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 Chicago bluesman Little Smokey Smothers. Enjoy!
Little Smokey Smothers - You Don't Love Me
“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
News and Opinion
The careless, astonishing cruelty of Barack Obama’s government
Let me introduce you to the world’s most powerful terrorist recruiting sergeant: a US federal agency called the office of the comptroller of the currency. Its decision to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in one of the poorest, most troubled places on Earth could resonate around the world for decades.
Last Friday, after the OCC had sent it a cease-and-desist order, the last bank in the United States still processing money transfers to Somalia closed its service. The agency, which reports to the US treasury, reasoned that some of this money might find its way into the hands of the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. It’s true that some of it might, just as some resources in any nation will find their way into the hands of criminals (ask HSBC). So why don’t we shut down the phone networks to hamper terrorism? Why don’t we ban agriculture in case fertiliser is used to make explosives? Why don’t we stop all the clocks to prevent armed gangs from planning their next atrocity?
Ridiculous? In fact it’s not far off. Remittances from the Somalian diaspora amount to $1.2bn-$1.6bn a year, which is roughly 50% of the country’s gross national income, and on which 40% of the population relies for survival. Over the past 10 years the money known to have been transferred to suspected terrorists in Somalia amounts to a few thousand dollars. Cutting off remittances is likely to kill more people than terrorists will ever manage.
Compare this pointless destruction with the US government’s continued licensing of HSBC. In 2012 the bank was condemned by a Senate committee for circumventing safeguards “designed to block transactions involving terrorists, drug lords, and rogue regimes”. It processed billions of dollars for Mexican drug barons, and provided services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked with the financing of terrorists. But there was no criminal prosecution because, the attorney general’s office argued, too many jobs were at stake. The outrageous practices revealed this week will doubtless be treated with the same leniency.
So in order to protect American jobs, the US government fails to take action over the illegal transfer of billions of dollars, while sentencing people in the Horn of Africa to death because of the illegal transfer of a few thousand. There is a word for these double standards: racism.
The U.S. Media and the 13-Year-Old Yemeni Boy Burned to Death Last Month by a U.S. Drone
The U.S. media just got done deluging the American public with mournful stories about the Jordanian soldier, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, making him a household name. As is often the case for victims of America’s adversaries, the victim is intensely humanized. The public learns all sorts of details about their lives, hears from their grieving family members, wallows in the tragedy of their death.
By stark contrast, I’d be willing to bet that the name “Mohammed Tuaiman al-Jahmi” is never uttered on mainstream American television. Most Americans, by design, will have no idea that their government just burned a 13-year-old boy to death and then claimed he was a Terrorist. If they do know, the boy will be kept hidden, dehumanized, nameless, without the aspirations or dreams or grieving parents on display for victims of America’s adversaries (just as Americans were swamped with stories about an Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran for two months, Roxana Saberi, while having no idea that their own government imprisoned an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami al-Haj, in Guantanamo for seven years without charges).
It’s worth considering the extreme propaganda impact that disparity has, the way in which the U.S. media is so eagerly complicit in sustaining ongoing American militarism and violence by disappearing victims of U.S. violence while endlessly heralding the victims of its adversaries. ...
In 2009, the U.S. got caught using cluster bombs in Yemen in an attack that slaughtered 35 women and children. Obama then successfully demanded that the Yemeni journalist who proved that the attack was from the U.S., Abdulelah Haider Shaye, be imprisoned for years. In December, 2013, a U.S. drone strike killed 12 people as they traveled to a wedding.
What’s confounding and irrational and inscrutable isn’t that people react by turning to “radicalism” and violence. It’s that many journalists and officials in western nations seem to think that they can go around for decades invading, occupying, imprisoning without charges and dropping bombs on multiple other countries around the world, regularly killing innocents, including children, and then act shocked and surprised when people in those countries, or who identify with them, want to bring violence back in return. That is a sentiment grounded in deep irrationality, blind nationalism, and primitive tribalism.
Isis war to extend far beyond Iraq and Syria under Obama's proposed plan
Sources say White House plan will bless anti-Isis war for three years and ensure that Obama, like George W Bush, will hand over two wars to his successor
Barack Obama’s proposed framework for the US-led war against the Islamic State will not restrict the battlefield to Iraq and Syria, multiple congressional sources said on Tuesday, placing the US into a second simultaneous global war that will outlast his presidency.
Several congressional sources familiar with the outlines of the proposal, all of whom expected the White House to formally unveil it on Wednesday, told the Guardian the so-called Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) would bless the anti-Isis war for three years.
Congressional language to retroactively justify the six-month-old US war against Isis will not, they said, scrap the broad 9/11-era authorities against al-Qaida, as some congressional Democrats had proposed, meaning the two war authorizations will coexist.
Asked if the anti-Isis AUMF opens the US to a second worldwide war against a nebulous adversary, one congressional aide answered: “Absolutely.”
Two legislative aides with knowledge of the outlines of the White House proposal said the new AUMF would clarify that the 2001 authority, which Obama has cited to justify everything from drone strikes in Yemen to detaining Taliban combatants beyond the end of US combat in Afghanistan, will no longer apply to the war against Isis.
'Truth always has a way of coming out' - CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou
'Deeply Unsettling': Allegation of Translator Link to CIA Torture Site Halts 9/11 Hearing
The pre-trial hearing for five men suspected of plotting the September 11 attacks was suspended on Monday after two of the men said that a courtroom interpreter was also present at a CIA "black site" where they were tortured.
Amnesty International said the incident marked "just the latest in a string of serious incidents that have marked the inherently unfair military commission process at Guantánamo Bay."
According to media reports, the allegation first came from 42-year-old Ramzi bin al Shibh, who told presiding judge Col. James Pohl soon into the hearing taking place at the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, "I cannot trust [the interpreter] because he was working at the black site with the CIA and we know him from there."
Carol Rosenberg reported for the Miami Herald:
Attorney Cheryl Bormann for another alleged plotter, Walid bin Attash, 36, told the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, that her client “was visibly shaken” at recognizing a man in the maximum-security war court from Bin Attash’s “illegal torture.”
She said it was either “the biggest coincidence ever” or “part of the pattern of the infiltration of defense teams.” Monday’s hearing was supposed to start with a presentation by a Justice Department lawyer, Fernando Campoamor-Sanchez, on FBI agents secretly questioning members of the Bin al Shibh defense team, which the Sept. 11 defense teams have called spying on privileged attorney-client conversations.
CNN, which saw a transcript of the proceedings, reports that Bormann also told Pohl that her client said that "there is somebody in this courtroom who was participating in his illegal torture."
Three Muslim Students Shot Dead in North Carolina
Three Muslim students were shot dead in an apartment near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus on Tuesday night.
A 46-year-old man called Craig Hicks later turned himself into the police and he has since been charged with first-degree murder. ...
The victims have been named as Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, Yusor Mohammad, 21, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19. Barakat was a second-year student in the School of Dentistry, according to a statement from the university. Mohammad was his wife, due to begin dental studies in the coming academic year. Abu-Salha was Mohammad's sister, and was a student at North Carolina State University.
Barakat was involved in raising money to provide dental care to Syrian refugees, and was planning to travel to Rihaniya, Turkey, in the coming summer.
Alongside Grief, Questions of Motive Follow Slaying of Muslim Family
The Chapel Hill Police Department has released a preliminary statementon Wednesday morning regarding the progress of their investigation into the killing of three local residents on Tuesday. The statement confirmed that the suspect in the shooting, identified as Craig Stephen Hicks, remains in police custody and has so far been cooperative with investigators. The police update continues:
Our preliminary investigation indicates that the crime was motivated by an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking. Hicks is cooperating with investigators and more information may be released at a later time.
“Our investigators are exploring what could have motivated Mr. Hicks to commit such a senseless and tragic act. We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case. Our thoughts are with the families and friends of these young people who lost their lives so needlessly,” said Chief Chris Blue of the Chapel Hill Police Department.
Obama’s Christian Right Critics Agree with Islamic State
In the furor over President Obama’s remarks last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he compared the rise of the Islamic State with the history of Christian extremism, it’s been lost that the president was carefully retreating from the idea that the U.S. is engaged in a grand civilizational war against Islam — a longstanding fallacy which many American politicians are apparently loath to abandon.
After the September 11th attacks in New York and Washington DC, then-President Bush made a memorable rhetorical choice to invoke the Crusades when describing the scope and nature of the coming American military response. ... American officials have continued in Bush’s tradition of defining the U.S. conflict with extremist Middle Eastern groups as a grand civilizational and religious battle, thus playing in to the same sharply polarizing narrative those groups seek to promote.
In the immediate aftermath of Bush’s declaration of a new crusade, Osama bin Laden himself cited Bush’s words in an interview as proof that America was a broadly hostile civilization planning to establish hegemony over the Middle East. Today, both Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine and Al Qaeda’s Inspire have regular sections devoted in part to publishing similarly helpful quotes from hostile Western officials.
Iraq Yazidis Launch Revenge Killings Against Arabs After ISIS Ouster
During many months of fighting over the territory around Sinjar, Iraq’s Yazidi minority has been seen as long-suffering victims. Since the ouster of ISIS by Kurdish forces, however, they too are turning on their neighbors. ...
Now with ISIS gone, Yazidis are turning their sights on their Arab neighbors, raiding their villages, killing some and trying to drive others away. The goal appears to be ethnic cleansing of the region.
Los indignados to Podemos, The Making of a Party (2/2)
NSA Claims Iran Learned from Western Cyberattacks
The U.S. Government often warns of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from adversaries, but it may have actually contributed to those capabilities in the case of Iran.
A top secret National Security Agency document from April 2013 reveals that the U.S. intelligence community is worried that the West’s campaign of aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks enabled Iran to improve its own capabilities by studying and then replicating those tactics.
The NSA is specifically concerned that Iran’s cyberweapons will become increasingly potent and sophisticated by virtue of learning from the attacks that have been launched against that country. “Iran’s destructive cyber attack against Saudi Aramco in August 2012, during which data was destroyed on tens of thousands of computers, was the first such attack NSA has observed from this adversary,” the NSA document states. “Iran, having been a victim of a similar cyber attack against its own oil industry in April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others.” ...
In June 2012, The New York Times reported that from “his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.” As part of that plan, the U.S. and Israel jointly unleashed the Stuxnet virus on Iranian nuclear facilities, but a programming error “allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet.” Israel also deployed a second virus, called Flame, against Iran.
Obama ordered cyberattacks despite his awareness that they would likely unleash a wholly new form of warfare between states, similar to the “first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade,” according to the Times report. Obama “repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons—even under the most careful and limited circumstances—could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.”
John Kerry - replaced by neocon robot, or just an asshat?
When would an anti-war activist back arms sales? When he's secretary of state
Secretary of State John Kerry has to be the worst anti-war activist in recorded history. Is there a military action - save one - that he hasn’t supported since he came to national prominence as an anti-war activist in the early 1970s? In the the past decade and a half alone, he’s voted for the war in Iraq, strongly defended drone strikes, was the chief advocate for the bombing of Syria in 2013, and was by far the most hyperbolic cabinet member calling for a years-long, multi-country war against ISIS.
And now Kerry has been privately telling lawmakers that he supports the US entering into a proxy-war against Russia by sending lethal weaponry to the Ukrainian military, even though the Obama administration supposedly does not yet have an official position.
German Chancellor in Washington Seeking a Negotiated Solution in Ukraine
East Ukraine in grip of heavy fighting as leaders prepare for Minsk talks
Intensive fighting has continued in eastern Ukraine with more than 20 people killed as government forces and pro-Russian rebels jockey for position ahead of planned peace talks in Minsk.
The summit in the Belarus capital is the climax of a frantic diplomatic push by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, François Hollande, to prevent the crisis from escalating further. Ten months of conflict have already claimed more than 5,400 lives.
For the first time since October, the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, is expected to come face-to-face with Vladimir Putin – whom Kiev and its western allies accuse of masterminding a pro-Russia rebellion.
Laurent Fabius, France’s foreign minister, said early on Wednesday that “quite a number of problems remain” in negotiations, including the future of eastern Ukraine, guarantees about the Ukraine-Russia border, and the prospects of a possible ceasefire, weapons pullback and prisoner exchange.
Fabius said the aim of the talks is to win an accord, but “not just one on paper”.
Poroshenko said on Wednesday that Ukraine was prepared to introduce martial law across the country if the separatist conflict continues to escalate, news agency Interfax reported.
Obama Calls Putin to Threaten Him Over Ukraine ‘Aggression’
Preparing to head to Belarus for ceasefire talks, Russian President Vladimir Putin had to take a call from President Obama, who threatened to impose “greater costs” on him over his “aggression” in the Ukraine. ...
The claims of “aggression” ring incredibly hollow, as Putin is the one working with France and Germany in Minsk to try to get a new Ukraine ceasefire in place, while the Obama Administration has refused to attend and is talking about escalating the conflict with arms shipments to the Ukrainian military.
The US and Britain have both repeatedly gone on the record as wanting the Ukrainian civil war to end, but only on their terms, which is an unconditional surrender of the rebels. Since the rebels have gained ground and Russia, France, and Germany are trying to negotiate a settlement, the US and Britain are trying to forestall the ceasefire, hoping they can shift the war in Ukraine’s favor enough that total surrender becomes possible.
After Months of Protest, NYPD Officer Charged for Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Black Man Akai Gurley
NYPD officer indicted over fatal shooting of Akai Gurley, lawyer says
An NYPD officer who shot and killed Akai Gurley, an unarmed 28-year-old black man, in Brooklyn last year has been indicted, according to a lawyer for Gurley’s family.
Scott Rynecki, who is representing Gurley’s partner Kimberly Ballinger, told the Guardian that NYPD officer Peter Liang will be arraigned in court at 2pm on Wednesday.
The Policemen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), a union representing rank and file NYPD officers, confirmed they had been notified by the district attorney’s office of the indictment. Laing will have PBA representatives with him at his arraignment on Wednesday, a spokesperson for the union confirmed.
The nature of the charges is unclear at present. Ken Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney who convened a grand jury following his department’s investigation into the death, said in a statement that he would not comment on the matter until after Wednesday’s arraignment. He said the grand jury decision will remained sealed.
Gurley was shot dead in November as he descended the darkened stairwell of a block in the Louis Pink Houses project in East New York. Police maintain that Liang fired accidentally. But community members and local politicians have asked why the officer was patrolling the project with his gun unholstered. ...
The New York City police commissioner, Bill Bratton, said on the day after Gurley’s death that Liang’s firearm discharged accidentally during his patrol. Reports suggested that Liang contacted his police union straight after the shooting, before radioing for medical assistance.
The Graduation Gap Between White and Black Students Is Widening in the US
The gap between high school graduation rates of young black men and young white men is widening in the US, adding to a trend that highlights the growing disparity of education attainment levels across the country, according to new report by an education group.
The Schott Foundation for Public Education released its 2015 report on black males and education on Wednesday, which showed that while graduation rates on the whole are on the rise across the US, only 59 percent of young black men will graduate compared with 65 percent of Latino and 80 percent of white, non-Hispanic males across 50 states in the 2012-13 school year. ...
The foundation, which has collected data on graduation in public schools since 2004, said that their most recent report indicates the gap between black and white males has widened to 21 percent — up from 19 percent since the 2012 report.
As Study Finds 4,000 Lynchings in Jim Crow South, Will U.S. Address Legacy of Racial Terrorism?
Loretta Lynch fumbled on HSBC years ago. Is Lynch the right person for the Attorney General job?
As US senators move towards confirming Loretta Lynch as the new attorney general, the big question is what she will do about HSBC, which is embroiled in a massive tax evasion scandal. The world’s second-largest bank allegedly enabled thousands of Americans and other nationals to escape taxes by concealing their assets in HSBC’s Swiss affiliate, a business HSBC acquired when it purchased the Republic National Bank of New York.
Lynch has investigated the bank in the past, but there are many questions about her record on taking Wall Street offenders to task. She became the chief attorney for an ongoing probe into HSBC’s money laundering crimes in 2010, during her assignment as the US attorney for the eastern district of New York. At roughly the same time, the US government received a damning trove of evidence from French officials against HSBC regarding tax evasion.
Yet it is not clear whether she investigated the tax fraud. The key questions senators must ask is: What did Lynch know about the tax fraud? If she wasn’t aware, why not?
Lynch’s investigation did result in a December 2012 deferred prosecution agreement, which is a half-measure in criminal cases, somewhere between a conviction and exoneration. In this agreement, HSBC admitted to massive money laundering violations for narco-traffickers, terrorists and tyrants. This involved more than $200tn in wire transfers. But Lynch did not bring criminal charges against HSBC or any HSBC executives for this admitted money laundering. ...
As attorney general, Lynch will own all the cases from here on out. And she will be especially responsible for explaining what has happened with HSBC.
Illinois Governor Moves to Weaken State Unions
Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s War on Workers
Bruce Rauner’s campaign for governor of Illinois hit a rough spot when it was revealed that he was talking about lowering the minimum wage. ...
So Rauner backtracked, declaring that he was being “flippant” and that he was actually interested in increasing wages. ... The flip-flop worked. Rauner was elected governor last November. ...
Last week, Rauner was talking up the idea of letting Illinois cities and counties reject the state’s labor laws and implement local “right-to-work zones,” where new rules could make it harder for unions to organize and effectively bargain for pay and benefit hikes.
This week, Rauner has moved unilaterally to overturn long-established models for collecting dues from state workers who are represented by public-employee unions. The governor claims that asking workers to pay their fair share for union representation violates the US Constitution ...
It appears that the governor’s ultimate goal is to spark a legal battle, which he hopes will lead to an anti-labor intervention by the activist majority on the US Supreme Court.
No one doubts that Rauner will pursue that legal fight aggressively. As a Chicago Sun-Times column put it: “Governor Bruce Rauner fired his first shot Monday in his campaign to give all Illinois workers the right to choose to work for less money.”
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature a review of the whereabouts of doings of Mother Jones from the fall of 1903 to February 1905, part II.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Bad Apples: One Company's Stranglehold on the American Education System
Pearson Education, the British-owned, for-profit education publishing and high-stakes testing service, rakes in tens of millions in profits at all levels of the American education system—"even when its results don't measure up," a Politico investigation has revealed. ...
"The story of Pearson’s rise is very much a story about America’s obsession with education reform over the past few decades," writes journalist Stephanie Simon, who scoured hundreds of pages of contracts, business plans and email exchanges, as well as tax filings, lobbying reports, and marketing materials, to offer the first comprehensive look at Pearson's business practices in the United States. ...
The education behemoth writes textbooks, workbooks, and standardized tests "that drive instruction in public schools across the nation," says Simon. It has developed myriad educational technology products, including software that grades student essays, tracks student behavior, and diagnoses—and allegedly "treats"—attention deficit disorder. At the other end of the pipeline, the company administers teacher licensing exams and coaches teachers once they're in the classroom.
Beyond that, Pearson operates a network of three dozen online public schools and co-owns the for-profit company that now administers the GED. In addition, it sells interactive tutorials for college courses on subjects from algebra to philosophy and builds online degree programs for higher education clients including George Washington University, Arizona State University, and Texas A&M. ...
In other words, Simon writes: "Pearson wields enormous influence over American education."
A Look at the Greek PM Tsipras' First Address to Parliament
Greece set for eurozone showdown
Greece’s Yanis Varoufakis heads for showdown talks with his fellow eurozone finance ministers on Wednesday afternoon, buoyed by a strong endorsement from parliament for the government’s hardline stance to renegotiate its bailout.
Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister, told MPs after they passed a vote of confidence in his legislative programme in the early hours of Wednesday that the government would not yield to demands from other European capitals over its aid programme “no matter how much” Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, demanded it.
“We are not negotiating the bailout; it was cancelled by its own failure,” he told parliament before winning the vote with the support of 162 members in the 300-seat chamber. ...
On Tuesday, Mr Schäuble appeared to dismiss out of hand the Greek government’s plans to seek a bridging loan, issue new short-term debt that would breach an existing €15bn ceiling and renegotiate some terms of the €172bn bailout. He said he expected Athens to live up to the terms of the existing deal before he would consider new proposals.
The Evening Greens
Wildfires Could Spread Chernobyl's Radioactive Material
Nearly three decades after the explosion at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the area is long devoid of permanent residents. But as much as nine percent of the radioactive cesium released into the air following the explosion remains in the soils and vegetation surrounding the decommissioned plant. Forest fires frequently break out and climate change could mean they become more frequent and more intense.
Those fires could release radioactive material into the atmosphere, which could pose health risks to humans living far beyond the contaminated zone, according to a new study published in the journal Ecological Monographs.
"In places like Chernobyl and now in Fukushima, we need to prepare for the possibility of these catastrophic fires," Tim Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, Columbia and co-author on the study, told VICE News. "And we need to invest in proper management of these areas so they don't go up in smoke."
The original disaster released radioactive cesium, which the researchers used because it's easy to measure, along with other radioactive elements including strontium and plutonium. Though much of the material has disappeared due to radioactive decay, what remains is dispersed in the soil and water, which is sucked up by growing trees and distributed throughout their leaf systems.
Dead, fallen leaves on the ground are a prime fuel for forest fires. In previous papers, the researchers discovered that leaves contaminated with radiation did not decompose as quickly as uncontaminated leaves, leading to greater buildup of leaf litter on the forest floor. ...
A fire consuming the leaves vaporizes the radioactive material, and its heat causes the vapors to rise into the atmosphere. Once there, the vapors travel on the air until they fall or are brought to the ground with rain.
Federal Campaign to Save Monarch Fails to Address Root Cause of Decline
A $3.2 million campaign to save the imperiled monarch butterfly, announced Monday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), fails to address the root cause of its decline and therefore does not go far enough to save the iconic species, says the Center for Food Safety.
The Center, which last week released a report detailing the significant impact recent agricultural practices—specifically Monsanto's Roundup Ready crop system—have had on monarch habitat, has called for the pollinator to be protected under the Endangered Species Act.
The butterfly's decline has been linked to the proliferation of glyphosate, a primary ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup and one of the very few herbicides that kills milkweed. The monarch exclusively lays its eggs on plants in the milkweed family.
While glyphosate was little used two decades ago, it has become by far the most heavily used herbicide in the U.S. thanks to glyphosate-resistant Roundup Ready corn and soybean crops, engineered by Monsanto. According to the Center for Food Safety, corn and soybean fields in the Corn Belt have lost 99 percent of their milkweed since 1999.
Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday it would provide $2 million in immediate funding for on-the-ground conservation projects, such as awareness campaigns and milkweed seed-planting efforts, as well as an additional $1.2 million to a new 'Monarch Conservation Fund,' the first dedicated source of funding for projects working to conserve the species. ...
A Monsanto representative applauded the announcement in a statement to the Huffington Post, saying "[f]arming and habitat for Monarchs can co-exist."
California's Wastewater Injection Problem Is Way Worse Than Previously Reported
Documents released this week as part of the EPA’s investigation into the state of California’s underground injection control program show that in addition to hundreds of wastewater injection wells there are thousands more wells illegally injecting fluids from “enhanced oil recovery” into aquifers protected by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
At a time when California is experiencing extreme and prolonged drought, you might expect state regulators to do everything they can to protect sources of water that could be used for drinking and irrigation. But that simply isn’t the case.
For every barrel of oil produced in California — the third largest oil-producing state in the nation, behind Texas and North Dakota — there are 10 barrels of wastewater requiring disposal. California produces roughly 575,000 barrels of oil a day, meaning there are nearly 6 billion barrels of wastewater produced in the Golden State on a daily basis — a masive waste stream that state regulators have utterly failed to manage properly.
The EPA first learned of the extent of the problem in 2011, when it performed an audit of California’s UIC Class II Program and found serious problems, many of which date all the way back to the early 1980s, when the federal agency formally turned over control of underground injection activities to the state. The program, as documented by the San Francisco Chronicle, was practically doomed from the start, as there were two lists of aquifers exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, and no one could agree on which was the correct list.
Given this troubled history and the fact that DOGGR regulators have continued to issue permits to thousands of injection wells despite their inability to ensure that the wells weren’t polluting otherwise useable sources of water, activists are calling on California Governor Jerry Brown to immediately shut down all of the offending wells.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Life in the Emerald City: Houthis Control Yemen, But They Don’t Yet Govern It
A Rush to Judgment in Argentine Bomb Case?
Wretched US Journalism on Ukraine
Road Trips
A Little Night Music
Little Smokey Smothers - I Need Love So Bad
Little Smokey Smothers - 43rd Street Blues
Little Smokey Smother - Sweet Black Angel
Little Smokey Smothers + Elvin Bishop - Roll Your Moneymaker
Little Smokey Smothers - Days Are Dark
Elvin Bishop & Little Smokey Smothers - That's My Partner!
Little Smokey Smothers - Things Ain't What They Used To Be
Little Smokey Smothers - Black Cat Girl
Smokey Smothers - I Ain't Gonna Be No Monkey Man No More
Smokey Smothers - Do Your Thing
Little Smokey Smothers - Little Red Rooster
Little Smokey Smothers - Soft Winds
Elvin Bishop & Little Smokey Smothers - Stomp
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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