Welcome! "The Evening Blues - Weekend Edition" is a casual community diary (published Saturday & Sunday, 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 Texas' own Western Swing masters, Ray Benson and Asleep At The Wheel. Enjoy!
Asleep At The Wheel - Route 66
We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God.
Chief Joseph, Nez Percé
News and Opinion
Obama condemns apparent execution of Japanese Isis hostage
US president offers condolences to family of Haruna Yukawa after picture and audio posted on internet suggest his murder
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has called for the immediate release of a Japanese journalist held by Islamic State after a video surfaced claiming that his fellow Japanese captive had been executed.
Japanese government officials said they had not yet confirmed whether the recording, and an image of what appeared to be the decapitated body of Japanese captive Haruna Yukawa, who went missing in Syria in August, were real. However, US president Barack Obama has issued a statement condemning the killing, suggesting that authorities now believe the video is authentic.
Abe called for the immediate release of the remaining Japanese captive, reporter Kenji Goto.
“We are using every diplomatic channel and means to work towards a release,” a grim-looking Abe told reporters in brief remarks after calling a meeting with his foreign, defence and other ministers after midnight in Tokyo. “This act of terrorism is an outrageous and unacceptable act of violence. I feel a strong sense of anger and firmly condemn this. I again strongly demand the immediate release of Mr Kenji Goto unharmed.”
The sudden escalation of the hostage crisis has become a test for Abe and the dominant news story in Japan since Tuesday, when Islamic State militants released a video showing Goto and Yukawa kneeling with a knife-wielding, masked man demanding a $200 million ransom for their release. The 72-hour deadline set in the first video expired on Friday.
US-led task force launches 26 air strikes against Isis in Syria and Iraq
*According to coalition statement, 13 targets hit in Syria as well as 13 hit in Iraq
*‘Isis mobile oil drilling rig’ among targets in Syria, says US Central Command
The US and its coalition partners have launched another round of air strikes against Islamic State (Isis) militants in Iraq and Syria, conducting 26 strikes since early on Friday.
In a statement released on Saturday from the Combined Joint Task Force leading the military operation, officials said 13 strikes hit in Syria and also 13 hit in Iraq.
In Syria, 12 air strikes targeted Isis positions near Kobani. In Iraq, five strikes hit near Mosul and five near Tal Afar, the statement said.
US Central Command later said that of the strikes near Kobani, a town on the Turkish border which has been contested for months, “12 airstrikes struck eight Isis tactical units and a large Isis unit and destroyed an Isis vehicle, an Isis building, and eight Isis fighting positions”.
The other strike in Syria was near al-Hasakah, Central Command said, and “destroyed an Isis mobile oil drilling rig”.
US woman jailed for attempting to join ISIL
Nineteen-year-old, who wanted to "correct the wrongs against the Muslim world," arrested before boarding plane from US.
A 19-year-old Colorado woman who has admitted that she had planned to travel overseas to join the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has been sentenced to four years in a US federal prison.
In a statement to the court on Friday before sentencing, Shannon Maureen Conley expressed gratitude to the FBI for "potentially saving my life" by intervening to arrest her, and said she rejected the violent ideology espoused by some Muslims.
"I believe in true Islam, where peace is encouraged," Conley, a Muslim convert, said.
Conley, from suburban Denver, struck up an online relationship last year with a Tunisian man, identified as Yousr Mouelhi, who said he was a member of ISIL, according to an FBI arrest warrant affidavit.
"During their communications, Conley and Mouelhi shared their view of Islam as requiring participation in violent jihad," according to the plea agreement reached with federal prosecutors.
AQAP Develops Its Own Version of Reddit’s AMA and Twitter’s Blue Checkmark Verification
Over the past year, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has made a substantial shift in its communications strategy. For years, the group communicated through a methodical process that involved official statements issued through official websites, along with videos released by its media arm, al Malahem Media. Since early 2014, the group has deployed social media operatives on Twitter to spread its message and to engage with its followers and critics alike.
Under pressure from the U.S. government, Twitter regularly shuts down AQAP-affiliated accounts. AQAP, in turn, creates new ones—often just adjusting a twitter handle by one character. These accounts, of course, have no blue checkmarks to prove they are “validated” accounts, as many public figures and groups possess. Instead, AQAP has created its own system of verifying its Twitter accounts: publishing the handles through its official communication channels. For example, the group might draw up an online communique on an authoring and hosting site like JustPaste.it and include a list of Twitter handles underneath its various official pronouncements. This communique would then be posted on Jihadist web forums using accounts believed to be associated with AQAP. In other cases, AQAP might set up backup Twitter accounts and announce them through their current account before that account is shut down by Twitter.
“Whenever they get knocked down and create new [accounts], you know it’s them,” says Aaron Zelin, a specialist on jihadist movements at The Washington Institute. “Plus you can just tell from the quality and production value.”
It’s not as simple as a blue checkmark, but AQAP has proven pretty effective at maintaining its bizarro verification method.
Pro-Russian rebels attack key port, Ukraine says at least 30 dead
(Reuters) - Pro-Russian rebels launched an offensive against the strategic port of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine on Saturday, prompting the European Union's foreign policy chief to warn of a further "grave deterioration" in EU-Russian relations.
Mariupol's city administration said the rebels had killed at least 30 people and injured 83 others in the offensive by firing rockets from long-range GRAD missile systems.
The city of 500,000 on the Sea of Azov is vital for eastern Ukraine's steel and grain exports and also straddles the coastal route from the Russian border to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula in southern Ukraine seized by Russia last March.
President Petro Poroshenko, pledging to protect Ukrainian territory, said he would convene an emergency meeting of his country's security council on Sunday.
Putin says Ukraine ordered new offensive against rebels
Russian leader accuses Kiev of violating latest truce as pro-Moscow fighters unveil their own large-scale assault plans.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine's government of ordering a major new offensive against pro-Russian rebels in the separatist east, in spite of the latest ceasefire agreement.
Putin said on Friday that "artillery is being used, rocket launchers and aviation, and it is used indiscriminantly and over densely populated areas". Kiev is responsible for the deaths, he said.
Meanwhile, NATO said it had indications that a major rebel offensive was being planned due to heavy weapons moving in from Russia, as they have prior to previous rebel pushes.
On Friday, a rebel leader in the 'Donetsk People's Republic' (DPR) said that the separatists would reject truce talks and go on to take over the entire Donetsk region - half of which is currently controlled by Ukrainian authorities.
"So we made the decision not to wait until the Ukrainian army starts an offensive and not allow them to make battle formations ... [or] allow them to harm us in any way," said Alexander Zakharchenko, a rebel leader of the DPR group.
"We will attack until we reach the borders of Donetsk region."
The War in Ukraine Has Somehow Gotten Even Worse
Over the past few days, Ukraine has taken a significant turn for the worse. Fighting between rebels and government forces has intensified, the civilian death toll has increased, and the war of words between Ukraine and Russia has further escalated.
To understand why this is the case and what it might mean, two questions should be asked: What has caused this deterioration and is this yet another step towards an increasingly inevitable full-scale and open military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine?
More than four months ago, on September 5, 2014, the government in Kiev and rebel leaders signed a ceasefire agreement in Minsk, followed by a memorandum on its implementation two weeks later. But there was no follow-through from either side. The best that can be said about the period since September is that violence became more sporadic, the rate at which people were killed in fighting, or as a consequence of it, slowed down, and neither side pushed overly hard for further territorial gains.
Yet, even this picture might be too optimistic. There were almost daily shoot-outs between pro- and anti-government forces along the frontlines in the east of Ukraine—some 1,000 people have died since September (out of a total of almost 5,000 casualties over the course of the crisis) and fighting has been particularly intense around Donetsk airport. The airport—now reduced to rubble—remained a highly prestigious “prize” for either side, and fighting there continued even if only because of its symbolic value.
Revealed: how Blair colluded with Gaddafi regime in secret
Libyan government papers pieced together by team of London lawyers show how UK cosied up to Tripoli over dissidents
Submitted by: enhydra lutris
Tony Blair wrote to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to thank him for the “excellent cooperation” between the two countries’ counter-terrorism agencies following a period during which the UK and Libya worked together to arrange for Libyan dissidents to be kidnapped and flown to Tripoli, along with their families.
The letter, written in 2007, followed a period in which the dictator’s intelligence officers were permitted to operate in the UK, approaching and intimidating Libyan refugees in an attempt to persuade them to work as informants for both countries’ agencies.
Addressed “Dear Mu’ammar” and signed “Best wishes yours ever, Tony”, the letter was among hundreds of pages of documents recovered from Libyan government offices following the 2011 revolution and pieced together by a team of London lawyers.
The lawyers are bringing damages claims on behalf of a dozen Gaddafi opponents who were targeted by the two countries’ agencies during the covert cooperation. The claimants were variously detained and allegedly mistreated in Saudi Arabia, rendered from Mali to Libya, or detained and subjected to control orders in the UK.
UN: Dozens of children homeless after Israel illegally demolished Palestinian houses
The United Nations has condemned Israel for illegally demolishing houses of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, leaving 77 people, over half of whom are children, homeless in three days.
“Demolitions that result in forced evictions and displacement run counter to Israel’s obligations under international law and create unnecessary suffering and tension,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in statement Friday.
The demolitions took place in East Jerusalem and the districts of Ramallah, Jericho and Hebron, according to the statement.
“Some of the demolished structures were provided by the international community to support vulnerable families,” said James Rawley, who is also UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, urging Israel that the demolitions “must stop immediately”.
In the 2014, Israel carried out a record number of demolitions in the west bank and East Jerusalem and area known as Area C, which is under full Israeli control.
Obama won’t meet with Netanyahu
President Obama won’t meet with Benjamin Netanyahu when the Israeli Prime Minister comes to the U.S. in March to speak before both chambers of Congress -- and likely voice support for increased sanctions against Iran that the White House opposes.
Citing “long-standing practice and principle,” National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said Thursday that the administration does not meet with heads of state or candidates in “close proximity to their elections, so as to avoid the appearance of influencing a democratic election in a foreign country.”
That means Obama won’t meet with Netanyahu, who is up for reelection on March 17, two weeks after his planned address to Congress, Meehan said.
The latest diplomatic kerfuffle in the already-strained relationship comes as Obama has threatened to veto congressional efforts to ratchet up sanctions against Iran, saying they could undermine ongoing talks and divide the international community. Netanyahu, who has sharply criticized the negotiations as a “historic mistake,” said they’ve done nothing to roll back Tehran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon. Observers expect him to endorse stricter sanctions in his address.
On Verge of Victory, Europe's Ascendant Left Declares 'Subservience is Over'
Joining together ahead of Greek elections, leaders of Syriza and Podemos signal their unified fight against austerity will extend beyond national borders
"History is knocking at our door," declared Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the leftwing coalition party of Syriza in Greece, during a speech addressed to thousands of supporters in Athens on Thursday night as he stood next to his foreign compatriot Pablo Iglesias of the Spanish Podemos Party.
Syriza and Podemos have become the mouthpiece of the anti-austerity movement in southern Europe while Tsipras and Iglesias have emerged as key political leaders who emerged from the grassroots, street-level protest movements which rose in opposition to the severe economic policies imposed by elite forces following the financial crisis that began in 2008. In relatively short time, both Syriza and Podemos went from being non-existent political entities to standing on the doorstep of taking power.
With national elections in Greece just days away, and Syriza's polling numbers only improving, Alexis Tsipras announced that his party is prepared to "overthrow" the status quo and vowed to implement swift changes to undo the austerity policies—imposed at the behest of foreign creditors and attached to a bailout package offered by the European Central Bank and the IMF—that have left the Greek economy in tatters. Standing before the large crowd, Tsipras announced that by Monday, "[Greece's] national humiliation will be over. We will finish with orders from abroad."
Syriza's answer to austerity, he continued, would be this: "The bailout is over. Blackmail is over. Subservience is over."
Watch this report from Euronews:
Thai ex-premier says 'democracy has died’ after impeachment
Submitted by: enhydra lutris
BANGKOK — Thailand’s former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said Friday that democracy in her country was dead after the military-appointed legislature voted to ban her from politics for five years and the prosecutor announced plans to indict her on criminal charges in connection with a money-losing rice subsidy program.
The twin actions by the legislature and the attorney general against Yingluck are widely seen as an attempt by the military junta to cripple the political machine founded by Yingluck’s brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, another ousted prime minister, and prevent them from returning to power.
The legislature voted 190-18 to impeach Yingluck for her role in overseeing a government rice subsidy program that lost billions of dollars.
Separately, the attorney general’s office said it would indict her on criminal charges for negligence related to losses and alleged corruption in the rice program. If convicted, Yingluck could face 10 years in jail.
She was forced by a court ruling last May to step down from her job for illegally transferring a civil servant, and just days later the army staged a coup against her government.
US troops heading to Middle East to train Syria rebels
Some 100 US troops to arrive in the region in next few days to set up training sites for moderate rebels, Pentagon says.
The first advance detachment of US troops responsible for training moderate Syrian opposition forces will begin arriving in the Middle East in the next few days, a US Department of Defence official has said.
Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said the troops, mostly special operations forces, were authorised last week and would begin arriving in countries outside Syria in the coming days, with a subsequent wave of several hundred military trainers following in the weeks thereafter.
The US focus in the campaign against the armed Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group has been mainly on Iraq, with the exception of a large number of air strikes to support Kurdish fighters trying to prevent the takeover of the Syrian town of Kobane near the Turkish border.
Kirby said on Friday that Kurdish forces now control about 70 percent of Kobane, which was seen a few months ago as being near collapse, with much of it in the hands of ISIL.
He said the advanced element of US forces headed to establish training sites amounted to fewer than 100 troops.
Haiti forms electoral panel for overdue polls
Submitted by: enhydra lutris
Haiti has installed a Provisional Electoral Council to organise long-delayed elections - after weeks of protests and political uncertainty.
The nine-member panel represents different sectors of society.
It was sworn in shortly before a UN Security Council delegation arrived on a three-day mission.
General and municipal polls are three years overdue, and President Michel Martelly began ruling by decree last week when parliament was dissolved.
The dissolution followed a failure to elect new MPs in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
Iran moves away from US dollar in foreign trade
Iran is stopping mutual settlements in dollars with foreign countries and agreements on bilateral swap in new currencies will be signed in the near future, the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has said.
“In trade exchanges with foreign countries, Iran uses other currencies, including Chinese yuan, euro, Turkish lira, Russian ruble and South Korean won,” Gholamali Kamyab, CBI deputy head, told the Tasnim state news agency.
He added that Iran is considering the possibility of signing bilateral monetary agreements with several countries on the use of other currencies.
Kamyab believes bilateral currency swap agreements will ease trade and economic transactions between Iran and other states.
Researchers Made A Discovery That Changes Everything We Know About Greenland’s Melting Ice
Submitted by: NCTim
A group of researchers at The Ohio State University made a startling discovery while creating a high-resolution map of Greenland’s ice sheet. The researchers noticed that two lakes in the region have disappeared. The findings on each lake were published separately. The research on the first lake studied was published the open-access journal The Cryosphere. The findings related to the second lake were later published in the journal Nature.
Lakes that contain billions of gallons of water form underneath Greenland’s ice sheet. Their existence has been known of and well documented for a long time. A lake disappearing though, is a bizarre occurrence that Cornell University, Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor of earth sciences at Ohio State, who co-authored the paper, call a “milestone” for Greenland’s ice loss.
The researchers believe there is a growing body of evidence that the ice sheet has melted so much that the melt water it creates is flowing into the ice sheet’s “natural plumbing system” which causes “blowouts” to occur, leading to the lakes draining out. One of the lakes that experienced has disappeared has left a mile-wide crater underneath the ice sheet – it only took a few weeks for the lake to completely disappear, with an estimated 6.7 billion gallons of water. For comparison, that amount of water is equivalent to the reservoirs that the 1.9 million people in Columbus, Ohio use for water.
The other lake studied has shown even more alarming behavior. The lake appears to be draining and re-filling. The lake has already emptied and re-filled twice by melt water. Each time the lake drained it brought with it “latent heat” that further weakens the surrounding ice.
Whose Obama is it anyway? Inspiring lame-duck SOTU vs. six tepid years
With the clock running down, Obama reinvents himself as a progressive. But where has that guy been since 2009?
Liberals have been waiting to exhale for more than six years, and Barack Obama – the ultimate in noncommittal Problem Boyfriends – finally gave them that chance this week. Social media erupted in a chorus of Whitmanesque ecstasy: This was the guy they, or we, rallied around and swooned over in 2008, and have fruitlessly pined for ever since. This was the political visionary and masterful orator who announced himself, with that electrifying speech on the night of the Iowa caucuses (it almost seems a generation ago), as a transformative figure in 21st-century American history. Tuesday night’s State of the Union address was certainly full of refreshing rhetoric, and represents an intriguing political tactic (which a cynic might describe as pretending you have a governing majority when you don’t). But hang on a minute: Where has that guy been, anyway, and who was that other, somewhat less inspiring person who occupied the Oval Office between approximately Jan. 20, 2009, and this week?
After the dire and arid political slog of the past several years, the lame-duck SOTU of 2015 was a veritable cornucopia of big ideas: Free community college for all! A national childcare policy, to replace our national parental-enslavement policy (one of the most insidious victories of American capitalism)! Soaking the rich, albeit modestly, with higher capital-gains taxes! Diplomatic openings to Cuba and Iran, and an above-board military campaign against ISIS, duly authorized by Congress! A rational energy policy that looks toward the long-term future and addresses the climate crisis, instead of the build-a-pipeline-and-let-our-grandkids-suck-it approach! Rhetoric absolutely matters, in politics as in life, and before I go all Cassandra on you, let me be clear that I’d rather hear the president say things like that than not.
However – and you knew there was a “however” coming, didn’t you? – Obama’s bravura Jimi Hendrix solo from the other night was more than a little puzzling, and requires some decoding. Why all these quasi-utopian visions after years of nothing – and why now, after a crippling midterm defeat, with the shot-clock on his presidency running down into the single digits? I’m not entirely sure how to understand all this, except to say that its meaning is not obvious on the surface and that it feels inadequate to exclaim “At last!” and collapse onto the divan.
This SOTU feels like an “overdetermined” event, a concept from political theory meaning something caused and shaped by many different factors, which may be disharmonious or contradictory. My guess is that this speech and its agenda were both heartfelt and calculated, both an attempt to get us to gaze toward the far horizon and an attempt to put the Republicans on the wrong foot next year. No doubt it’s overly smug, after a speech that made so many disheartened Americans feel hopeful, to observe that actions speak louder than words. But Obama’s mixed and troubling record of official deeds stands in sharp contrast with the high-flying, big-picture rhetoric of that Throwback Tuesday speech. And at least when it comes to the remainder of his presidency – which will get swallowed up in the 2016 campaign any day now — Sen. Mitch McConnell’s crack that the SOTU felt like a laundry list of programs specifically designed not to pass is disconcertingly on target.
Federal Court Order: Explosive DOT-111 "Bomb Train" Oil Tank Cars Can Continue to Roll
A U.S. federal court has ordered a halt in proceedings until May in a case centering around oil-by-rail tankers pitting the Sierra Club and ForestEthics against the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). As a result, potentially explosive DOT-111 oil tank cars, dubbed “bomb trains” by activists, can continue to roll through towns and cities across the U.S.indefinitely.
“The briefing schedule previously established by the court is vacated,” wrote Chris Goelz, a mediator for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. “This appeal is stayed until May 12, 2015, or pending publication in the Federal Register of the final tank car standards and phase out of DOT-111 tank cars, whichever occurs first.”
The Wrong Senator to Oversee the CIA
Richard Burr now leads the intelligence committee, but he seems more interested in protecting the agency than holding it accountable.
Submitted by: NCTim
Senator Richard Burr is acting like a man who doesn't understand the role or duties that he now has. With the Republican Party assuming control of Congress, the North Carolinian is chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, the body charged with overseeing the CIA. His responsibilities are momentous. All senators are called to act as power-jealous checks on the executive branch. And the particular mission of the Senate intelligence committee, created in the wake of horrific CIA abuses, obligates Burr to “provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States" and "to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws.”
But as Senator Burr begins this job, he is behaving less like an overseer than a CIA asset. Rather than probe problems at the spy agency, of which there have been many, his first priority has been aiding CIA efforts to cover up past misdeeds. It is hard to imagine a more flagrantly inappropriate act by a head overseer.
Specifically, Burr is trying to help the CIA to suppress two reports on its torture of prisoners. Like the spy agency, he never wants the full reports to reach the public, and he is misusing his position on the oversight committee to advance that agenda. One report was commissioned by Leon Panetta, a former CIA director. Though it is classified, people who've seen it assert that it paints a scathing portrait of a spy agency that misled its overseers about the efficacy of tactics like waterboarding. No wonder current and former overseers on the intelligence committee, like Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, found great value in reading it.
But despite the significant value that some of Burr's fellow overseers insist that they gleaned from The Panetta Review, Burr wants to return the Senate committee's copy of the document back to the CIA. "The Panetta Review was never intended for the committee to have,” Burr told the Huffington Post. “At some point, we will probably send it back to where it came from.” On its face, the explanation makes no sense. Why would Burr speak as if the intentions of the CIA are dispositive? His job is to oversee the spy agency, not to respect its desire for privacy. What could be more antithetical to the proper posture of an overseer? (As if a bureaucracy would intentionally turn over evidence of its own abuses.)
Feds Won't Pursue Civil Rights Case Against Darren Wilson
Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford says Holder's DOJ is abdicating its responsibility to uphold the law by not charging officer Darren Wilson for killing Mike Brown
Distrust But Verify
What the U.S. government does openly is many times worse than anything it can be doing secretly, and yet the secrets fascinate us.
If you compare polling on majority views on most political topics with actual U.S. policy, there’s little overlap. Scholars now produce reports finding that the United States is an oligarchy. Most people don’t vote. Those who try to engage with U.S. politics get excited when the Democrats fall back into the minority and start pretending to favor popular policies again. People hope to find reflected bits of decency in official rhetoric during a two-year-long period of pretended governance that amounts to a public sales pitch and a private wink to the campaign funding overlords.
Our government openly subsidizes the destruction of our planet’s climate, openly allows corporations to pay negative taxes, openly redistributes wealth upward, openly funds a military as costly as the rest of the globe’s nations’ combined, openly serves as the marketing firm for the U.S. weapons that make up much of that other half of the globe’s armed forces, openly enacts corporate trade policies that ruin economies and the environment, openly denies us basic human services, openly prosecutes whistleblowers, openly restricts our civil liberties, openly murders large numbers of people with drone strikes. We can watch a police officer in New York choke a man to death on video and walk away without being prosecuted for any crime. We can watch the U.S. Congress take direction in promoting a new war from a foreign leader (tune in February 11 for the latest), and yet what goes on in secret obsesses us.
I don’t mean the lies that have been exposed, the false excuses for wars, the miscalculations, the “misplacement” of billions of dollars. I mean the human drama. It’s not enough to know that Obamacare is a grotesque and deadly monstrosity; we want to know about the insurance executives’ roles in writing it. It’s not enough to know that Iraq has been destroyed. We want to hear about the oil barons drawing up the plans with Dick Cheney. It’s not enough to know that a tragic crime was used to launch catastrophic wars, we want to know whether the crime was staged. We want to know who was behind every assassination, and every powerful bit of propaganda. We want to know whether each CIA operation can be explained by evil or incompetence. We’re like Mark Twain, who said, “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
American Sniper: anti-Muslim threats skyrocket in wake of film's release
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee writes to Bradley Cooper and Clint Eastwood requesting action as threat complaints triple
American Sniper continues to draw record-breaking audiences as it barrels into its second weekend in wide release, but a group representing Arab-Americans says the rate of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim threats resulting from the Oscar-nominated war film has already tripled.
Citing what an executive for the group told the Guardian was a “drastic increase” in hate speech on social media, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee wrote letters this week to actor Bradley Cooper and director Clint Eastwood to ask them to speak out “in an effort to help reduce the hateful rhetoric”.
The film, which was nominated for six Academy Awards including best picture, depicts the story of Chris Kyle, the famed US navy Seal notorious for the highest known single kill count in US military history. But its all-American depiction on screen has drawn heavy criticism from combat veterans and viewers alike – and especially about viewers themselves, many of whom have emerged from theatres desperate to communicate a kind of murderous desire.
A quick search on Twitter leads down a rabbit hole of anger.
“Great fucking movie and now I really want to kill some fucking ragheads,” read one tweet, in a set of screenshots that quickly went viral after being collated by journalist Rania Khalek for the online publication Electronic Intifada. “American sniper makes me wanna go shoot some fuckin Arabs,” read another.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal, which will feature a report on the funerals for martyrs of Roosevelt, New Jersey. WE NEVER FORGET.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Europe Is Not Waging a "Currency War" Against the U.S.
On Thursday, Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, announced a long-awaited plan to buy the bonds of companies and Eurozone countries to help boost the economy. Stocks inched upwards on the news and the value of the euro fell against the dollar. For some, this is evidence that the ECB is prepared to engage in a “currency war” against the United States—a deliberate attempt to hold down the value of the euro to boost exports at the expense of the U.S. But that’s wrong. While the ECB’s actions will cause the dollar to increase in value and hurt U.S. exports, it isn’t close to a currency war.
The key is that the ECB is taking actions to boost the Eurozone economy. The bond-buying program is supposed to lower interest rates for E.U. countries, although they are already very low, and hopefully spur more investment by European companies. Additionally, as the Washington Post’s Matt O’Brien explains, it will also effectively reduce the interest payments Eurozone countries owe on their debt. The ECB’s overall goal is to convince people that it will move inflation, which is currently -0.2 percent in part due to falling oil prices, back towards its 2 percent target.
As a side effect of the ECB’s bond-buying program, the euro’s value against the dollar will fall, helping E.U. exports and hurting the U.S.’s. That’s exactly what happened after Draghi announced the program. But it’s a side effect. The ECB’s actions aren’t intended to push down the value of its currency. If that were the case, it would be currency manipulation—and that would be a serious problem.
The difference between legitimate monetary policy moves and currency manipulation has not been well understood, even in the U.S. “In Davos, Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn said this week that the world has been in a currency war since Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's policies started pushing down the yen's rate two years ago,” Bloomberg View’s Leonid Bershidsky wrote Friday. “After that, Europeans felt the pinch and started devaluing the euro.” As noted, the Europeans aren’t taking a deliberate action to devalue the euro. But the case of Japan is a bit more complicated. Most of Abe’s policies are not intended to push down the value of the yen (even though they can have that effect) but instead to get Japan out of its deflationary trap. Yet, some Japanese policymakers have hinted strongly at manipulating its currency. In 2013, the Treasury Department warned Japan against such actions. So while Abe’s actions do not constitute an act of currency war, there is reason to be wary of them.
Cyber attacks worry Davos elites
Something strange is happening to Eugene Kaspersky.
The cyber-security guru, who has been at the forefront of his field for more than 25 years, can scarcely stride a few metres in the main conference hall of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos without being stopped by a chief executive or head of state.
Indeed, merely being in the Swiss mountains is eating into the fast-talking Russian's much sought-after time.
In recent weeks, he has spent more time in "Boeings and Airbuses" than on the ground, being flown around the world to advise business leaders and government bodies - including the UK's National Crime Agency - on battling ever more daring cyber criminals.
But it was not always thus. While the threat of corporate cyber attacks has been at the periphery of the WEF agenda for many years, 2015 is arguably the first year in which the issue is taking centre stage.
Snowden: iPhones Have Secret Spyware That Lets Govt's Monitor Unsuspecting Users
The NSA whistleblower's lawyer says the secret software can be remotely activated to watch the user.
The iPhone has secret spyware that lets governments watch users without their knowledge, according to Edward Snowden.
The NSA whistleblower doesn’t use a phone because of the secret software, which Snowden’s lawyer says can be remotely activated to watch the user.
"Edward never uses an iPhone, he’s got a simple phone," Anatoly Kucherena told Russian news agency RIA Novosti. "The iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him, that’s why on security grounds he refused to have this phone."
Apple has been active in making the iPhone harder for security services to spy on, and the company said that iOS 8 made it impossible for law enforcement to extract users’ personal data, even if they have a warrant. The company has also been active in campaigning for privacy reform after the Snowden revelations,joining with Facebook and Google to call for changes to the law.
But recently published files from the NSA showed that British agency GCHQ used the phones UDIDs — the unique identifier that each iPhone has — to track users. While there doesn’t seem to be any mention of such spying software in any of the revelations so far, a range of documents are thought to be still unpublished.
Why I Am Not a Maker
When tech culture only celebrates creation, it risks ignoring those who teach, criticize, and take care of others.
Submitted by: NCTim
Every once in a while, I am asked what I “make.” A hack day might require it, or a conference might ask me to describe “what I make” so it can go on my name tag.
I’m always uncomfortable with it. I’m uncomfortable with any culture that encourages you take on an entire identity, rather than to express a facet of your own identity ("maker," rather than "someone who makes things"). But I have much deeper concerns.
An identity built around making things—of being “a maker”—pervades technology culture. There’s a widespread idea that “People who make things are simply different [read: better] than those who don’t.”
I understand where the motivation for this comes from. Creators, rightly, take pride in creation. In her book The Real World of Technology, the metallurgist Ursula Franklin contrasts prescriptive technologies, where many individuals produce components of the whole (think about Adam Smith’s pinfactory), with holistic technologies, where the creator controls and understands the process from start to finish. As well as teaching my own engineering courses, I’m a studio instructor for a first-year engineering course, in which our students do design and fabrication, many of them for the first time. Making things is incredibly important, especially for groups that previously haven’t had access. When I was asked by the Boston-based Science Club for Girls to write a letter to my teenaged self (as a proxy for young girls everywhere), that’s exactly what I wrote about.
But there are more significant issues, rooted in the social history of who makes things—and who doesn’t.
As big as five football fields: Massive asteroid to be visible from Earth in just a day
An asteroid the size five football fields is approaching Earth and is expected to pass by on Monday. It will be visible through strong binoculars – definitely worth getting; the next time such an asteroid could be this close again will be in 2027.
At the closest point to the Earth, asteroid 2004 BL86 will be at a distance of 1.2 million kilometers which – approximately three times the distance from the Earth to the moon. Estimated to be 0.5 km in diameter, it is classified by scientists as potentially dangerous.
A space object is considered “potentially dangerous” if it crosses the Earth's orbit at a distance of less than 0.05 AU (approximately 19.5 distances from the Earth to the Moon), and if its diameter exceeds 100-150 meters. Objects of this size are large enough to cause unprecedented destruction, or generate a tsunami in case they fall into the ocean.
“While it poses no threat to Earth for the foreseeable future, it’s a relatively close approach by a relatively large asteroid, so it provides us a unique opportunity to observe and learn more,” Don Yeomans from NASA's Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement.
‘123456’ still most popular password but users waking up to cyber dangers – study
Slowly but surely, it seems as though the public are beginning to take a little more care about the passwords they use. A study shows that the ‘imaginative’ “123456” is still the most popular, but people are moving away from using such common passwords.
The SplashData survey was conducted by compiling more than 3.3 million passwords leaked during 2014. The top two, “123456” and “password” are still the most popular, while numerical combinations make up nine of the top 25 passwords.
“Passwords based on simple patterns on your keyboard remain popular despite how weak they are,” said Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData. “Any password using numbers alone should be avoided, especially sequences. As more websites require stronger passwords or combinations of letters and numbers, longer keyboard patterns are becoming common passwords, and they are still not secure,” the company's website stated.
However, the top 25 most common passwords now only account for2.2 percent of those leaked, so it would seem that some progress is being made. When SplashData started compiling their list fouryears ago, the top 25 accounted for six percent of leakypasswords
The Evening Greens
Evening Greens Weekend Editor: enhydra lutris
Boston's leaky pipes release high levels of heat-trapping methane
A research team estimates that each year about 15 billion cubic feet of natural gas, worth some $90 million, escapes the Boston region's delivery system. The findings have implications for other regions, especially cities that, like Boston, are older and rely on natural gas for a significant and increasing portion of their energy needs. While policymakers have focused on the production end of the natural gas supply chain--wells, off-shore drilling platforms, and processing plants--much less attention has been paid to the downstream gas delivery infrastructure.
Imagine if every time you filled your car with gas, a few gallons didn't make it into the tank and instead spilled onto the ground. That's essentially what happens every day with the aging system of underground pipes and tanks that delivers natural gas to Boston-area households and businesses, with adverse economic, public health, and environmental consequences. Now a group of atmospheric scientists at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has produced hard numbers that quantify the extent of the problem.
The Harvard-led team estimates that each year about 15 billion cubic feet of natural gas, worth some $90 million, escapes the Boston region's delivery system. They calculated that figure by placing sophisticated air monitoring equipment in four locations: two atop buildings in the heart of Boston, and two at upwind locations well outside of the city. Then they analyzed a year's worth of continuous methane measurements, used a high-resolution regional atmospheric transport model to calculate the amount of emissions, and concluded that:
Some 2.7 percent of the gas that is brought to the Boston region never makes it to customers; it escapes into the atmosphere. That is more than twice the loss rate that government regulators and utilities estimate;
Depending on the season, natural gas leaking from the local distribution system accounts for 60 percent to 100 percent of the region's emissions of methane, one of the most insidious heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
The findings have implications for other regions, especially cities that, like Boston, are older and rely on natural gas for a significant and increasing portion of their energy needs. While policymakers have focused on the production end of the natural gas supply chain--wells, off-shore drilling platforms, and processing plants--much less attention has been paid to the downstream gas delivery infrastructure. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggests that intra-city distribution and end use systems may contribute more to the nation's overall methane emissions than previously understood.
Arctic Ice Slides into the Ocean
Satellite images have revealed that a remote Arctic ice cap has thinned by more than 50 metres since 2012 – about one sixth of its original thickness – and that it is now flowing 25 times faster.
A team led by scientists from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) at the University of Leeds combined observations from eight satellite missions, including Sentinel-1A and CryoSat, with results from regional climate models, to unravel the story of ice decline.
The findings show that over the last two decades, ice loss from the south-east region of Austfonna, located in the Svalbard archipelago, has increased significantly. In this time, ice flow has accelerated to speeds of several kilometres per year, and ice thinning has spread more than 50km inland – to within 10km of the summit.
“These results provide a clear example of just how quickly ice caps can evolve, and highlight the challenges associated with making projections of their future contribution to sea level rise,” said the study’s lead author Dr Mal McMillan, a member of the CPOM team from the University of Leeds.
Atmospheric Rivers Add to Antarctica's Ice Sheets
Extreme weather phenomena called atmospheric rivers were behind intense snowstorms recorded in 2009 and 2011 in East Antarctica. The resulting snow accumulation partly offset recent ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet, report researchers from KU Leuven.
Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow water vapour plumes stretching thousands of kilometres across the sky over vast ocean areas. They are capable of rapidly transporting large amounts of moisture around the globe and can cause devastating precipitation when they hit coastal areas.
Although atmospheric rivers are notorious for their flood-inducing impact in Europe and the Americas, their importance for Earth’s polar climate – and for global sea levels – is only now coming to light.
Princess Elisabeth
In this study, an international team of researchers led by Irina Gorodetskaya of KU Leuven’s Regional Climate Studies research group used a combination of advanced modelling techniques and data collected at Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth polar research station in East Antarctica’s Dronning Maud Land to produce the first ever in-depth look at how atmospheric rivers affect precipitation in Antarctica.
Success! Private sector Soy Moratorium effective in reducing deforestation in the Amazon
Today, fewer chicken nuggets can trace their roots to cleared Amazon rain forest.
In 2006, following a report from Greenpeace and under pressure from consumers, large companies like McDonald's and Wal-Mart decided to stop using soy grown on cleared forestland in the Brazilian Amazon. This put pressure on commodity traders, such as Cargill, who in turn agreed to no longer purchase soy from farmers who cleared rain forest to expand soy fields.
The private sector agreement, a type of supply chain governance, is called the Soy Moratorium and it was intended to address the deforestation caused by soy production in the Amazon. In a new study to evaluate the agreement, published today (Jan. 22, 2015) in Science, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Holly Gibbs and colleagues across the U.S. and Brazil show that the moratorium helped to drastically reduce the amount of deforestation linked to soy production in the region and was much better at curbing it than governmental policy alone.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
BigAl: It's Getting Late
Hellraisers Journal: John Mitchell a Traitor, Is Charge of Delegate at Convention of U. M. W. of A.
Oil Dinosaurs Face Extinction: State Oil Companies and the Meteor-Strike of Low Oil Prices
Western Politicians and Media Rush To Issue Tributes To King That Led The World In Beheadings, Whipped Bloggers For Criticism & Banned Women From Driving
State of the Union 2015: Lethal, Predatory, Delusional
Truthdigger of the Week: Barrett Brown
musiccitymollie: Paul Jay, Real News Network, Interviews Chris Hedges, "How The Liberal Elites Betray Us"
Why Many Cities Aren’t Allowed to Provide the Cheap, Fast Internet Obama Wants You to Have
EPA Sued Over Disclosure Rules for Toxic Pollution From Drilling and Fracking
Nothingness and Being
joe shikspack: Sharecropping
A Little Night Music
Asleep At The Wheel - Bump, Bounce, Boogie
Asleep at the Wheel - Hot Rod Lincoln
Asleep at the Wheel - House of Blue Lights
Asleep At The Wheel - San Antonio Rose
Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel - Oh, You Pretty Woman
Vince Gill & Asleep at the Wheel - Corrina, Corrina
Asleep at the Wheel - The Other Woman
Merle Haggard & Asleep At The Wheel - I Wonder If You Feel The Way I Do
Asleep at the Wheel - Am I Right (Or Amarillo)
Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel - Whiskey River
Lyle Lovett & Asleep At The Wheel - You're From Texas
Asleep at the Wheel - Cotton Eyed Joe
Asleep at the Wheel - Way Down Texas Way
Jason Roberts & Asleep At The Wheel - Amarillo By Morning
Asleep at the Wheel - Sugar Moon
Asleep at the Wheel - Big Balls in Cow Town
Asleep At The Wheel - You Don't Know Me
Asleep at the Wheel - Boot Scootin' Boogie
Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel - Hesitation Blues
Willie and Asleep at the Wheel - Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon
Asleep at the Wheel - Keeping Me up Nights