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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features delta blues musician Willie Brown. Enjoy!

^{Willie Brown - Make Me a Pallet on the Floor}

"We came, we saw, he died. Hahahahaha!"

-- Hillary Clinton

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News and Opinion

There is quite a lot of very interesting material in this article, this is only a small taste, it's worth a full read. Apparently the New Year's Eve document dump of Hillary emails was quite revealing of the motives of our dark overlords.

New Hillary Emails Reveal Propaganda, Executions, Coveting Libyan Oil and Gold

Historians of the 2011 NATO war in Libya will be sure to notice a few of the truly explosive confirmations contained in the new emails: admissions of rebel war crimes, special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, Al Qaeda embedded in the U.S. backed opposition, Western nations jockeying for access to Libyan oil, the nefarious origins of the absurd Viagra mass rape claim, and concern over Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves threatening European currency. ...

Though the French-proposed U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 claimed the no-fly zone implemented over Libya was to protect civilians, an April 2011 email sent to Hillary with the subject line “France’s client and Qaddafi’s gold” tells of less noble ambitions.

The email identifies French President Nicholas Sarkozy as leading the attack on Libya with five specific purposes in mind: to obtain Libyan oil, ensure French influence in the region, increase Sarkozy’s reputation domestically, assert French military power, and to prevent Gaddafi’s influence in what is considered “Francophone Africa.”

Most astounding is the lengthy section delineating the huge threat that Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves, estimated at “143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver,” posed to the French franc (CFA) circulating as a prime African currency. In place of the noble sounding “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine fed to the public, there is this “confidential” explanation of what was really driving the war:

This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.)

Though this internal email aims to summarize the motivating factors driving France’s (and by implication NATO’s) intervention in Libya, it is interesting to note that saving civilian lives is conspicuously absent from the briefing.

Instead, the great fear reported is that Libya might lead North Africa into a high degree of economic independence with a new pan-African currency.

French intelligence “discovered” a Libyan initiative to freely compete with European currency through a local alternative, and this had to be subverted through military aggression.

Bush Opened Guantánamo Without Congress, So Why Can't Obama Close It?

Saudis Seek to Reassure US They Won’t Be Obstacle in Syria Talks

US officials are increasingly concerned that the Saudi execution of a top Shi’ite cleric, a move which fueled a huge backlash across the Shi’ite world, is going to do serious harm to efforts to get Syrian peace talks going.

The US warned the Saudis against the execution, believing this would happen, and Saudi officials are trying to reassure the US that they won’t be an obstacle to the process, though the assurances suggest they still expect Shi’ite acrimony to be a problem and are just trying to shift the blame.

European Sympathies Lean Toward Iran in Conflict With Saudi Arabia

In the days since Saudi Arabia inflamed tensions with Iran by executing 47 people, including a Shiite cleric, European observers have been quick to condemn the action, reflecting broader concern across the Continent about Saudi policy and its role in the tumult rolling through the Middle East.

Opposition in Europe to the death penalty — and harsh corporal punishment, including the flogging of a Saudi blogger who has become something of a cause célèbre in Europe — is just one element of the criticism of the Saudi monarchy. Even as European governments continue to view Saudi Arabia as a vital if problematic stabilizing force in the region, as well as a rich market for European arms and other products, European opinion has grown increasingly critical of Saudi support and financing for Wahhabist and Salafist preachers who have contributed to the Sunni extremist ideology that has fueled Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

In addition, the European Union and six major world powers reached a deal in Vienna over the summer to contain Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran is seen as essential to ending the five-year-old civil war in Syria, which has fueled a surge of migrants to the Continent, the highest number since World War II.

So for many Europeans, Iran — long a pariah because of its anti-Western rhetoric and its nuclear program — has suddenly become, at least in comparison with Saudi Arabia, an object of sympathy.

“As long as Saudi Arabia is led by its obsession to put Iran in its place, all attempts at peace in the Middle East will fail,” Rainer Hermann, a Middle East expert in Germany, wrote in a column in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, warning that Saudi Arabia might destroy the carefully wrought attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

Saudi Arabia Fueling Sectarianism to Destabilize the Region and Suppress Domestic Dissent

Why stoking sectarian fires in the Middle East could be Saudi Arabia's biggest mistake

The motive for the mass execution of Sheikh Nimr and 46 others, many Sunni jihadists, was primarily domestic. The threat to the al-Saud family within Saudi Arabia comes from Sunni extremists in al-Qaeda and Isis and not from the Shia, who are only a majority in two provinces in the eastern region of the country. ... Saudi Arabia and its fundamentalist Wahhabi variant of Sunni Islam has been blamed by many outside the kingdom as the ideological forbearer of Isis, but the real danger for the monarchy is that it should be seen at home as insufficiently zealous as defender of the faith.

Over the past year the Saudis have overplayed their hand, backing local allies and proxies in Syria and Yemen who are never going to win decisive victories. ... The Saudis claimed that the Houthis were Iranian stooges, an accusation that was always exaggerated, but may be self-fulfilling as Yemen becomes increasingly split along Shia-Sunni lines. As with Afghanistan, Yemen is easy to invade but difficult to get out of as the Houthi leadership shows no sign of giving up. With no peace in sight, Riyadh faces the prospect of the Yemen war becoming a permanent running sore.

Saudi Arabia’s entanglement in the conflict in Yemen limits its ability to exert influence elsewhere. Even Saudi resources are under strain given the low price of oil with this year’s budget totalling $137bn (£93bn) and spending $224bn (£152bn). “Thanks to the over-confidence and under-competence of the Saudi royal family,” writes Aron Lund of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the online newsletter Syria Comment. “Syrian rebels may turn out to be among the biggest losers of the Yemeni war.”

Saudi rulers have faced serious challenges before, but they have never been faced with the degree of instability in states surrounding or close to the kingdom. There are wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, a guerrilla conflict in Sinai and street protests in Bahrain that could always become more serious. It should be much in Saudi Arabia’s interest to mitigate these crises but instead it stokes them but without any real plan on how to bring them to an end.

The Speaker of Iran’s Parliament Just Toured an Underground Bunker Filled With Missiles

Iranian state TV released footage on Tuesday that showed Ali Larijani, the head of the country's parliament, strolling down a long underground corridor beside a long chain of trucks — each one loaded with a large missile. It's the latest PR move by Iran touting its new stock of Emad medium-range missiles, ballistic surface-to-surface weapons that General Hossein Dehghan, Iran's defense minister, has bragged can hit targets with "high precision." ...

The most recent video comes just a week after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani ordered the military to redouble its efforts to improve missile technology. ...

The expansion of missile technology, Anthony H. Cordesman, an expert on Iranian military technology at the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained, is part of a regional arms race and will be [more] difficult to contain than Iran's nuclear capabilities.

"There's a massive arms race in that region, and it's dominated by the Gulf states," he said, referring to Iran's regional rival Saudi Arabia and the kingdom's allies among the Gulf monarchies, which purchase tens of billions of dollars in arms — mostly from the US — each year.

Over the past five years, the US has sold Saudi Arabia over $100 billion in arms. In November, Saudi Arabia purchased over a billion dollars' worth of advanced air-to-surface munitions such as laser-guided bombs, bunker buster bombs, and MK84 general purpose bombs. On top of that, the Saudis have a formidable air force that flies American-made F-15s.

The Iranians have very little airpower, Cordesman explained, and their missile program is one way they try to compensate.

Saudi Coalition Just Bombed a Center for the Blind in Yemen

The new year seems to have brought little change for civilians living under bombs in Yemen. Early Tuesday morning, missiles reportedly fired by aircraft supporting the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed coalition damaged a center for the blind in the capital city of Sanaa, as well as the city’s chamber of commerce, a wedding hall, and at least one residential area.

Multiple outlets reported that the attacks caused no casualties, though one local report, citing an unidentified security official, claimed “at least three people” were wounded at the al Noor Center for Care and Rehabilitation of the Blind in Sanaa. Footage from the capital, published by the International Business Times, showed images of crumbled buildings, collapsed rooftops, and a young man weeping in the street. A spokesperson for UNICEF in Sanaa told Vice News that the al Noor Center offers classes for visually impaired students.

In an email to The Intercept Tuesday, Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, confirmed that his office had received reports of airstrikes in Yemen indeed hitting the al Noor Center, as well as the other reported sites. The Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the region, did not respond to requests for comment.

Sarin Exposure Raises Concerns About ISIS Chemical Weapons in Syria

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has issued a report today affirming that the blood samples of some Syrians tested positive for exposure to sarin, raising concerns about the use of chemical weapons in the ongoing civil war.

... The OPCW followed this up by affirming that the Syrian government’s entire chemical weapons arsenal was already destroyed.

Most nations have eagerly blamed the Syrian government for such exposure, though Russia put two and two together and noted that the two reports made the probability “very high” that ISIS has developed its own rudimentary chemical weapons.

Will U.S. Deport Kurdish Activist Ibrahim Parlak Back to Turkey Where He Was Jailed & Tortured?

Erdoğan critic and ex-police chiefs go on trial over corruption inquiries

A US-based Muslim cleric is being tried in absentia in Turkey, accused of attempting to overthrow the government by masterminding corruption inquiries in 2013 that targeted people close to the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Fethullah Gülen, a former ally turned rival of Erdoğan, was not present at the start of the proceedings in Istanbul because Washington did not grant Turkish requests for his extradition.

He is being tried along with dozens of former police officers, including the former head of Istanbul police Yakup Saygılı and the city’s ex-deputy criminal police chief Kazım Aksoy, both of whom are said to have ordered the graft investigation. The pair have been held in detention since September 2014 and were in court at the start of the trial. ...

Erdoğan, [Erdogan's son] Bilal, son-in-law Berat Albayrak and Turkey’s spy chief Hakan Fidan are among the complainants in the case, along with four former ministers who lost their jobs over the corruption allegations.

The top suspects are charged with plotting to topple the Turkish government with the graft allegations, as well as membership of a terrorist group.

At Ethiopia’s Request, US Closes Drone Base

US officials have revealed that their decision to close the Arba Minch drone base in southern Ethiopia this week came at the behest of Ethiopian officials, who wanted to close a facility that was only intended to be temporary.

The Arba Minch base was the only publicly acknowledged US drone base in Ethiopia, and while it was originally supposed to be for surveillance drones, officials also say it was used for drone strikes against targets in both Somalia and Yemen.

UK Labor Party Departing from Austerity to Strengthen Economy

Greece's Varoufakis to Launch Pan-European Progressive Movement

Hoping to show Europeans they have an alternative to the prevailing system of "authoritarianism" and austerity, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced a new cross-continent movement with a "simple, common agenda:" To democratize Europe.

The movement, known as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (or DiEM 25), will be launched on February 9 at Berlin's Volksbühne theater.

Varoufakis, who first revealed the plan late last month in an interview with L'Espresso, said that he is hopeful this "activist movement" will connect progressives across the continent and enable them to take back power from the ruling elite and what he described as the "shadowy world of bureaucrats, bankers, and unelected officialdom."

"To counter this de-politicisation of political decision making, which reinforces the economic crisis and the crisis of legitimacy facing Europe, we need a movement that rises up throughout in Europe, at once, with the same agenda everywhere to re-politicize political decisions and to democratize the decision making process," he said in an interview with El Diario published on Saturday.

"There is no other means by which to arrest the awful feedback between authoritarianism and failed economic policies—a feedback that, left unchecked, will wreck Europe and help ultra-nationalism triumph," Varoufakis added, referring to the rise of ultra-right and fascist forces such as Greece's Golden Dawn party.

Tension grows as Oregon militia occupies wildlife refuge for fourth night

As the militia prepared for their fourth night on Tuesday, a tense energy infused the surrounding community, where federal agents set up office in the local school district headquarters and held courthouse meetings with US prosecutors and others on how to solve the lingering occupation.

Harney County sheriff David M Ward told reporters the FBI was pursuing trespassing charges against the protesters and implored residents not to offer militia members as much as “a Snickers bar”. ...

Their standoff at the wildlife refuge is getting a very different response 30 miles away, in Burns, where townsfolk feel under siege.

Half of the 5,000 residents in the rural town work jobs with the local, state or federal government. Ammon Bundy and his associates spent weeks in the lead-up to the occupation wandering around the town, attempting to rally support for their hardline cause.

“Listen, the potential of violence is on everyone’s mind here,” said Burns’s mayor, Craig LaFollette. “We want this to end peacefully. But even without violence, these outsiders have disrupted our lives here, closed our schools. It’s time for these people to leave.” ...

Amid growing concern about the fallout from the armed occupation, various town leaders held a crisis meeting with federal authorities on Tuesday.

“An ongoing siege could break a county like this one,” said Randy Fulton, one of the attendees of the closed-door gathering. “Nobody wants this to continue.”

Here's What the Oregon Occupiers and the GOP Presidential Candidates Agree On

Retired neurosurgeon and Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said he did not condone the takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, which began on Saturday after a protest in nearby Burns, Oregon, but aligned himself with the occupiers. "We have better ways of expressing our displeasure than that," Carson said in an appearance on CNN. "But the fact of the matter is there are legitimate grievances."

Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, both GOP contenders for the White House, agreed. ...

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said that "the best" of the Republican field has failed to speak out against the takeover of the wildlife refuge. But he added, "The worst [of the Republicans] have endorsed parts of the radical anti-federal agenda, supporting its call to turn federal land belonging to all American's over to the counties, loggers, ranchers, and miners." ...

Steve and Dwight Hammond, the jailed ranchers who Bundy and the two dozen or so militia members have pointed to as the proximate cause for their occupation, have received the equivalent of almost $250,000 in federal subsidies, according to Suckling. On one hand, he said, they've benefitted from grazing their cattle on federal lands, while, on the other hand, threatened federal employees and denied that the federal government has a right to even operate a wildlife refuge.

"The federal government has massively subsidized private ranches with public money, grass, and water for decades," said Suckling. "While many ranchers are thankful for the help and obey the federal policies that come with it, the Bundys and Hammonds are bitterly resentful of the very existence of the federal government. They not only want the handout — they want the hand as well."

Obama to Expand Gun Background Checks and Tighten Enforcement

President Obama will announce executive actions on Tuesday intended to expand background checks for some firearm purchases and step up federal enforcement of the nation’s gun laws, White House officials said Monday, once again trying to sidestep a gridlocked Congress on a politically divisive issue. ...

“This is it, really?” asked Jennifer Baker, an official with the N.R.A.’s Washington lobbying arm. “This is what they’ve been hyping for how long now? This is the proposal they’ve spent seven years putting together? They’re not really doing anything.”

Obama best gun salesman ever: Smith & Wesson, Ruger share prices soar after new gun control measures

In an otherwise bleak economy, Obama has sighted a sure-fire way to raise the caliber of consumer spending:

As Obama Issues Executive Orders, Gun Stocks Explode

Stocks for two major gunmakers skyrocketed as President Obama unveiled a long-awaited series of executive orders intended to reduce gun violence.

The increase in stock prices reflects the expectation that gun sales will surge again. Gun sales skyrocketed after the Sandy Hook massacre on fears the federal government would crack down on gun ownership.

The Intercept recently reported that gun manufacturers and retailers, talking to investors, said they expect sales to rise after massacres. “You can see after a tragedy, there’s also a lot of buying,” Jeff Buchanan, the chief financial officer of Smith & Wesson, told investors. ...

Smith & Wesson also raised its revenue and earnings guidance on Tuesday, announcing “that the sell-through rate of its products at distribution has been stronger than originally anticipated,” reducing distributor inventories even as the high number of background checks, “an indicator of consumer purchases, reflected strong growth versus December 2014.”

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The UK Will Debate Banning Donald Trump From the Country

British politicians will hold an official debate on whether US presidential candidate Donald Trump should be barred from the UK after a petition sparked by his comments about Muslims gathered more than half a million signatures.

The debate will take place on January 18, though it will not be followed by a vote. The UK government responds to all petitions that gain more than 10,000 signatures and the proposals made by them are considered for parliamentary debate if they gather 100,000. ...

Trump's proposal was met with outrage across the world, including in Britain, where by the morning after the comments around six people a second were signing the petition to ban him from the country.

Don't let Donald Trump fool you: rightwing populism is the new normal

Bernie Sanders outlines plan to end Wall Street's 'greed, fraud and arrogance'

Bernie Sanders sought to rekindle the anger of the Occupy Wall Street movement in a major policy speech in New York on Tuesday that revealed how he would aim to dismantle much of the modern investment banking system within months of taking office.

Amid a slew of new pledges were proposals ranging from seizing control of credit rating agencies to turn them into not-for-profits, capping credit card and ATM fees, and preventing banks from earning interest on deposits made at the Federal Reserve.

Declaring that the “business model of Wall Street is fraud”, the Democratic presidential hopeful also fleshed out longstanding promises to jail bank executives and introduce a sweeping new transaction tax on speculation.

“Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today,” Sanders told supporters in midtown Manhattan. “To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear. Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation.” ...

Sanders also called for a national “usury law” to regulate interest rates charges by lenders.

I'm glad @BernieSanders is out there fighting to hold big banks accountable, make our economy safer, & stop the GOP from rigging the system.

— Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) January 6, 2016

Saudi Game-Changing Head-Chopping

Will Official Washington’s dominant neocon/liberal-interventionist claque continue to protect the Saudis who have built a regional alliance of convenience with Israel over their shared hatred of Iran? ... The Saudis – and indeed the Israelis – are showing what they’re really made of. Israel has removed its humanistic mask as it ruthlessly suppresses Palestinians and mounts periodic “grass mowing” operations, using high-tech munitions to slaughter thousands of nearly defenseless people in Gaza and the West Bank while no longer even pretending to want a peaceful resolution of the long-simmering conflict. Israel’s choice now seems to be apartheid or genocide.

Meanwhile, the Saudis – though long-hailed in Official Washington as “moderates” – are showing what a farcical description that has always been as the royals now supply U.S.-made TOW missiles and other sophisticated weapons to Sunni jihadists in Syria, fighting alongside Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front. ...

The Saudi decision to chop off Sheikh Nimr’s head and slaughter 46 other people in one mass execution also puts Sen. Bernie Sanders on the spot over his glib call for the Saudis “to get their hands dirty” and intervene militarily across the region.

That may have been a clever talking point, calling on the rich Saudis to put some skin in the game, but it missed the point that – even before the Nimr execution – the Saudis’ hands were very dirty, indeed covered in blood.

For Sanders to see the Saudis as part of the solution to the Mideast chaos ignores the reality that they are a big part of the problem. Not only has Saudi Arabia funded the extreme, fundamentalist Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam – building mosques and schools around the Muslim world – but Al Qaeda and many other jihadist groups are, in essence, Saudi paramilitary forces dispatched to undermine governments on Riyadh’s hit list. ...

Though Sanders has resisted articulating a detailed foreign policy – instead seeking to turn questions back to his preferred topic of income inequality – the latest Saudi barbarism gives him a new chance to distinguish himself from front-runner Clinton. He could show courage and call for a realignment based on reality, not propaganda.

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VW 'close to agreement with US regulators' over emissions scandal

A senior Volkswagen executive has apologised to German consumers and said that the German car maker is close to reaching an agreement with US regulators on how it will recall some half a million cars that have illegally exceeded emissions targets for years.

Dr Herbert Diess, Volkswagen’s chief executive of passenger vehicles, told a packed audience at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the company was “focused on ensuring something like this can never happen again”. ...

Diess said the company has reached an agreement with European regulators to update software on VW cars across the continent. “Most of them will be fixed in 2016,” he said. Left unsettled is what advice to give half a million American VW owners still running vehicles that produce emissions that are as much as 40 times over the legal limit. ...

The company is still negotiating with US regulators on how to recall affected vehicles. In the meantime, some affected car owners are entitled to a $500 Visa debit card and $500 to spend at a Volkswagen dealer.

Californians warned to keep conserving water despite heavy rains

Forced by drought to conserve water, Californians were warned against reverting to old habits on Tuesday as the first of several storms spawned by a record-tying El Niño began drenching the state.

A series of storms lining up over the Pacific Ocean was welcome news in parched California, despite their potential for causing flash floods and mudslides. But authorities cautioned that even the wettest of winters can’t replenish depleted reservoirs and aquifers unless everyone keeps pitching in.

California’s water deficit is so deep after four years of drought that a “steady parade of storms” like these will be needed for years to come, said Mike Anderson, climatologist for the state’s department of water resources.

“We’re at least on a good trajectory,” he said. “We’ve got to keep it going.”

The current El Niño – a natural warming of the central Pacific Ocean that interacts with the atmosphere and changes weather worldwide – has tied 1997-1998 as the strongest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center said, citing statistics that go back to 1950.

Rick Snyder thinks that his poisoning of 100,000 people is an emergency now that federal prosecutors are investigating the cause of the poisoning.

State of emergency declared over polluted drinking water in Flint, Michigan

Michigan governor Rick Snyder has declared a state of emergency in Flint over problems with lead in the city’s drinking water as federal officials confirm they are investigating the matter.

Snyder announced the action on Tuesday. It makes available state resources in cooperation with local response and recovery operations.

Federal prosecutors also said on Tuesday they are working with the US Environmental Protection Agency on an investigation into problems with lead in Flint’s water supply.

Organic Farmers Score New Victory in 'David and Goliath' GMO Fight

Organic farmers are racking up new victories in the fight against 'franken-food', as a growing number of counties line up to bar genetically engineered (GE) crop cultivation throughout the country.

A federal judge in Jackson County, Oregon recently upheld a consent decree that designates the region a "GE-free zone," a ruling which officially protects the decree from appeal, granting new protections to farmers, consumers, and the environment.

That means organic and traditional farms in Jackson County will be protected from chemicals produced by Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, and other biotech giants. The ruling follows the passage of other similar ordinances in at least eight U.S. counties, including in Hawaii, California, and Washington, along with another Oregon county. As the Washington Post pointed out on Monday, more bans are on the horizon, with Costilla County in Colorado pushing for its own GE-free zones.

"GE-Free Zones like Jackson County are important to the future of our food because they allow farmers to grow traditional and organic crops without risk of transgenic contamination," said George Kimbrell, senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety (CFS), a consumer advocacy group which served as legal counsel to the farmers.

Oklahoma Is Now the Earthquake Capital of America

Earthquakes in Oklahoma increased by 50 percent in 2015, surpassing the previous year's record and sounding new alarms over the risks of oil and gas operations like hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

In fact, according to the state public utilities regulator, Oklahoma now officially experiences more earthquakes than anywhere else in the world—likely thanks to its expanding fossil fuel industry and the subsequent swell of wastewater disposal operations that scientists say triggers seismic activity.

U.S. Geological Survey data shows that Oklahoma was hit by 881 earthquakes with a magnitude of 3 or higher, an average of 2.4 per day—up from 585 in 2014.

"For all of us involved, frustration isn't even a word, you feel just as every other resident does, that you're being physically attacked, like you're dealing with a living breathing thing," Matt Skinner, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC), told a local outlet on Monday.

About 1.5 billion barrels of wastewater from oil and gas sites were disposed of underground in the state last year.

If Obama is a Climate Leader, Why Is US Oil Industry Booming?

Despite President Barack Obama's claims of climate leadership, the U.S. oil industry is booming under his watch.

Bloomberg Business journalist Jennifer Dlouhy reported on Tuesday that "U.S. oil production has surged 82 percent to near-record levels in the past seven years and natural gas is up by nearly one-quarter."

The domestic fracking surge—a pillar of Obama's "all of the above" energy policy—is key to this trend. ...

"As the president’s last full year in office begins, we hope that he will take note of and help foster the U.S. model," said Jack Gerard, CEO and president of the American Petroleum Institute. "We hope that he’ll note that the already heavy regulatory burden—almost 100 pending regulations and counting—upon the oil and natural gas industry could hinder, rather than advance what he hopes to be one of his administration’s defining legacies, environmental improvement." ...

But Bill Snape, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, told Bloomberg he has a different take.

"From day one of the administration and accelerating into the present, this administration and this White House has viewed the natural gas and oil bonanza in this country as an economic opportunity, and they have ridden it and ridden it hard," said Snape. "They greased the skids for too much natural gas, oil and fracking in this country."

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Also of Interest

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

Convincing the Young to Blame the Old, Not the Rich

Earth is 'experiencing a global warming spurt'

Flurry of big business endorsements is likely aimed at building congressional momentum for TPP

Failed US Sanctions on Russia

Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia

5 Taxpayer Handouts the Bundys Receive While Railing Against Government “Tyranny”

How the Leader of the Oregon Armed Protest Benefited From a Federal Loan Program

Why Are the Largest Corporations Sitting on Trillions in Cash?

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A Little Night Music

Willie Brown - Mississippi Blues

Stefan Grossman - Mississippi Blues

The Notting Hillbillies - Mississippi Blues

Willie Brown - Future Blues

Willie Brown - Ragged And Dirty

Willie Brown - M & O Blues

Walter Davis - M & O Blues

Hans Theessink - M & O Blues

Charlie Patton + Willie Brown - Dry Well Blues

Kid Bailey (Willie Brown?) - Mississippi Bottom Blues

Kid Bailey (Willie Brown?) - Rowdy Blues

Be Good Tanyas - Rowdy Blues

Thomasina Winslow & Nick Katzman - Rowdy Blues

Doc Watson - Make Me a Pallet On Your Floor

Gillian Welch - Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor

Tuba Skinny - Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor

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