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This evening's music features jug band and blues harmonica player Hammie Nixon. Enjoy!

"99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.”

-- Lemony Snicket

News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

Five Years After the Brooklyn Bridge Arrests, the Occupy Wall Street Worth Remembering

On September 17, 2016, a handful of onetime Occupy participants returned to Zuccotti Park to mark five years since the camp’s inception. They paid homage with cardboard signs carrying anti-capitalist slogans and spoke to the few journalists who were present, answering questions about the presidential election. Caleb Maupin, 28, told The Guardian that he thought the Sanders campaign was like “a giant Occupy Wall Street rally.” “Every candidate wants you to think they are the Occupy candidate,” he said. There was a time, five years ago, when for many of the protest participants, the term “Occupy candidate” was an oxymoron.

It “changed the conversation.” That much has been said, again and again, of Occupy Wall Street in the years since the brief but intense flourish of encampments, marches, and political direct action that began in New York in September 2011. What this tends to mean is that issues of income inequality, banking regulation, and raising the minimum wage — and phrases like “the 99 percent” and “the 1 percent” — have been picked up by politicians and recognized by major media institutions. And there’s truth to it. One need look no further than the popularity (especially among the young) of the self-described democratic socialist who wanted to be president.

The problem with Occupy’s legacy as primarily a “conversation changer” is that the protest moment gets framed as a set of talking points — a corrective to mainstream political discourse alone. “Occupy” has been historicized as a slogan and forgotten as a tactic and a verb. This is understandable: Historians bestow the title “success” on that which continues — after all, “to succeed” doesn’t just mean to win, but also to follow and replace. But we miss a useful lesson in radical political history if we confine Occupy’s memory to the thing that laid the ground for Sanders’s campaign and “changed the conversation.” ...

Consider the several hundred protesters camping with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline construction. The question of occupation is complicated here by the fact that it is Sioux land under threat by the pipeline. But the strength of the protest tactic reminds us of the history of contesting colonized space by physically taking it (back) — this is the political history in which Occupy belongs. Sen. Sanders has stood with the protestors at Standing Rock, and elsewhere, which recalls a different Occupy legacy worth preserving: If elected officials turned up, they stood with the group, in the group, not for the group.

Former CIA Detainees Describe Previously Unknown Torture Tactic: A Makeshift Electric Chair

Two former CIA captives recently described being threatened with a makeshift electric chair — a previously unreported torture method — while being held in the U.S. government’s infamous “Salt Pit” prison in Afghanistan.

In independent interviews with Human Rights Watch in August that were made public on Monday, Ridha al-Najjar, 51, and Lufti al-Arabi al-Gharisi, 52, described a metal device that had wires with clips that would attach to the fingers, and a helmet connected to wires.

“I saw an electric box… the chair. They said, we will torture you with electricity here,” al-Gharisi said.

Al-Gharisi said he was forced into the chair and connected to the machine, but was never actually electrocuted.

Both men also described various forms of water torture, including having their heads dunked in a bucket of water until they couldn’t breath, waterboarding, and being strapped to a board while submerged face down in a bathtub.

This is the first time al-Najjar and al-Gharisi, both of who are Tunisian nationals, have spoken out about their time in CIA custody.

There is no mention of electric chairs in the unclassified executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Torture Report that was released in December 2014.

“These terrifying accounts of previously unreported CIA torture methods show how little the public still knows about the U.S. torture program,” said Laura Pitter, senior national security counsel for Human Rights Watch.

Pentagon Spent Over $500 Million Making Fake Al-Qaeda Videos

It has already been well-documented that the Pentagon spent a substantial amount of money on propaganda during the occupation of Iraq, running pro-occupation commercials and also covertly getting pro-occupation news stories into the media around the region. It turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg.

It has now been revealed that there was a third program ongoing, in which a London-based PR agency was paid $540 million to make fake al-Qaeda propaganda videos for Pentagon use. ... Then, during the many US military raids going on during the occupation, a few of the fake propaganda CDs were scattered around here or there in the wreckage of smashed-up houses and compounds. Officially, the goal was for al-Qaeda sympathizers to get ahold of them. ...

Unspoken within the reports as they’ve emerged so far, having “al-Qaeda propaganda” laying around in the wreckage of US raid targets was likely also an end unto itself, as anyone who came to investigate after the fact would see them and assume the raid was on an actual al-Qaeda target, never suspecting the US troops were planting the discs.

[See also: Fake News & False Flags: How the Pentagon Paid a British PR firm $500 Million for Top Secret Iraq Propaganda - js]

Russia Warns US Attack on Syrian Troops Would Have ‘Terrible, Tectonic Consequences’

The Russia Foreign Ministry today issued a statement warning the United States against launching any attacks on the Syrian government, cautioning it would have “terrible, tectonic consequences” not just in Syria but also across the entire Middle East.

Since the collapse of the Syrian ceasefire about two weeks ago, the US has been railing against Russia and Syria, and threatening non-specific “non-diplomatic actions” against them, particularly in the city of Aleppo, where Syrian forces are fighting against the Nusra Front. ... Russian officials have repeatedly criticized the US response after the ceasefire, arguing they’re overtly backing terrorist groups like Nusra, which is closely aligned with al-Qaeda.

Obama Warned to Defuse Tensions with Russia

ALERT MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: PREVENTING STILL WORSE IN SYRIA

We are hoping that your President’s Daily Brief tomorrow will give appropriate attention to Saturday’s warning by Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova: “If the US launches a direct aggression against Damascus and the Syrian Army, it would cause a terrible, tectonic shift not only in the country, but in the entire region.”

Speaking on Russian TV, she warned of those whose “logic is ‘why do we need diplomacy’ … when there is power … and methods of resolving a problem by power. We already know this logic; there is nothing new about it. It usually ends with one thing – full-scale war.”

We are also hoping that this is not the first you have heard of this – no doubt officially approved – statement. If on Sundays you rely on the “mainstream” press, you may well have missed it. In the Washington Post, an abridged report of Zakharova’s remarks (nothing about “full-scare war”) was buried in the last paragraph of an 11-paragraph article titled “Hospital in Aleppo is hit again by bombs.” Sunday’s New York Times totally ignored the Foreign Ministry spokesperson’s statements.

In our view, it would be a huge mistake to allow your national security advisers to follow the example of the Post and Times in minimizing the importance of Zakharova’s remarks.

Events over the past several weeks have led Russian officials to distrust Secretary of State John Kerry. Indeed, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who parses his words carefully, has publicly expressed that distrust. Some Russian officials suspect that Kerry has been playing a double game; others believe that, however much he may strive for progress through diplomacy, he cannot deliver on his commitments because the Pentagon undercuts him every time. We believe that this lack of trust is a challenge that must be overcome and that, at this point, only you can accomplish this.

It should not be attributed to paranoia on the Russians’ part that they suspect the Sept. 17 U.S. and Australian air attacks on Syrian army troops that killed 62 and wounded 100 was no “mistake,” but rather a deliberate attempt to scuttle the partial cease-fire Kerry and Lavrov had agreed on – with your approval and that of President Putin – that took effect just five days earlier.

In public remarks bordering on the insubordinate, senior Pentagon officials showed unusually open skepticism regarding key aspects of the Kerry-Lavrov deal. ... Policy differences between the White House and the Pentagon are rarely as openly expressed as they are now over policy on Syria. We suggest you get hold of a new book to be released this week titled The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by master historian H. W. Brands. It includes testimony, earlier redacted, that sheds light on why President Truman dismissed WWII hero Gen. Douglas MacArthur from command of U.N. forces in Korea in April 1951. One early reviewer notes that “Brands’s narrative makes us wonder about challenges of military versus civilian leadership we still face today.” You may find this new book more relevant at this point in time than the Team of Rivals.

Syria Offers Rebels Safe Passage to Flee Aleppo

Fighting continued at several locations inside the Nusra Front-held eastern half of the Syrian city of Aleppo, as the military tried to expel the Islamist rebels from key neighborhoods. Airstrikes were also reported, as the Syrian government made a surprise offer of safe passage if the rebels flee.

An official statement released on Syrian state media and made on behalf of both the Syrian and Russian governments offered all armed rebel factions inside eastern Aleppo safe passage as well as “aid as necessary” if they agreed to leave the city “and let civilian residents live their normal lives.”

This is not totally without precedent. Throughout the Syrian Civil War the government has on several occasions made such deals to secure the recovery of important neighborhoods or districts within cities, at times even busing the rebels out of the area and into other rebel territory.

Vulnerable refugees to be moved from 'squalid' camps on Greek islands

Greece is poised to transfer thousands of refugees from overcrowded camps on its Aegean islands to the mainland amid escalating tensions in the facilities and protests from irate locals.

The leftist-led government said unaccompanied minors, the elderly and infirm would be among the first to be moved as concerns mounted over the future of a landmark EU-Turkey deal to stem migrant flows.

“The situation on the islands is difficult and needs to be relieved,” deputy minister for European affairs Nikos Xydakis told the Guardian. “Accommodation on the mainland will be more suitable. We will start with transfers of those who are most vulnerable, always in the sphere of implementing and protecting the EU-Turkey agreement.”

Erdogan says Turkey in 'endgame' over EU membership

Istanbul: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday warned that Turkey had reached the "end of the game" over its decades-long EU membership bid, saying it was time for Brussels once and for all to make clear if it wanted Ankara as a member.

In a hard-hitting speech marking the opening session of parliament, Erdogan also told Brussels it needed to allow Turks visa-free travel to the bloc by October, as per a previous agreement to decrease migrant flows.

Relations between the European Union and Turkey have strained in the wake of the July 15 failed coup, with EU officials among the most vocal critics of the relentless crackdown against the alleged plotters and supporters

"If the EU is going to make Turkey a full member, we are ready. But they should know that we have came to the end of the game," Erdogan said in a televised speech in Ankara.

Taliban assault on Kunduz sparks exit of MSF staff

International agencies are evacuating foreign staff from Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, following a heavy attack by Taliban forces who entered the city on Sunday.

In a two-pronged assault, the militants have also stepped up their months-long offensive in Helmand in the south, seizing Nawa district on Sunday, according to officials, and inching closer than ever to the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. ...

When the city was last under Taliban control, a US airstrike hit a Médecins Sans Frontièrs hospital, killing 42 people and razing the clinic to the ground.

Following Sunday’s attack, MSF evacuated its foreign staff, who had been based in Kunduz to look after what was left of the destroyed hospital, said a spokesman for the charity. It also cancelled a commemoration ceremony on the hospital grounds, which had been expected to draw as many as 1,000 guests.

The UN also airlifted at least one foreign staff member in the afternoon.

Medea Benjamin: If Americans Can Sue Saudis over 9/11, Drone Victims Should Be Able to Sue U.S.

9/11 widow files lawsuit against Saudi Arabia

tephanie DeSimone was two months pregnant when her husband, Navy Cmdr. Patrick Dunn, was killed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Now, 15 years later -- and two days after Congress legally paved the way -- she's filed a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, claiming the kingdom is partially responsible for his death.

In court documents filed Friday in Washington, D.C., DeSimone alleges Saudi Arabia provided material support to al Qaeda for more than a decade and was aware of the terror group's plan to attack the US.
"Absent the support provided by the Kingdom, al Qaeda would not have possessed the capacity to conceive, plan, and execute the September 11th attacks," the documents say.

The lawsuit alleges that the plaintiffs -- which include DeSimone's daughter -- suffered "severe and permanent personal injuries" and are seeking unspecified compensation.

The documents go on to allege Saudi Arabia, through agents and purported charities, provided al Qaeda members with financial and other logistical support to carry out the attacks.

Hackers are using smart devices to launch cyberattacks

Hackers are exploiting serious vulnerabilities in the security of the billions of connected devices collectively known as the Internet of Things, and building zombie armies capable of knocking any target offline, threatening free speech and the internet economy.

Over the past week Brian Krebs, an independent journalist who investigates the shady world of cybercrime and the dark net, has seen his website hit with one of the largest attacks in the history of the internet, carried out by a botnet of compromised CCTV cameras — which some experts see as a harbinger of things to come. ...

Normally with DDoS attacks, the devices used to flood a site with traffic are PCs that have been compromised with malware to become part of a so-called botnet, an army of zombie computers that can be controlled remotely to do a hacker's bidding.

But in this case, the botnet was comprised of web-connected devices collectively known as the Internet of Things, such as CCTV cameras, which can be looped in to a botnet attack.

Depending on which estimate you believe, the number of connected devices in use around the world by 2020 will range somewhere from 20 billion to 75 billion. ... Everything from industrial control systems and factory robots to the smart TVs, fridges, ovens and thermostats in our homes will be online and therefore open to attack. Though connected cameras might not have the same processing power as desktop PCs, for the purposes of a botnet army, they make the perfect zombie soldier.

Europe’s Top Human Rights Court Will Consider Legality of Surveillance Exposed by Edward Snowden

Ten organizations – including Privacy International, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Amnesty International – are taking up the landmark case against the U.K. government in the European Court of Human Rights. In a 115-page complaint released on Thursday, the groups allege that “blanket and indiscriminate” surveillance operations carried out by British spy agencies in collaboration with their U.S. counterparts violate privacy and freedom of expression rights.

The case represents the first time Europe’s top human rights court has been asked to consider the legality of surveillance exposed in the Snowden documents. Its judgments are legally binding and could potentially have ramifications for how surveillance is conducted by U.K. agencies.

“Through bulk surveillance programs, the U.S. and U.K. governments intercept the private communications and data of millions of people around the world,” said Ashley Gorski, staff attorney at the ACLU National Security Project. “Not only is bulk surveillance unlawful, but it has a deeply chilling and corrosive effect on political discourse and our personal communications. We are hopeful that the European Court of Human Rights will recognize that this mass surveillance violates fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of speech, and that the court’s ruling will help put an end to these practices on a global scale.”

Colombians Reject Peace Deal in Stunning Referendum, Advocates Cite Climate of "Intimidation & Fear"

Colombian voters just rejected the country’s historic peace deal

Colombian voters narrowly rejected a historic peace accord on Sunday that was supposed to end a war between the country's largest rebel group and the government that has lasted more than half a century.

The peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC, failed by around 0.5 percent, or 61,000 votes, in a referendum.

Opinion polls predicted an easy victory for the "yes" campaign that was championed by both President Juan Manuel Santos and FARC leaders, who held a festival-style congress last month and celebrated their imminent transformation into a political party.

The shock result now plunges the country into uncertainty. ...

With the upset yet to fully sink in, Santos called an emergency meeting of the top peace negotiators and security chiefs in the country. He later gave a short statement to the press in which he accepted the loss at the polls but said the current ceasefire with the guerrillas would remain in place.

Blow for Transparency as Supreme Court Rejects Wisconsin Corruption Case

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal to re-launch a John Doe investigation into Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and conservative organizations in the state.

Wisconsin Public Radio writes that the order, quietly issued without explanation, "would seem to mark the end of the road for the case known in Wisconsin as John Doe 2," which came about after Walker won a recall campaign in 2012 and prosecutors began investigating whether he'd colluded with the Wisconsin Club for Growth and other conservative groups on advertising without disclosing their donations to his campaign. ...

Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Wisconsin-based watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, told Common Dreams in response to the order, "The Wisconsin Supreme Court's ruling in the Walker John Doe [case] overturned almost 40 years of transparency in campaigns and elections in our state. Today's decision means that, for now, the people of Wisconsin will not know what special interests are secretly bankrolling their politicians or calling in the special favors."

Black immigrants much more likely to be deported over criminal offenses, data shows

It is widely recognized that African Americans in the US are more likely to be arrested, convicted and imprisoned. A new report finds this pattern of criminalization has had a spillover effect for black immigrants.

People from Africa and the Caribbean are twice as likely to face deportation due to a criminal conviction compared to those from other regions, and more than three times as likely to be detained while their cases are pending, according to the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

“This report shows black immigrants encounter major social and economic challenges in the US because of systemic racism,” said Opal Tometi, the Alliance’s Executive Director and a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, who is a first generation Nigerian American and was born and raised in Arizona.

But criminal convictions are just one of the reasons immigrants are placed in deportation proceedings. Others are funneled into deportation proceedings simply because of immigration violations. Overall, black immigrants are slightly more likely to face deportation for any reason than immigrants overall. Black immigrants comprise about 7% of immigrants in the US, and nearly 11% percent of those facing deportation.

The U.S. Still Profits from Slavery Because the 13th Amendment Perpetuates Prison Labor

The man who filmed NYPD officers choking Eric Garner to death is going to prison

His cell phone video of the last moments of Eric Garner's life triggered a national conversation about policing and race, and gave the nascent Black Lives Matter movement a slogan: "I can't breathe."

Now Ramsey Orta is going to jail to serve a four-year sentence for selling heroin and illegal possession of a firearm. ...

Orta starts his prison term Monday, part of a plea agreement with the New York District Attorney. But he has always contended that he got extra scrutiny from the police because of his video. "I get spotlights shined in my window," Orta told VICE News in an interview. "Officers park around my house, wave at me, follow me, point me out, say 'that's the video guy.'"

He has been arrested numerous times, including at a Black Lives Matter demonstration and while recording police conducting a traffic stop.

Hacked Audio Reveals Hillary Clinton Sees Herself Occupying “Center-Left to Center-Right”

In the hacked recording of a private conversation with campaign donors in February, Hillary Clinton distanced herself from progressive goals like “free college, free healthcare” and described her place on the political spectrum as spanning from the center-left to the center-right.

The newly disclosed comments came in audio, apparently from hacked emails, that was revealed this week by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative blog run by a Republican communications strategist. Clinton was speaking at a Virginia fundraiser hosted by Beatrice Welters, the former U.S. ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, and her husband Anthony Welters, the executive chairman of an investment consulting firm founded by former Clinton aide Cheryl Mills. ...

CLINTON: It is important to recognize what’s going on in this election. Everybody who’s ever been in an election that I’m aware of is quite bewildered because there is a strain of, on the one hand, the kind of populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory kind of approach that we hear too much of from the Republican candidates. And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel. So as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don’t have much company there. Because it is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is — I don’t want to overpromise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do. ...

Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future. I met with a group of young black millennials today and you know one of the young women said, “You know, none of us feel that we have the job that we should have gotten out of college. And we don’t believe the job market is going to give us much of a chance.” So that is a mindset that is really affecting their politics. And so if you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing. So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism. We want people to be idealistic. We want them to set big goals. But to take what we can achieve now and try to present them as bigger goals.

Washington's governing elites think we're all morons, a new study says

Voters are angry at the political establishment and the political establishment doesn't much care for the voters either. In fact, they think voters are pretty damn stupid.

That's the conclusion of a new survey of America's unelected governing elites by political scientists at Johns Hopkins University. While media outlets endlessly poll and probe the American people to understand why they feel so disenchanted with their government, Professor Benjamin Ginsberg and Senior Lecturer Jennifer Bachner instead looked at America's political ruling class for answers. The federal bureaucrats, think tank leaders, and congressional staff members they surveyed, Ginsberg said in an interview with VICE News, "have no idea what Americans think and they don't care. They think Americans are stupid and should do what they are told." ...

In their new book What Washington Gets Wrong, Ginsberg and Bachner report that the overwhelming majority of D.C.'s Beltway Insiders think the American public is pitifully uninformed on government policy. ... With such a low opinion of the American public, perhaps it is not surprising that the vast majority of these political insiders believe they should ignore public opinion. ...

If the public resists, Ginsberg told VICE News, then bureaucrats "nudge people into obedience." In fact, 'nudge' has been the PR-friendly word of choice for bureaucratic regulations in the Obama era. Cass Sunstein, Obama's Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, even co-wrote a book in 2008 called Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health Wealth, and Happiness that lays out how the government can use behavioral psychology to more efficiently achieve policy goals.

WikiLeaks Cancels Major Clinton Revelation Amid ‘Security Concerns’

WikiLeaks canceled a scheduled Tuesday announcement regarding information related to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, according to an MSNBC reporter.

The organization’s founder, Julian Assange, was scheduled to make the mysterious announcement from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he is currently holed up to avoid extradition over rape allegations.

WikiLeaks canceled the event “due to security concerns,” according to MSNBC’s Jesse Rodriguez. He did not elaborate on the nature of the concerns, but later tweeted that Assange will appear via video at a Berlin press conference Tuesday morning.

Feds say they won't evict sprawling pipeline protest camp

The sprawling encampment that's a living protest against the four-state Dakota Access pipeline has most everything it needs to be self-sustaining — food, firewood, fresh water and shelter. Everything, that is, except permission to be on the federal land in North Dakota.

Federal officials say they won't evict the Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires camp, due to free speech reasons, even though it's on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land near the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers that many Native Americans believe is still rightfully owned by the Standing Rock Sioux under a nearly 150-year-old treaty.

"We're not leaving until we defeat this big black snake," camp spokesman Cody Hall said of the pipeline. ...

The camp is the overflow from smaller private and permitted protest sites nearby and began growing in August. The gathering has been called the largest gathering of Native American tribes in a century, all there to protest Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners' $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline, which tribal officials believe threatens sacred sites and a river that's a source of water for millions.

Citing Environmental Risks, Scientists Back Tribes in Dakota Access Fight

Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation finds pipeline spill detection system severely flawed

Close to 100 scientists have signed onto a letter decrying "inadequate environmental and cultural impact assessments" for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), and calling for a halt to construction until such tests have been carried out as requested by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

Lead signatories Stephanie Januchowski-Hartley, Anne Hilborn, Katherine Crocker, and Asia Murphy drew attention to the missive in a letter to the journal Science published Friday.

"The DAPL project is just one of many haphazard approaches to natural resource extraction that overlook broader consequences of oil development," they wrote.

Furthermore, the open letter (pdf) states, "We as scientists are concerned about the potential local and regional impacts from the DAPL, which is symptomatic of the United States' continued dependence on fossil fuels in the face of predicted broad-scale social and ecological impacts from global climate change." Specifically, they cite the Standing Rock Sioux's concerns that the pipeline project threatens biodiversity and clean water.

Underscoring those concerns, a Reuters investigation into the nation's pipeline system published Friday reveals that "sensitive technology designed to pick up possible spills is about as successful as a random member of the public...finding it, despite efforts from pipeline operators."

In fact, according to the Reuters analysis of U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) data, "[o]ver the last six years, there have been 466 incidents where a pipeline carrying crude oil or refined products has leaked. Of those, 105, or 22 percent, were detected by an advanced detection system."

0:02 / 10:56
As Earth Reaches Frightening CO2 Milestone, Bill McKibben Calls for War on Climate Change

Forget Paris, Scientists Say 'Radical Change' Only Way to Stay Below 2 Degrees

To much fanfare, global leaders have agreed to tackle the climate crisis by ratifying the Paris climate agreement, but a group of esteemed scientists is warning that current pledges to reduce emissions are far from sufficient and, in fact, put the world on track to reaching the dangerous 2°C climate threshold by 2050.

"The pledges are not going to get even close," said Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and lead author of a new report out Thursday. "If you governments of the world are really serious, you're going to have to do way, way more."

Aptly titled The Truth About Climate Change, the report, put forth by the Argentina-based Universal Ecological Fund (Fundación Ecológica Universal FEU-US), comes amid a rash of new research, all suggesting that key global warming thresholds will be reached much more rapidly than previously thought.

Led by Watson, the team examined the climate commitments, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), put forth by COP21 signatories and concluded that the delayed commitment to climate action has essentially eliminated the possibility to keeping the Earth's temperature increase beneath 1.5°C.

The report states:

[T]he 1.5°C target has almost certainly already been missed because of the lack of action  to stop the increase in global GHG emissions for the last 20 years. Global average temperature  has already reached 1°C above pre-industrial times in 2015, as reported by the World  Meteorological Organization. This is a significant increase, compared to the 0.85°C above pre-industrial times in 2012 reported by the IPCC. An additional warming of 0.4-0.5°C is expected as a consequence of GHGs that have already been emitted. This additional increase in global  temperature is due to the slow response of the ocean-atmosphere system to the increased atmospheric concentrations of GHGs.

Global GHG emissions are not projected to decrease fast enough, even if all the pledges are fully implemented. Full implementation of the pledges will require the promised US$100 billion per year in financial assistance for developing countries to be realized. As a result, the 1.5°C target could be reached by the early 2030s and the 2°C target by 2050.

Further, the researchers minced no words when laying the blame for the missed targets on "political and sectoral interests," including those "benefiting from the use of fossil fuels," for promoting "deliberate misinformation" about the current situation.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Russia-Baiting and Risks of Nuclear War

How Arms Sales Distort US Foreign Policy

45 Years After Attica Uprising, Prisoners Are Rebelling Again

Lawmaker Who Pushed Bill to Protect People Filming Police Arrested for Filming Police

Can the Left Survive a Trump Presidency?

The six US supreme court cases that could set the tone for the post-Scalia era

WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange: 'We Believe in What We're Doing'

Media Hails Shimon Peres as Man of Peace — But Doesn’t Bother to Ask Arabs

Germany’s Deutsche Bank, Again in Trouble, Received a U.S. Bailout Twice as Big as Lehman Brothers

DEA’s Army of 18,000 Informants Pocketed $237 Million Over Five Years

Arundhati Roy announces second novel after 20-year gap

A Little Night Music

Hammie Nixon - The Judge, He Pleaded (Viola Lee Blues)

Sleepy John Estes & Hammie Nixon - Corrine Corrine

Hammie Nixon + Sleepy John Estes - Someday Baby Blues

Hammie Nixon & Son Bonds - Trouble Trouble Blues

Hammie Nixon + Sleepy John Estes - Stop That Thing

Hammie Nixon & Napoleon Strickland

Hammie Nixon - Im Going Home

Hammie Nixon + Sleepy John Estes - Drop Down Mama