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 blues harmonica player and singer Lester "Mad Dog" Davenport. Enjoy!
Lester Davenport - Chicago Blues Festival
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
-- Groucho Marx
News and Opinion
Obama's war authorization in trouble on Hill
The president’s plan doesn’t please either Democrats or Republicans.
Key Democrats are hardening their opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposal for attacking Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria, raising fresh doubts the White House can win congressional approval of the plan as concerns grow over its handling of crises around the globe.
In interviews this week, not a single Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed support for the president’s war plan as written; most demanded changes to limit the commander in chief’s authority and more explicitly prohibit sending troops into the conflict.
That opposition puts the White House and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, in a quandary — stuck between Republican defense hawks who are pushing for a more robust U.S. role against the terrorist group known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and liberals who fear a repeat of the Iraq war.
In an interview, Corker issued a stark warning: If Democrats refuse to lend any support to Obama’s request for the Authorization for Use of Military Force against ISIL, he may scrap a committee vote, making it less likely the full Senate or House would even put it on the floor, much less pass it. The comments put pressure on the White House to deliver Democratic votes or witness the collapse of a second war authorization plan in Congress in as many years.
The demonisation of Russia risks paving the way for war
Hundreds of US troops are arriving in Ukraine this week to bolster the Kiev regime’s war with Russian-backed rebels in the east. Not to be outdone, Britain is sending 75 military advisers of its own. As 20th-century history shows, the dispatch of military advisers is often how disastrous escalations start. They are also a direct violation of last month’s Minsk agreement, negotiated with France and Germany, that has at least achieved a temporary ceasefire and some pull-back of heavy weapons. Article 10 requires the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Ukraine.
But Nato’s hawks have got the bit between their teeth. Thousands of Nato troops have been sent to the Baltic states – the Atlantic alliance’s new frontline – untroubled by their indulgence of neo-Nazi parades and denial of minority ethnic rights. A string of American political leaders and generals are calling for the US to arm Kiev, from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, to the new defence secretary, Ashton Carter. For the western military complex, the Ukraine conflict has the added attraction of creating new reasons to increase arms spending, as the US army’s General Raymond Odierno made clear when he complained this week about British defence cuts in the face of the “Russian threat”.
Putin’s authoritarian conservatism may offer little for Russia’s future, but this anti-Russian incitement is dangerous folly. There certainly has been military expansionism. But it has overwhelmingly come from Nato, not Moscow. For 20 years, despite the commitments at the end of the cold war, Nato has marched relentlessly eastwards, taking in first former east European Warsaw Pact states, then republics of the former Soviet Union itself. As the academic Richard Sakwa puts it in his book Frontline Ukraine, Nato now “exists to manage the risks created by its existence."
Instead of creating a common European security system including Russia, the US-dominated alliance has expanded up to the Russian border – insisting that is merely the sovereign choice of the states concerned. It clearly isn’t. It’s also the product of an alliance system designed to entrench American “leadership” on the European continent – laid out in Pentagon planning drawn up after the collapse of the Soviet Union to “prevent the re-emergence of a new rival”. ...
In the west, Ukraine – along with Isis – is being used to revive the doctrines of liberal interventionism and even neoconservatism, discredited on the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, Angela Merkel and François Hollande have resisted American pressure to arm Kiev. But when the latest Minsk ceasefire breaks down, as it surely will, there is a real risk that Ukraine’s proxy conflict could turn into full-scale international war.
Russia & US are in a new Cold War, relations gone off the cliff – post-Soviet studies prof
Hat tip Azazello:
Financial collapse leads to war
Scanning the headlines in the western mainstream press, and then peering behind the one-way mirror to compare that to the actual goings-on, one can't but get the impression that America's propagandists, and all those who follow in their wake, are struggling with all their might to concoct rationales for military action of one sort or another, be it supplying weapons to the largely defunct Ukrainian military, or staging parades of US military hardware and troops in the almost completely Russian town of Narva, in Estonia, a few hundred meters away from the Russian border, or putting US “advisers” in harm's way in parts of Iraq mostly controlled by Islamic militants. ...
Let's review. Afghanistan, after the longest military campaign in US history, is being handed back to the Taliban. Iraq no longer exists as a sovereign nation, but has fractured into three pieces, one of them controlled by radical Islamists. Egypt has been democratically reformed into a military dictatorship. Libya is a defunct state in the middle of a civil war. The Ukraine will soon be in a similar state; it has been reduced to pauper status in record time—less than a year. A recent government overthrow has caused Yemen to stop being US-friendly. Closer to home, things are going so well in the US-dominated Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that they have produced a flood of refugees, all trying to get into the US in the hopes of finding any sort of sanctuary.
Looking at this broad landscape of failure, there are two ways to interpret it. One is that the US officialdom is the most incompetent one imaginable, and can't ever get anything right. But another is that they do not succeed for a distinctly different reason: they don't succeed because results don't matter. You see, if failure were a problem, then there would be some sort of pressure coming from somewhere or other within the establishment, and that pressure to succeed might sporadically give rise to improved performance, leading to at least a few instances of success. But if in fact failure is no problem at all, and if instead there was some sort of pressure to fail, then we would see exactly what we do see. ...
Any rationale for war will do, be it terrorists foreign and domestic, Big Bad Russia, or hallucinated space aliens. Military success is unimportant, because failure is even better than success for maintaining order because it makes it possible to force through various emergency security measures. Various training runs, such as the military occupation of Boston following the staged bombings at the Boston Marathon, have already taken place. The surveillance infrastructure and the partially privatized prison-industrial complex are already in place for locking up the undesirables. A really huge failure would provide the best rationale for putting the economy on a war footing, imposing martial law, suppressing dissent, outlawing “extremist” political activity and so on.
Perhaps the sabre-rattling and warmongering on the part of the US is also good for the other side on much the same terms as suggested in the article above:
Putin Sounds the Alarm Over Budding 'Color Revolutions' in Russia
President Vladimir Putin urged Interior Ministry officials on Wednesday to focus on smothering budding color revolutions, thus bolstering the current political climate by reinforcing a widespread fear of domestic enemies, analysts told The Moscow Times.
"We see attempts to use so-called 'color revolution technology,' ranging from organizing unlawful public protests to open propaganda of hatred and enmity on social networks," Putin said during Wednesday's expanded session of the Interior Ministry Board, according to the Kremlin's website.
"The aim is obvious — to provoke civil conflict and strike a blow at our country's constitutional foundations, and ultimately even at our sovereignty," he said, adding that "preventive work" should be done to counter the eventuality.
A color revolution in Russia seems highly unlikely given Putin's vertiginous 86 percent approval rating and the population's general reluctance to protest. Yet the notion has permeated Putin's lexicon, emerging periodically in his speeches. At a Security Council meeting in November, Putin said that color revolutions in post-Soviet states should serve as a "lesson and warning," emphasizing that "everything necessary" should be done to prevent their occurrence in Russia. ...
A survey published last week by the Levada Center revealed that only 10 percent of the population would willingly take part in a political protest. ... The poll also showed that only 15 percent of the Russian population sympathized with members of the country's non-systemic opposition, such as blogger Alexei Navalny and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down steps from the Kremlin on Friday night. ... "There need to be internal enemies for the [authorities] to justify taking the measures needed to keep [the political climate] in its current state," Levinson said. "I think there will be continued attention by officials and state media toward [opposition] groups within the state."
Outcry over Isis destruction of ancient Assyrian site of Nimrud
Activists, officials and historians have condemned Islamic State (Isis) for the destruction of the ancient Assyrian archaeological site of Nimrud in Iraq, with Unesco describing the act as a war crime.
“They are not destroying our present life, or only taking the villages, churches, and homes, or erasing our future – they want to erase our culture, past and civilisation,” said Habib Afram, the president of the Syriac League of Lebanon, adding that Isis’s actions were reminiscent of the Mongol invasion of Arabia.
Iraq’s tourism and antiquities ministry said on Thursday night that Isis had bulldozed the ancient city of Nimrud, south of Mosul, which was conquered by the militants in a lightning advance last summer. ...
“In a new crime in their series of reckless offences they assaulted the ancient city of Nimrud and bulldozed it with heavy machinery, appropriating the archaeological attractions dating back 13 centuries BC,” it said.
The destruction of the site, which became the capital of the neo-Assyrian empire, was confirmed by a local tribal source speaking to Reuters.
PLO officials calls for ending security coordination with Israel
The Palestinian Liberation Organization's central council announced Thursday that it recommended that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stop security coordination with Israel, a step that could further escalate tensions, after it did not honor the agreements signed between the parties.
It is not clear if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will implement the resolution by the PLO's Central Council. ...
Despite the tensions, security coordination between Abbas' forces and Israeli troops has continued in the West Bank. The coordination is meant to prevent violence, including possible attacks against Israel.
Where’s Gaza's Money?
Obama's Ferguson Commission a Joke: Why Liberal Proposals and "Solutions" Don't Cut It
The report from Barack Obama's “Task Force for 21st Century Policing” the official White House response to widespread public disgust at the unpunished police murder of Michael Brown is out. And it contains --- wait for it – a lot less than meets the eye. ... The gist of it is that everything will be OK if we can just ”build trust” between cops and communities by adopting better rules of police conduct, hiring more black and brown cops, making them parts of the communities through “nonenforcement strategies” like coaching basketball leagues, moving slowly toward “independent investigations” of excessive force complaints, and encouraging police to act a bit less like occupying armies. ...
We live in a class society, where a tiny fraction controls all the wealth, and through private media monopolies, literally owns and controls the public conversation. Bipartisan policies embraced by liberals and conservatives alike are lowering wages, shrinking or eliminating the pubic sector and the commons, expanding poverty, making millions to drop out of the workforce, and maintaining permanent states of war abroad and fear of "terrorism" at home. Liberals and conservatives together have called the world's largest prison system into existence to contain, to cow, to discipline and make to instructive examples of big chunks of the largely black and brown population for whom America will not provide education, housing, health care or jobs.
By marking and stigmatizing the class of people it interacts with as “undeserving losers” the police and prison state performs the vitally important function of justifying the vast inequities of life in neoliberal America.
Real change that rolls back the prison and police states won't come from residency requirements, or cops on bicycles or more training, or meetings with police in neutral territory or any of the other task force recommendations.
If the Obama White House ever wanted, ever intended, ever dreamed of changing this stuff, of rolling back the police and prison state they wouldn't have waited till their last 600 and some days in office and when they don't control either house of Congress. The report is a gesture of contempt. President Obama, the CBC and the rest of the black political class are prepared to praise each other and for us to praise them. But they are not prepared to take political risks for the class of people victimized by the police and prison state which liberals as well as conservatives helped create.
"I Thought I Saw Death": John Lewis Remembers Police Attack on Bloody Sunday in Selma 50 Years Ago
Ferguson and the Logic of Neoliberalism
A cognitive challenge for White Americans (and ‘conservative’ Blacks) is the distance between facts like police repression in Ferguson and the mythology of capitalist democracy that we live by. Use of the police for economic extraction in Ferguson, for funding the town budget through racial repression, ties state power to economic power within the particular circumstances of American racial and economic history. In a most basic sense this integration reframes state-market relations claimed to relate capitalism to democracy. More broadly, the TPP and TIPP ‘trade’ deals being pushed by President Obama are a variation on the racist shakedown in Ferguson. Their intent is to replace state power with corporate power while leaving Western states intact to provide state services for the benefit of corporations and the illusion of democratic control.
Discovery of a police ‘black site’ in Chicago, the prevalence of racist violence by the police across the U.S., the return of debtor’s prisons and ‘civil forfeiture’ laws that allow the police to take belongings without evidence of a crime illustrate the growing lawlessness of the police. When tied to illegal surveillance carried out by the NSA, DEA and FBI against citizens and non-citizens alike and the extra-judicial powers claimed by Mr. Obama a picture of widespread state lawlessness emerges. When considered in the context of no criminal prosecutions for war crimes against the (George W) Bush administration or against prominent bankers in the financial and economic debacle of the last decade a picture of widespread elite lawlessness emerges. Clearly the state, including local police departments, exists for purposes other than enforcing fealty to the law. ...
The police in Ferguson can murder with impunity and shake down citizens at their discretion to fund the city budget (and their paychecks) while poor and middle class Blacks are disproportionately murdered and sent to prison for similar acts. What is legal and what isn’t is determined by who has social power, not by the acts themselves. In a racist and classist society the law is codification of class and race interests. If a black citizen of Ferguson puts a gun to someone’s head and demands their valuables they are a criminal but if the same act is committed by a cop it is within the law. Here events in Ferguson are fact and metaphor— overwhelming evidence (links above) suggests that similar social relations exist across much of the country.
This view of the law has precedence in Richard Nixon’s contention that “when the President does it that means that it is not illegal.” Earlier precedence can be found in Nazi law and in the laws of fascist Italy in the 1930s and 1940s. This isn’t to call anyone who isn’t a self-proclaimed Nazi a Nazi. The precedence lies in the view that the law is the will of a leadership class, be it the Nazi leadership in Germany or city government in Ferguson. One problem with this theory is that it makes the law capricious and ultimately impossible to follow. Race based law enforcement criminalizes race, not nominally proscribed acts. Stories of the Chicago police department’s black site (link above) have political protesters and poor Blacks accused of no crimes taken there. If people can be arrested without evidence that a crime was committed then what is the difference in outcomes between committing and not committing crimes?
A relation of neo-liberalism to fascism can be made through replacement of civil governance with corporate governance that subordinates the rights and privileges of civil society to corporate interests. The investor-state dispute mechanisms (link above) being broadened and formally codified in the TTIP trade deal will be used to demand compensation for environmental regulations that keep drinking water safe and limit greenhouse gas emissions, the metaphorical equivalent of threatening to end the planet if we don’t pay up. Civil forfeiture has the police taking valuables they might want at the point of a gun if necessary. The Ferguson police shake down poor Blacks using the law as a weapon. At the same time a ruling elite has immunity from prosecution for well documented crimes.
LAPD shooting of mentally ill black man reflects deeper policy issues
Around 12 p.m. on Sunday, March 1 in the Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles, three police officers shot and killed an unarmed 39-year-old homeless man.
The incident was recorded from multiple vantage points that included bystanders with their cell phones, security cameras and police body cameras. Footage of the shooting went viral after one of the cell phone videos was uploaded to Facebook; it has been viewed millions of times. So far, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has refused to make the video footage from the body cameras public. The identities of the officers involved have yet to be released. ...
Known around Skid Row as “Cameroon” to some and “Africa” to others, his death at the hands of the LAPD on Sunday shines light on a section of Los Angeles with one of the highest concentrations of homeless people in the United States. On any given day, there are thousands of people living and sleeping in tents in the area.Considered by many to be the site of a mental health crisis, Skid Row is now at the center of a renewed debate about the role of police in intervening with mentally ill individuals and the use of excessive force. As a black, formerly institutionalized, homeless, mentally ill immigrant, Africa’s death fits into a deeper, nationwide pattern of mentally ill people of color being killed by the police.
From Carlos Ocana and Ezzell Ford in Los Angeles to Dontre Hamilton in Milwaukee to Kaijeme Powell in St. Louis to Tanisha Anderson in Cleveland, the use of excessive force reflects the widespread failure of police officers to recognize and effectively respond to individuals who exhibit signs of mental illness. Police officers often misinterpret schizophrenia or bipolar disorder as “erratic” or “threatening” behavior, and resort to force as a “defensive” mechanism. These misinterpretations are in no small part due to a lack of training as to how to interact with individuals who are mentally ill.
And, as with many other issues surrounding our criminal justice system, problems arising from this lack of training are exacerbated by implicit racial bias, all too often leading to fatal outcomes.
Petraeus won't serve a day in jail for his leaks. Edward Snowden shouldn't either
The sweetheart deal the Justice Department gave to former CIA director David Petraeus for leaking top secret information compared to the stiff jail sentences other low-level leakers have received under the Obama administration has led to renewed calls for leniency for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. ...
According to the indictment, Petraeus gave Broadwell eight black books containing “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings … and [his personal] discussions with the president of the United States.” Much of this was Top Secret, and some was SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) higher than Top Secret – and he admitted in his plea to lying to the FBI about his leaks, knowing that doing so was a crime in itself.
“If disclosing the identities of covert agents to an unauthorized person and storing them in several unauthorized locations deserves a charge with a maximum sentence of one year,” famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said, “then Edward Snowden should face not more than that same one count.”
Snowden’s US lawyer Ben Wizner made a similar point on Thursday to US News and World Report. “If Petraeus deserves exceptional treatment because of his service to the nation,” he said, “then surely the same exception should be offered to Edward Snowden, whose actions have led to a historic global debate that will strengthen free societies.” ...
The government had the chance to hold Petreaus out as an example on the same felony Espionage Act charges they’ve leveled (unfairly) against every conscientious whistleblower they’ve indicted. Their answer? Leaking should no longer be a felony. Let’s make sure we hold them to that, and not only for CIA Directors.
General David Petraeus: Too Big To Jail
The leniency shown former CIA Director (and retired General) David Petraeus by the Justice Department in sparing him prison time for the serious crimes that he has committed puts him in the same preferential, immune-from-incarceration category as those running the financial institutions of Wall Street, where, incidentally, Petraeus now makes millions. By contrast, “lesser” folks – and particularly the brave men and women who disclose government crimes – get to serve time, even decades, in jail.
Petraeus is now a partner at KKR, a firm specializing in large leveraged buyouts, and his hand-slap guilty plea to a misdemeanor for mishandling government secrets should not interfere with his continued service at the firm. KKR’s founders originally worked at Bear Stearns, the institution that failed in early 2008 at the beginning of the meltdown of the investment banking industry later that year.
Despite manifestly corrupt practices like those of subprime mortgage lenders, none of those responsible went to jail after the 2008-09 financial collapse which cost millions of Americans their jobs and homes. The bailed-out banks were judged “too big to fail” and the bankers “too big to jail.” ...
It remains true that not one of the crooked bankers or investment advisers who inflicted untold misery on ordinary people, gambling away much of their life savings, has been jailed. Not one.
And now Petraeus, who gave his biographer/mistress access to some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and then lied about it to the FBI, has also been shown to be too big to jail. Perhaps AG Eric Holder decided it would be a gentlemanly thing to do on his way out of office – to take this awkward issue off Holder’s likely successor, Loretta Lynch’s initial to-do list and spare her the embarrassment of demonstrating once again that equality under the law has become a mirage; that not only big banks, but also big shots like Petraeus – who was Official Washington’s most beloved general before becoming CIA director – are, in fact, too big to jail.
Chelsea Manning: court order bans US military from referring to soldier as 'he'
Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier serving 35 years in prison for leaking a huge stash of state secrets, has won a small but significant victory in her bid to transition to living as a woman.
Manning has taken on the might of the US military, challenging its ongoing refusal to refer to her as a woman, and won. A court order from the US army court of criminal appeals instructs the military to refer to the soldier in all future official correspondence either using the gender neutral “Private First Class Manning” or employing the feminine pronoun.
As a result, the military is henceforth forbidden from referring to Manning as a man.
The court order marks another advance towards Manning’s goal of gender transition which she has had to fight every step of the way in the face of an intransigent army hierarchy. Last month, Manning, who has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, was allowed to start hormone treatment, having struggled for years to convince her jailers to grant her the medical care that had been indicated.
The treatment marked a breakthrough for the US military, which continues to ban transgender individuals from service.
Meet Jesús "Chuy" García, the Chicago Activist Aiming to Unseat "Mayor 1%" Rahm Emanuel
Gender pay gap will not close for 70 years at current rate, says UN
The income of female workers across the world will lag behind men’s for another 70 years if the gender pay gap continues to reduce at the present painfully slow rate, the UN is warning in a report that lays bare global inequality in the workplace.
More than half a century after the United States passed the Equal Pay Act, and 45 years after similar legislation in the UK, women across the world earn 77% of the amount paid to men, a figure that has improved by only three percentage points in the past 20 years, according to a report from the UN’s International Labour Organization (pdf) (ILO).
Over and above the pay gap, women face a “motherhood pay gap”. Women with children can expect to earn less when they return to work than childless women, with the difference increasing for every child they have, according to an ILO analysis.
The report, released ahead of International Women’s Day on Sunday, also shows that the gender gap in work participation has barely shifted in two decades. Since the Beijing Declaration on women’s rights was signed by 189 governments in 1995, the difference in men’s and women’s labour market participation rates has dropped by only 1%. Today 50% of the world’s women work, compared with 77% of men. In 1996, the figures were 52% and 80% respectively.
“The overriding conclusion 20 years on from Beijing is that, despite marginal progress, we have years, even decades, to go until women enjoy the same rights and benefits as men at work,” said Shauna Olney, chief of the gender, equality and Diversity branch of the ILO.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature from the Appeal to Reason: an anti-labor strikebreaking agency exposed by letter offering spies and gunthugs for sale, to be used against the United Mine Workers.
Tune in at 2pm!
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Wisconsin Workers Rally As Anti-Worker Bill Nears Walker's Desk
As the Wisconsin Assembly began debate on anti-worker legislation that would prohibit private-sector employees from being required to join a union or pay dues under union contracts, opponents of the so-called "right-to-work" bill protested at the Capitol building on Thursday, saying the measure is aimed at keeping wages low and dismantling the labor movement.
The session was expected to last up to 24 hours, as lawmakers on both sides of the issue voiced their positions on the American Legislative Exchange Council-inspired bill.
According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Thursday morning that, though some of his fellow GOP lawmakers would vote against the bill, it would "easily pass" in a house where 63 of the 99 members are Republican.
Anti-union Gov. Scott Walker, the Republican considering a run for president in 2016 and whorecently compared protesters to ISIS, said Wednesday that he expected to sign the bill by Monday. If enacted, Wisconsin would become the 25th state with this sort of anti-worker law on the books.
Hat tip civil wingnut:
Feds prepare criminal corruption charges against Senator Bob Menendez
The Justice Department is preparing to bring criminal corruption charges against New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat, alleging he used his Senate office to push the business interests of a Democratic donor and friend in exchange for gifts.
People briefed on the case say Attorney General Eric Holder has signed off on prosecutors' request to proceed with charges, CNN has learned exclusively. An announcement could come within weeks. Prosecutors are under pressure in part because of the statute of limitation on some of the allegations.
The case could pose a high-profile test of the Justice Department's ability to prosecute sitting lawmakers, having already spawned a legal battle over whether key evidence the government has gathered is protected by the Constitution's Speech and Debate clause.
The FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department's public integrity section, have pursued a variety of allegations against Menendez, who has called the probe part of "smear campaign" against him.
Capital Controls May Become Necessary in Greece
The Evening Greens
In Illinois, Flames and Clouds of Smoke Signal Yet Another 'Bomb Train' Disaster
In yet the latest fiery example of a crude-by-rail disaster, a derailment on Thursday of a train carrying crude oil near the Mississippi River in Galena, Illinois (not far from the Iowa border) saw several cars burst into flames as thick black smoke billowed into the air.
Noting that this is third such derailment in the United States in as many weeks, environmental campaigners voiced immediate concern that government have proven immovable when it comes to curbing the dangers posed by the large increase in crude-by-rail traffic in recent years.
"The only thing more mind-boggling than three such accidents in three weeks is the continued lack of action by the Obama administration to protect us from these dangerous oil trains," declared Mollie Matteson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement on Friday morning. "The government has the authority to take immediate action to address this crisis – which puts homes, waters and wildlife at risk – and yet it has sat back and watched."
She added, "There are simply no excuses left for the Obama administration. The fact that these trains are still moving on the rails is a national travesty. The next explosive wreck — and there will be more, so long as nothing changes — may take lives, burn up a town or level a city business district, and pollute the drinking water of thousands of people. Enough is enough."
El Niño finally arrives but is weaker than expected, says US agency
A long-anticipated El Niño has finally arrived.
The US National Weather Service on Thursday proclaimed the phenomenon is now in place. It involves a warming of a certain patch of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns worldwide, associated with flooding in some places, droughts elsewhere, a generally warmer globe, and fewer Atlantic hurricanes.
El Niños are usually so important that economists even track them because of how they affect commodities.
But this is a weak, weird and late version of El Niño, so do not expect too many places to feel its effects, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the weather service’s Climate Prediction Center. He said there may be a slight decrease in the number of Atlantic hurricanes this summer, but he also points out that 1992’s devastating Hurricane Andrew in Florida occurred during an El Ninño summer, so coastal residents should not let their guard down.
This is the first El Niño since spring of 2010.
Deforestation May Be Helping to Spread the Plague in Africa
The destruction of forests is known to cause the release of massive amounts of greenhouse gases, destroy critical wildlife habitat, and increase soil erosion, which can lead to deadly floods and landslides.
But converting forests to farmland can also increase the spread of the plague, according to researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB).
"It pops up every other year or so, and the number of cases per year is quite variable and it's also poorly reported," Hillary Young, an ecologist at UCSB, who led the study, told VICE News. "So we don't have a good sense of the number of cases per year in the region."
About one percent of the forest in Tanzania is cleared every year, mostly to make room for crops. Young and her team trapped rodents in three parts of northern Tanzania from both forested and converted land and tested them for exposure to the bacteria Yersinia pestis, which causes the plague.
After testing more than 100 rodents from eight species, they found that the prevalence of the bacteria was nearly twice as high in rodents trapped from agricultural areas than in forested areas. Farmed land also had a higher number of rodents present than forested land, and minimal presence of larger mammals.
One rodent in particular dominated in the farmed land, the Natal multimammate mouse, also known as the common African rat, which is known to spread the deadly Lassa fever in West Africa. The mice can produce up to 14 pups per litter and reproduce every two to three months, enabling them to proliferate during crop seasons when the food supply is high.
Converted land had nearly 20 times as many of these rodents than forested land.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
More About That "Centrist" Democratic Counterattack
Brooklyn Teen Was Charged With Assaulting A Cop Until Video Proved The Police Were Lying
Top Lobbyist: 2016 To Be “Bumper Year” Thanks to Clinton Campaign
Don't look away now, the climate crisis needs you
The gentrification of Skid Row - a story that will decide the future of Los Angeles
An Agreement That Is Good for Israel, Bad for Netanyahu
Why shouldn't it be possible to conquer the world and at the same time make it a little bit better?
Existing Beyond Theory
Privatizing Injustice
A Little Night Music
Lester 'Mad Dog' Davenport - Mad Dog On The Loose
Lester Davenport - She's 41 Years Old
Lester Davenport - Walkin' the Streets at Midnight
Lester Davenport - Let's go party
Lester "Mad Dog" Davenport - Miss Sallie Mae
Mad Dog Lester Davenport - So long
Lester Davenport - Chicago Blues Festival pt. 2
Lester Davenport - Lester`s Comet
Mad Dog Lester Davenport - Slow Down Baby
Lester 'Mad Dog' Davenport - I Smell A Rat
Lester 'Mad Dog' Davenport - No Peace
Lester 'Mad Dog' Davenport - When My Troubles End
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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