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 guitarist Lonnie Mack. Enjoy!
Lonnie Mack, Albert Collins & Roy Buchanan - Further On Down the Road
“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
-- Noam Chomsky
News and Opinion
Bombed in Their Homes and in the Streets, Where Can Gazans Flee?
Palestinian death toll in Gaza reaches 736, more than half killed since Israel began ground op
Israel entered the 17th day of its operation in the Gaza Strip on Thursday after a night of calm on the Israeli side, with only one rocket fired overnight at border towns. The rocket fire resumed over the course of the morning, with mass barrages fired at the south and at Tel Aviv and its northern environs.
The Israel Defense Forces struck 35 targets in the Gaza Strip overnight, killing 51 people over the course of the day, bringing the Palestinian death toll to 736, more than half of them killed since Israel began its ground operation. The Israeli death toll stands at 32 soldiers and three civilians. ...
The UN human rights council in Geneva decided Wednesday to form an international commission of inquiry for alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration early Thursday lifted the ban it placed on all U.S. flights to and from Israel.
At least 15 dead in Israeli shelling of Gaza school
Israeli forces shelled a U.N.-run school sheltering Palestinians in the northern Gaza strip, the Gaza health ministry said on Thursday, killing at least 15 people and raising the conflict's death toll to nearly 750.
Israel Radio said, without citing a source, that most of those killed at the United Nations school were children. ...
Ashraf al-Qidra, spokesman for the Gaza Health Ministry, said that as well as the 15 dead, another 200 people were wounded in the attack. The director of a local hospital said various medical centers around Beit Hanoun in the coastal enclave were receiving the wounded.
Pools of blood lay on the ground and on students' desks in the courtyard of the school near the apparent impact mark of the shell, according to a Reuters photographer at the scene.
"Such a massacre requires more than one hospital to deal with it," said Ayman Hamdan, director of the Beit Hanoun hospital.
More than 140,000 Palestinians have fled 17 days of fighting between Israel and Gaza militants, many of them seeking shelter in buildings run by the U.N. Refugee Works Agency (UNWRA).
Israeli Security cabinet discusses both expanding Gaza operation, cease-fire efforts
The security cabinet meeting came at the end of another intensive day of diplomatic efforts to forge a cease-fire, and after a meeting in Tel Aviv between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Even as the two were meeting, one government official said a cease-fire “is not in the cards yet.” The diplomatic efforts, the official said, were “still in flux” and a “work in progress.” ...
Before the security cabinet meeting, one of its members – Finance Minister Yair Lapid – said in a Channel 2 interview that the objectives of the operation needed to be met “before they talk to us about a ceasefire.”
Lapid defined the objectives as cleansing “Gaza of its terrorist tunnels and delivering a significant blow to Hamas’s rocket infrastructure.”
Even amid all the talk of a ceasefire, Lapid said the government was telling IDF to “go, achieve your objectives.”
The finance minister said in addition to the tunnels and rocket infrastructure, Israel will also go after the heads of Hamas.
“We see them as legitimate targets,” he said, making no distinction between the organization’s political and military leadership.
This is an excellent article, well worth reading in full:
Why do Palestinians continue to support Hamas despite such devastating losses?
In the film [The Fog of War], Robert McNamara, a brilliant systems analyst, who is today associated more than anything with the Vietnam War, says that part of President Kennedy’s successful management of the Cuban Missile Crisis was his administration’s ability to put itself in the shoes of the Soviets and understand their point of view. “In the case of Vietnam,” he says, “we didn’t know them well enough to empathize.” As a result, each side had a completely different understanding of what the war was about.
This understanding came to McNamara only in 1991, when he visited Vietnam and met with the country’s foreign minister. ... “You were fighting to enslave us,” yelled the foreign minister at McNamara, who in turn replied that that is an absurd notion. The two nearly came to blows. But as time passed McNamara understood. “We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War,” he says, whereas what the foreign minister was trying to tell him was that for the Vietnamese it was a war of independence. Communism was not the heart of the matter for the Vietnamese. They were willing to make the worst sacrifices because they were fighting for their freedom – not for Marx or Brezhnev.
Nations will make inconceivable sacrifices in these kinds of struggles. An entire one percent of the Jewish population was killed in the 1948 war. The public accepted it painfully and with a stiff upper lip because they felt, just like the Vietnamese, that they were fighting for their lives and for their freedom. We have become so much more susceptible to loss, not because we went soft, but because we have a deeper understanding that despite all the “we’re fighting for our future” slogans, 2014 is not 1948.
Over 2,000 Palestinians were killed in all three military operations in Gaza, not including the Second Intifada. Most of them were civilians. I’ve exchanged emails with people in Gaza in the past few days. These are people who don’t care much for Hamas in their everyday lives, whether due to its fundamentalist ideology, political oppression or other aspects of its rule. But they do support Hamas in its war against Israel; for them, fighting the siege is their war of independence.
UN Rights Council Votes to Investigate Israeli War Crimes in Gaza
US Lone 'No' Vote Amid Soaring Civilian Death Toll
The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) today agreed to open an investigation into Israeli war crimes during their ongoing invasion of the Gaza Strip. The vote was pressed by the Palestinian observer to the council.
The vote was not close, with 29 votes in favor and only the US voting against the probe. Several US allies also abstained, but none of them voted against the resolution. ...
Israeli officials railed against the vote, saying Hamas was the only one committing war crimes in the war, and that they were merely “a democracy defending itself” from a “terrorist aggressor.”
Decrying "Brutal Operation Taking Place in Our Name," Israeli Military Reservists Refuse to Serve
The Dangerous Logic Used to Justify Killing Civilians
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden argued that Al Qaeda was perfectly justified in killing all those people inside the World Trade Center because they weren't really civilians–they were complicit in U.S. might and misdeeds. Didn't their taxes fund America's CIA assassinations and war planes? ...
The latest to succumb to this seductive illogic, to insist that slain civilians weren't really civilians, is New York University's Thane Rosenbaum, who writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Gazans sheltered terrorists and their weapons in their homes, right beside ottoman sofas and dirty diapers. When Israel warned them of impending attacks, the inhabitants defiantly refused to leave. On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.
For purposes of this article, let's set aside all the adults killed in Gaza, just for the sake of argument. The dead Palestinian children are evidence enough that "real civilians" are being slaughtered. In the above passage, the author focuses on the dirty diapers rather than the baby that produced them. Elsewhere, he acknowledges the revolting number of kids killed in this conflict, and then adds, as if it's concession enough, "Surely there are civilians who have been killed in this conflict who have taken every step to distance themselves from this fast-moving war zone, and children whose parents are not card-carrying Hamas loyalists. These are the true innocents of Gaza." In fact, even a toddler whose father is a card-carrying Hamas loyalist is an innocent, by virtue of being a young child!
It is a moral failure not to acknowledge at least that. And the failure is worth dwelling on because wide embrace of Rosenbaum's logic would be a setback for a world where civilians have legal protection in war, however often it is violated. As Daniel Larison explains:
Rosenbaum’s argument is extremely similar to the justifications that terrorist groups use when they target civilians in their own attacks. It is based on the false assumption that there are no real innocents or bystanders in a given country because of their previous political support for a government and its policies, which supposedly makes it permissible to strike non-military targets. It is very important to reject this logic no matter where it comes from or whose cause in a conflict it is being used to advance, because this is the logic that has been used to justify countless atrocities down through the years.
Just so.
“The more the dead, the better”: Israel’s crumbling media war
Israeli propaganda has hit a new low. While the world was still trying to come to terms with the mass deaths in Shejaiya, Benjamin Netanyahu went on CNN to state that Hamas uses the “telegenically dead” to further “their cause.” He added that for Hamas: “The more the dead, the better.” Even while Netanyahu followed the propaganda script, which is to first show sympathy and express remorse, by reducing dead Palestinians to a photo-op he showed how his own mind works.
There is a standard script for how to deal with Palestinian casualties. After Israel killed four boys on the Gaza beach on July 16, the U.S. establishment media fell in line behind Israel’s PR framework: acknowledge the tragedy but blame Hamas. This is exactly what Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev said on Channel 4 News when grilled by the anchor Jon Snow. It is also how the U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki responded, using the same word-for-word talking points.
This framework, developed in 2009, can be found in The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary. The Orwellian manual [created by rethug Frank Luntz - js] provides a detailed outline on how to “communicate effectively in support of Israel.”
One of its first instructions is that pro-Israeli propagandists need to show empathy. The manual insists that they should “show empathy for BOTH sides” (caps in original) as a way of gaining credibility and trust. To make sure that the point is understood, the manual repeats again (in bold, and underlined this time) the instruction “use Empathy”—the suggestion being that empathy is an important tool to be used in the propaganda war.
When innocent Palestinian children and women are killed, the first response should be to show empathy; the next is to reframe the issue stating that Israel is not to blame and that it is only defending itself and further that it only wants peace. Even when it is raining death and destruction on Palestinians, the manual is clear: “Remind people—again and again—that Israel wants peace.”
US media blame game VS Russia’s counter-evidence
State Dept Contradicts Intel Community, Says Putin Directly to Blame for MH17
Determined not to let the US intelligence community’s open admission that they have “no evidence of direct Russian involvement” in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines MH17, the State Department has once again insisted Russian President Vladimir Putin is “directly” to blame for it.
Puzzlingly, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf cited the exact same intelligence community briefing as proving Putin’s guilt, even though the officials delivering that briefing said the exact opposite of it. Harf also claimed to be privy to even more secret evidence that had not gone public yet, which also pinned the whole thing on Putin.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: With 100,000+ Displaced, Why is U.S. Ignoring Ukraine’s Civil War?
Russia says will cooperate with MH17 probe led by Netherlands
Russia will cooperate with the investigation into the downing of a Malaysian airliner a week ago and is satisfied that the Netherlands, rather than Ukraine, is leading the effort, the country's ambassador to Malaysia said on Thursday.
Liudmila Vorobyeva also rejected suggestions that the pro-Russian separatists blamed by Western governments for shooting down Flight MH17 possessed a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile, and said the rebels lacked the training to use such a system. ...
The norm under rules set down by the United Nation's civil aviation body (ICAO) is that an air investigation is led by the state in whose territory the plane crash, but Russia had said that Ukraine should not take charge because the rebels who control the crash site did not trust the authorities in Kiev.
"We want an international investigation led by ICAO. Any country part of ICAO may take part. Netherlands has the right to lead this," the ambassador told Reuters in an interview in Kuala Lumpur. "We are members of ICAO, we will cooperate with the investigation."
Vorobyeva said Russian experts were already participating in the investigation, although she did not say what role they were playing.
"As soon as experts from ICAO and international experts have a part, we think it could lead to authentic results and the truth will come out," she said.
Ukraine rebel quoted by media telling conflicting stories about Buk missile system
A top rebel commander in eastern Ukraine has reportedly said that the armed separatist movement had control of a Buk missile system, which Kiev and western countries say was used to shoot down a Malaysia Airlines plane last week.
Alexander Khodakovsky, who leads the Vostok battalion – one of the main rebel formations – said the rebels may have received the Buk from Russia, in the first such admission by a senior separatist. ...
Russian news agencies later said people close to Khodakovsky denied he made the admissions. Khodakovsky himself told Life News, a Russian news agency with links to Moscow's security services, that he was misquoted and had merely discussed "possible versions" with Reuters. Khodakovsky said the rebels "do not have and have never had" a Buk. ...
Other leaders have repeatedly denied the rebels had a Buk, despite photographic and video evidence of one in the area of the crash last Thursday. There are rivalries and hatred between many of the rebel formations and Khodakovsky is believed to be out of favour with Igor Strelkov, the main commander of the Donetsk rebels.
Secret Documents Show How Britain Helped the US Cover Up Its Own Plane Shooting Disaster
The US and UK governments are among those pressing Putin hardest. David Cameron is trying to convince other EU leaders to impose sanctions. Russia's complicity in the disaster – not to mention its possible cover up by trying to steal the aircraft's black boxes – is beyond the pale. Decent countries just don't do this, the logic goes. It's something that puts the country on the level of a rogue state and makes its President some kind of Gadaffi figure.
But how did the UK and US react when the American’s shot down an Iranian airliner, in a remarkably similar incident in 1988? According to some secret documents that I obtained by Freedom of Information request, they tried to cover it up.
... [O]n the 3rd of July 1988, in an incident which echoed horribly in the MH17 disaster, the captain of American warship the USS Vincennes launched two guided missiles to destroy Iran Air Flight 655, an Iranian civilian Airbus carrying 290 passengers and crew to Dubai. ...
The US claimed that the Americans had been under unprovoked attack by Iranian patrol boats and mistook the airliner for an Iranian warplane. Many aspects of the US story were eventually shown to be false, key being that the Airbus was on a scheduled flight and had not, as the American’s claimed, changed course towards their ship.
According to secret documents that I got my hands on, American President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote to each other saying Iran itself was to blame for the US shooting down an Iranian civilian airliner. Ron and Maggie said the US were acting “in self defence” when they killed the 290 passengers and crew. The papers show that the British publicly backed American claims that the Iranians were to blame. But in private both British and American officials knew the official US story was bullshit, and the papers show the British helped the Americans cover their arses. ...
America never made a formal apology to Iran, though it did compensate the families of the victims to the tune of $131.8 million (£77.23 million) in 1996, to settle a court case brought by the Iranian Government. The captain of the USS Vincennes later gained a Legion of Merit medal.
Heh, somebody in Egypt has the right instinct and they subjected international-threat-to-peace, John Kerry to a security screening:
John Kerry 'wanded' by security guards at Egypt's presidential palace
John Kerry has spent much of this week shuttling between Middle Eastern capitals, trying to get Hamas and Israel to put down their guns. For his efforts, Kerry probably did not expect to be suspected of being an armed threat himself.
Yet that was what briefly happened on Tuesday, when Kerry was stopped by security guards as he entered Cairo's presidential palace to meet Egypt's president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Footage shows America's top diplomat being "wanded" with a hand-held electronic scanner. It was a move that raised eyebrows among members of Kerry's travelling press corps, who said the US secretary of state was usually afforded every courtesy when on official business abroad. ...
Still, Kerry's stubborn support for Egypt's regime appears undiminished. Following his "wanding" experience, Kerry continued to praise the new Egyptian government, despite widespread criticism of its year-long crackdown on dissent. "I want to thank the people of Egypt for transitioning to democracy," said Kerry.
Poland broke human rights convention on al-Qaida suspects held by the CIA
ECHR finds for Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who argued they were tortured by US agents in a Polish forest prison
Poland became the first EU country held to account for its involvement in the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme on Thursday when the European court of human rights found it guilty of the unlawful detention and torture of two men at a secret prison in the north of the country after 9/11.
In two damning judgments, the court also ruled that the Polish government had failed to conduct a proper investigation into the episode, and ordered it to pay €100,000 (£79,000) compensation to each of the men, who are currently held at Guantánamo Bay.
The rulings are the first in a series of cases being brought against European states, with Lithuania and Romania also facing accusations that they allowed the CIA to open secret prisons on their territory. ...
The two unanimous rulings found that the rendition programme was completely illegal, as its rationale had been "specifically to remove those persons from any legal protection against torture and enforced disappearance and to strip them of any safeguards afforded by both the US Constitution and international law".
The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist
The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.
The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place “entire categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.
The heart of the document revolves around the rules for placing individuals on a watchlist. “All executive departments and agencies,” the document says, are responsible for collecting and sharing information on terrorist suspects with the National Counterterrorism Center. It sets a low standard—”reasonable suspicion“—for placing names on the watchlists, and offers a multitude of vague, confusing, or contradictory instructions for gauging it. In the chapter on “Minimum Substantive Derogatory Criteria”—even the title is hard to digest—the key sentence on reasonable suspicion offers little clarity:
“To meet the REASONABLE SUSPICION standard, the NOMINATOR, based on the totality of the circumstances, must rely upon articulable intelligence or information which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrants a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been knowingly engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to TERRORISM and/or TERRORIST ACTIVITIES.”
The rulebook makes no effort to define an essential phrase in the passage—”articulable intelligence or information.” After stressing that hunches are not reasonable suspicion and that “there must be an objective factual basis” for labeling someone a terrorist, it goes on to state that no actual facts are required:
“In determining whether a REASONABLE SUSPICION exists, due weight should be given to the specific reasonable inferences that a NOMINATOR is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his/her experience and not on unfounded suspicions or hunches. Although irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are not necessary, to be reasonable, suspicion should be as clear and as fully developed as circumstances permit.”
US warned: surveillance reform hinges on change to Reagan executive order
... 38-year old [John Napier Tye, a] former State Department official has raised a Snowden-like alarm that Americans' communication data remains highly vulnerable to surreptitious collection by the National Security Agency – and will remain vulnerable despite the legislative fixes wending through Congress to redress the bulk domestic phone data collection Snowden revealed.
Like Snowden, Tye means to spark a debate on the proper boundaries of NSA authorities. His focus is on an obscure, Reagan-era executive order that serves as a foundational set of rules for the intelligence apparatus. The order, known as Executive Order 12333, renders the current surveillance debate hollow, he said, even as it shows signs of traction in the Senate.
"Without reform of activities under 12333, changes to the 215 program won't address the major challenges to Americans' privacy from the NSA," Tye, who until April worked on promoting internet freedom issues at Foggy Bottom, told the Guardian, using legal shorthand for the domestic phone data collection.
The only real restrictions, according to Tye and the text of the order, are that the collection must occur outside the borders of the United States; and the data – communications content as well as the records of those communications – must be, as the text reads, "obtained in the course of a lawful foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, international narcotics or international terrorism investigation."
Tye said he would not talk about actual intelligence operations, but said: “To the extent US person information is either stored outside the United States, routed outside the United States, in transit outside the United States, it's possible for it to be incidentally collected under 12333."
Privacy watchdog’s next target: the least-known but biggest aspect of NSA surveillance
An independent privacy watchdog agency announced Wednesday that it will turn its focus to the largest and most complex of U.S. electronic surveillance regimes: signals intelligence collection under Executive Order 12333.
That highly technical name masks a constellation of complex surveillance activities carried out for foreign intelligence purposes by the National Security Agency under executive authority. But unlike two other major NSA collection programs that have been in the news lately, EO 12333 surveillance is conducted without court oversight and with comparatively little Congressional review.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent executive branch agency, over the last year has taken in-depth looks at the other two NSA programs. It concluded the bulk collection of Americans’ phone call metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act was illegal and raised constitutional concerns. By contrast, it found the gathering of call and email content under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to be lawful, though certain elements pushed “close to the line” of being unconstitutional.
Now the board is planning to delve into EO 12333 collection, among other topics. It is not clear, however, how deep or broad its examination will be. ...
Collection outside the United States has attained new relevance given media reports in the last year about broad NSA surveillance based on documents leaked to journalists by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Police Brutality and the Failure of Liberal Democrats
Arizona murderer dies almost two hours after execution begins
The controversy engulfing the death penalty in the United States escalated on Wednesday when the state of Arizona took almost two hours to kill a prisoner using an experimental concoction of drugs whose provenance it had insisted on keeping secret.
Joseph Wood took an hour and 58 minutes to die after he was injected with a relatively untested combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone. The procedure took so long that his lawyers had time to file an emergency court motion in an attempt to have it stopped. For more than an hour, he was seen to be “gasping and snorting”, according to the court filing.
The attempt to execute Wood had begun at 1.52pm, with sedation of the prisoner confirmed five minutes later. The office of the Arizona attorney general, Tom Horne, announced at 3.49pm local time that Wood was dead.
According to the emergency motion, Wood was seen to be still breathing at 2.02pm, and the next minute his mouth moved. “He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour,” his lawyers said. When the officials in charge of the execution checked the prisoner at 3.02pm – an hour and 10 minutes after the procedure began – he was confirmed still to be alive.
One eyewitness, Michael Kiefer of Arizona Republic, counted the prisoner gasping 660 times. Another witness, reporter Troy Hayden, told the same paper that it had been "very disturbing to watch ... like a fish on shore gulping for air."
Obama presses to close corporate tax loophole 'inversions'
U.S. President Barack Obama will call on Thursday for an end to a corporate loophole that allows companies to avoid federal taxes by shifting their tax domiciles overseas in deals known as "inversions," White House officials said. ...
Several Democrats have offered bills to curb inversions, which let companies cut their taxes primarily by putting foreign earnings out of the reach of the Internal Revenue Service.
Obama will throw his weight behind the Democratic bills, calling for a rule change that would deem any company with half of its business in the United States to be U.S.-domiciled.
The proposed changes, already put forward in Obama's annual budget, would be retroactive to May of this year and implemented independently of moves to achieve broader tax reform.
Hightower: Is Citigroup's $7 Billion Fine Bogus?
Media outlets across the country trumpeted the stunning news with headlines like this: "Citigroup Punished." ... While seven billion bucks is more than a slap on the wrist, it pales in contrast to the egregious nature of Citigroup's crime and the extent of the horrendous damage done by the bankers. ... For most of us, paying billions is impossible to imagine, much less do. But this is a Wall Street colossus with $76 billion in revenue last year alone. It rakes in enough profit in six months to more than cover this "punishment."
Also, the bank will get to deduct 40 percent of the penalty from its income tax. Then there's this little number that the prosecutors failed to mention when they announced the settlement: Citigroup's taxpayer bailout in 2008 was $45 billion -- six times more than it is now having to pay back!
Even by Wall Street standards, pulling a 600 percent profit from grand larceny is a pretty sweet deal. ...
Justice Department's prosecutors filed no criminal charges in Citigroup's blatant, gargantuan theft -- not against the bank itself, nor against any of the bankers who plotted, executed and profited from the theft. They certainly had evidence of criminal fraud -- in one internal email, a Citigroup executive essentially admitted that the package of loans sold to investors as solid, were in fact crap: "(I) think we should start praying," he wrote to his higher ups, "I would not be surprised if half of these loans went down." But the bank peddled the packages anyway.
US Courts Defend Rights of Vulture Funds Over Argentina
The Evening Greens
Halliburton Fracking Spill Mystery: What Chemicals Polluted an Ohio Waterway?
On the morning of June 28, a fire broke out at a Halliburton fracking site in Monroe County, Ohio. As flames engulfed the area, trucks began exploding and thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals spilled into a tributary of the Ohio River, which supplies drinking water for millions of residents. More than 70,000 fish died. Nevertheless, it took five days for the Environmental Protection Agency and its Ohio counterpart to get a full list of the chemicals polluting the waterway. "We knew there was something toxic in the water," says an environmental official who was on the scene. "But we had no way of assessing whether it was a threat to human health or how best to protect the public." ...
Officials from the EPA, the Ohio EPA, and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) arrived on the scene shortly after the fire erupted. Working with an outside firm hired by Statoil, the site's owner, they immediately began testing water for contaminates. They found a number of toxic chemicals, including ethylene glycol, which can damage kidneys, and phthalates, which are linked to a raft of grave health problems. Soon dead fish began surfacing downstream from the spill. Nathan Johnson, a staff attorney for the non-profit Ohio Environmental Council, describes the scene as "a miles-long trail of death and destruction" with tens of thousands of fish floating belly up.
Statoil and the federal and state officials set up a "unified command" center and began scouring a list of chemicals Halliburton had provided them for a compound that might be triggering the die off. But the company had not disclosed those ingredients that it considered trade secrets. ...
Within two days of the spill, Halliburton disclosed the proprietary chemicals to firefighters and the oil and gas division chief, but it didn't give this information to the EPA and its Ohio counterpart until five days after the accident, by which time the chemicals had likely reached or flowed past towns that draw drinking water from the Ohio River. ... Other key players, including local water authorities, the private company hired to monitor water contamination, and area residents, did not get a full rundown of chemicals, even after the EPA and the Ohio EPA finally received the information.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: We'll Have to ‘Sink Lower’ Before Congress Takes Action to Save the Planet
LA: To talk a bit again about climate change — not so much from a climate scientist perspective but in a general sense — in “Cosmos” you talk about the promise of green energy, but there’s also a lot of discussion lately about it being too late at this point to make meaningful change, and of people feeling discouraged. Do you think we have what it takes as a society to reverse course?
NDT: In my read of history, when things get very bad, people tend to come into agreement about what next steps they need to take and there’s less arguing. For example, in 1939, 1940 there were nationalists in America who didn’t want to engage in the war in Europe. There were strong debates in Congress and the executive branch — and then we get attacked at Pearl Harbor, and at that point everyone is aligned. And we, at the time, had the tenth or something largest army in the world — something much lower than other countries that were actively engaged in this war — but once all of our pistons were aligned, we built a military machine that tipped the balance of power in the world over a four-year period. We felt threatened, we felt down, we felt like we had to act as one.
So I’ve seen this country do that. On multiple occasions: We did it for Sputnik. If someone wants to fly over your country in the air, there’s a law, you need permission to allow them to do that. But if they’re above the air, they’re in space where there is no law that controls that — so there was Sputnik, launched in 1957, flying over the United States. A Soviet piece of hardware, launched on a vessel that would otherwise be used to carry intercontinental ballistic missiles. We freaked out. All of our pistons became aligned, and within 12 years of Sputnik going up, we are walking on the moon. We alluded to that in “Cosmos,” with reference to Kennedy’s speech about doing things not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.
So I think maybe we have to sink lower before the pistons of Congress and the electorate align to take meaningful action, to protect the planet going forward. And this idea about being too late, well that’s defeatist of course. That’s saying, “Well, okay, we don’t know what to do so therefore let’s do nothing.”
U.S. Ranks Near Bottom on Energy Efficiency; Germany Tops List
Germany leads the world in harnessing the benefits of energy efficiency, followed by Italy, the European Union, China and France, according to a new ranking of the world's 16 largest economies. The United States was near the bottom, placing 13th.
America's poor showing is sobering for a nation accustomed to being a world leader, and it could have economic consequences. "How can the United States compete in a global economy if it continues to waste money and energy that other countries save and can reinvest?" said Rachel Young, the principal author of the energy efficiency report card.
Even more sobering is the news that many of the countries are stalled or regressing on energy efficiency, and all them could save significantly more energy by embracing the full range of proven technologies and policies, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), which produced the International Energy Efficiency Scorecard released on Thursday.
"There are substantial opportunities for every country to improve," said Young. The average score of all the ranked economies was just 50 points out of a possible 100—an indication, she said, that "overall, countries are failing to adopt best practices, and if they improve, they do so in small increments."
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Israeli reservists refuse to serve
Egypt’s anti-Muslim Brotherhood stance makes it odd choice as cease-fire broker
As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensifies, it is not anti-Semitic to say: not in my name
A Little Night Music
Lonnie Mack - Memphis
Lonnie Mack - Satisfy Susie
Lonnie Mack - Why
Lonnie Mack - Too Rock For Country, Too Country For Rock And Roll
Lonnie Mack - Cincinnati Jail
Lonnie Mack - Honky Tonk
Lonnie Mack - Suzie Q
Lonnie Mack - Oreo Cookie Blues
Lonnie Mack - Riding The Blinds
Lonnie Mack- I Found a Love
Lonnie Mack - Mt Healthy Blues
Lonnie Mack - Down In The Dumps
SRV & Lonnie Mack - Wham
Lonnie Mack - You Aint Got Me
Lonnie Mack - Long Way From Memphis
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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