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 evening's music features early Texas bluesman Alger "Texas" Alexander. Enjoy!
Texas Alexander - Range in My Kitchen
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H.L. Mencken
News and Opinion
Feinstein & Rogers justify NSA Spying with Syrian Rebels (Voted to Arm Syrian Rebels)
Senator Diane Feinstein and Rep. Mike Rogers took to the airwaves on Sunday to warn that Americans are less safe than two years ago and that al-Qaeda is growing and spreading and that the US is menaced by bombs that can’t be detected by metal detectors.
Call me cynical, but those two have been among the biggest detractors of the American citizen’s fourth amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure of personal effects and papers. I think their attempt to resurrect Usama Bin Laden is out of the National Security Agency internal playbook, which specifically instructs spokesmen to play up the terrorist threat when explaining why they need to know who all 310 million Americans are calling on our phones every day. ...
Rogers makes a big deal out of the fighting in northern Syria as a threat to the United States and says “thousands” of “Westerners” have gone to fight there. But Rogers is just obfuscating by mentioning vastly exaggerated statistics.
The number of Americans estimated by the FBI to be fighting in Syria? 24. Two dozen. That’s it.
The Syrian civil war has nothing to do with the US, and is a local struggle rather unlikely to involve hitting America (more especially since, as Rogers carefully avoids mentioning, the US is committed to arming these rebels to fight against al-Assad.)
That’s right. Mike Rogers voted to give arms to the Syrian rebels. ...
Let us say that again. Feinstein and Rogers just came on television to scaremonger the American people with the Syrian jihadis, and both of them voted to give the Syrian rebels millions of dollars in arms.
That’s a pretty good racket.
Have a cellphone? Incidentally, the NSA knows where you are now and where you've been all day, every day.
NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show
The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.
The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result. ...
In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them. ...
The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect. ...
The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile.
Senators Call on Obama Administration to Provide the Public More Information on Drone Strikes
In their Nov. 26 letter, [Senators Wyden, Udall and Heinrich] thanked the attorney general for providing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with access to the Justice Department’s opinions setting out the U.S. rationale for killing Americans via drone strikes. (The United States has acknowledged killing four U.S. citizens using drones so far. Only one of those killings, it says, was intentional.) Although the letter doesn’t reveal the legal framework or specific facts the U.S. relied upon, the Senators say they believe “the decision to use lethal force against Anwar al-Aulaqui was a legitimate use of the authority granted to the President.” ...
The three senators go on to note that the U.S. government has failed to provide the same sort of information on any of the hundreds of other lethal drone strikes it has conducted outside of Afghanistan since 2009. In fact, we still have no official explanation of whom the U.S. has secretly targeted, whom it has killed, and pursuant to which legal authorities. ...
The senators ask in particular for an explanation of “how much evidence [the Executive Branch] thinks the President needs to determine that a particular American is a legitimate target for military action”; how the Obama administration defines an “imminent threat,” and how exactly the administration concludes that a particular target’s capture is “infeasible” and that he therefore must be executed. They also ask the attorney general to clarify whether the lethal strikes so far have been carried out pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or “based solely on the President’s own authorities.” ...
Indeed, international law sets out strict limits on when the government of one nation can kill citizens of another one. Those rules are different, depending on whether the state wielding the weapon is killing in the context of an actual armed conflict, or outside of one. Whether regarding the killing of the four American citizens or the hundreds or thousands of others, the U.S. has never made clear which rules it is following, and how it is applying them.
Guardian will not be intimidated over NSA leaks, Alan Rusbridger tells MPs
The Guardian has come under concerted pressure and intimidation designed to stop it from publishing stories of huge public interest that have revealed the "staggering" scale of Britain's and America's secret surveillance programmes, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper has said.
Giving evidence to a parliamentary committee about stories based on the National Security Agency leaks from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, Alan Rusbridger said the Guardian "would not be put off by intimidation, but nor are we going to behave recklessly".
During an hour-long session in front of the home affairs select committee, Rusbridger also:
• Said the Guardian had consulted government officials and intelligence agencies – including the FBI, GCHQ, the White House and the Cabinet Office – on more than 100 occasions before the publication of stories.
• Said the D-Notice committee, which flags the potential damage a story might cause to national security, had said that nothing published by the Guardian had put British lives at risk.
• Argued that news organisations that had published stories from the Snowden files had performed a public service and highlighted the weakness of the scrutiny of agencies such as GCHQ and the NSA. "It's self-evident," he said. "If the president of the US calls a review of everything to do with this and that information only came to light via newspapers, then newspapers have done something oversight failed to do."
• Asked why parliament had not demanded to know how 850,000 people had been given access to the GCHQ top-secret files taken by Snowden, who was a private security contractor.
Red-herring 'Inquisition': Guardian editor defends Snowden leaks to MPs
It's outrageous to accuse the Guardian of aiding terrorism by publishing Snowden's revelations
There are at least five legal and political issues arising out of Snowden's revelations on which reasonable opinion is divided. These include whether Snowden should enjoy the legal protection accorded a whistleblower who reveals wrongdoing; whether his revelations have weakened the counter-terrorism apparatus of the US or the UK; whether, conversely, they show the need for an overhaul of surveillance powers on both sides of the Atlantic (and even an international agreement to protect partners like Germany); whether parliament has been misled by the services about the extent of intrusive surveillance; and whether the current system for parliamentary oversight of the intelligence and security services is sufficiently robust to meet the international standards laid down by my predecessor at the UN, Martin Scheinin.
These questions are too important for the UN to ignore, and so on Tuesday I am launching an investigation that will culminate in a series of recommendations to the UN general assembly next autumn. As in the case of Chelsea Manning, there are also serious questions about sensitive information being freely available to so many people. The information Snowden had access to, which included top-secret UK intelligence documents, was available to more than 850,000 people, including Snowden – a contractor not even employed by the US government.
There is, however, one issue on which I do not think reasonable people can differ, and that is the importance of the role of responsible media in exposing questions of public interest. I have studied all the published stories that explain how new technology is leading to the mass collection and analysis of phone, email, social media and text message data; how the relationship between intelligence services and technology and telecoms companies is open to abuse; and how technological capabilities have moved ahead of the law. These issues are at the apex of public interest concerns. They are even more important – dare I say it – than whether Hugh Grant's mobile was hacked by a tabloid.
Syria's chemical weapons to be shipped in delicate US-Danish operation
A Danish cargo vessel is due to load Syria's chemical arms stockpile and transfer it to a specially adapted US ship in a delicate and unprecedented operation early in the new year, according to the world's chemical weapons watchdog's current plans.
The plans being drawn up by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have not been finalised. It is not yet clear, for example, whether the transfer between the two ships of about 500 tonnes of lethal chemicals, including nerve agents, will be done on sea or when both vessels are docked.
Both options have serious challenges. A sea transfer from one ship to another with such a hazardous cargo would be fraught with danger. But so far, no Mediterranean port has agreed to host the transfer on land, say weapons experts briefed on the plan by the OPCW yesterday in The Hague.
Welcome to the Memory Hole: Disappearing Edward Snowden
Hiding something from users by reprogramming search engines is one dark step to come. Another is actually deleting content, a process as simple as transforming the computer coding behind the search process into something predatory. And if Google refuses to implement the change-over to “negative searches,” the NSA, which already appears to be able to reach inside Google, can implant its own version of malicious code as it has already done in at least 50,000 instances.
But never mind the future: here's how a negative search strategy is already working, even if today its focus -- largely on pedophiles -- is easy enough to accept. Google recently introduced software that makes it harder for users to locate child abuse material. As company head Eric Schmidt put it, Google Search has been “fine-tuned” to clean up results for more than 100,000 terms used by pedophiles to look for child pornography. Now, for instance, when users type in queries that may be related to child sexual abuse, they will find no results that link to illegal content. Instead, Google will redirect them to help and counseling sites. “We will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global,” Schmidt wrote.
While Google is redirecting searches for kiddie porn to counseling sites, the NSA has developed a similar ability. The agency already controls a set of servers codenamed Quantum that sit on the Internet’s backbone. Their job is to redirect “targets” away from their intended destinations to websites of the NSA's choice. The idea is: you type in the website you want and end up somewhere less disturbing to the agency. While at present this technology may be aimed at sending would-be online jihadis to more moderate Islamic material, in the future it could, for instance, be repurposed to redirect people seeking news to an Al-Jazeera lookalike site with altered content that fits the government's version of events. ...
Leaked revelations will be as pointless as dusty old books in some attic if no one knows about them. Go ahead and publish whatever you want. The First Amendment allows you to do that. But what's the point if no one will be able to read it? You might more profitably stand on a street corner and shout at passers by. In at least one easy-enough-to-imagine future, a set of Snowden-like revelations will be blocked or deleted as fast as anyone can (re)post them.
Another use of the Memory Hole Utility:
Guantánamo ends daily hunger-strike reports
The Guantánamo prison, whose motto is "safe, humane, legal, transparent detention," announced Tuesday that it will no longer disclose daily hunger-strike figures — abandoning a practice that allowed the public to see the rise and fall of the captives’ nearly year-long protest.
Under the new policy, the U.S. military will "no longer publicly issue the number of detainees who choose not to eat as a matter of protest," said Navy Cmdr. John Filostrat, the chief of the prison camps’ 20-member public-relations team.
At the height of the hunger strike this summer, a special Navy medical unit at the prison counted 106 of the then-166 captives as hunger-strikers, using a calculus of meals missed, weight lost, and detainee claims that they were fasting.
It bottomed out at 11 prisoners counted as hunger-strikers on Nov. 15 but had risen as of Monday — the last day the prison disclosed the hunger-strike figure — to 15 captives so thin they were eligible for forced-feeding through nasogastric tubes if they didn’t voluntarily chug a dose of Ensure.
How the Defeat of Trade Unionism Gave Rise to Low-Wage Jobs
New Study Confirms that Lower Corporate Tax Rates Don’t Create Jobs
Corporate executives love to peddle the notion that they need to have their low tax payments reduced even further, even as the share of GDP represented by company profits is at unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, corporations paid between 5% and 6% of GDP in taxes in the early 1950 versus a trivial 1.3% in 2010. The GAO reported earlier this year that the effective Federal tax rate paid by large corporations in 2010 was 12.6%, versus a nominal rate of 35%. And roughly 10% of large companies pay no Federal tax at all.
One of the arguments made by big companies in favor of making their low payments even low is that they’d go out and create more jobs. This is clearly spurious. Large companies are already awash with cash, thanks in no small measure to taking advantage of the Fed’s largesse and issuing bonds. They could invest and create jobs with the dough they already have if they were so inclined. But in fact, large corporations have been shedding jobs for some time, since Wall Street reacts positively to downsizing and higher stock prices lead to bigger executive pay packages. And don’t blame the crappy economy. Big companies weren’t investing even in the last expansion; they had abandoned the role of capitalists and were net saving. Large companies have been more keen to buy back stock than invest in the business of their business. ...
The Center for Effective Government study, The Corporate Tax Rate Debate: Lower Taxes on Corporate Profits Not Linked to Job Creation, is particularly damning. It shows that small businesses, who have long been the engine for job growth, pay more in taxes than their grousing big company brethren, an average rate of 19% when you include Federal, state, and local versus 16.9% for the big boys.
But even more telling is that among the 60 large companies it examined in depth, tax payments are if anything negatively correlated with job growth.
Does Lowering Corporate Tax Rates Create Jobs? Answer is a resounding "no"
For years (decades, actually), the American pro-wealthy right has argued that lowering corporate tax rates will create jobs. That is the presumed purpose behind the push by Dave Camp to enact a tax reform package with lower corporate rates, and the reason that even President Obama has voiced (tepid) support for lower corporate rates. ...
The Center for Effective Government (formerly OMBWatch) has now done a study looking at the "job creation track records of 60 large, profitable U.S., corporations (from a list of 280 Fortune 500 companies) with the highest and lowest effective tax rates between 2008 and 2010." See Scott Klinger & Katherine McFate, The Corporate Tax Rate Debate: Lower Taxes on Corporate Profits Not Linked to Job Creation, Center for Effective Government, Dec. 2013. It confirms that corporate tax cuts don't create jobs.
The study, for example, found that a supermajority (22) of the 30 corporations paying the HIGHEST tax rates created 200,000 jobs between 2008 and 2012, while only 8 of those 30 had any reductions in the number of employees. IN contrast, the 30 profitable corporations paying no or very little taxes in that period had an aggregate loss of more than 51,000 jobs--half created a few jobs and half reduced jobs between 2008 and 2012.
Detroit Bankruptcy: Wall Street, Lost Revenues Forced Decline, But City Pensioners to Pay the Costs
A federal judge has approved Detroit’s bid to qualify for bankruptcy, putting the city on a path to financial recovery — but threatening the livelihoods of thousands of city workers. In a landmark decision that could harm retiree benefits nationwide, Federal Judge Steven Rhodes ruled that federal bankruptcy law can override state laws that protect public pensions. That clears the way for Detroit to make major cuts to the health and retirement benefits of city employees. The city faces about $18 billion in debt, of which $3.5 billion is pension obligations. Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has told public unions to brace for "significant cuts," but has not laid out details. Workers’ pensions in Detroit average around $19,000 per year. By the new year, Orr will present a "plan of adjustment" in bankruptcy court that will clarify how much pensions will be cut.
Blaming Black People in Detroit
Detroit has been delivered to the bankruptcy vultures, with a foreign bank first in line to scavenge the carcass.
According to news reports the damage done by moving money and other resources to the mostly white suburbs was not a problem. Neither were the disastrous Wall Street derivatives deals which robbed the city. The Republican takeover of the state legislature wasn’t an issue either, despite the fact that the emergency management plan was instituted against the wishes of Michigan voters who rejected it in a referendum. According to conventional wisdom none of these factors and none of the bad actors are responsible for the decision to make the people of Detroit liable for the connivance of the 1%.
The corporate media say nothing about the fact that Barclays bank gets paid first, so that it can then pay Bank of America and others. They say nothing about how creditors from civil litigants to vendors will have to settle for pennies on the dollar. They don’t mention that city of Detroit retirees couldn’t pay into Social Security and have nothing to live on except their soon to be decimated pensions. Of course they also fail to say that the state’s constitution specifically protects pensions from cuts announced by the emergency manager. That law is no longer worth the paper it is written on. ...
In 2008 the mortgage-backed securities house of cards fell apart but the international banksters weren’t prosecuted or even really blamed by the masses of people. In the minds of too many white Americans, the housing bubble was caused by black people buying homes they couldn’t afford. That same line of reasoning says that Detroit is bankrupt because of overpaid city workers and greedy retirees. Some of those black people who worked on automobile assembly lines were also blamed for the struggles of the big three car makers. Even black people who have jobs are considered shiftless bums who must pay a price for just about anything that the reptile racist brain can imagine. ...
But racism is a two edged sword, capable of hurting white people, too. Black people may be punished first but the swath of destruction won’t leave white people untouched for long. Black people are the most vulnerable and the easiest to victimize but are not the only Americans depending on pensions to survive. Judge Rhodes made history and in a terrible way. There will be nothing to protect the few Americans who still have defined retirement benefit plans. They can now begin kissing those plans good-bye.
'Americanization' Leading the Way... in Attack on Workers
The 'race to the bottom' for labor, perfected by the US, is spreading to Europe
The day after two major developments in the U.S. saw worker pensions put on the chopping block in order to bail out state and local governments, an analysis in the New York Times shows that across the Atlantic, European nations are now stripping their worker protections and dismantling pensions as they follow the established American model of putting corporate elites first in a race to the bottom for cheap labor and deregulated capitalism.
On Tuesday in Detroit, a bankruptcy judge ruled that city pensioners can have their earned benefits cut as he approved the largest municipal bankruptcy in the state's history.
Also on Tuesday, the state of Illinois passed a measure that dramatically alters the pension formula for retired workers and diminishes those benefit programs for current and future public employees. ...
Meanwhile, in an expansive piece in the New York Times on Wednesday, titled "Americanized Labor Policy Is Spreading in Europe," Eduardo Porter explains how European governments and policy makers—by following the U.S. example of cancelling collective bargaining protections, attacking pensions, and slashing wages—are not only expanding income and wealth inequality but are "radically changing the nature of Europe’s society."
According to Porter:
In 2008, 1.9 million Portuguese workers in the private sector were covered by collective bargaining agreements. Last year, the number was down to 300,000.
Spain has eased restrictions on collective layoffs and unfair dismissal, and softened limits on extending temporary work, allowing workers to be kept on fixed-term contracts for up to four years. Ireland and Portugal have frozen the minimum wage, while Greece has cut it by nearly a fourth. This is what is known in Europe as “internal devaluation.”
Tethered to the euro and thus unable to devalue their currency to help make their goods less expensive in export markets, many European countries — especially those along the Continent’s southern rim that have been hammered by the financial crisis — have been furiously dismantling workplace protections in a bid to reduce the cost of labor.
Economic Pain Inflicted, Austerity-Pushers Now Targeting Human Rights
European watchdog shows that attack on social protections has followed top-down drive to impose economic cuts
The political drive to enact economic austerity across Europe is not only harming the financial position of millions upon millions of people, it is also undermining human rights protections across the continent and beyond.
That is the message from the Council of Europeans on Wednesday, backed up by a new report (pdf) highlighting how the misguided policies implemented by governments in the name of fighting back against the financial crisis that began in 2008 have had the unintended (though predictable) consequences of harming fundamental social protections, especially for those most needy in society. ...
And highlighting recent developments in Spain, the EU Observer explores the report's argument that assaults on public dissent and democratic freedoms, such as the right to assemble and free speech, have been most severely squelched by the same governments who have most aggressively pushed austerity on their citizens:
The report notes civil and political rights have also eroded as some governments exclude people on having any say in austerity proposals, provoking large-scale demonstrations.
The latest twist came over the weekend when Spain backed a draft law on public order that cracks down on civil disobedience.
The revised draft, if ratified, means Spaniards can be fined up to €30,000 for insulting a government official, burning a flag, or protesting outside the parliament without a permit.
Covering faces or wearing hoods at demonstrations is also an offence.
Judges would also be able to impose fines of up to €600,000 for picketing at nuclear plants, airports, or if demonstrators interfere with elections.
What Americans have to look forward to:
Yanis Varoufakis: What Europeans Should Know About the Current Situation in Greece
It takes a passionate disregard for the truth to suggest that Greece is recovering. Investment has fallen by 18% since the dismal levels of 2011/12, credit to non-financial institutions is 20% down from the asphyxiating depths of 2012, poverty has reached record heights, and is still growing, employment is at levels that are best narrated in the style of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, public debt is exceeding the worst expectations of the greatest pessimists, private debt is reaching for the sky at a time when the collateral posted (e.g. house prices) are sinking fast, the government’s tax take is trailing the worst forecasts. The list of woes is endless and the so-called ‘Greek Success Story’, or ‘Greek-covery’, reflects nothing except the determination to reverse the truth, Goebbels-like, by those who insisted on the policies which resulted in this debacle. ...
Europeans have a duty to themselves to see through this toxic propaganda. There is no such thing as a Greek budget surplus – not even a primary surplus (i.e. a surplus if we not count loan and interest repayments). If you look at the government’s own accounts, the January to October 2013 balance reveals a primary budget deficit of nearly €6 billion. As for the rumoured primary ‘surplus’ that is ‘around the corner’ this is a projection, a piece of wishful thinking that may, or may not eventuate, next year. As for growth, the Greek economy is still, by the government’s own accounts, shrinking at -4%. The projection of growth of… 0.4% is for 2014. Europeans need to look at this projection in the context of similar projections which, for example, had (at the time of ‘bailout Mk1’) Greece growing by 2012 at a dizzying rate of 2.3%! In truth, 2014 and 2015 will again see the Greek social economy shrink further. ...
What your readers must come to understand is that, the moment the ‘bailouts’ were forced upon Greece in 2010 and then again in 2012, all chance of meaningful, effective reform disappeared. Think about it for a moment: In 2010 the Greek private and public sectors became insolvent. So, what did Europe and the Greek government do? They piled on the weak shoulders of the bankrupt Greek social economy the largest loan in human history on condition that Greece’s GDP (from which old and new loans would have to be repaid) shrinks substantially (for this is what the stringent austerity meant)! Naturally, no one with any sense invested in this country and the insolvency both of the state and of the private sector deepened. Now, turning to reforms, ask any CEO of any decent company: “If you want to reform, to modernise, to re-structure your company, can you do it on the cheap? Without any investment?” The answer is negative. Similarly with Greece. The country was pushed into a never-ending negative spiral that rendered it un-reformable and un-governable all at once. For it is not ‘reform’ to cut wages, pensions and to push taxes through the roof at a time when GDP is collapsing and the banks have no capacity whatsoever to lend even to potentially successful enterprises. These so-called ‘reforms’ are nothing but acts of brutality. The homage propaganda pays to irrationality. ...
Greece is being used as if it were an experimental laboratory in which the welfare state is dismantled and the experimenters keenly observe the effects of its dismantling. If so, it is time to end this misanthropic experiment. For we can now see that the result is untold pain, economic collapse (even of potentially profitable enterprises), and the rise and rise of a Nazi party in the one country of the European Union that fought most heroically against the original Nazis.
The Evening Greens
Bloomberg LP Launches First Tool That Measures Risk of 'Unburnable Carbon' Assets
In a move that underscores Wall Street's growing unease over the business-as-usual strategy of the world's fossil fuel companies, Bloomberg L.P. unveiled a tool last week that helps investors quantify for the first time how climate policies and related risks might batter the earnings and stock prices of individual oil, coal and natural gas companies.
The company's new Carbon Risk Valuation Tool is available to more than 300,000 high-end traders, analysts and others who regularly pore over the stream of information that's available through Bloomberg's financial data and analysis service. The move significantly broadens and elevates the discussion of "stranded" or "unburnable" carbon reserves—expanding it beyond climate groups and sustainability investors to the desks of the world's most active and influential investors and traders.
Investors and Bloomberg are responding to a growing body of work suggesting that a variety of factors—including carbon emission limits, falling demand and the spiraling costs of new oil production—could force fossil fuel companies to abandon reserves that underpin share prices and future earnings.
While energy companies and most financial analysts see those issues as merely new risks for an industry that has thrived despite periodic financial, technological and political setbacks, others see long-term peril—especially when it comes to threats related to climate change.
Abrupt Climate Disaster Threat Raises Call for Early Warning System
Climate change "tipping points" could be sudden and surprising, experts say.
The threat of sudden climate change disaster—from the poles melting to farmlands failing—is real and requires an early warning system, an expert panel suggested on Tuesday.
Looking at "tipping points" for global warming disasters, the National Research Council panel report on "abrupt" climate impacts finds noteworthy risks of sharp, sudden sea-level rise, water shortages, and extinctions worldwide in coming years and decades.
"Climate change is real, it is happening now, and we need to deal with it," says James White of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who headed the panel. "Step number one is to recognize the points where we stand on the threshold of abrupt impacts." ...
The new report differs from past ones in taking continued global warming as inevitable and looking for impacts on humanity and animals, not just geophysical and weather effects like melting glaciers or drought.
“End corporate sponsorship of our arts institutions by genocidal corporations”
If there is one organisation that has done more than most to spin the dirty tar sands as responsible, dependable oil, it is probably the largest lobby group in Canada for the oil and gas industry, called the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, or CAPP. ...
In Canada, there has been growing evidence for years that local Indigenous communities close to the tar sands have unusually high rate of cancer and immune diseases. It is now accepted that the tar sands threatens the very way of life of the local indigenous communities. ...
So it beyond irony that last week the Canadian Museum of Civilisation announced it was “proud” to have struck a sponsorship deal with none other than CAPP. Mark O’Neill, CEO of the Museum called CAPP’s sponsorship “a shining example of a private and public partnership”. ...
For years, the wonderful artists and activists from the London-based organisation Platform have campaigned against how oil money influences the arts.
As Platform pointed out yesterday: “It’s easy to see why this will be a PR coup for CAPP … The companies desperately need the social licence to operate that association with prestigious arts institutions can bring, especially at a time when Canadian public opinion and international attention is being drawn to the Indigenous Rights violations and ecological devastation of Canada’s tar sands.”
Even more compromising for the Canadian Museum is that, in previous exhibitions, CAPP “had exerted pressure to alter exhibit content they felt treated the industry too harshly”, note Platform.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
The journalist who hacked the old system
A Little Night Music
Texas Alexander - The House Of The Rising Sun
Texas Alexander - Levee Camps Moan Blues
Texas Alexander - Peaceful Blues
Texas Alexander - Frost Texas Tornado Blues
Texas Alexander - Crossroads
Texas Alexander - Penitentiary Moan Blues
Texas Alexander w/Joe King Oliver + Eddie Lang - Frisco Train Blues
Texas Alexander w/Lonnie Johnson + Eddie Lang - Work Ox Blues
Texas Alexander - No More Woman Blues
Texas Alexander - Normangee Blues
Texas Alexander - Blue Devil Blues
Texas Alexander - Broken Yo Yo
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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