an FBI database.
In all, the hackers claimed that the FBI files they accessed had more than 12 million Apple UDIDs, the unique identifier associated with every iPhone and iPad that comes off the production line. They also said that most UDIDs in the FBI’s database had names, cell phone numbers and addresses attached to them, which were edited out before publication. ... Apple told a congressional inquiry in 2010 that it cannot track iPhones in real time, but a hacker named Eric Smith noted that third party applications can transmit UDIDs, which could potentially be linked to the owner and used to track that person.
And that’s precisely what hackers with Anonymous think the FBI was doing.
Quebec separatists look to sweep elections
Quebec’s separatists look to sweep back into power in elections Tuesday, buoyed by rising frustration with the current leadership and months of student protests over a planned tuition hike.
Voters in the country’s only majority French-speaking province will choose 125 lawmakers — and pre-election polls point to theParti Quebecois coming out on top, though without a full majority, a rarity in Canadian politics.
The PQ has been in the opposition since its 2003 defeat by the Liberals, led by Jean Charest, who has served three terms as premier.
Democratic Party platform weakens commitment to climate change action
The Democratic Party’s 2012 platform no longer pledges to free Americans from the tyranny of big oil, dropping the prior platform’s hard-line support for renewable energy for an “all-of-the-above” strategy favored by President Barack Obama and his Republican rivals.
While the platform does still call for an international deal to curtail the types of pollution that accelerate climate change, it does not say that the agreement should be binding, as it did in 2008. The platform also drops the party’s 2008 support for the “cap and trade” scheme Democrats failed to pass in 2010.
UN urges action to avoid food catastrophe
A 'catastrophe affecting tens of millions' and repeat of the 2007-2008 world food crisis must be prevented with urgent action, UN agencies stated on Tuesday.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Program (WFP) issued the call for urgent action to address international food prices. ...
The "high food prices are a symptom," they say, of an ineffective system. Lacking resiliency, it is impacted by climate that has wreaked havoc on crops through drought and floods; being highly centralized, where only a "handful of nations are large producers of staple food commodities," leaves millions at risk. In addition, food price spikes have been the result of "increased diversion of food stock for non-food purposes and increased financial speculation are among the various drivers of increased price levels and volatility. "
Barclays makes £500m betting on food crisis - Outrage as bank revealed to be major speculator while millions face starvation
Barclays has made as much as half a billion pounds in two years from speculating on food staples such as wheat and soya, prompting allegations that banks are profiting handsomely from the global food crisis.
Barclays is the UK bank with the greatest involvement in food commodity trading and is one of the three biggest global players, along with the US banking giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, research from the World Development Movement points out.
Last week the trading giant Glencore was attacked for describing the global food crisis and price rises as a "good" business opportunity.
The extent of Barclays' involvement in food speculation comes to light as new figures from the World Bank show that global food prices hit an all-time high in July, with poor harvests in the US and Russia pushing up the average worldwide cost of staples by an unprecedented 10 per cent in a month.
The Real Hunger Games - Big Commodity Traders Control World Grain Market
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
The Six Stages of Climate Grief
Global manufacturing in recession; rest of global economy to follow?
A Little Night Music
Percy Mayfield - Stranger in my own home town
Percy Mayfield - Louisiana
Percy Mayfield - Nothing stays the same forever
Percy Mayfield: I Made It Just the Same
Percy Mayfield - My Jug and I
Percy Mayfield - The River's Invitation
another version:
Percy Mayfield - Life Is Suicide
Percy Mayfield - Memory Pain
Percy Mayfield - Hopeless
Percy Mayfield - Lonesome Highway
Percy Mayfield & the Maytones - You Were Lyin' To Me
Percy Mayfield - Cookin' In Style
Percy Mayfield - I Wouldn't Do the Same Thing To You
Percy Mayfield - I Ain't Gonna Cry No More
Percy Mayfield - The Hunt Is On
Percy Mayfield - Cry Baby
Percy Mayfield - Baby Please
Percy Mayfield - My Friend
Percy Mayfield - Never no more
Johnny Adams - You're In For A Big Surprise
Percy Mayfield - Gone Astray
Gladys Knight + BB King - Please Send Me Somebody To Love
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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