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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues rock guitarist and singer Lonnie Mack. Enjoy!

^{Lonnie Mack, Albert Collins & Roy Buchanan - Further On Down the Road}

“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”

-- Bertrand Russell

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News and Opinion

This article is well worth clicking on and reading in full:

Syria in 2016 will be like the Balkans in 1914 as explosive violence breaks out on an international scale

The CIA analyst is confident about what is likely to happen in Syria. He says that “Assad is playing his last major card to keep his regime in power”. He believes that the Assad government will step up its efforts to prove that its enemies “are being manipulated by outsiders”. The probable outcome is a split within Syria’s ruling elite leading to Assad being ousted, though he admits that there is no obvious replacement for him.

The reasoning in the CIA special analysis, entitled “Syria: Assad’s Prospects”, is sensible and convincing, though overconfident that Assad’s days are numbered. The extent of this overconfidence is highlighted by a glance at the date of the document, which is 17 March 1980, or 35 years ago, and the President Assad, whose imminent political demise is predicted as likely, is not Bashar al-Assad but his father, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000. The analysis was released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act in 2013.

The CIA paper is an interesting read, not least because it shows how many ingredients of the present crisis in Syria have been present for decades, but had not yet come together in the explosive mix which produced the present horrific war. ... The CIA certainly wanted Assad gone and had some ideas about how this might be achieved. “Army discipline may well collapse in the face of widespread riots,” it says. “This could lead to bloody war between Sunni Muslim and Alawite units. The Alawites, however, may choose to topple Assad before such turmoil develops in order to keep their position secure.”

This last sentence could have been written at any time since 2011 as a summary of what the US would have liked to happen in Syria: it has always wanted to get rid of Assad, but it does not intend to destroy or even weaken the Syrian state and thereby open the door to Isis and al-Qaeda. Even super-powers sometimes learn from history. ...

Serious powers such as Russia and Turkey are being sucked in and have invested too much of their prestige and credibility to pull back or suffer a defeat. Their vital interests become plugged into obscure but violent local antagonisms, such as those between Russian-backed Kurds and Turkish-backed Turkomans, through whose lands run the roads supplying Aleppo. The Syrian-Iraqi conflict has become to the 21st century what the Balkan wars were to the 20th. In terms of explosive violence on an international scale, 2016 could be our 1914.

This is also an excellent essay worth checking out:

The Unbearable Lightness of America’s War Against the Islamic State

If Washington were really serious about defeating terrorism, it would have an entirely different playbook.

In the classic World War II novel The Caine Mutiny, author Herman Wouk quoted an “ancient adage” about the typical bureaucratic response to a crisis:

“When in danger or in doubt,

Run in circles, scream and shout.”

That couplet summarizes the prevailing U.S. response to global terrorism perfectly. All one has to do is read the panicky, narrow-minded, and irresponsible ravings of the current GOP presidential aspirants, as well as look at the latest poll numbers, and it’s clear that a good portion of the U.S. electorate is prepared to follow them off the deep end.

Yet the unhinged nature of the current discourse on terrorism also reveals how profoundly unserious U.S. counterterrorism efforts really are. To say this sounds odd, given the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been thrown at the problem, and the tens of thousands of lives (both American and foreign) that have been lost waging the “global war on terror” (or if you prefer, the “campaign against violent extremism”), is an understatement. It sounds even odder when one considers the vast army of people who are now employed to protect us from terrorism, not to mention the countries we’ve invaded, the drone strikes and targeted assassinations we’ve performed, and the mountains of metadata we’ve collected. Surely all this effort shows that Washington is deeply engaged in the challenge of thwarting al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other violent radicals.

If only. For starters, consider what we have to show for all this effort and expense. We now have a vast counterterrorism industry, much bigger intelligence budgets, and more energetic government surveillance, but the basic counterterrorist playbook has evolved little over the past 20 years. In particular, our national security establishment is still convinced that the main way to defeat extremist groups is U.S. military intervention, despite the nagging suspicion that it just creates more ungoverned spaces and makes it easier for groups like the Islamic State to recruit new members. The New York Times reported this week that the Pentagon is now seeking a new set of military bases in or around the Arab and Islamic world so that it can prosecute the military campaign against the Islamic State et al. more effectively.

Excuse me, but isn’t that exactly what we’ve been doing since the 1990s and with greater energy and effort over time? Yet there are more al Qaeda affiliates now than there were back in 2001, and organizations like the Islamic State didn’t even exist back then.

[A good elaboration of the steps the US might take to seriously combat terrorism (with an eye to minimizing it rather than capitalizing on it for the purposes of creating wealth and political control) follows at the link. - js]

Obama Touts U.S. Strikes on ISIL, But Can Military Escalation Make Up for Failed Strategy?

In Pentagon Briefing, Obama Offers Little Substance on ISIS Fight

Just a week after his Oval Office address talking up the ISIS war, President Obama made a rare briefing at the Pentagon, following a strategy meeting with military leaders. What followed was a lot of bragging on progress, but little substance.

Obama named off seven ISIS leaders believed to have been killed in recent months, vowing escalations that would kill more in the future, while advancing the dubious claim that ISIS had lost “40 percent” of the populated area it controlled in Iraq. ...

Hawkish Sen. John McCain (R – AZ) blasted the comments as “business as usual,” dismissing the visit to the Pentagon as little more than a photo op for the president. McCain has been pushing for a full-scale invasion of Iraq and Syria, while Obama has insisted the war needs to be primarily airstrikes and special forces raids.

US and Russia Are Meeting to Try to Find Common Ground on Syria

US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Moscow on Tuesday in an attempt to build bridges with Russia in how the international community should respond to the Syrian conflict.

Kerry said he wanted to use the visit to make "real progress," as he seeks to prepare the ground for a third round of talks of world powers on Syria — though it is not yet clear if a meeting pencilled in for Friday in New York will go ahead.

Russia and the United States have not reached agreement over the role of Syrian President Bashar al Assad in any political transition or over which rebel groups should be part of talks. ...

Speaking before Kerry's arrival, a State Department official said Kerry would raise concerns about Russia's continued bombing of Syrian opposition forces, including some backed by Washington and its allies.

For its part, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement complaining that Washington was not ready to fully cooperate in the struggle against Islamic State militants and needed to rethink its policy of "dividing terrorists into good and bad ones".

Growing Disarray as Free Syrian Army Defections Mount

Throughout the Syrian Civil War, the US has championed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as the eventual victors, bankrolling them and throwing arms at them for years on the conviction they’d eventually win, despite a glaring lack of actual success on the ground.

That seems to be fading, once again, as Stars and Stripes reports the group to be on “the verge of collapse,” citing mass defections to more successful Islamist factions and dwindling morale, with many complaining that their paychecks, already some of the lowest among rebel forces, have a nasty tendency of getting stolen on their way down from the leadership through various ranks.

Can somebody rush a load of clown noses to the State Department?

When the State Department Tries to Choose Muslim Thought Leaders to Win “Hearts and Minds”

Last year, the State Department announced with great fanfare a new social media campaign to counter ISIS’ online messaging. They called it “Think Again, Turn Away,” and created Twitter and Facebook accounts in that name. ... It was a massive comedic failure from the start. And that failure continues. Yesterday, Think Again, Turn Away’s Twitter account promoted and hailed someone they think will serve as an inspiring thought leader for Muslims around the world:

#LantosPrize #HumanRightsDay pic.twitter.com/7fI3fp4LBg

— Think AgainTurn Away (@ThinkAgain_DOS) December 14, 2015

Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali likely to be the effective messenger to the Muslim world which the State Department envisions her to be? ...

She has spouted some of the most virulent anti-Muslim bigotry, the worst of which may have been her 2007 interview with Reason, where she said she rejects the notion that “we” are at war only with radical Islam but instead are at war with Islam generally. Behold the State Department’s chosen Ambassador to the Muslim world:

Reason: Should we acknowledge that organized
religion has sometimes sparked precisely the kinds of emancipation
movements that could lift Islam into modern times? Slavery in the
United States ended in part because of opposition by prominent
church members and the communities they galvanized. The Polish
Catholic Church helped defeat the Jaruzelski puppet regime. Do you
think Islam could bring about similar social and political
changes?

Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because
right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry
expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and
the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.

Reason: Don’t you mean defeating
radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s
defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very
difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in
peace.

Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5
billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that
mean, “defeat Islam”?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with
Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated
in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology
itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to
Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is
infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West.
You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning,
and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say,
“This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a
moment when you crush your enemy.

Reason: Militarily?

Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you
don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence
of being crushed.

Can you hear all the Muslim hearts and mind changing throughout the world yet? Other than ISIS, who does the State Department think is going to be remotely excited about and receptive to this message? To combat ISIS’s message, the State Department is promoting someone who has articulated a bloody, vicious vision of global war against Islam that coincides perfectly with ISIS’s greatest dream.

UN Official: Russia ‘Deliberately’ Attacking Aid Supplies in Northern Syria

An unnamed UN official based in southern Turkey has gone on the record today as accusing Russia of “deliberately” attacking aid supplies and food infrastructure in al-Qaeda-held parts of northern Syria, calling it “very specific targeting.”

The allegations of attacking grain silos and bakeries, along with strikes near border crossings, which aid groups say have made shipments from Turkey more difficult to provide, seem to largely mirror early US strikes in Syria, which similarly burned a number of grain silos, only in ISIS territory further to the east.

The Pentagon shrugged its own attacks off, saying they’d mistaken large grain silos for a “jihadist base,” but similar attacks occurred several times.

Days of Revolt: The Militarism of U.S. Diplomacy

Canada to Washington: Thanks for the Letter, But We're Still Pulling Out of Bombing Mission

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is sticking to his promise of pulling Canada out of the bombing campaign against the Islamic State, despite a request for more military help from the US government.

Renee Filiatrault, spokesperson for Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan, confirmed to VICE News on Monday that he has received a letter from US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, which asked for more contributions in the fight against IS militants. ...

Filiatrault confirmed that Canada's plans to pull out of the bombing mission have not changed. She said details about how Canada will contribute to the mission are expected in the coming days.

During his campaign, newly-elected Prime Minister Trudeau promised to remove Canada's six CF-18s, which are participating in airstrikes against the militant group in Iraq and Syria, from the region.

Turkey-Russia summit cancelled: Kremlin

Russia on Monday said a summit between President Vladimir Putin and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan pencilled in for December 15 had been cancelled, with ties between the two leaders in tatters over the downing of a Russian warplane.

The meeting between the two leaders had been agreed at the G20 summit in Turkey on November 16, just over a week before Ankara shot down one of Moscow's warplanes at the Syrian border.

152 Pro-Saudi Troops Killed in South Yemen Missile Strike

In what appears to be the single deadliest strike of the nine-month Saudi war in Yemen, forces loyal to the Shi’ite Houthis fired an OTR-21 Tochka tactical ballistic missile at a pro-Saudi coalition base near Taiz, with early reports putting the death toll around 152 troops.

The identities of all the slain are still being sorted out, but dozens of foreign troops are among the slain, including Saudi Special Forces commander Col. Abdullah Sahyan. Emirati and Moroccan soldiers were also identified as among the slain.

The Houthis reported the attack was carried out by one of the nation’s few remaining Tochka missiles, and reported causing “many losses in lives and military equipment,” claiming to have destroyed Apache helicopters in the strike.

Critics try, but fail to kill $1 billion weapons deal for Saudi Arabia

Barring last minute opposition from Congress, Saudi Arabia is poised to receive a hefty $1.3 billion weapons package that includes 13,000 “smart bombs” from the United States by the end of the year. But don’t necessarily expect it to be used to fight ISIS.

Critics say the payload of sophisticated weapons will instead bolster the Saudis' continuing air war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. That campaign is drawing fire from human rights groups, who say the kingdom has been targeting civilians with American-made weapons, and may be responsible for war crimes.

“President Obama is poised to sell thousands of bombs and warheads to a government that unlawfully targets civilians,” Amnesty International, which has been lobbying hard for Congress to kill the deal, said in a statement Thursday.

More than 5,700 people, including at least 2,577 civilians — 637 of them children — have been killed in the eight months Saudi Arabia has led a coalition of Gulf States in the bombing campaign, according to the United Nations. Another 2.3 million have been displaced. Meanwhile, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that "almost two-thirds of reported civilian deaths had allegedly been caused by coalition airstrikes.”

Israel seizes 4,000 Palestinian stone-thrower dolls

Israeli customs officers have seized a consignment of 4,000 dolls dressed as Palestinian stone-throwers, which officials said were intended to incite Palestinian children. ...

Each of the identical stuffed toys wore red, green, black and white scarves, and their heads were covered by keffiyehs inscribed with the words “Jerusalem is ours” and “Jerusalem, here we come”. In the doll’s raised hand was a grey object clearly meant to resemble a stone.

Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, said: “These dolls were making their way to the Palestinian Authority with one clear purpose, and that was to poison the minds of innocent children. The Palestinians are continuing to incite their youth using any means necessary to educate them about violence and hatred. Here, it’s in the form of a doll.”

Despite her claim, it was not entirely clear who the recipient was intended to be.

Congress Reportedly Slipping CISA Spy Bill Into Must-Pass Omnibus

Digital rights groups are sounding the alarm after sources reportedly confirmed on Monday that the controversial cyber-surveillance bill formerly known as CISA has been slipped into the "must-pass" omnibus spending bill that Congress is expected to vote on later this week.

Fight for the Future, a leading digital rights group that has organized fierce grassroots resistance to CISA (otherwise known as Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act) and similar bills, issued a statement saying that all eyes will be on President Barack Obama should the legislation reach his desk.

"Now is when we’ll find out whether President Obama really cares about the Internet and freedom of speech, or whether he’s happy to roll over and allow technologically illiterate members of Congress break the Internet in the name of cybersecurity," said the group's campaign director, Evan Greer. ...

Fight for the Future on Monday launched a petition campaign calling on the president to reject the bill, which it warns would allow "unlimited surveillance" thus destroying online privacy, make users more vulnerable to hackers, and eliminate any incentive that private technologies might have to improve cyber security.

Amid Stagnant Wage Growth and Weak Recovery, Fed Rate Hike Would be 'Mistake'

It's almost certain that the Federal Reserve on Wednesday will raise a key interest rate for the first time in almost a decade, a move critics warn will slow the economy, chip away at workers' bargaining power, and raise consumer borrowing rates.

The Fed's benchmark interest rate, used to set terms for many consumer and business loans, was cut to just above zero in 2008, and has stayed there ever since. Now, some economists—along with Wall Street and big banks—say that falling unemployment and a strengthening economy signal it's time for a gradual rate increase.

But progressive economists have been sounding the alarm for months, saying "a rate hike would set in motion a slowing down of economic growth before that growth could lift the fortunes of millions of people still looking for work or whose wages have stagnated because the labor market is not tight enough," as Campaign for America's Future's Isaiah Poole wrote in September.

"I think this is a mistake," said Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute in a briefing earlier this month with U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.).

Bivens explained: "You should raise interest rates only when you think you need to start slowing the pace of economic growth because you’re worried that fast growth and falling unemployment will spark too-rapid wage growth that will bleed into rapid price inflation. But there’s no reason to think that the pace of economic growth today is excessive and needs to be slowed because of incipient inflation."

Furthermore, Bivens continued, "the stakes to getting this trade-off between low unemployment and stable inflation wrong are huge."

Those stakes involve nothing less than the pace of economic recovery and average Americans' standard of living.

Seattle Just Became the First City in the US to Allow Uber Drivers to Unionize

The Seattle City Council unanimously passed a law on Monday that allows ride-sharing drivers — like those who work for Uber and Lyft — to form a union. As the council announced its decision Monday afternoon, the room erupted in applause. ...

The new law permits Seattle drivers who perform at least 150 trips every 30 days to select an "exclusive driver representative" who can negotiate directly with management on their behalf. It seeks to address a number of wide-ranging grievances from drivers in the city.They want more transparency in companies' "deactivation" policy, which allows Uber and Lyft to essentially "fire" drivers at will, and they want a say in their rates. But most of all, they hope for a way to make demands on the company as a group.

"We wanted to be able to sit down across the the table from the company, and have a conversation about improving things," said Daniel Ajema a former Uber driver who was part of the original group that decided to push for a union back in 2013. Ajema was studying law at the time, and used Uber to supplement his income. But as the rates began to fall, he tried to set up a meeting with a group of drivers and Uber's management in Seattle to discuss their differences.

Uber, he said, refused to meet with the group, and insisted drivers bring up their concerns individually. "That's when I started Googling 'Seattle unions,'" he said. The drivers got in touch with Teamsters Local 117, and began to organize.

The Controversial "Rule" Police Rely on to Shoot and Kill Supsects

Did Laquan McDonald, Mario Woods, and others die because of a police training myth from the 1980s?

Last month, the attorney representing the Chicago police officer who shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald offered an explanation for his client's actions: "There is this 21-foot rule," the attorney, Dan Herbert, told CBS News. "It talks about how an individual is a significant threat to a police officer when they're in that 21-foot boundary." ...

The concept originated with a March 1983 SWAT magazine article, "How Close Is Too Close," by Dennis Tueller, a retired lieutenant and former firearms instructor with the Salt Lake City Police Department. "Let's consider what might be called the 'Danger Zone' if you are confronted by an adversary armed with an edged or blunt weapon," Tueller wrote. Tueller conducted a series of tests and found that in the time it took for the officer to unholster, aim, and shoot his gun—1.5 to 2 seconds—the attacker could cover a distance of 21 feet.

Tueller never called this idea a rule, but that's how it became known. "The '21-foot rule' concept spread throughout the law enforcement community almost like a virus," Ron Martinelli, a retired cop and forensic criminologist, wrote in a March 2015 Law Officer article about the so-called rule. "Tueller never imagined when he designed his simple firearms training drill that, 30 years later, the 21-foot rule would eventually become a police doctrine that is taught and testified to hundreds of times a year."

In Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Surveillance State, Controlling the Data Is Key

First, late on Friday night, December 4, 2015, Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, released hundreds of pages of police reports from the October 2014 Laquan McDonald murder — including false statements by police officers who were at the scene of the crime. The data dump came at such a late hour that the Chicago Tribune was not able to report on the massive discrepancies between those statements and the dashcam video of McDonald’s death until an article posted early Saturday morning, at 1:25 a.m., while most of the city was asleep.

Then, in a Saturday op-ed simultaneously placed in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, Emanuel offered a different story than he had previously about why he did not view the dashcam video in the months before its November 2015 release. ... The timing of the op-eds also raises suspicion. They went online earlier Friday afternoon and were in print Saturday morning, just in time to wash out the late Friday data dump. Once again, it seems, the city’s leader was gaming the data flow.

The fact is, the digital traces were everywhere in the murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by Officer Van Dyke. ... Everything was digitally captured. But then, the data were suppressed for 13 months, and would likely have been suppressed indefinitely if a state court had not compelled their release under the state’s open records act.

You might think this is paradoxical. After all, Mayor Emanuel has been a champion of total awareness and has helped turn Chicago into the most surveilled metropolis in the United States. ... But in our digital age, seeing, monitoring, and recording the digital footprints is quite different from sharing, releasing, revealing, or publicizing the data. We are all exposed today, most of us out of our own desires and passions. The political struggle, though, is over who controls those digital traces. It’s not a question of privacy anymore, since we so often crave publicity; it is a question of controlling the data flows.

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Marco Rubio Pushes to Block Low-Cost, High-Speed Broadband

In a rare senatorial act, full-time Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio joined with a handful of fellow legislators on Friday in an attempt to block local municipalities from undercutting big telecom companies by providing cheap, fast internet service.

Rubio, who is raising campaign cash from the telecom industry for his presidential campaign, fired off a letter to the Federal Communications Commission asking the agency to allow states to block municipal broadband services.

The letter was the latest salvo in a long-running effort by the major telecom companies to outlaw municipal broadband programs that have taken off in cities such as Lafayette, Louisiana, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, because they pose a threat to a business model that calls for slow, expensive internet access without competition.

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GOP's Drive to Lift Oil Export Ban Antithetical to COP21 Climate Goals

Climate justice advocates warn that lifting the decades-old U.S. oil export ban—an outcome that appears imminent as a result of Republican maneuvering and Democratic capitulation in Congress—would be antithetical to the goals of the brand-new Paris Agreement aimed at reining in global emissions.

News outlets reported Monday afternoon that a provision to end the ban, instituted during energy shortages of the 1970s, is almost certain to be tucked into the omnibus year-end spending bill needed to keep the government running.

According to ABC News:

In return for lifting the 4-decade-old ban, Democrats were seeking various environmental concessions, including permanently extending tax credits for solar and wind energy production and reviving an environmental conservation fund. Democrats also were trying to block GOP efforts to roll back Obama administration environmental regulations, with Democratic lawmakers who traveled to the Paris climate talks returning energized to fight harder on such issues.

But critics say the COP21 Paris talks only provided more of a reason to keep the oil export ban in place, arguing that to do otherwise would lead to "a massive expansion of dangerous oil drilling."

COP21 – Climate Emergency

US agency rarely intervened in projects that could risk endangered species

The US government has not halted a single project out of the 88,000 actions and developments considered potentially harmful to the nation’s endangered species over the past seven years, a new study has found.

An analysis of assessments made by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the agency very rarely used its powers to intervene in projects that could imperil any of the US’s endangered plants and animals, which currently number almost 1,600.

Of 88,000 actions assessed by the FWS between January 2008 and April 2015, just two triggered significant further action. A 2007 plan to drop fire retardant in California was deemed by the FWS to be prohibitively harmful to forest-dwelling endangered species, although this was challenged in court. The FWS also stepped in over a plan to divert water from the San Francisco Bay Delta due to concerns over the impact to threatened fish. ...

According to Defenders of Wildlife, a wildlife welfare group that conducted the analysis, the FWS is intervening in a diminishing number of cases. A tally from 1991 shows that there were 350 “jeopardy judgements” out of 73,560 previous consultations, compared with the two adverse outcomes in 80,000 cases over the past seven years.

Defenders of Wildlife said that the analysis shows it is misleading to claim that federal wildlife regulations are hampering development and harming jobs.

Sea lion deaths linked to severe brain damage caused by toxic algae bloom

The mystery of why sea lions have been stranding in droves on US west coast beaches in recent years is closer to being solved.

A new study suggests that sea lions have been eating crabs and small fish laced with the algal toxin domoic acid, which causes chronic seizures and brain damage, impairing the animals’ ability to navigate, eat and generally survive in the ocean.

Domoic acid was already a known cause of sea lion deaths, but the new study is the first to pinpoint how it affects behavior – and thus how it could indirectly lead to widespread declines in the population even when it doesn’t kill the animals.

By studying rescued sea lions at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California, researchers found that domoic acid bioaccumulates in sea lions as they eat large quantities of small fish until it causes significant brain damage, specifically to the hippocampus, a process which erodes memory. ...

The toxin is the reason why the season for Dungeness crab, a well-known and lucrative fishery along the west coast, has been delayed this year and has increasingly become one of the main impacts of warmer waters along the west coast as domoic acid-producing algal blooms grow larger and longer-lasting.

Historically, the toxic algal bloom would last just a few weeks, but due to warmer waters from climate change and this year’s El Niño weather phenomenon, this year’s bloom lasted for months.

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Also of Interest

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

How ‘Obscure’ Bureaucrats Cause Wars

Obama Goes To Pentagon As Free Syrian Army Nears Collapse

Go See “The Big Short” Right Now — And Then Read This

In Defense of Trump’s Name-Calling

Unplanned Nuclear Reactor Shutdown Highlights Power Plant's Dangers

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A Little Night Music

Lonnie Mack - Memphis

Lonnie Mack - Stop

Lonnie Mack - Satisfy Susie

Lonnie Mack - Natural Disaster

Lonnie Mack - Why

Lonnie Mack - Too Rock For Country, Too Country For Rock And Roll

Lonnie Mack - Cincinnati Jail

Lonnie Mack - Honky Tonk

Lonnie Mack - Suzie Q

Lonnie Mack - Oreo Cookie Blues

Lonnie Mack - Falling Back in Love with You

Lonnie Mack - Riding The Blinds

Lonnie Mack- I Found a Love

Lonnie Mack - Mt Healthy Blues

Lonnie Mack - Down In The Dumps

SRV & Lonnie Mack - Wham

Lonnie Mack - You Aint Got Me

Lonnie Mack - Long Way From Memphis

Lonnie Mack - Chicken Pickin'

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