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 one of the great bluesmen of all time, B.B. King. Enjoy!
BB King, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jimmie Vaughan - Rock Me Baby
“Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses.”
-- Santiago Ramón y Cajal
News and Opinion
Raul Grijalva is doing the "lone voice in the wilderness" thing:
The audacity of air strikes and secret deals: just making Isis grow stronger?
The insurgency in Iraq, Syria and beyond is a fight for natural resources as much as political control. Why are we so busy giving leverage to terrorists?
US-led air strikes make recruiting exponentially easier for the Islamic State (Isis) and other extremist movements without actually making America any safer. And selling weapons to state and non-state actors in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East only aids and abets insurgent movements. Insurgent groups, it seems, have found a reliable source for armaments in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency. ...
The poor execution of our already weak – or non-existent – political approach to the region fed a willingness among Sunni moderates to support Isis. ... The US could avoid repeating its past mistakes in Iraq by deemphasizing its military focus and admitting that air strikes and drone strikes won’t work to effect regional change. A strategy focused on political reconciliation, regional cooperation, arms embargoes and humanitarian aid that finally meets the basic needs of a war-ravaged nation is the only plan that could bring lasting security and political stability. ...
The economic diplomacy approach has also been completely neglected by the international community – despite Isis’s interest in taking over oil-rich and water-rich sectors in northern Iraq. From oil and gas wells to river dams, Isis’s interest in the resource-rich regions is a consequence of America’s post-invasion disinterest in resource sharing or economic security – and of Baghdad’s inability to ensure that Iraq’s natural resources were distributed fairly to its entire population. ...
Like Syria’s civil war, which started with public frustration over mismanaged water supplies during one of the region’s worst droughts, the Isis-led insurgency in Iraq and beyond is a fight for natural resources as much as political control – and they give the international community more leverage against Isis than air strikes ever could.
Weeks of U.S. Strikes Fail to Dislodge ISIS in Iraq
BAGHDAD — After six weeks of American airstrikes, the Iraqi government’s forces have scarcely budged the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State from their hold on more than a quarter of the country, in part because many critical Sunni tribes remain on the sidelines.
Although the airstrikes appear to have stopped the extremists’ march toward Baghdad, the Islamic State is still dealing humiliating blows to the Iraqi Army. On Monday, the government acknowledged that it had lost control of the small town of Sichar and lost contact with several hundred of its soldiers who had been besieged for nearly a week at a camp north of the Islamic State stronghold of Falluja, in Anbar Province. ...
The foundation of the Obama administration’s plan to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is the installation of a new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who has pledged to build a more responsive government and rebuild Sunni support. But, though at least some Sunni Arabs are fighting alongside the army in places like Haditha, influential Sunni sheikhs who helped lead the Awakening say they remain unconvinced.
“The Sunnis in Anbar and other provinces are facing oppression and discrimination by the government,” said Mohamed el-Bajjari, a sheikh in Anbar who is a spokesman for a coalition of tribes. “This government must be changed to form a technocratic government of nonsectarian secular people, or the battles and the anger of the Sunni people will continue.”
US air strikes against Isis will only escalate violence
Bombing in itself never achieves a political goal. It terrifies, provokes, destroys, kills. It can assist victory when in close support of ground forces, as in the conquest of Kabul or Tripoli. But that impact is limited to the battlefield. So-called strategic bombing has an appalling record, mitigated only by the power of the arms lobby and a cosy perception that air strikes “send messages”, a sort of beefed-up economic sanctions.
The current wave of bombing in Syria appears to be a response, as is often the case with air wars, to US domestic politics. It is to show Barack Obama is “not a wimp” and is “taking the fight to the enemy”. Even so he has been forced to justify it on the grounds that Isis is a “threat to American security”, a ludicrous claim. Terrorists can explode bombs and kill people, but they do not endanger modern democracies.
Expanding U.S. Strikes to ISIS in Syria, Has Obama Opened New Phase of "Perpetual War"?
US Leads Airstrikes Against Islamic State in Syria
The US has led airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria including the extremist group's stronghold of Raqqa, in the first direct military intervention by foreign powers since the start of the country's crisis.
Huge explosions shook Raqqa, the militants' capital in Syria, as fighter jets pounded the area and the northern province of Idlib. Unconfirmed air raids also hit the neighbouring provinces of Deir al-Zour and Aleppo, according to local reports.
Several Gulf states partnered the US in the 14 airstrikes, which were conducted using fighter and bomber jets and Tomahawk missiles following last week's international talks on combating the Islamist fighters.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE all "participated in or supported" the attacks, the Pentagon confirmed. Spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said that "US military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles." ...
The Syrian foreign ministry said it was informed about the strikes before they took place. ... Foreign ministry statements flashed across Syrian state television as the airstrikes went on. "Syria supports any international effort that aims at fighting terrorism, whatever the terrorist group - IS, al-Nusra Front or any other one," one said, according to BBC Monitoring. ...
An Islamic State fighter meanwhile insisted the group would have its revenge for the attacks, and held Saudi Arabia responsible for allowing them to go ahead.
"These attacks will be answered. The sons of Saloul are the ones who are to be blamed. It happened because of them," he told using a derogatory term for Saudi Arabia's royal Saudi family.
U.S. Bombs ISIS Sites in Syria and Targets Khorasan Group
In a statement early Tuesday, the U.S. military said that in addition to taking out ISIS targets it mounted eight separate strikes overnight “to disrupt the imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests conducted by a network of seasoned al Qaeda veterans,” also known as “the Khorasan group.” The strikes against Khorasan — which had established a haven in Syria to plot attacks, build roadside bombs and recruit Westerners to fight — targeted the group’s training camps, explosives production facility, communication building and command and control facilities, the Pentagon said.
A senior U.S. defense official told NBC News that intelligence agencies had requested the airstrikes against Khorasan as a last-minute add-on and said they were not the operation's primary target. ...
The U.S. military said the strikes — launched from warships in the Red Sea and the North Arabian Gulf — destroyed or damaged “multiple” targets, which included ISIS fighters, their training compounds, headquarters, command facilities, a finance center and armed vehicles. The U.S. military said that it will continue to bomb ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq as needed, adding that it now has conducted 194 airstrikes in total across Iraq – including four strikes on Monday which took out Humvees and an ISIS fighting position southwest of Kirkuk.
“There Is No Military Solution” — But Obama Launches a New U.S. War in Syria
President Obama’s decision to bomb Syria stands in stark violation of international law, the UN Charter, and the requirements of the U.S. Constitution. It contradicts his own commitment, stated a year ago in the UN General Assembly, to reverse Washington’s “perpetual war footing.”
And it portends disaster for the people of Syria, the region, and much of the world.
The White House stated goal is to destroy the headquarters of the violent and extremist ISIS militia. But you can’t bomb extremism out of existence. The U.S. bombs do not fall on “extremism,” they are falling on Raqqah, a 2,000 year-old Syrian city with a population of more than a quarter of a million people – men, women and children who had no say in the take-over of their city by ISIS. The Pentagon is bombing targets like the post office and the governor’s compound, and the likelihood of large number of civilian casualties as well as devastation of the ancient city, is almost certain.
Syria is sticking point between Russia and U.S. on defeating Islamic State
MOSCOW— As the United States worked to build an international coalition for expanded strikes against the Islamic State, Russia has taken the opportunity to say “we told you so” and hedged broader support until the Syrian government gets a larger role.
The Kremlin has no trouble with the intended target — like the United States, Russia wants the Islamic State destroyed and thinks it must be defeated in Syria and Iraq. ...
In the past, competing allegiances in the Syrian conflict have not blocked all cooperation. Last year, Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin brokered an agreement to transfer Syria’s chemical weapons to international control, narrowly avoiding U.S. airstrikes. But the near-complete erosion of trust between the two countries since then — and pervasive suspicion about the United States’ motives — complicates the chances of a similar breakthrough.
“There’s quite widespread suspicion here that the U.S. will start to bomb the Islamic State but will end up bombing the Syrian army,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a Moscow-based analyst and head of an advisory panel to the Kremlin on foreign and defense policy. ...
In [Sergei] Lavrov’s calculus, the Islamic State is the legacy of years of U.S. Middle-Eastern policy and only the latest evidence that the West never should have tried to distinguish “between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ terrorists” opposing Assad’s rule in Syria — or anywhere else. Russians were surprised and angered when NATO forces authorized to protect civilians in Libya helped to topple dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, and often cite Libya, now a playground for warring militias, as a reason to be suspicious of U.S. plans for Syria.
Israel Shoots Down Syrian Fighter Jet over Golan Heights
Israel said it had downed a Syrian warplane over the Golan Heights on Tuesday, the first incident of its kind in more than three decades and a sign of the growing risk to regional stability as the Syrian conflict drags in its neighbours.
The Israeli military said that the Syrian Sukhoi fighter jet was shot down by its US-made Patriot missile system after it "infiltrated Israeli airspace" over the area, a disputed territory captured from Syria by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War.
The plane may have accidentally strayed into Israeli airspace while attacking rebel targets on the Syrian side of the border, according to early indications. ...
Syria condemned the downing of the plane as an "act of aggression" in a statement on state television, and linked it to the US-led airstrikes on Islamic State targets in the country overnight.
Triumph of anti-American rebels in Yemen raises questions about Obama success claims
For roughly two years, the Obama administration has hailed Yemen as a rare U.S. success story in the Middle East. The internationally brokered transition from the longtime rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh to the current government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi was cast as a post-Arab Spring model.
The United States’ cooperation with Hadi on counterterrorism matters, including drone strikes, was portrayed as a bilateral triumph. Despite increasing signs of trouble, the U.S. government stuck to the narrative; as recently as Sept. 10, President Barack Obama cited Yemen as a success in his speech explaining his plans for “degrading” the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Over the weekend, however, the growing gap between administration rhetoric and reality came to a head, as the acerbically anti-American Houthi rebels _ who American diplomats allege have close financial and military ties with Iran _ took control of many areas of the capital, Sanaa, with minimal resistance from the U.S.-supplied Yemeni armed forces.
In the context of Yemen’s politics, the weekend’s events are earth-shattering to the point that their ultimate significance cannot yet truly be understood. But there’s little question that despite the signing of a peace agreement, tensions will continue, while the balance of power appears to have shifted irrevocably in ways nearly inconceivable mere months ago.
Obama eviscerates another campaign promise, ramps up nuclear weapons modernization and deployment with trillion dollar pricetag:
U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A sprawling new plant here in a former soybean field makes the mechanical guts of America’s atomic warheads. Bigger than the Pentagon, full of futuristic gear and thousands of workers, the plant, dedicated last month, modernizes the aging weapons that the United States can fire from missiles, bombers and submarines.
It is part of a nationwide wave of atomic revitalization that includes plans for a new generation of weapon carriers. A recent federal study put the collective price tag, over the next three decades, at up to a trillion dollars.
This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. The original idea was that modest rebuilding of the nation’s crumbling nuclear complex would speed arms refurbishment, raising confidence in the arsenal’s reliability and paving the way for new treaties that would significantly cut the number of warheads.
Instead, because of political deals and geopolitical crises, the Obama administration is engaging in extensive atomic rebuilding while getting only modest arms reductions in return.
A blast from the past:
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.
Robert Parry with an excellent commentary on how the media wurlitzer is helping unsavory corporate and political interests create a less stable, less peaceful world. It's worth a click and a look at the full article.
High Cost of Bad Journalism on Ukraine
The costs of the mainstream U.S. media’s wildly anti-Moscow bias in the Ukraine crisis are adding up, as the Obama administration has decided to react to alleged “Russian aggression” by investing as much as $1 trillion in modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
On Monday, a typically slanted New York Times article justified these modernization plans by describing “Russia on the warpath” and adding: “Congress has expressed less interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington’s escalating confrontation with Moscow.” ...
Rather than Putin’s “warmongering” – as the Times said in the lead-in to another Monday article – the evidence is clear that it was the United States and the European Union that initiated this confrontation in a bid to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and into the West’s orbit. ...
[O]ther victims [aside from those butchered, broken or dispossessed in various US and US-supported military actions] from these latest machinations by the U.S. political/media elite will include the American taxpayers who will be expected to foot the bill for the new Cold War launched in reaction to Putin’s imaginary scheme to instigate the Ukraine crisis so he could reclaim territory of the Russian Empire.
As nutty as that conspiracy theory is, it is now one of the key reasons why the American people have to spend $1 trillion to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal, rather than scaling back the thousands of U.S. atomic weapons to around 900, as had been planned.
Or as one supposed expert, Gary Samore at Harvard, explained to the New York Times: “The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.”
Thus, you can see how hyperbolic journalism and self-interested punditry can end up costing the American taxpayers vast sums of money and contributing to a more dangerous world.
War, Whistleblowing and Independent Journalism Panel
Australia’s Prime Minister Gives a Master Class in Exploiting Terrorism Fears to Seize New Powers
This morning, Australia’s Liberal Party Prime Minister Tony Abbott delivered a speech to the nation’s parliament that is a perfect distillation of the key post-9/11 pathologies of western democracies. It was a master class in how politicians shamelessly exploit terrorism fears to seize greater power. ...
Regrettably, for some time to come, Australians will have to endure more security than we’re used to, and more inconvenience than we’d like.
Regrettably, for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift.
There may be more restrictions on some so that there can be more protections for others.
After all, the most basic freedom of all is the freedom to walk the streets unharmed and to sleep safe in our beds at night
With those scary premises in place, the prime minister proceeded to rattle off a laundry list of new legal powers and restraints on freedom that he craves. It begins with “creating new offences that are harder to beat on a technicality”, which he said is “a small price to pay for saving lives.” It includes brand new crimes and detention powers (“Legislation to create new terrorist offences and to extend existing powers to monitor or to detain terror suspects will be introduced this week”). There’s also this: “it will be an offence to be in a designated area, for example Raqqa in Syria, without a good reason.” ...
The ease with which terrorism is exploited by western governments—a full 13 years after 9/11—is stunning. Americans now overwhelmingly favor military action against a group which, three months ago, almost none of them even knew existed, notwithstanding clear government admissions that the group poses no threat to the “homeland.” ...
Political leaders love nothing more than when populations are put in fear of external threats. In that regard, these western leaders share exactly the same goal as ISIS: to terrorize their nation’s citizens by grossly exaggerating its power and reach. Any museum exhibit on the degradation of western behavior in the post-9/11 era would be well-advised to put Abbott’s full speech on the wall, as it illustrates the fear-mongering games and propagandistic tactics that have led to all of that.
Apple Still Has Plenty of Your Data for the Feds
In a much-publicized open letter last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged to protect user privacy with improved encryption on iPhones and iPads and a hard line toward government agents. It was a huge and welcome step toward thwarting the surveillance state, but it also seriously oversold Apple’s commitment to privacy.
Yes, Apple launched a tough-talking new privacy site and detailed a big improvement to encryption in its mobile operating system iOS 8: Text messages, photos, contacts, and call history are now encrypted with the user’s passcode, whereas previously they were not. This follows encryption improvements by Apple’s competitors Google and Yahoo.
But despite these nods to privacy-conscious consumers, Apple still strongly encourages all its users to sign up for and use iCloud, the internet syncing and storage service where Apple has the capability to unlock key data like backups, documents, contacts, and calendar information in response to a government demand. iCloud is also used to sync photos, as a slew of celebrities learned in recent weeks when hackers reaped nude photos from the Apple service. ...
The improved encryption in iOS 8 is a great move towards protecting consumer privacy and security. But users should be aware that in most cases it doesn’t protect your iOS device from government snoops.
While Apple does not have the crypto keys that can unlock the data on iOS 8 devices, they do have access to your iCloud backup data. Apple encrypts your iCloud data in storage, but they encrypt it with their own key, not with your passcode key, which means that they are able to decrypt it to comply with government requests.
Keiser Report: Price Propaganda
The Evening Greens
Flood Wall Street: 100 Arrested at Sit-In Targeting Financial Giants’ Role in Global Warming
Perhaps it is time to give history a little help and hold the climate villains accountable now.
Leonardo DiCaprio at the UN:'You can make history or be vilified by it’
[excerpt from full speech at link - js]
Thank you, Mr Secretary General, your excellencies, ladies and gentleman, and distinguished guests. I’m honored to be here today, I stand before you not as an expert but as a concerned citizen, one of the 400,000 people who marched in the streets of New York on Sunday, and the billions of others around the world who want to solve our climate crisis. ...
Every week , we’re seeing new and undeniable climate events, evidence that accelerated climate change is here now. We know that droughts are intensifying, our oceans are warming and acidifying, with methane plumes rising up from beneath the ocean floor. We are seeing extreme weather events, increased temperatures, and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets melting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead of scientific projections.
None of this is rhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. It is fact. The scientific community knows it, Industry and Governments know it, even the United States military knows it. The chief of the US navy’s Pacific command, admiral Samuel Locklear, recently said that climate change is our single greatest security threat.
My Friends, this body – perhaps more than any other gathering in human history - now faces that difficult task. You can make history ... or be vilified by it.
Dozens arrested as police face off with Flood Wall Street protesters
More than 100 protesters were arrested after hundreds of people gathered in New York City’s financial district on Monday to denounce to denounce what organisers say is Wall Street’s contribution to climate change.
Flood Wall Street demonstrators, primarily dressed in blue to represent climate change-induced flooding, marched to New York City’s financial centre to “highlight the role of Wall Street in fuelling the climate crisis,” according to organisers.
While the day started off peacefully, demonstrators began trying to push back metal barricades when trading closed on the New York Stock Exchange at 4pm.
Police used pepper spray to push them back and later broke up the gathering. A core group of a few dozen activists staged a sit-in steps away from Wall Street, and police officers handcuffed and walked them away one-by-one, taking them to police vans parked nearby.
Those arrested included a person wearing a white polar bear suit and two women dressed as Captain Planet. Most of the arrests were for disorderly conduct.
Vandana Shiva, Winona LaDuke & Desmond D’Sa on a Global, Grassroots Response to U.N. Climate Summit
Water: A Defining Issue for Post-2015
A gift of nature, or a valuable commodity? A human right, or a luxury for the privileged few? Will the agricultural sector or industrial sector be the main consumer of this precious resource? Whatever the answers to these and many more questions, one thing is clear: that water will be one of the defining issues of the coming decade.
Some estimates say that 768 million people still have no access to fresh water. Other research puts the number higher, suggesting that up to 3.5 billion people are denied the right to an improved source of this basic necessity.
As United Nations agencies and member states inch closer to agreeing on a new set of development targets to replace the soon-to-expire Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the need to include water in post-2015 development planning is more urgent than ever.
The latest World Water Development Report (WWDR) suggests, “Global water demand (in terms of water withdrawals) is projected to increase by some 55 percent by 2050, mainly because of growing demands from manufacturing (400 percent), thermal electricity generation (140 percent) and domestic use (130 percent).”
In addition, a steady rise in urbanization is likely to result in a ‘planet of cities’ where 40 percent of the world’s population will reside in areas of severe water stress through 2050.
Groundwater supplies are diminishing; some 20 percent of the world’s aquifers are facing over-exploitation, and degradation of wetlands is affecting the capacity of ecosystems to purify water supplies.
Befouled Again: New Toxic Mine Spill Reported in Mexico's Sonora River
After a flyover of the region showed an abnormal orange stain in the water, authorities in northern Mexico have issued a new alert of a toxic spill in the Sonora River basin from a copper mine operated by Grupo Mexico, the state director of civil protection said Sunday.
According to news reports, the Sonora state civil protection agency said it was ending its relationship with mining giant Grupo Mexico because it was continuing to discharge toxic substances into the river, even after a devastating spill in August of around 10 million gallons of acids and heavy metals contaminated two rivers and a dam downstream.
Farmers in the region are already struggling as a result of the August disaster, which "paralyzed" the agriculture and ranching industries and left 22,000 people along the river without a regular running water supply, Al Jazeera reported last week. ...
Grupo Mexico, which has been accused of lying about clean-up and containment measures and of lax supervision at its $1-billion-a-year Buenavista mine, blamed the new spill on heavy rains caused by Hurricane Odile last week. The company created a $147 million fund to help mitigate damages from the prior spill, was fined $3 million by the government, and has denied any wrongdoing.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
An excellent interactive graphic representation of climate change problem sources and variables:
Carbon map – which countries are responsible for climate change?
Obama: the 'yes we can' president with the 'at least I tried' legacy
The HeForShe Campaign and the Social Good Summit
A Little Night Music
B.B. King - Lucille
B. B. King - The Thrill Is Gone
B.B. King - Blues Boys Tune
BB King - Why I Sing The Blues
B.B. King - Sweet Sixteen
BB King - Night Life
BB King & James Brown Band - Let the good times roll
B.B. King - How Blue Can You Get
B.B. King - Fool Me Once
B.B. King and Lowell Fulson - Little by Little
B.B King - Hummingbird
B.B.King - Never Make Your Move To Soon
BB King - Nobody Loves Me But My Mother
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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