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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 blues rocker Rory Gallagher. Enjoy!
Rory Gallagher - Out On The Western Plain
“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."
-- Gustave Flaubert
News and Opinion
Hope dashed: Obama poster artist says president is a disappointment
Shepard Fairey, whose blue and red portrait became the defining image of the 2008 campaign, says president did not live up to the hype – ‘not even close’
The man on the poster is still president. But the artist behind the poster has moved on.
Shepard Fairey, whose stencil portrait of Barack Obama with the caption “Hope” became the defining image of the 2008 presidential campaign, told Esquire magazine in an interview published on Thursday that the politician had not lived up to the propaganda.
“Not even close,” Fairey said.
“Obama has had a really tough time, but there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected. I mean, drones and domestic spying are the last things I would have thought [he’d support].”
Al Qaeda Syria Boss Says That His “So-Called Khorasan Group Doesn’t Exist”
In early September 2014, an Associated Press story quoted unnamed U.S. officials discussing an imminent threat from a previously unknown, Syria-based terror outfit called the “Khorasan Group.” U.S. officials told the AP that the jihadist group was stocked with al Qaeda veterans and was plotting imminent attacks against U.S.-bound airline flights. Officials also suggested that the level of danger posed by the group exceeded that of ISIS, the militant group which now controls much of Iraq and Syria.
Weeks later, after similarly breathless coverage of the so-called Khorasan Group from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, CBS News and others, American airstrikes against Syria commenced, including strikes that were said to have specifically targeted this shadowy new organization.
After the airstrikes had commenced, reports began to surface that no identifiable Syrian activists within the country had ever heard of such an organization. Days after the U.S. initiated military operations within Syria, it became increasingly unclear whether the “Khorasan Group” itself actually existed.
Yesterday, the head of al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria gave the clearest indication yet that the group is a fabrication. In an interview conducted with Al Jazeera Arabic, Abu Muhammad al Jolani, the head of Jabhat al Nusra, said the following:
“The so-called Khorasan group, supposedly active within our ranks, doesn’t exist. We first heard about it via the media after the U.S.-led coalition bombed us. It is merely a Western invention to justify the bombings on us. There are some brothers from Khorasan who joined our strife though.”
... None of the subsequent reports about these initial threat posed by the group has ever been substantiated. Indeed, highly-credulous reporting on the group at the time did not even do so much as discern whether the organization itself independently existed at all. The “Khorasan Group,” after helping quickly manipulate public opinion to win acceptance for yet another American war in the Middle East, simply disappeared from government statements and media reports as quickly as it first rose to prominence.
ISIS Gains Strategic Ground in Iraq and Syria
Rebels capture last Syrian town in Idlib province
The Syrian army has pulled back from the northwestern city of Ariha after a coalition of insurgent groups seized the last city in Idlib province in northwestern Syria near the Turkish border that was still held by the government.
A coalition of rebel groups called Jaish al Fateh, or Conquest Army, said it had taken over the city. Syria's al Qaeda offshoot Nusra Front is a major part of the coalition.
Obama denies the "Pottery Barn rule."
White House: US Not Responsible for Iraqi Security
In an effort that simultaneously seeks to eschew responsibility for the situation on the ground and to define certain limits on the scope of the US war, the White House today declared itself to be unwilling to be “responsible” for the security situation in Iraq.
Though press secretary Josh Earnest emphasized the growing problem of foreign fighters flowing into Iraq, he insisted the war itself, at least on the ground, was up to the Iraqi government to fight and win.
This comes irrespective of Pentagon efforts to dictate exactly where and when Iraqi forces launch offensives, and to try to push them into cooperative relationships with pro-US tribal factions.
Mosque Attack: ISIS 2nd attack in Saudi Arabia kills 4
Isis claims responsibility for second Saudi Arabia suicide bombing
Islamic State has said it carried out the deadly bombing at a Shia mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia on Friday, the second attack in the country claimed by the group in a week.
The interior ministry said four people were killed when a car exploded outside al-Anoud mosque in Dammam during noon prayers., Witnesses said a suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up in the car park when guards stopped him from entering the building. ...
Isis acknowledges it is trying to stir sectarian confrontation as a way of hastening the overthrow of the ruling Al Saud family, and has urged young Saudi Sunnis in the kingdom to attack targets including Shia.
Cuba removed from US terror list
The Obama administration on Friday formally removed Cuba from a U.S. terrorism blacklist as part of the process of normalizing relations between the Cold War foes.
Secretary of State John Kerry signed off on rescinding Cuba's "state sponsor of terrorism" designation exactly 45 days after the Obama administration informed Congress of its intent to do so on April 14. Lawmakers had that amount of time to weigh in and try to block the move, but did not do so.
"The 45-day congressional pre-notification period has expired, and the secretary of state has made the final decision to rescind Cuba's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, effective today, May 29, 2015," the State Department said in a statement.
"While the United States has significant concerns and disagreements with a wide range of Cuba's policies and actions, these fall outside the criteria relevant to the rescission of a state sponsor of terrorism designation," the statement said.
Inside NSA, Officials Privately Criticize “Collect It All” Surveillance
As members of Congress struggle to agree on which surveillance programs to re-authorize before the Patriot Act expires, they might consider the unusual advice of an intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency who warned about the danger of collecting too much data. Imagine, the analyst wrote in a leaked document, that you are standing in a shopping aisle trying to decide between jam, jelly or fruit spread, which size, sugar-free or not, generic or Smucker’s. It can be paralyzing.
“We in the agency are at risk of a similar, collective paralysis in the face of a dizzying array of choices every single day,” the analyst wrote in 2011. “’Analysis paralysis’ isn’t only a cute rhyme. It’s the term for what happens when you spend so much time analyzing a situation that you ultimately stymie any outcome …. It’s what happens in SIGINT [signals intelligence] when we have access to endless possibilities, but we struggle to prioritize, narrow, and exploit the best ones.”
The document is one of about a dozen in which NSA intelligence experts express concerns usually heard from the agency’s critics: that the U.S. government’s “collect it all” strategy can undermine the effort to fight terrorism. The documents, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, appear to contradict years of statements from senior officials who have claimed that pervasive surveillance of global communications helps the government identify terrorists before they strike or quickly find them after an attack.
The Patriot Act, portions of which expire on Sunday, has been used since 2001 to conduct a number of dragnet surveillance programs, including the bulk collection of phone metadata from American companies. But the documents suggest that analysts at the NSA have drowned in data since 9/11, making it more difficult for them to find the real threats.
Loretta Lynch Joins Obama Administration Fearmongering Over Encryption
Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Wednesday expressed “grave concerns” about how encryption is hampering law enforcement, joining the ranks of Obama administration officials who are trying to make a crucial feature of the Internet seem like something nefarious.
“We are seeing many more people involved in terrorism investigations using peer to peer communications, specifically encrypted communications—communications that are designed to disappear once they are sent,” Lynch said in response to a reporter’s question at a press conference that was otherwise mostly about the indictments of FIFA soccer officials. ...
But Alison Macrina, the founder of the Library Freedom Project, which focuses on training librarians around the country to utilize encryption tools, told The Intercept that Lynch and Comey were “fearmongering,” and ignoring how vitally important secure communication is to a variety of people not engaged in wrongdoing.
“Strong encryption tools are vital if people are to use the web safely, and the users who rely on encryption are from all walks of life—journalists, students, small business owners, activists and even law enforcement,” Macrina noted.
She added that focusing strictly on bad actors to make a case against encryption is, “like saying you want to ban roads because some people use them to drive drunk—ignoring the majority of people who use them to drive their cars their cars to work, or ride their bikes to school.”
U.N. Report Asserts Encryption as a Human Right in the Digital Age
Encryption is not the refuge of scoundrels, as Obama administration law-enforcement officials loudly proclaim – it is an essential tool needed to protect the right of freedom of opinion and expression in the digital age, a new United Nations report concludes.
Encryption that makes a communication unintelligible to anyone but the intended recipient creates “a zone of privacy to protect opinion and belief,” says the report from David Kaye, who as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression is essentially the U.N.’s free speech watchdog.
The significance of encryption extends well beyond political speech, Kaye writes. “The ability to search the web, develop ideas and communicate securely may be the only way in which many can explore basic aspects of identity, such as one’s gender, religion, ethnicity, national origin or sexuality.”
Encryption, like anonymity, is essential to artists, journalists, whistleblowers, and many other classes of people, the report says.
And far from banning or weakening encryption, governments should embrace and strengthen it, Kaye writes. He specifically urges the U.S. Congress to “prohibit the Government from requiring companies to weaken product security or insert back-door access measures.”
Big data is coming for your purchase history - to charge you more money
Unprotected consumer data will allow price personalization by companies who know how much you need something and how much you can manage pay
A study by Benjamin Reed Shiller, an economist at Brandeis University looked at what happened to Netflix’s profits when it collected varying degrees of information about its customers and charged different prices for the same product. Just having basic demographic information alone to charge different prices increased profits 0.14%, while adding data from web browsing history increased profits by 1.4%, with some customers paying twice as much as others for the exact same product.
The goal is to get to a market of one. One-to-one selling pits each individual against a far more knowledgeable and sophisticated seller. Instead of standard prices and products offered to everyone, companies can instantly set prices specifically for you. In the right circumstances, a company that knows how much you need something and how much you can manage to pay can empty your wallet in a millisecond. ...
Before the internet, market power was equated with monopoly, the power of a single seller across a large market. Big data changes the game, tilting the balance dramatically in favor of data-rich sellers. Rather than raising prices uniformly across huge markets, a data-rich seller can opportunistically exercise power where traditional monopoly is not visible, charging extra for gas today and a bit more for a movie tomorrow. That granular capability is entirely new, and requires new responses.
That’s why antitrust enforcement has become more important than ever as big data supercharges the power of traditional monopolies. Consumers are just as vulnerable to the effects of personalized pricing as they are to price fixing - yet the government has done little to put safeguards in place. That’s why we must start with protecting the very weapon that companies use against us: our data.
Greece in Suspended Animation
U.S. warns G7 of global economy 'accident' without Greece deal
The United States warned on Friday of a possible accident for the world economy if Greece and its creditors miss their June deadlines to avert a debt default.
Germany said there was no sign of a breakthrough.
With Athens struggling to make repayments due next month, the debt stand-off between Greece and its European Union partners overshadowed a meeting of policymakers from the Group of Seven rich nations otherwise held to focus on ways to get the global economy growing strongly again.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew repeated warnings not to minimize the global stability risk of Greece sliding out of the euro zone, even if most of its debt is no longer held by commercial banks.
"There is great uncertainty in there at a time when the world needs greater stability and certainty," Lew told reporters after the G7 meetings.
The vultures are hungry and demand to be fed.
G-7 Weighs In on Greece as Government Told to Be Serious
Germany and France told Greece to get serious about striking a deal on rescue aid, as ministers from the world’s biggest economies urged a resolution of the crisis to stop it from spilling beyond Europe’s borders.
Delegates at a meeting of Group of Seven finance chiefs in Dresden, Germany, diverged from the main program to push back against Greek claims that an agreement is near and called for stronger efforts to resolve the standoff. The gathering in a former palace brings together Greece’s three creditor institutions as well as Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who chairs meetings of his euro-area colleagues. ...
European officials lined up to rebuff Greek claims on Wednesday that the country will start drafting an accord, and that a deal is close with the European Central Bank, European Commission and IMF. ...
President Barack Obama’s administration stepped up pressure on officials to work out a compromise.
“Brinkmanship is a dangerous thing, when it only takes one accident” U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob L. Lew said in London on Wednesday before traveling to Germany. “Everyone has to double down and treat the next deadline as the last deadline.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Lew spoke to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras for the second time in less than a week, in a sign of deepening global concern over the standoff.
The US and China can avoid a collision course – if the US gives up its empire
The problem isn’t China’s rise, but rather America’s insistence on maintaining military and economic dominance right in China’s backyard
Americans fear that China’s rapid economic growth will slowly translate into a more expansive and assertive foreign policy that will inevitably result in a war with the US. Harvard Professor Graham Allison has found: “in 12 of 16 cases in the past 500 years when a rising power challenged a ruling power, the outcome was war.” Chicago University scholar John Mearsheimer has bluntly argued: “China cannot rise peacefully.”
But the apparently looming conflict between the US and China is not because of China’s rise per se, but rather because the US insists on maintaining military and economic dominance among China’s neighbors. Although Americans like to think of their massive overseas military presence as a benign force that’s inherently stabilizing, Beijing certainly doesn’t see it that way. ...
Leaving aside caricatured debates about which nation should get to wave the big “Number 1” foam finger, it’s worth asking whether having 50,000 US troops permanently stationed in Japan actually serves US interests and what benefits we derive from keeping almost 30,000 US troops in South Korea and whether Americans will be any safer if the Obama administration manages to reestablish a US military presence in the Philippines to counter China’s maritime territorial claims in the South China Sea. ...
International relations theorist Robert Jervis has written that “the pursuit of primacy was what great power politics was all about in the past” but that, in a world of nuclear weapons with “low security threats and great common interests among the developed countries”, primacy does not have the strategic or economic benefits it once had. ...
The struggle for military and economic primacy in Asia is not really about our core national security interests; rather, it’s about preserving status, prestige and America’s neurotic image of itself. Those are pretty dumb reasons to risk war.
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Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature continuing coverage from the Appeal to Reason of John D's Go-Round with Frank P Walsh, Chairman of the Commission on Industrial Relations.
Tune in at 2pm!
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US economy shrinks 0.7% in first quarter as strong dollar eats into growth
A harsh winter, a strong dollar and falling oil prices took their toll on the US economy in the first quarter, the Commerce Department revealed on Friday.
US gross domestic product (GDP) – the broadest measure of economic growth – shrank at an annualized rate of 0.7%. The Commerce Department had previously estimated output grew 0.2% from January through March. ...
Business investment fell at a 2.8% pace and exports declined 7.6%, hurt by the strength of the dollar.
EU-US trade deal as dodgy as TPP?
The Evening Greens
Obama's Arctic drilling tweets alarm environmentalists
Environmental groups were baffled on Thursday after President Barack Obama wrote a series of seemingly misleading tweets justifying Royal Dutch Shell being allowed back into the US Arctic for exploration and drilling.
Two weeks ago, the Obama administration gave Shell the go-ahead to restart drilling in the region despite repeated warnings from environmentalists that it could very probably lead to an ecological disaster as well as a finding in one of the government’s own reports that the likelihood of a spill in the next 77 years was as high as 75%. ...
Obama, using his recently acquired @POTUS Twitter handle, answered a question posed to him: “Why are you allowing oil drilling in the Arctic if you are concerned about climate change?”
The president’s response was issued in three parts.
Addressing the claim that oil exploration could not be entirely prevented in the region, Cassady Sharp with Greenpeace said oil exploration in the US Arctic could be halted, and that the person who could halt it was the president himself.
“He has the power as the executive branch,” Sharp said, adding Obama had not shied away from executive action in other fields.
“He is skirting around the issue, making it look like the decision [to allow Shell into the US Arctic for drilling] is not in his hands, when it is.”
Globs of tar wash ashore, closing popular Los Angeles beaches
Popular beaches along nearly seven miles (11 kilometres) of Los Angeles-area coastline were off-limits to surfing and swimming on Thursday as scientists looked for the source of globs of tar that washed ashore.
The sand and surf on south Santa Monica bay appeared virtually free of oil after an overnight clean-up, but officials weren’t sure if more tar would show up. They planned to assess during low tide at midday. ...
US Coast Guard and state officials said samples of tar and water would be analysed to identify where it originated, but it could take days to get the results. Nothing has been ruled out, including last week’s coastal oil spill that created a 10-square-mile (26-sq km) slick about 100 miles (160km) to the north-west, off the Santa Barbara County coast.
The Future of Crude in the Texas of the North
Oil lobby group recruited Canadian minister for secret strategy meeting
An oil industry lobby group successfully recruited a Canadian cabinet minister to deliver a pep talk and dispense strategic planning advice at a closed door meeting in a luxury Rocky Mountains resort, the Guardian has learned.
In the 21 October 2014 session, Greg Rickford, the natural resources minister, urged the 40 to 50 assembled executives to work harder to spread the oil industry’s message.
“You are fighting an uphill battle for public confidence,” he said. “Our messages are not resonating.”
The 2,900-word prepared speech makes no mention of climate change or the conclusions of studies that say most of the tar sands will have to stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic global warming.
Instead, Rickford commiserated with the executives about criticism of tar sands oil, suggesting it was misguided.
“Much of the debate over energy is characterized by myth or emotion,” he said, accusing scientists and campaigners of “crowding out the real facts”.
“You’ve heard them all: that the oil sands are a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
A copy of Rickford’s speech and briefing notes were obtained under a freedom of information request by the Greenpeace campaign group and made available to the Guardian. ... Greenpeace said the speech exhibited the overly close relationship between government and industry.
Saudi Arabia Says It's Ditching Fossil Fuels — Kinda
Saudi Arabia seems to see the writing on the wall when it comes to climate change, but experts think the Kingdom's oil exports are too profitable for it to ever abandon the fossil fuel industry entirely.
In comments to a recent gathering of business and political leaders in Paris, Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, suggested that his nation would phase out domestic consumption of fossil fuels by the middle of the century. He also declared that Saudi Arabia would become a major producer of wind and energy power in the near future.
"In Saudi Arabia, we recognize that eventually, one of these days, we are not going to need fossil fuels. I don't know when, in 2040, 2050, or thereafter," al-Naimi said. Because of this phase out, he continued, the Kingdom planned to become a "global power in solar and wind energy" that relied on renewable sources for its energy needs.
About a quarter of the 10 million barrels Saudi Arabia produces everyday are used within the country, and the number is growing. A 2012 study by Citigroup suggested if domestic demand stays constant, it could be a net importer of oil by 2030. The minister's comments might be an expression of the Kingdom's hope to reduce and eventually eliminate domestic oil consumption. ...
Edgar van der Meer, a senior analyst at NRG Expert, suggested that Saudi Arabia wanted to increase its domestic use of renewable fuels because oil consumed internally represents lost revenue that could be generated from exports.
"Any domestic consumption is an opportunity cost for Saudi Arabia which is why the focus will shift to domestic consumption of alternate and renewable energy, to protect the revenue stream of oil exports to other countries," he told VICE News.
As GOP Candidates Question Climate Change, Texas & Oklahoma Hit by Devastating Floods Killing 23
Emails Reveal Dairy Lobbyist Crafted “Ag-Gag” Legislation Outlawing Pictures of Farms
Across the country, legislatures are responding to whistleblowers and activists who have exposed inhumane and at times unsanitary practices at farms by passing laws that criminalize the taking of photos or videos at agricultural facilities.
Farming interests have publicly backed the campaign to outlaw recording. But emails I obtained through a records request reveal that in Idaho, which passed an “ag-gag” law last year, dairy industry lobbyists actually crafted the legislation that was later introduced by lawmakers.
State Sen. Jim Patrick, R-Twin Falls, said he sponsored the bill in response to an activist-filmed undercover video that showed cows at an Idaho plant being beaten by workers, dragged by the neck with chains, and forced to live in pens covered in feces, which activists said made the cows slip, fall and injure themselves. The facility, Bettencourt Dairies, is a major supplier for Burger King and Kraft. The workers who were filmed were fired. ...
Patrick’s bill was introduced on February 10, 2014, sailed through committee within days, and was signed by Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter on February 28. The legislation calls for a year in jail and fines up to $5,000 for covertly recording abuses on farms or for those who lie on employment applications about ties to animal rights groups or news organizations.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Legendary Journalist in Private: “It Is All Fraudulent, All of It, Everywhere”
Resurgence of the ‘Surge’ Myth
Critics Blast 'Compromises' as Patriot Act Barrels Toward Sunset
What a Real Anti-Poverty Movement Looks Like
Hat tip dharmasyd:
Washington’s “Two Track Policy” to Latin America: Marines to Central America and Diplomats to Cuba
“The Fire This Time: Black Youth and the Spectacle of Postracial Violence,” by Henry A. Giroux
May 29, 1932 - Bonus Army arrives in D.C.
Blackout Congress by Fight for the Future
Climate change conferences sponsored by fossil fuel interests.
Squared Away
A Little Night Music
Rory Gallagher - Too Much Alcohol
Rory Gallagher - Want Ad Blues
Rory Gallagher - Messin with the kid
Rory Gallagher - Bullfrog Blues
Rory Gallagher - Pistol Slapper Blues
Rory Gallagher - Off The Handle
Rory Gallagher - Going To My Hometown
Rory Gallagher - Walk On Hot Coals
Rory Gallagher - Tore Down
Rory Gallagher - Bring It On Home To Me
Rory Gallagher - Walkin' Blues
Rory Gallagher - The beat club sessions 1971-72
