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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features the doo-wop group The Olympics. Enjoy!

^{The Olympics - Good Lovin'}

“The president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

-- Barack Obama

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News and Opinion

Perhaps Obama's confusion over how "humanitarian" aims are accomplished accounts for the murder of caregivers. Surely those doctors were dangerous as hell and an imminent threat to the United States.

Doctors Without Borders Staff Shot While Fleeing Kunduz Hospital, Report Finds

"MSF doctors and other medical staff were shot while running to reach safety in a different part of the compound."

The medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders released its internal report on Thursday about the October attack on its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. 

At least 30 people were killed in the airstrikes, led by U.S. forces, the report said. "Patients burned in their beds," it added, and "medical staff were decapitated and lost limbs."

The organization found that "a patient in a wheelchair attempting to escape from the
inpatient department ... was killed by shrapnel from a blast."

The report also revealed that pilots shot at staff members fleeing the hospital.

"Many staff describe seeing people being shot, most likely from the plane, as people tried to flee the main hospital building that was being hit with each airstrike," the report said. "Some accounts mention shooting that appears to follow the movement of people on the run. [Doctors Without Borders] doctors and other medical staff were shot while running to reach safety in a different part of the compound."

Although the review isn't finished, Doctors Without Borders President Dr. Joanne Liu said that the organization released the report to "counter speculation and to be transparent."

Silly human rights groups! The US government makes allegations of human rights abuses and, when convenient, parrots those that you make as weaponized propaganda - the US government does not respond to allegations of its own abuses.

Rights Groups Call on U.S. Agencies to Appoint Human Rights Contact

More than two dozen civic groups groups are asking why government agencies haven’t found somebody to respond to possible human rights violations within the agencies’ areas of responsibility — as required by a 1998 executive order.

The groups sent letters to six agencies on Wednesday — the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — echoing their past request for a point of contact who can respond to violations of international human rights treaties. ...

“The United States is lagging behind most of the free world with its disregard of the rights of the rest of the world,” wrote Amie Stepanovich, U.S. policy manager for Access Now, in an email to The Intercept. “It is now more important than ever for the U.S. to recognize that human rights treaties have force beyond our borders.”

Power Wars: How Obama Continued Bush's National Security State After Campaigning Against It

America’s Non-Representative War Government

Questioning the authenticity of representative government may seem beyond the pale in America. But occasionally the veil slips, and we glimpse reality. If we really live under a representative government, how can a president take the country to war without even a show vote in Congress, much less a referendum? (The proposed Ludlow Amendment to the Constitution would have required a referendum on war.)

Barack Obama has announced he is sending special operations forces into Syria to help those fighting both the government of Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State, just as last year he ordered airstrikes in Syria. He previously said he would not send ground forces, but you can forget about that now. After a Delta Force soldier was killed there while on a raid last month, Secretary of War Ash Carter acknowledged that Americans will be at risk. Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said, “The norm is not going out in raids. I’m obviously not going to rule anything out.”

Note well: the U.S. Congress has not declared war on Syria (nor should it), so Obama’s moves are unconstitutional and illegal. ...

Orwellian war-denial is nothing new for the Obama administration. Obama refused to call the 2011 regime-changing air campaign in Libya a war; thus he dismissed the War Powers Resolution as irrelevant. ...

Going to war is the most consequential step a government can take. If the people have nothing to say about war ex ante, the government can hardly be described as representative.

The PKK Have Just Announced That Their Ceasefire Is Over

Kurdish militants ended a month-old ceasefire in Turkey on Thursday, a day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to "liquidate" them, dashing hopes of any let-up in violence in the wake of a national election.

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group said the ruling AK Party, which won back its parliamentary majority in Sunday's election, was on a war footing.

"The unilateral halt to hostilities has come to an end with the AKP's war policy and the latest attacks," it said in a statement carried by the Firat news agency, which is close to the militant group.

Erdogan, who oversaw a peace process with the PKK which collapsed in July, vowed on Wednesday to continue battling the PKK until every last fighter was "liquidated."

["Oversaw a peace process ... which collapsed in July" is a distortion of events. All reasonable accounts of events suggest that Erdogan and AKP deliberately "collapsed" the peace process (and ceasefire) with extreme prejudice for self-serving political reasons. - js]

Turkey’s President Gets His Majority – at a Terrible Price

If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the November 1 Turkish elections, it’s that fear works, and there are few people better at engendering it than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Only five months after his Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its majority in the Turkish parliament, a snap election put it back in the driver’s seat.

The cost of the victory, however, may be dear.

To achieve it, Erdogan reignited Turkey’s long and bloody war with the Kurds, stood silent while nationalist mobs attacked his opponents, and unilaterally altered the constitutional role of his office.

Observers from the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said that violence and attacks on the media had a significant impact on the election. “Unfortunately we come to the conclusion that this campaign was unfair, and was characterized by too much violence and fear,” said Andreas Gross, a Swiss parliamentarian and head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe delegation.

At the same time the European Union itself seemed Observers criticise ‘unfair’ Turkish election campaign

Monitors express concern at bias in state media coverage and violence in run up to vote

The campaign for Turkey’s parliamentary elections, which saw the ruling AK Party win back a majority on Sunday, was unfair and marred by fear and violence, international election observers said on Monday. ...

The heads of the joint mission from the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said at a news conference the violence had a significant impact.

They pointed to attacks and intimidation against members of the pro-Kurdish HDP, which saw its support drop 2 per cent compared with June polls. ...

So far no parties have lodged formal complaints over the results, although the HDP said it was planning to contest several seats. Official results are not expected for another 11 days, in order to allow time for complaints to be assessed.

US admits ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels joined Al-Qaeda affiliate

Pentagon Vows More Weapons Drops to Syrian Rebels

Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren today announced that the US intends to carry out more weapons airdrops in the Hasakeh Province of northeastern Syria, claiming the “Democratic Forces” faction has achieved massive gains in the weeks since they dropped their last batch of arms there.

The Democratic Forces have been hyped by the US as a major new force against ISIS, though most analysts agree the group exists “in name only” and simply refers to the Kurdish YPG and a few mostly irrelevant allies. Interestingly, the US claim of success is the first claim that any major territory has changed hands in Hasakeh recently.

Russian FM: Negotiators Must Decide Which Syrian Rebels Are Legitimate

Meeting with UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov urged the international community to get together and decide on a formal list of “legitimate” Syrian rebel organizations before the next round of talks in Vienna.

This might seem an odd request, but since the participants in the last Vienna talks agreed to invite legitimate opposition groups for this round, the lack of identification for who those groups are going to be has made inviting them pretty much impossible. ...

The ambiguity about which rebels are “the good guys” has also complicated the narrative on Russia’s airstrikes in Syria, with the US complaining that everyone Russia attacks who isn’t explicitly ISIS is an unacceptable target. Russia has insisted that many of these targets are al-Qaeda or their allies, and indeed with many of the non-ISIS strikes centering on al-Qaeda territory, there is reason to believe that is often the case.

US: Growing Russian Presence Not Making Significant Gains in Syria

US officials were predicting a Russian military failure in Syria within hours of the first airstrikes, and a month in, officials are already crowing that Russia, despite launching myriad airstrikes and have around 4,000 ground troops inside Syria, haven’t made “significant territorial gains” there. ...

The US criticism undercuts their own shaky war strategy, for if the administration believes 4,000 Russian troops aren’t a difference maker, the recently announced plan to send 30-50 US troops to Syria is downright puzzling.

Refugee crisis: EU states failing to meet funding and resource commitments

EU member states are falling short of all the main commitments they agreed to in September to urgently address the refugee crisis.

Too few had responded to calls from Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia to provide the resources they need to cope with the situation, according to the European commission.

The three countries have called on the support of the EU civil protection mechanism, a scheme designed to offer practical assistance to countries overwhelmed by the situation. But so far only 10 member states have responded to their requests - Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, the UK and Romania.

Many items requested by Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia have not been delivered, including essentials such as beds, blankets, protective clothing, first aid kits and water containers.

That EU states so far have relocated only 116 refugees out of the 160.000 agreed is pretty scandalous. https://t.co/rUeUqgLwcJ

— Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) November 4, 2015

US defence chief to visit carrier in South China Sea amid Beijing tensions

US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter arrived in eastern Malaysia on Thursday, from where he was due to fly out to an American aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.

The official purpose of his visit was to highlight America’s shift of strategic attention toward the Asia-Pacific region.

But the move was likely to further rile Beijing amid a big-power confrontation over Chinese claims to the virtually the entire South China Sea.

Carter was to take the 30-minute flight from the Malaysian state of Sabah to the USS Theodore Roosevelt aboard an Osprey, a tilt-rotor aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter but fly like a plane. ...

The nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Theodore Roosevelt has been conducting routine operations in the strategic seaway and is not part of the “freedom of navigation” push.

The people of Yemen can't get a break. I wonder if the cyclone slowed down the US-Saudi scorched-earth military campaign.

Nearly 40,000 Displaced After Cyclone Chapala Slams Into Yemen

Cyclone Chapala slammed into Yemen earlier this week, a rare occurrence in the region, displacing tens of thousands and creating an acute humanitarian problem in a region already steeped in civil war and pervasive poverty.

The storm, with its extremely heavy rains and flooding, affected as many as 1.1 million people, and displaced more than 36,000, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The agency said that an airlift was being prepared for Socotra Island, where three people reportedly died from the storm. 

Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, said that Cyclone Chapala was the first hurricane-strength storm to hit Yemen since the 1940s, and the first tropical storm-strength tempest to hit the country since 1960 — with the caveat that historical records from the region are not good. (Hurricanes in the Indian Ocean are called cyclones.) ...

"This Chapala storm is the second-strongest storm in the Arabian Sea, on record," he said. Records date to roughly 1990. He estimated that it was a category-one storm when it made landfall.

A Possible Bomb in the Russian Plane Crash

A bomb may have brought down the Russian passenger jet that crashed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula over the weekend, U.S. officials told several news outlets late Wednesday afternoon.

Russian and Egyptian investigators have not yet announced the cause of the crash, and are examining the data within the aircraft’s black boxes recovered from the wreckage.

A U.S. official told the Associated Press that U.S. intelligence agencies have reached “the tentative conclusion that the Islamic State group’s Sinai affiliate planted an explosive device on the plane.”

ISIS Reiterates Responsibility for Downing Russian Plane

With growing reports from Western intelligence agencies, including in the US, that Saturday’s downing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula likely was the result of an ISIS bombing, ISIS is again reiterating its claim of responsibility.

ISIS’ claims of credit don’t read particularly credibly, as the group declined again to offer any details on exactly how they did it, only challenging those who say they didn’t do it to prove otherwise.

If Isis did target Russian plane, what does it mean for 'war on terror'?

If Islamic State did bring down a packed passenger jet over the Sinai desert, as many US and UK officials believe is a “significant possibility”, then the act would mark a significant escalation of the group’s capabilities and strategic aims, but also underline its continuing regional – rather than global – focus.

One of the key differences between Isis and al-Qaida is that the former has focused its energies almost exclusively on seizing and holding territory. Al-Qaida, the veteran terrorist organisation from which Isis broke away, still, theoretically at least, prioritises spectacular strikes on targets in the west.

Al-Qaida has a long track record of targeting planes. This goes back to 1995 and a plot to bring down half a dozen airliners over the Pacific. Then came the 9/11 attacks, a 2002 attempt to bring down an Israeli airliner with a surface to air missile, a hugely ambitious plot in 2006 targeting transatlantic planes, and several more recent attempts by the Yemen-based affiliate, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, to strike at western air traffic.

Isis has avoided such operations. One reason is that social media and digital technologies mean it no longer needs a spectacular attack killing large numbers of westerners to gain publicity, as was the case when professional news editors or repressive states decided what was broadcast and what was not. ...

If it was indeed an Isis bomb that brought down the plane – and both Egypt and Russia have downplayed any suggestion that the crash is linked to terrorism – then this still does not signal that the group has launched a fully fledged global campaign of violence.

Report: Military Spent Over $10 Million on ‘Paid Patriotism’

You know when you go to a baseball game and invariably during some inning break the team points out a group of soldiers or national guard members in the stands and tries to get a big round of applause going? That doesn’t just happen.

A new report from Sens. John McCain (R – AZ) and Jeff Flake (R – AZ) revealed that the Pentagon has spent over $10 million in recent years to keep those “shows of patriotism” active across sporting events.

Whether it’s paying for special VIP parking for generals or for some team to show the military’s logo on their jumbotron, these programs are overwhelmingly pay-to-play sponsorship schemes. If 20 members of the military are getting the “Richard Petty ride-along experience,” it comes as part of a $1.5 million annual expenditure.

The Most Militarized Universities in America

[Click the link for full report and list of the top 100 militarized universities. - js]

U.K. Government Proposes More, Not Less, Electronic Snooping

Two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the vast reach of U.S. and U.K. surveillance, the U.S. Congress rolled back the most manifestly unconstitutional element: the bulk collection of domestic phone data.

The U.K. government, on Wednesday, chose to double down instead.

The newly unveiled text of what critics are calling a proposed “Snooper’s Charter” or “Hacker’s License” would explicitly authorize the bulk collection of domestic data, require telecommunications companies to store records of websites visited by every citizen for 12 months for access by the government, approve the government’s right to hack into and bug computers and phones, severely restrict the ability of citizens to raise questions about secret surveillance warrants or evidence obtained through bulk surveillance presented in court, and oblige companies to assist in bypassing encryption. ...

There are some new limits in the bill. For example, if police wanted to use phone call information to try and track down a journalist’s source, those efforts would now have to be approved by a judicial commissioner. In fact, most warrants would need approval by a judicial commissioner, after the U.K. secretary of state signs off.

But overall, the bill, which May described as “world-leading” in its oversight provisions, remains a concern for privacy advocates because of its massive surveillance authorities and vague language and loopholes.

[For even greater detail, see this article: Seven Major Takeaways From the U.K.’s Proposed Surveillance Rules - js]

Congressman introduces bill to end warrantless Stingray surveillance

A bill has been introduced in Congress that aims to control the use of the sophisticated surveillance equipment known as Stingray, following a Guardian investigation which revealed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as the 13th federal agency known to possess the devices. ...

On 29 October, three days after the investigation was published, Representative Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House oversight committee, along with the rest of the committee, sent a bipartisan letter to IRS commissioner John Koskinen demanding documents detailing the agency’s guidelines, policies and use of the devices.

The Senate judiciary committee is also holding an inquiry into their use, and in the Senate finance committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon also asked Koskinen for details about the agency’s use of Stingray. In response, Koskinen said that it requires a court order for its use.

On Monday, Chaffetz introduced a bill to the House floor which would make it illegal for Stingray technology to be deployed without a warrant by either local, state or federal agencies – a much higher judicial bar for their use than the Pen register, or trap-and-trace, court order which they previously required.

“When you find out the IRS, and potentially others are using this tech – whoa! That’s a bridge too far,” Chaffetz told the Guardian on Wednesday. “If they have [probable] cause, go get a warrant. But if you’re just on a surfing expedition, back off.”

Days of Revolt: The Corporate Coup d'etat with Ralph Nader

Portugal’s Democracy Crisis

A likely vote of no confidence in Portugal’s hard-right government will signify whether voters in the EU can still choose their own government.

On Nov. 10 Portugal’s minority right-wing government will likely lose a vote of confidence, initiating a series of events that will determine whether voters in the European Union (EU) still have the right to a government of their own choosing.

The crisis was set off by the Oct. 4 elections that saw the right-wing Forward Portugal coalition, which has overseen austerity policies that have driven 20 percent of the population below the poverty line, lose its majority in the parliament to three parties on the left: the Socialist Party, the Left Bloc, and a Communist/Green alliance. ...

Instead of asking the left if it could form a government, however, on Oct. 23, Portuguese president Cavaco Silva—a former prime minister for the Social Democratic Party—reappointed the right-wing alliance’s leader, Pedro Coelho, as prime minister.

Silva went further, however, delivering anincendiary speech in which he declared that he would never appoint “anti-European forces” to run the government, and denouncing parties on the left for opposing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the common currency, the euro. ...

He has received support for his position as well. Joseph Daul, president of the center-right grouping in the European Parliament, said, “The sacrifices made by the people of Portugal must not be jeopardized by a government composed of anti-EU and anti-NATO parties.” German ChancellorAngela Merkel said an anti-austerity government in Portugal would be a “very negative” development.

If the Portuguese president refuses to allow the left to form a government and Portugal Forward is defeated in the Nov. 10 vote, Silva can appoint Coelho to run a caretaker government and call for new elections. But those won’t be for eight months. Silva’s presidency runs out in January, and new elections can’t be held for six months following the appointment of a new president.

The left has the votes to insure a president compatible with the will of the voters—they have already overridden the right’s candidate for Speaker of the House and put their own candidate in—but there will still be six months before the next election. Eight months is enough time for a right-wing caretaker government and its backers in the EU and the Troika to do considerable mischief. Greece has felt the power of the Troika and seen what it can do to undermine opposition to its policies. ...

If this “soft coup” stands, taxes, interest rates, public ownership, investments, and economic strategies to control inflation and unemployment—long the battleground for conflicting ideologies—will no longer be issues to be decided democratically. Unelected bodies, like the Troika, will make those decisions, in spite of the fact that many of the Troika’s policies—like austerity—are highly controversial and have an almost unbroken track record of failure.

From Digby:

That damned democracy always interfering with what's important

TPP trade deal: text published online

New Zealand has put the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) online, offering the first detailed look at the world’s largest free trade deal, the most ambitious effort in years to remove barriers to commerce.

The New Zealand government, which signed on to the deal, put the contents of the agreement on its website on Thursday, saying it would continue to undergo legal review.

New Research Says Income Inequality Worsened Under Fed's Quantitative Easing Policy

A travesty unfolds...

Congress Will Honor Dick Cheney With A Statue In The U.S. Capitol

Starting in December, the likeness of former Vice President Dick Cheney will grace the U.S. Capitol, in accordance with a Senate tradition honoring former vice presidents.

The Huffington Post was tipped off by a Senate resolution "authorizing the use of Emancipation Hall in the Capitol Visitor Center for the unveiling of the marble bust of Vice President Richard Cheney on December 3, 2015."

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The Case for Bernie Sanders

When we reporters are introduced to a politician, the first thing we ask ourselves is if he or she is acceptable to the political establishment. We don't admit that we ask this as a prerequisite, but we do.

Anyone who's survived without felony conviction a few terms as a senator, governor or congressperson, has an expensive enough haircut, and has never once said anything interesting will likely be judged a potentially "serious" candidate.

If you're wondering why no Mozarts or Einsteins ever end up running for president in America, but an endless succession of blockheads like Rick Perry are sold to us on the cover of Time magazine as contenders, it's because of this absurd prerequisite.

Ultimately, what we're looking for is someone who's enough of a morally flexible gasbag to get over with the money people, and then also charming enough on some politically irrelevant level to attract voters. ("I'm a war hero, and Sharon Stone's cousin" was Chris Rock's take on acceptable presidential self-salesmanship). ...

If questioned, most reporters would justify this by noting that an effective president must be able to bridge the gap between powerful interests and populist concerns. So it makes some sense to interrogate candidates accordingly, to make sure they're acceptable to both sides.

The flaw in this reasoning is that it assumes that Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Big Pharma and the rest need the help of us reporters to weed out the undesirables.

Bernie Sanders Just Introduced a Bill That Would End Pot Prohibition

Bernie Sanders introduced new legislation in the US Senate on Wednesday that would lift the federal ban on marijuana, allowing states to decide how to regulate the drug.

The Vermont Senator, who currently trails Hillary Clinton in the polls for the Democratic nomination, is calling for weed to be removed from the Controlled Substances Act, the law that governs US drug policy. Pot is currently listed as a Schedule I controlled substance, alongside heroin, LSD, and other narcotics that the federal government says have no accepted medical use and a high risk of abuse. Marijuana activists have been calling for years for marijuana to be "de-scheduled," but Sanders is the first federal lawmaker to actually propose it.

Sanders vowed last week in a speech to students at George Washington University that he would take steps to legalize marijuana, citing the impact that criminalization of the drug has had on mass incarceration. "We need major changes in our criminal justice system — including changes in drug laws," Sanders said. "Too many Americans have seen their lives destroyed because they have criminal records as a result of marijuana use. That's wrong. That has got to change."

Voters in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington, DC have already approved measures to legalize recreational marijuana, and some form of medical marijuana is currently legal in 23 states. Still, more than 700,000 people were arrested last year in the US for marijuana offenses.

[Also of interest: Mexico Just Took a Big Step Towards Marijuana Legalization - js]

Bernie Sanders sees 'real path' to winning African Americans' support

Vermont senator and prospective Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders has admitted that his campaign is currently lagging behind that of Hillary Clinton among African-American voters, but said that he saw “a real path” to winning the community’s support. ...

Speaking to NPR’s Morning Edition on Thursday, Sanders said that “if the election were held today … just among the African-American vote, we would lose.” This is because he is “just not yet well-known” in the community, Sanders said.

“People will tell you that – it’s just the simple truth,” he said. “We have to do a better job of … discussing my record, which in the US Congress is one of the strongest records in terms of civil rights.”

Sanders said that “the African-American community and the Latino community are struggling, in a nation in which our middle class is struggling”. He pointed to America’s high incarceration rate as being “disproportionately black and Latino”.

“So I think the issues we are focussing on, rebuilding the economy, and in the process creating up to 13m decent-paying jobs, many of those jobs will be for minority communities,” Sanders continued. “Making public colleges and university tuition free will benefit everyone in America, but even more so in the African-American community.” ...

In his interview with NPR, Sanders also highlighted that he had chosen not to have a Super Pac, and struck out at Clinton for taking donations from the wealthiest sectors of society, saying that he had been “walking the walk, not just talking the talk”.

“People should be suspect of candidates who receive large sums of money from Wall Street and then go out and say: ‘Trust me, I’m going to really regulate Wall Street,’” he told the Journal.

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Scientists warned the US president about global warming 50 years ago today

On 5 November 1965 climate scientists summarized the risks associated with rising carbon pollution in a report for Lyndon Baines Johnson

Fifty years ago today, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science highlighted, US president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sent him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment. The introduction to the report noted:

Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations.

The report included a section on atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate change, written by prominent climate scientists Roger Revelle, Wallace Broecker, Charles Keeling, Harmon Craig, and J Smagorisnky. Reviewing the document today, one can’t help but be struck by how well these scientists understood the mechanisms of Earth’s climate change 50 years ago.

The report noted that within a few years, climate models would be able to reasonably project future global surface temperature changes. In 1974, one of its authors, Wallace Broecker did just that in a paper titled Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?.

In addition to rising temperatures, the report discussed a variety of “other possible effects of an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide”, including melting of the Antarctic ice cap, rise of sea level, warming of sea water, increased acidity of fresh waters (which also applies to the danger of ocean acidification, global warming’s evil twin), and an increase in plant photosynthesis. ...

Fifty years later, the impending Paris international climate negotiations represent our last chance to heed the expert counsel about the dangers posed by human-caused climate change before we’re fully committed to the deleterious consequences that climate scientists have been warning us about for a half century.

Federal Lands Are Being Ruined for Inefficient Solar Energy

The U.S. government is committed to a mistaken and damaging renewable-energy policy that promotes and heavily subsidizes industrial-scale solar and wind development on public lands.

This industrial assault is already under way, and may ultimately cover hundreds of thousands of acres of our public land — much of which consists of intact ecosystems that provide habitat for rare and endangered plants and animals, sequester carbon, and offer the chance for ecosystem adaptation to climate change.

Utility-scale solar and wind generating plants are transforming ecologically rich lands into industrial facilities, privatizing vast areas of public land.

Utility-scale solar and wind generating plants, most with footprints of several thousand acres, are transforming ecologically rich, multiple-use lands to single-use industrial facilities, in effect privatizing vast areas of public land. Those lands cannot be returned to their previous state; conversion is total and permanent, even though most projects will generate power for only 15 to 30 years. ...

We must create a better energy future that serves both humans and the environment. Let’s pursue efficiency upgrades and “distributed generation”—point-of-use generation on rooftops, in parking lots and highway medians, brownfields and throughout the built environment. These are cost-effective, efficient, clean and democratic approaches that are faster to implement; they have far less environmental impact than industrial-scale solar or wind power on intact ecosystems; and they make our power grid far less vulnerable to catastrophic failure and sabotage.

Regardless of Keystone XL, Tar Sands Oil Will Still Flow to the Gulf

US denies TransCanada request to delay Keystone XL review

The United States has formally denied a TransCanada Corp request to pause the US review of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, a State Department spokesman said on Wednesday.

John Kirby told a briefing there was no legal requirement to pause the Keystone review based on the developer’s request. Secretary of state John Kerry has not given a timeline for making a recommendation.

“The secretary believes that, out of respect for that process and all the input that has gone into it, that it is the most appropriate thing to keep that process in place, to continue the review,” Kirby added.

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Also of Interest

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

The Most Militarized Universities in America

Bolts from the blue - a Guardian invesigation of police Taser use and regulation

'Iron-ass' Cheney and 'arrogant' Rumsfeld damaged America, says George Bush Sr

John Roberts's anti-immigrant hypothetical was just legal wordplay

The Perils of Obama's Latest Undeclared War

NY Times Buries Intercept Whistleblower’s Shocking Drone War Disclosures

I got 643 days of torture. My tormentor gets Cameron’s red carpet

How Pollution Killed a Louisiana Town

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A Little Night Music

The Olympics - Baby It's Hot

The Olympics - Big Boy Pete

The Grateful Dead - Big Boy Pete

The Olympics - The Hully Gully

Olympics - Mash Them 'Taters

The Olympics - Shimmy Like Kate

The Olympics - The Bounce

The Olympics - I'll Do A Little Bit More

The Olympics - Lookin' For A Love

The Olympics - Dooley

The Olympics - The Duck

The Olympics - Private Eye

The Olympics - Western Movies

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