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!
This evenings music features a continuation from last night, the blues shouter Wynonie Harris, an r&b star who made indelible contributions to rock and roll.
Wynonie Harris - Don't Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes At Me
"Rising sea levels, severe draughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief."
-- Leon Panetta
"I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity."
-- John D Rockefeller
News
Financial Costs of Sandy Being Measured in Tens of Billions
Superstorm fulfills warnings long made by climate change experts
From being called 'Frankenstorm' as it made its way up the east coast, to a 'superstorm' as it moved over highly populated areas of the northeast coast on Monday night into Tuesday—including devastating impacts in New York City, Atlantic City, New Jersy and elsewhere—the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, as agencies get their first look, is being measured in the tens of billions of dollars and could be the most expensive storm ever to hit this area of the United States.
"With about one-fifth of the U.S. affected directly by Hurricane Sandy," reports ABC News Tuesday morning, "tragic human loss reached 69 in the Caribbean, and U.S. economic losses could range around $35 billion to $45 billion."
As climate scientists and global warming campaigners have long warned, the financial impacts of extreme weather events—in addition to the enormous human and ecological toll of climate change—will ultimately manifest in ways the US public and elected officials would find hard to ignore.
Are horrific storms like Sandy the new norm?
We Are All from New Orleans Now: Climate Change, Hurricanes and the Fate of America's Coastal Cities
The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change, but climate change has decided to speak to them. And what is a thousand-mile-wide storm pushing eleven feet of water toward our country’s biggest population center saying just days before the election? It is this: we are all from New Orleans now. Climate change—through the measurable rise of sea levels and a documented increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms—has made 100 million Americans virtually as vulnerable to catastrophe as the victims of Hurricane Katrina were seven years ago.
Arriving atop fantastically warm water and aided by a full foot of sea-level rise during the last century, Hurricane Sandy is just the latest example of climate change’s impact on human society. Unless we rapidly phase out our use of fossil fuels, most Americans within shouting distance of an ocean will—in coming years—live behind the sort of massive levees and floodgates that mark Louisiana today.
The New York Academy Sciences has already begun examining the viability of three massive floodgates near the mouth of New York Harbor, not unlike the Thames River floodgate that protects London today. Another floodgate has been proposed for the Potomac River just south of Washington, fending against tsunami-like surge tides from future mega storms. Plus there will be levees—everywhere. Imagine the National Mall, Reagan National Airport and the Virginia suburbs—all well below sea level—at the mercy of “trust-us-they’ll-hold” levees maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers. ...
What can we do? Three major options: (1) abandon our coastal cities and retreat inland, (2) stay put and try to adapt to the menacing new conditions or (3) stop burning planet-warming fossil fuels as fast as possible.
Two nuclear power plants shut down in aftermath of Superstorm Sandy
Two US nuclear power plants were shut down early Tuesday in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, but the plant operators stressed there were no risks to the public.
New Jersey’s main power company PSEG Nuclear shut down its Salem 1 unit on the Delaware river, saying most of its water circulation pumps had been rendered unusable “due to weather impacts”.
PSEG said it manually shut down the 1,175 MW unit, but said there were “no issues” in the shutdown and the facility was “currently stable.” ...
In New York, power generator Entergy shut down a unit of its Indian Point nuclear facility “due to external electrical grid issues.”
Alert Declared at Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reporting that an “alert” has been declared at the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Ocean County, New Jersey. An alert is the second level on the four-point scale, a step above an “unusual event.”
The NRC declared the alert at 8:45 PM local time, as a combination of rising tides, wind and the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy caused water to rise above safe levels in the plant’s water intake structure. Sandy, which made landfall at around 8 PM in southern New Jersey with 90 mph winds, has caused power outages and widespread flooding along the Atlantic coast from Maryland to New York. ...
Particular concerns were raised about Oyster Creek. The reactor is currently offline for maintenance, which means all the reactor fuel, along with generations of used fuel, is in the plant’s spent fuel pools. The plant itself is not generating any electricy, and so is dependent on external power. If the power were to fail, there would be no way to circulate cooling water through the pools.
North Atlantic Tropical Storms
This figure shows the number of named tropical storms in the North Atlantic, per year, smoothed out over a 10-year running average to minimize the noise in year-to-year variation. Since 1996, tropical storm frequency has exceeded by 40% the old historic maximum of the mid-1950s, previously considered extreme. Recent peer-reviewed studies suggest a link between higher sea surface temperature and storm frequency. Extreme weather events are a projected impact of global climate change.
U.S. Poised to Be World's Top Oil Producer, Part of 'The New Middle East'. The Bad News: We'll Also Have Their Climate.
AP reports:
U.S. oil output is surging so fast that the United States could soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest producer. Driven by high prices and new drilling methods, U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons is on track to rise 7 percent this year to an average of 10.9 million barrels per day.
The Energy Department forecasts that U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons, which includes biofuels, will average 11.4 million barrels per day next year. That would be a 40-year high for the U.S. and just below Saudi Arabia's output of 11.6 million barrels. Citibank forecasts U.S. production could reach 13 million to 15 million barrels per day by 2020, helping to make North America "the new Middle East."
When your farmland turns into the Sahara thanks to unrestricted emissions from burning coal, oil, and gas, you’ll have a bunch of cool oil derricks to show for it.
Climate change: Drought may threaten much of globe within decades
The United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades, according to a new study by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientist Aiguo Dai. The detailed analysis concludes that warming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry soil conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely if ever been observed in modern times.
Using an ensemble of 22 computer climate models and a comprehensive index of drought conditions, as well as analyses of previously published studies, the paper finds much of the Western Hemisphere, along with large parts of Eurasia and Africa, may be at threat of extreme drought this century.
America’s 2011 drug war tally: One marijuana arrest every 42 seconds
New numbers released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting Program show that nearly half of all drug arrests in 2011 were marijuana-related, and of those arrests almost 90 percent were for possession alone.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a drug reform advocacy group, said that the latest numbers show that marijuana users were arrested last year at a rate of one every 42 seconds. Accounting for all illegal drug users, they added that arrest rate jumps to one every 21 seconds. ...
“Even excluding the costs involved for later trying and then imprisoning these people, taxpayers are spending between one and a half to three billion dollars a year just on the police and court time involved in making these arrests,” Neill Franklin, director of LEAP and a former Baltimore police officer, said in a prepared statement. “That’s a lot of money to spend for a practice that four decades of unsuccessful policies have proved does nothing to reduce the consumption of drugs.”
Bank of England official: Occupy movement right about global recession
The Occupy Movement has found an unlikely ally in a senior Bank of England official, Andrew Haldane, who has praised protesters for their role in triggering an overhaul of the financial services sector.
Haldane, who oversees the City for the central bank, said Occupy acted as a lever on policymakers despite criticism that its aims were too vague. He said the protest movement was right to focus on inequality as the chief reason for the 2008 crash, following studies that showed the accumulation of huge wealth funded by debt was directly responsible for the domino-like collapse of the banking sector in 2008. ...
Haldane said Occupy’s voice had been “loud and persuasive” and that “policymakers have listened and are acting in ways which will close those fault-lines” with a “reformation of finance that Occupy has helped stir”. He said inequality was fuelled by bank lending for speculation on property and other assets that enriched some in society at the expense of others.
“The asset-rich, in particular the owner-occupying rich, became a lot richer. Meanwhile, the asset-less and indebted fell further behind. In other words, the pre-crisis asset price bubble acted like a regressive tax,” he said.
Reflections on Occupy Baltimore
Greek journalist arrested for publishing list of Swiss bank account holders
A Greek journalist has been arrested for publishing the names of wealthy Greek citizens with deposits totalling €2bn (£1.bn) in Swiss bank accounts. ...
It names 2,000 Greeks with Swiss accounts who are regarded as potential tax evaders. Yet the Athens government is alleged to have failed to take any action in the two years since it received the information.
In a challenge to the authorities, a major Greek newspaper, Ta Nea, today reprinted the names. It devoted 10 pages to the list. ...
The list has drawn criticism from both opposition parties, as well as politicians within the governing coalition. Most comments link the failure to track down possible tax evasion by those on the list to the government's preparations to introduce new austerity measures to secure international aid.
Here's a comment on this from the arrested journalist, Kostas Vaxevanis, from his piece Greece Gave Birth to Democracy. Now It Has Been Cast Out by a Powerful Elite:
In Ancient Greek mythology, justice is presented as blind. In modern Greece, it is merely winking and nodding. A study of the Lagarde list is highly revealing. Publishers, businessmen, shipowners, the entire system of power is shown to have transferred money abroad. And this is information from only one bank. Meanwhile in Greece, people are going through dumpsters for food.
The crisis in Greece wasn't caused by everyone. And not everyone is paying for the crisis. The exclusive, corrupt club of power tries to save itself by pretending to make efforts to save Greece. In reality, it is exacerbating Greece's contradictions, while Greece is teetering on the edge of a cliff.
If in the Bible, sinners "strain out the gnat and swallow the camel", in Greece the sinful powers that be strain out pensions and swallow lists – in order, of course, to make them disappear. These are the lists of their friends, acquaintances, favourites and mess mates.
In the country that, as we like to remind ourselves, gave birth to democracy, democracy has become a strange new breed. Those in charge make sure that the right to vote come across as democracy, while negating democracy in the way they abuse the rights voters give them. And justice remains in thrall to politics.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
Obama Defends His Finance Reform Record to Rolling Stone: A Response - by Matt Taibbi
We Don’t Know, Exactly, What the Trans-Pacific Partnership Is, But I’m Against It
"it’s virtually impossible to be a citizen"
Pres Should Modify 2nd Term Plan --Sandy Shovel Ready Jobs & Beyond
A Little Night Music
Wynonie Harris - Rock Mr. Blues
Wynonie Harris - Tell a Whale of a Tale
Wynonie Harris - Drinking Blues
Wynonie Harris - Lollipop Mama (Jump Mr Blues)
Wynonie Harris - Lightning Struck The Poorhouse
Arnett Cobb & Wynonie Harris - Good Morning Corrine
Wynonie Harris - Big Old Country Fool
Wynonie Harris - A Tale Of Woe
Everybody's Boogie - Wynonie Harris w/Oscar Pettiford & his All Stars
Wynonie Harris - Rebecca's Blues
Come Back, Baby - Wynonie Harris and his All Stars
Wynonie Harris - All She Wants To Do Is Mambo
Wynonie Harris - Good Mambo Tonight
Wynonie Harris - Stormy Night Blues
Wynonie Harris - Luscious Woman
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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