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 the King of the Slide Guitar, Elmore James. Enjoy!
Elmore James - Dust My Broom
Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.
-- Will Rogers
News and Opinion
US accuses Israel of spying on Iran nuclear talks
Israel denies Wall Street Journal reports that it shared confidential information from talks with members of the US Congress in attempt to derail any deal
The US has accused Israel of spying on international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme and using the intelligence gathered to persuade Congress to undermine the talks, according to a report on Tuesday.
The Wall Street Journal citedsenior administration officials as saying the Israeli espionage operation began soon after the US opened up a secret channel of communications with Tehran in 2012, aimed at resolving the decade-long standoff over Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
The apparent decision by the White House to leak the allegations is the latest symptom of the growing gulf between Barack Obama’s administration and Binyamin Netanyahu’s government over the Iran talks, in which the Israeli leader suspects US officials of being ready to make too many concessions at the expense of Israeli security. Intelligence analysts suggested that the leak reflects the degree of anger in Washington at Netanyahu’s actions, and could mark a more serious blow to the already tottering relationship. ...
According to the report, the US has long been aware that Israel is among the shortlist of countries with the most aggressive intelligence operations targeting America, alongside Russia, China and France. It said American diplomats attending the talks in Austria and Switzerland were briefed by US counterintelligence officials about the threat of Israeli eavesdropping. It also raised the possibility that Israel gathered intelligence about the US position by spying on other participants in the negotiations, from western Europe, Russia, China or Iran. US intelligence had previously provided help to the Israelis to spy on the Iranians, the report said.
The US also conducts intelligence operations against Israel, and learned of the Israeli spying operation when it intercepted communication between Israeli officials exchanging classified information that US intelligence believed could only have been acquired by espionage.
An Angry White House Vows to Confront Netanyahu, But Will It End Key U.S. Support for Occupation?
White House Chief of Staff Says Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank 'Must End'
After a divisive election campaign by incumbent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that further soured his already troubled relationship with the US, President Barack Obama's chief of staff said Monday that Israel's occupation of the West Bank "must end," and that Obama will "never stop working for a two-state solution."
Speaking to a left-leaning audience at a conference hosted by J Street, a pro-Israel group aligned with the Democratic Party, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough received a round of applause after he said, "Israel cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely." ...
Netanyahu's political flip-flopping has not been well received in the US. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Obama described a frosty phone call in which he told the Israeli prime minister that it would now be "hard to find a path where people seriously believe [peace] negotiations are possible." ...
Despite the ongoing disputes, the US has emphasized that it will continue providing its annual $3 billion in military aid to Israel, and that security and intelligence cooperation between the two countries will not cease.
U.S. remains in Israel’s corner at UN human rights session
The United States signaled no change in its support for Israel at the United Nations on Monday, refusing to take part in a forum on alleged Israeli human rights violations.
Despite the Obama administration’s pledge to rethink its support for Israel at the United Nations in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign rejection of a Palestinian state, the United States’ refusal to discuss alleged Israeli abuses at the U.N. Human Rights Council was consistent with the previous U.S. position.
Other major Western countries, including Great Britain, France and Germany, also refused to participate in the discussion.
Netanyahu apologizes to Israeli Arabs for Election Day comments
Following massive criticism over his Election Day rhetoric on Israeli Arabs, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized Monday evening for labeling a high Israeli Arab voter tunrout as a "threat" and saying Israel's Arabs were comming out "in droves" to vote.
However, Israel's sole Arab party rejected the apology, calling it "empty words intended to preserve his racist regime." ...
Israel's only Arab party, the Joinst Arab List, rejected the apology, saying "Sadly the racism of Netanyahu and his government did not start with this statement and it surely will not be its end.
"Racist and exclusionary legislation are part of Netanyahu's work plan for the next Knesset, and thus we have no choice but to reject this apology and continue our struggle for equality for (Israel's) Arabs. His 'apology' is just empty words intended to preserve his racist regime," they said in a statement. ...
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters Monday that she had not seen the Netanyahu apology but that the Israeli prime minister is hard to read because "he said diametrically opposing things in the matter of a week."
"When you say things, words matter. And if you say something different two days later, which do we believe," she said. "What we're looking for now are actions and policies."
Is Israel Democratic? Not So Clear
Is Israel a democracy? The answer is not so straightforward, and it increasingly matters given the diplomatic fallout over hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu's re-election last week.
The displeasure felt in some quarters over his win has placed front and center the world community's unwritten obligation to accept the results of a truly democratic vote. It is a basic tenet of the modern order which has survived the occasional awkward election result — as well as recent decades' emergence of some less-than-pristine democracies around the globe.
For Israel, the argument is especially piquant, because its claim to be the only true democracy in the Middle East has been key to its branding and its vitally important claim on U.S. military, diplomatic and financial support. Israel's elections, from campaign rules to vote counts, are indeed not suspect.
But with the occupation of the West Bank grinding on toward the half-century mark, and with Netanyahu's election-week suggestion that no change is imminent, hard questions arise.
Among Israelis themselves, there is increasing angst over the fact that their country of 8 million people also controls some 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians who have no voting rights for its parliament.
If the 2 million Palestinians of Gaza — a territory dominated indirectly by Israel — were added to the equation, then together with the 2 million Arab citizens of "Israel proper" the Holy Land would be home to a population of some 12 million, equally divided between Arabs and Jews.
Of the Arabs, only a third have voting rights. These are the "Israeli Arabs" who live in the areas that became Israel in the 1948-49 war, which established the country's borders.
After Liberation Came Destruction: Iraqi Shiite Militias Accused of Looting, Burning Sunni Villages
The EU and NATO Are Gearing Up to Fight Russia — On the Internet
One year after the Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, the European Union and NATO want to step up an information campaign to counter what they've called "false narratives" disseminated by the Kremlin.
On Sunday, Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said there was a "need as a Western group of nations or as an alliance to engage in this informational warfare."
"The way to attack the false narrative is to drag the false narrative into the light and expose it," Breedlove, an American, told a forum in Brussels.
[Breedlove should be intensely aware of the effect of sunshine on propaganda and false narratives, since his lies and propaganda have been debunked by allies. - js]
Like the US, most European countries already have state-funded media arms. But the West sees Russia's recent forays into foreign broadcasting as a cynical ploy to spread disinformation, particularly about its alleged involvement in eastern Ukraine. Breedlove contended that Russian government reporting is particularly worrisome because the Kremlin's involvement can be "hidden."
[Whereas American propaganda and disinformation are completely transparent. pfffttt!!! - js]
Last summer, the US began a social media campaign to publicize its version of the events in Ukraine, but Russia was quick to co-opt the American hashtag #UnitedForUkraine to disseminate its own messages. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, has reportedly created a special unit to serve as "Facebook warriors" in the online battle against its former Cold War nemesis.
House Overwhelmingly Passes Call to Arm Ukraine - Resolution Doesn't Mention Ceasefire
In an overwhelming 348-48 vote, the House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for President Obama to immediately begin providing weaponry to the Ukrainian government.
The resolution claims Russia is plotting to take over eastern Ukraine, and cites Pentagon officials supporting arms shipments to the Ukrainian military. The resolution is non-binding.
The preamble to the resolution includes several factual errors about the Ukrainian conflict, including the bizarre claim that Russia’s annexation of Crimea undermined an international order established after World War 2. At the end of WW2, Crimea was still part of Russia’s Soviet Socialist Republic, and it had been Russian from the early 19th century.
Russia’s return to Nicaragua worrying many in Central America
ussia is rekindling its once-strong ties to Nicaragua, possibly including providing the Central American nation with jet fighters, stoking unease as far away as the Andes in South America. ...
The rumored provision of the Russian jet fighters to Nicaragua has spawned fears of an arms race in Central America and once again made Nicaragua a bit player in the geopolitical to-and-fro between Washington and Moscow. ...
Some analysts see the dust-up over the jet fighters as part of a global chess game between the United States and Russia, which has been under U.S. and European Union sanctions since its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine a year ago. Nicaragua supported the annexation.
“Because of the U.S. presence in countries abutting Russia, Russia may be looking to do the same in our region,” said Carlos Rivera Bianchini, president of the Foundation for Peace and Democracy in San José, Costa Rica. ...
Since Ortega’s return to power, Russia has boosted aid, providing 100,000 tons of wheat each year since 2011 and turning over 520 Russian-made public buses. In 2013, Russia agreed to offer patrol gunboats to Nicaragua.
As part of the Russian defense minister’s visit in February, Nicaragua agreed to ease rules to allow Russian warships to enter Nicaraguan ports.
The NSA's plan: improve cybersecurity by hacking everyone else
The National Security Agency want to be able to hack more people, vacuum up even more of your internet records and have the keys to tech companies’ encryption – and, after 18 months of embarrassing inaction from Congress on surveillance reform, the NSA is now lobbying it for more powers, not less. ...
A leaked presidential directive issued in 2012 called for an expanded list of hacking targets all over the world. The NSAspends ten of millions of dollars per year to procure “‘software vulnerabilities’ from private malware vendors” – ie, holes in software that will make their hacking much easier. The NSA has even created a system, according to Edward Snowden, that can automatically hack computers overseas that attempt to hack systems in the US.
Moving further in this direction, Rogers has also called for another new law that would force tech companies to install backdoors into all their encryption.The move has provoked condemnation and scorn from the entire security community - includinga very public upbraiding by Yahoo’s top security executive - as it would be a disaster for the very cybersecurity that the director says is a top priority.
And then there is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) the downright awful “cybersecurity” bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last week in complete secrecy that is little more than an excuse to conduct more surveillance.The bill will do little to stop cyberattacks, but it will do a lot to give the NSA even more power to collect Americans’ communications from tech companies without any legal process whatsoever. The bill’s text was finally released a couple days ago, and, as EFF points out, tucked in the bill were the powers to do the exact type of “offensive” attacks for which Rogers is pining.
Detained Ferguson journalist to appear in court
One of about two dozen journalists arrested while covering the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting dead of 18-year-old Michael Brown faces a court hearing on Tuesday.
St Louis-based videographer Mary Moore, who was charged with municipal violations after being arrested on 3 October, has said she wants her reputation, and her criminal record, cleared. She says she was only shooting video footage but was among 13 people taken into custody during a demonstration outside Ferguson police headquarters. ...
Moore, whose videos have been used by the Associated Press, TV networks and other news organisations, is among the few journalists to face a court hearing. She was charged with failure to comply and resisting arrest. She said she was not part of the protest, but was simply documenting it on video.
“There was no resisting,” she said in a phone interview. “I’m not an idiot.”
The San Francisco-based Freedom of the Press Foundation compiled a list of journalists arrested in Ferguson. Nineteen journalists were arrested in August, one in September, two in October and two in November.
Another black teen killed by Cleveland police as mother asks: 'Why? What happened?'
When Brandon Jones was home on Cleveland’s East Side with his mother, Tonya Brown, he would check in on her to make sure she had everything she needed. Jones was the middle child of eight kids and worked hard to make sure the people around him were happy and taken care of.
So on those days when Jones was home, the days before a police officer fatally shot him less than a week before his 19th birthday, he would frequently ask if his mother was OK. ...
On Thursday last week, Jones broke into the nearby Parkway Grocery and stole cigarettes and money, according to the store’s owner. Officers responded to a call of a break-in at approximately 2.15am and struggled with Jones after he left the store carrying a bag. One officer fired, striking Jones, who died at the hospital hours later.
“Everybody knows he shouldn’t have been there,” Brown said. “Everybody knows what he did was wrong – we’re past that. My baby should not be dead.”
The police department has provided few details about the shooting, and they did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
The officers, who have not been identified, were placed on three-day administrative leave and the department’s use of deadly force team is looking into the case.
Greece to run out of cash by April 20 without fresh aid-source
Greece will run out of money by April 20 unless it receives fresh aid from creditors, a source familiar with the familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
Athens is scrambling to send a list of planned reforms to its European lenders in the coming days in the hope of unlocking fresh aid and averting bankruptcy.
It has lately relied on repo transactions - where it borrows money from state entities - to cover its cash crunch, but can continue to rely on that only for a few more weeks, the source said.
Greece & main creditor Germany discuss Athens’ intl debt
Tsipras raises Nazi war reparations claim at Berlin press conference with Merkel
Greece’s leftwing prime minister Alexis Tsipras stood beside German leader Angela Merkel and demanded war reparations over Nazi atrocities in Greece on Monday night, even as the two leaders sought to bury the hatchet following weeks of worsening friction and mud-slinging.
“It’s not a material matter, it’s a moral issue,” said Tsipras, unusually insisting on raising the “shadows of the past” at the heart of German power in the gleaming new chancellery in Berlin. It was believed to be the first time a foreign leader had gone to the capital of the reunified Germany to make such a demand. ...
Two months after winning the election by promising to abolish “Merkelism” – the harsh austerity ordained by the eurozone and other creditors in return for €240bn (£175bn) in bailout loans over the past five years – Tsipras held to the view that Greece’s crisis was not of his making. He delivered a lengthy diagnosis of what had gone wrong in the last five years, but had next to nothing to say about his own policies except vague references to fighting corruption. And when he raised the corruption issue, he singled out a German company, Siemens, because of its alleged activities in Greece.
A stony-faced Merkel reiterated what she had said in Brussels on Friday after a late-night session with Tsipras – that a 20 February agreement with the eurozone extending Greece’s bailout until the end of June remained the yardstick. That agreement obliges Tsipras to deliver a persuasive menu of detailed fiscal and structural reforms which need to be vetted by the eurozone before any further bailout funding can be released.
Asked if she had reached any agreements with Tsipras, Merkel avoided the question and stressed she was only one of 19 eurozone national leaders.
Tsipras was believed to have told the German leader that Greece faced insolvency within weeks without the release of more funds, which are being held up because he has failed to produce a coherent policy package.
“The medium-term liquidity problem is well known,” he said. “We inherited it.”
While neither side wants Greece to leave the euro, the lack of agreement in Berlin signalled a digging in of hardline positions on both sides that could result in a major negotiating failure.
Thousands in Montreal Unite Against Austerity and Petro-Economy
Called by the Comité Printemps 2015 (Spring 2015 Committee), the "Popular Protest Against Austerity and the Petro-Economy" in Montreal on Saturday, March 21, was the spring's first major demonstration in what many hope will be a heated season. ...
At its start, the crowd at Place Émilie-Gamelin had hardly reached 1,000, and police were present in full force, walking in groups through the crowd, wearing riot gear, and some carrying tear-gas launchers.
Once the drum band started up and the crowd got walking the protest swelled, with turnout estimates ranging from 12,000 (99.999% Presse) down to 5,000 (Journal de Montréal).
Declared illegal but tolerated from the start by Montreal police, the SPVM, the event went relatively peacefully with one arrest made and three tickets issued.
Related events were held around Quebec, and a large anti-austerity protest was held in Madrid, Spain, "Bread, work, and a roof."
The Rise of Podemos
The new generations came up with different values. And fear, which played a very important role, because the dictatorship was a very, very nasty one. For every political assassination that Mussolini did, Franco did ten thousand. And even today, Spain is the second country after Cambodia with a larger of number of people who have disappeared because of political reasons. The fear was still in the street. But the new generations broke with that. And they just said, enough. We want democracy. And in that sense, the demand for democracy was a revolutionary demand in Spain, because democracy was very limited. So the Indignados movement was the first symptom of that. So people went out to the street and said, enough. We want authentic democracy. La democracia real. Real democracy. And in that sense, they knew that the political system was not representative. The famous phrase, they do not represent us. No nos representan. They were not anti-political parties. They were pro-democracy, but didn't feel those parties were representing their interests, and they were calling for all the forms of democracy beside representative democracy.
Hellraiser Preview
Sherman, set the time machine for tomorrow's Hellraisers Journal which will feature an editorial from the Labor World on the upcoming convention of industrial unionist being planned for June in the city of Chicago.
Tune in at 2pm!
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House leader says prospects good for fixing Medicare doctor pay
House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday that prospects were good for passage of a permanent fix to Medicare's flawed doctor-pay formula that would spare physicians from impending steep pay cuts. ...
Earlier on Tuesday, Boehner and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi announced that bipartisan legislation had been introduced to change the way doctors are reimbursed for Medicare costs. A vote is expected on Thursday. ...
Congress needs to take action by April 1 to avoid having hundreds of thousands of doctors who participate in traditional Medicare face a 21 percent cut in their reimbursements. Medicare serves 54 million elderly and disabled people.
Congress to Weigh a Plan to Protect Medicare Fees and Children’s Insurance
Lobbyists will descend on Congress this week as lawmakers near a bipartisan agreement to finance health care for the oldest and youngest Americans, by revamping the payment of doctors under Medicare and by extending the Children’s Health Insurance Program
The agreement ... would establish an “incentive payment system” to reward doctors who receive high performance scores from the government. Scores would be based on factors like the ability to keep patients healthy while controlling costs. ...
One proposal would require higher-income Medicare beneficiaries to pay higher premiums for coverage of prescription drugs and doctors’ services. Another would require some new beneficiaries to pay more of the out-of-pocket costs now covered by certain insurance policies that supplement Medicare.
The supplemental policies reduce the need for consumers to worry about deductibles and co-payments. As a result, critics say, patients use more services, driving up Medicare costs and premiums for all beneficiaries. ... House Republican leaders said President Obama’s latest budget request included similar proposals to make some beneficiaries pay more.
Congress’ Medicare ‘Fix’ Could Leave Seniors Paying More
[David Dayen explains the cuts:]
There would reportedly be more means-testing for Medicare beneficiaries, increasing premiums for seniors showing income over $133,000 and couples over $266,000. These seniors would have to pay 65 percent of their total costs under the new plan. This would go up at higher incomes. Means-testing historically dips lower and lower as budgeters try to get more out of beneficiaries, so this continues that ratcheting process for Medicare. It’s not necessarily where this line is set now but where it might go in the future that should cause concern.
Under the deal, new Medigap policies — privately sold but publicly managed plans which fill in spaces in Medicare coverage — would need a $250 deductible starting in 2020. Virtually every senior I’ve ever spoken with says that they need supplementary coverage because Medicare doesn’t stretch far enough. But this would raise out-of-pocket expenses on all 9 million seniors with a Medigap plan, including the 86 percent of these beneficiaries who have incomes under $40,000, and almost half with incomes below $20,000. So this cut hits those who can’t really afford it. (This idea, along with the means-testing, was in President Obama’s budget, incidentally.)
The proper term for this is cost-shifting, pushing funding for a public program onto those who get the benefits. Medigap was created to deal with cost-shifting in Medicare, and now Congress may look to shift costs within it as well. And like means-testing, cost-shifting is prime terrain for double-dipping over time. ...
All of this is being done to protect doctor salaries, which are among the highest in the industrialized world. Maybe Medicare doctors shouldn’t endure a 20 percent pay cut, but the idea that they wouldn’t see patients if the cut were 5 or 7 percent doesn’t pencil out. Plus, doctor payment rates are tied to Medicare premiums, as the Congressional Budget Office has explained: “Beneficiaries enrolled in Part B of Medicare pay premiums that offset about 25 percent of the costs of those benefits.” This means that any permanent change to a new doctor payment formula will likely result in a hike to Part B premiums.
Clearly everyone in Congress hates the messy process of annual “doc fix” patches, and the uproar from the hospital lobby that accompanies it. But nobody in Washington has raised the point that higher costs for ordinary patients might not be a great solution to the supposed problem of lower cash flow for doctors.
Naomi Klein, David Sirota Win Izzy Award for Achievement in Independent Media
Another world is possible, without the 1%
If you are in the top 1 percent of the global wealth stakes, our economic system works exceptionally well. Since the financial crisis in 2008, most of the wealth created in the world has ended up in your bank accounts. By next year, you could own more wealth than the rest of the world put together. ...
The growing gap between rich and poor is a reality for seven out of ten people on the planet. Last week the World Bank calculated that ten Africans own more wealth than half the continent. Statistics like these are actually a cold shower on people’s natural, positive aspirations to improve their lot – they’re telling us the 99 percent won’t get there, or anywhere close. ...
This is a system that sees a world possessed of huge wealth nevertheless leaving the vast majority of humanity behind with virtually nothing at all. One where women are systematically exploited; at the current rate of progress it will take 75 years before women are paid the same as men, never mind that women’s unpaid care work continues to remain invisible. And it is a system that is leading us to runaway climate change.
Yet the 1 percent are quick to tell us that there is no real alternative. Sadly, they say, nothing is ever perfect and of course there will be winners and losers (and typically, by implication, talented winners and feckless losers). But that we should be grateful – it’s the best we can hope for.
What an appalling failure of imagination. What a shocking lack of faith in human invention, ingenuity and spirit. I am sure of two things. One is that another world is possible; the second that it cannot be imagined or created by the 1% – it is up to us.
The Evening Greens
Pipeline Nation: America’s Broken Industry
A pipeline network more than 2.5 million miles long transports oil and natural gas throughout the United States — but a top official in the federal government's pipeline safety oversight agency admits that the regulatory process is overstretched and "kind of dying." A recent spike in the number of spills illustrates the problem: the Department of Transportation recorded 73 pipeline-related accidents in 2014, an 87 percent increase over 2009.
What Is the US Government Doing to Prevent the Next Oil Pipeline Disaster?
We are currently in the midst of a robust international conversation about our energy future, a conversation driven in no small part by the contentious debate over the proposed Keystone XL project. But we aren't making enough room in that conversation for some equally robust talk about the present, about the safety and health of the 2.5 million miles of pipelines in the United States that have already been built.
While the nation fights over whether to build new oil and gas pipelines, our existing ones continue to burst, rupture, and leak. That devastates places like Harlem, New York. Jackson, Wisconsin. And Salt Lake City.
It has been five years since the Marshall disaster in Michigan — and also five years since the terrible San Bruno, California pipeline explosion that killed eight people — but federal regulators have done almost nothing to improve the safety of the nation's existing pipelines. Partly in response to these incidents and others like them, in 2011 Congress passed the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act. Yet in the intervening time, the agency charged with implementing that bill's provisions, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHMSA), has failed to finalize and institute any new major regulations. ...
We need to demand more from our regulators and legislators. The evidence of the past four years suggests that both lack the will to impose stricter standards of safety and regulations that are easier to enforce before a pipeline fails instead of after. We need to insist upon more transparency in enforcing safety standards and greater public participation in rule-making processes. The current system, essentially a friendly collaboration between regulators and industry, is clearly not working.
Climate denial is immoral, says head of US Episcopal church
The highest ranking woman in the Anglican communion has said climate denial is a “blind” and immoral position which rejects God’s gift of knowledge.
Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in the developing world.
“It is in that sense much like the civil rights movement in this country where we are attending to the rights of all people and the rights of the earth to continue to be a flourishing place,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said in an interview with the Guardian. “It is certainly a moral issue in terms of the impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable around the world already.”
In the same context, Jefferts Schori attached moral implications to climate denial, suggesting those who reject the underlying science of climate change were turning their backs on God’s gift of knowledge.
US museums asked to sever ties with fossil fuel industry
Climate scientists and cultural figures called on national history and science museums on Tuesday to sever their ties to the fossil fuel industry, singling out a major patron from the Koch family of conservative oil billionaires.
Corporate sponsorships from the fossil fuel industry threatened the credibility of important institutions and eroded the public trust, the scientists said in a letter.
“We are concerned that the integrity of these institutions is compromised by association with special interests who obfuscate climate science, fight environmental regulation, oppose clean energy legislation, and seek to ease limits on industrial pollution,” the letter signed by nearly three dozen scientists and museum professionals said.
The letter explicitly targeted David Koch, a trustee and leading donor and exhibit sponsor of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who has also spent at least $67m (£45m) funding climate denial front groups.
“When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions in museums of science and natural history, they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge,” the letter said.
Death of US Coal Exemplifies Need for Paradigm Shift for Global Energy System
Rapidly decaying coal industry reveals fate of all fossil fuels, argue researchers at Carbon Tracker Initiative
A new report released Tuesday by the London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative warns that the crash of U.S. coal markets is but a harbinger of things to come for all fossil fuel investments.
The report, The U.S. Coal Crash – Evidence for Structural Change (pdf), found that the slump in coal prices has forced more than two dozen U.S. coal companies into bankruptcy over the past three years.
With the rise of renewable energy and a growing call for countries to adapt their energy infrastructures for a more carbon-constrained future, the authors of the report argue that the crash of the U.S. coal economy "provides an excellent example of how the future may pan out globally and with other fuels as the world moves to a low-carbon economy." ...
On Monday, the international market research firm Macquarie Research warned investors that the outlook for U.S. coal producers is "increasingly bleak," and the sector is likely to undergo "a wave of bankruptcies."
Where the U.S. coal market was historically tied to economic growth, as Carbon Tracker notes, "there is now clear evidence" that the two indicators have been "decoupled."
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Tony Blair Joins a Strange and Exclusive Club of Political Leaders Whose Careers Have Been Blighted by the Middle East
Trial begins in the killing of Jennifer Laude
A Little Night Music
Elmore James - Rollin' and Tumblin'
Elmore James - The Sky is Crying
Elmore James - Madison Blues
Elmore James - It hurts me too
Elmore James - Blues Before Sunrise
Elmore James - Something Inside of Me
Elmore James - Standing At The Crossroads
Elmore James - She Just Won't Do Right
Elmore James - Stranger Blues
Elmore James - You Know You're Wrong
Elmore James - No Love in My Heart
Elmore James - Done Somebody Wrong
Elmore James - I Held My Baby Last Night
Elmore James - One Way Out
Elmore James - Sunnyland
Elmore James - I Was A Fool
Elmore James - Talk To Me Baby
Elmore James - Shake Your Moneymaker
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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