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This evening's music features blues guitarist and harmonica player Louis Myers. Enjoy!

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse,
"why don't people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."

-- Douglas Adams

News and Opinion

Dem Pundits Spent Yesterday Lying About DNC Primary Rigging Document

The establishment liberal spin machine has been working overtime the last 24 hours to make it seem as though former acting DNC chair Donna Brazile had not admitted what she’d admitted in an excerpt from her book published by Politico on Thursday. Their argument, if you can call it that, rests on the claim that a document which unquestionably shows inappropriate bias and collusion does not show inappropriate bias and collusion because it contains a paragraph which says the document should not be construed as containing inappropriate bias and collusion. ...

It makes sense that they’d want to lie about such a thing. A top-level DNC insider admitting to something that Sanders voters have been screaming for over a year, and admitting it to a large mainstream audience, is a very big deal. ... When NBC published the Hillary Victory Fund agreement between the DNC and Hillary For America, they and their acolytes spent yesterday running around screaming “Great news, everyone! Turns out we’re perfect after all, no need to change anything!” when they saw the following paragraph:

Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC’s obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary. Further we understand you may enter into similar agreements with other candidates.

The only problem with that is that by no stretch of the imagination does it nullify the blatant power advantage Clinton was given by the rest of the agreement, which does indeed violate the DNC’s obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the nominating process. Scribbling the equivalent of “Oh hey, to anyone reading this in the future, we agree with each other that we’re not breaking any rules here” does not mean that rules were not broken. Scribbling “this is not a rule violation” on a rule violation, René Magritte style, doesn’t stop it from being a rule violation. ...

Regarding the claim by plutocracy teat sucklings like Howard Dean that that the agreement applied only to the general election (which would make the Clinton campaign’s added control of DNC operations standard practice) and not to the primary (which would make it a violation of the DNC’s Impartiality Clause), this is pure hogwash. Firstly, the dates on the document plainly contradict this assertion, as they were set during the primary contest and scheduled to end long before Clinton became the nominee, beginning September 1, 2015 and ending March 31, 2016. The DNC convention in which Clinton became the nominee wasn’t until July 2016.

Chris Hedges, On Contact: Age of Anger with Pankaj Mishra

Saudi Arabia’s Government Purge — And How Washington Corruption Enabled It

The mass arrest of high-ranking Saudi businessmen, media figures and royal family members Saturday has shaken the global business community. Among 10 other princes and 38 others, the roundup netted Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world’s richest men, who owns significant shares in everything from Citibank to Twitter to the parent company of Fox News. ... The move against Alwaleed and the other officials was couched as the result of a secret investigation carried out by a “high committee on fighting corruption.” Minister of Education Dr. Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Issa “hailed the royal decree,” according to the Saudi Press Agency, saying, “this committee heralds a future of firmness against those who are trying to to undermine the capabilities of the homeland.”

Whatever the official explanation, it is being read around the world as a power grab by the kingdom’s rising crown prince. “The sweeping campaign of arrests appears to be the latest move to consolidate the power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the favorite son and top adviser of King Salman,” as the New York Times put it. “The king had decreed the creation of a powerful new anti-corruption committee, headed by the crown prince, only hours before the committee ordered the arrests.” ...

The move marks a moment of reckoning for Washington’s foreign policy establishment, which struck a bargain of sorts with the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, and Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the U.S. who has been MBS’s leading advocate in Washington. The unspoken arrangement was clear: The UAE and Saudi Arabia would pump millions into Washington’s political ecosystem while mouthing a belief in “reform,” and Washington would pretend to believe that they meant it. MBS has won praise for some policies, like an openness to reconsidering Saudi Arabia’s ban on women drivers.

Meanwhile, however, the 32-year-old MBS has been pursuing a dangerously impulsive and aggressive regional policy, which has included a heightening of tensions with Iran, a catastrophic war on Yemen, and a blockade of ostensible ally Qatar. Those regional policies have been disasters for the millions who have suffered the consequences, including the starving people of Yemen, as well as for Saudi Arabia, but MBS has dug in harder and harder. And his supporters in Washington have not blinked.

Saudi Arabia intercepts ballistic missile over capital

Yemeni rebels on Saturday targeted an airport in Saudi Arabia's capital with a ballistic missile, according to Yemen's Houthi-controlled Defense Ministry.

But the missile was intercepted over northeast Riyadh, the Saudi Ministry of Defense said in a statement carried on government-backed Al-Arabiya television.

Yemen's Defense Ministry said the missile attack "shook the Saudi capital" and the operation was successful. The attack was conducted using a Yemeni-made, long-range missile called the Burqan 2H, it said. ...

Airstrikes later in the day targeted Yemen's capital Sanaa, shaking homes and breaking windows. This is the first night attack on Sanaa in weeks, according to CNN's Hakim al-Masmari from Sanaa.

1 out of every 10 people in South Sudan face starvation

1.25 million people. That’s how many people in war-torn South Sudan are in danger of starvation in the near future, according to a new report by the United Nations and the country’s government. That number accounts for more than one-tenth of the country’s population. The food shortage in South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, has been escalating rapidly as a direct result of the country’s civil war, which has killed 50,000 since fighting broke out in 2013.

South Sudan, a landlocked nation in East Africa, broke away from Sudan in 2011. But two years into its existence, a split among leaders the country’s ruling government plunged the country into a new round of fighting that continues to this day. Fighting has disrupted the country’s economy, exacerbated food shortages and made delivering food and aid extremely difficult. The worst-hit regions are now being forced to rely on foraging for food in the wilderness, one humanitarian told VICE News.

Donald Trump’s Vow to Hit ISIS “10 Times Harder” Guarantees More Terrorism Against Americans

Who says Donald Trump doesn’t keep his promises? On the campaign trail, the reality TV star pledged to “bomb the shit” out of the Islamic State. ... Bombing the shit out of ISIS has become Trump’s signature move. “What we’re doing is every time we are attacked from this point forward … we are hitting them 10 times harder,” the president told reporters on Friday, in the wake of the latest ISIS-inspired terror attack in New York City, vowing that the U.S. would “hit [ISIS] like you folks won’t believe.”

But here’s the problem: Trump may want to sound tough and strong yet his strategy — if you can even call a response based on bombs, bombs, and more bombs a “strategy” — only makes the United States a much bigger ISIS target and puts many more innocent American lives at risk. Don’t take my word for it. Consider the federal criminal complaint against Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbek immigrant accused of using a truck to murder eight people in Manhattan last week on behalf of ISIS. He began planning the attack, it states, “approximately one year ago.” Saipov, the complaint continues, “was motivated to commit the attack after viewing a video in which [ISIS leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi … questioned what Muslims in the United States and elsewhere were doing to respond to the killing of Muslims in Iraq.”

Sound familiar? Well, Saipov isn’t of course the first Al Qaeda or ISIS attacker to refer to the deaths of Muslim civilians abroad as a motivating factor for murderous violence inside the United States. Faisal Shahzad, the Time Square bomber, told a federal judge in 2010 that he wanted to avenge U.S. drone strikes in his native Pakistan that “kill women, children, they kill everybody.”

The Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, in the words of a former colleague, “had been unhappy about U.S. foreign policy and had made several comments that the U.S. should not be in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Dzhokar Tsarnaev, one of the two Boston Marathon bombers, told interrogators, according to the Washington Post, that “the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack.” Eyewitnesses say the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen told the 911 dispatcher that he had attacked the Pulse nightclub in 2016 “because he wanted America to stop bombing” Afghanistan.

As Marc Sageman, a leading terrorism expert and former CIA case officer, once said to me: “At what point are you going to start listening to the perpetrators who tell you why they’re doing this?”

Resigned USS Cole case lawyers to defy war court judge’s order — again

The death-penalty attorney who quit the USS Cole case over a secret ethical dilemma said Thursday that he and his colleagues will for a second time defy the military judge’s order to appear in court.

“Nobody’s going,” attorney Rick Kammen told the Miami Herald on the eve of a 9 a.m. hearing Friday in which judge Air Force Col. Vance Spath has ordered the Indiana lawyer and two civilian colleagues to appear by teleconference from war court headquarters in Virginia.

Kammen, Rosa Eliades and Mary Spears until last month willingly defended Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who is accused of plotting al-Qaida’s suicide bombing of the warship off Aden, Yemen, in October 2000. Seventeen U.S. sailors died in the attack, and Nashiri could face execution if he’s convicted.

Then they quit, with permission of the chief defense counsel for military commissions, Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker. Spath rejected that, saying that only he has the power to excuse an attorney of record in his court, and ordered them to come to Guantánamo Sunday and litigate. They did not.

he underlying issue is the belief of [Nashiri's now former lawyers] that they cannot ethically defend Nashiri because of a covert breach of attorney-client privilege involving something so secretive at the terror prison that neither the client nor the public can know what it is.

Ground Invasion Only Way to Destroy North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal, Pentagon Says

The only way to locate and destroy with complete certainty all components of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is through a ground invasion.

That blunt assessment from the Pentagon is in response to a letter from two Democratic congressmen asking about casualty assessments in a conflict with North Korea.

Rear Adm. Michael J. Dumont of the Joint Staff offered the assessment in response to a letter from Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Ruben Gallego of Arizona.

In a joint statement issued Saturday, 15 Democratic lawmakers and one Republican — all military veterans — called the assessment that a ground invasion would be required to destroy the North’s nuclear arsenal “deeply disturbing” and said that such an action “could result in hundreds of thousands, or even millions of deaths in just the first few days of fighting.”

Former Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis on Catalonia, Muslim Ban and a Sustainable World Order

Carles Puigdemont: This is not just about Catalonia. This is about democracy itself

Catalonia is right now the only territory in the European Union that has been denied the supreme law its citizens voted for; the parliament that its citizens elected; the president that this parliament elected; and the government that this president appointed in the exercise of his powers. Acting in an arbitrary, undemocratic, and in my view, unlawful manner, the Spanish state decided to dissolve the Catalan parliament in the middle of the legislative term, to dismiss the president and the Catalan government, to intervene in our self-government and the institutions that the Catalans have been building in our nation for centuries. It committed a brutal judicial offensive to bring about the mass imprisonment and criminalisation of candidates promoting political ideas that, just two years ago, obtained historically high levels of public support. ...

Let us remember one key fact: in the elections of 27 September 2015, Junts pel Sí (Together for Yes), the undisputed winner, stood on a manifesto where it explicitly pledged to declare independence and to convene constituent elections. The voters who supported us knew at all times what our purpose was. Yet two years after those elections we are accused of sedition, conspiracy and rebellion for delivering on an electoral programme that we never concealed.

It’s an odd conspiracy, one that receives the popular vote. The 2015 elections delivered a clear majority in favour of Catalan independence: 72 seats out of 135. Only 52 of the 135 seats went to candidates who explicitly rejected the idea of ​​an independence referendum. Yet the legitimate Catalan government has now been outlawed, the Catalan parliament dissolved and a political agenda that has nothing to do with the will of the majority has been imposed.

Surely, what must prevail is the will of the majority of the citizens and the respect for fundamental rights included in international treaties signed by the kingdom of Spain, and also incorporated into its constitution. What we have instead are two levels of democracy in Spain: you can be a pro-independence party, but only if you do not rule. You will be charged with rebellion if you comply with your electoral commitment. And if you are against independence but you lack a parliamentary force to govern, the almighty state will come to your defence.

The Spanish state must honour what was said so many times in the years of terrorism: end violence and we can talk about everything. We, the supporters of Catalan independence, have never opted for violence – on the contrary. But now we find it was all a lie when we were told that everything was up for discussion.

Thousands of Basque protesters take sides in Catalonia dispute

Protests against Madrid's handling of the Catalan crisis spread to another Spanish region on Saturday, as the streets of the northern city of Bilbao in the Basque Country were awash with protesters waving umbrellas. According to the regional paper Naiz, some 44,000 people took part in the rally, which was called by several Basque Country pro-independence groups, the ultraleft party Podemos' regional branch and several labor unions.

The Basque region has, until recently, seen decades of violence by the paramilitary group ETA which left some 850 people dead. ETA surrendered its weapons earlier this year, effectively ending its campaign of terror, after the region won financial concessions from Madrid.

Speaking to the media during the Bilbao protest, Arnaldo Otegi, leader of Basque pro-independence party EH Bildu and a former jailed ETA member, decried the recent events in Catalonia. "In the face of this situation, it's necessary that the Basques take to the streets, as we're doing today, and build a popular, democratic wall that allows us to confront this situation," he said. While several separatist political parties attended Saturday's rally, the Basque Nationalist Party, which rules the autonomous region, refused to officially take part.

Carles Puigdemont bailed pending Brussels ruling

A Belgian judge has released the ousted Catalan leader, Carles Puigdemont, and four of his ministers on bail after a hearing lasting more than 10 hours.

Puigdemont, who faces charges of misuse of public funds, disobedience and breach of trust relating to the secessionist campaign, turned himself in to Belgian police earlier on Sunday.

The judge decided to grant them conditional release late in the evening pending a ruling by a court within the next 15 days whether to execute the European arrest warrant issued by Spain. The five have been told they must not leave the country and stay in a fixed address.

“The request made by the Brussels’ Prosecutor’s Office for the provisional release of all persons sought has been granted by the investigative judge,” a statement from the federal prosecutor’s office said.

On Friday, the Spanish government had issued European arrest warrants against Puigdemont, Antoni Comín, Clara Ponsatí, Meritxell Serret and Lluís Puig for trying to “illegally change the organisation of the state through a secessionist process that ignores the constitution”.

Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite's hidden wealth

The world’s biggest businesses, heads of state and global figures in politics, entertainment and sport who have sheltered their wealth in secretive tax havens are being revealed this week in a major new investigation into Britain’s offshore empires.

The details come from a leak of 13.4m files that expose the global environments in which tax abuses can thrive – and the complex and seemingly artificial ways the wealthiest corporations can legally protect their wealth.

The project has been called the Paradise Papers. It reveals:

• Millions of pounds from the Queen’s private estate has been invested in a Cayman Islands fund – and some of her money went to a retailer accused of exploiting poor families and vulnerable people.
• Extensive offshore dealings by Donald Trump’s cabinet members, advisers and donors, including substantial payments from a firm co-owned by Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law to the shipping group of the US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross.
• How Twitter and Facebook received hundreds of millions of dollars in investments that can be traced back to Russian state financial institutions.
• The tax-avoiding Cayman Islands trust managed by the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s chief moneyman.
• Aggressive tax avoidance by multinational corporations, including Nike and Apple.
• How some of the biggest names in the film and TV industries protect their wealth with an array of offshore schemes.

Bernie Sanders warns of 'international oligarchy' after Paradise Papers leak

Bernie Sanders has warned that the world is rapidly becoming an “international oligarchy” controlled by a tiny number of billionaires, highlighted by the revelations in the Paradise Papers.

In a statement to the Guardian in the wake of the massive leak of documents exposing the secrets of offshore investors, Sanders said that the enrichment of wealthy individuals and companies in tax havens was “the major issue of our time”.

He said the Paradise Papers opened the door on a “major problem not just for the US but for governments throughout the world”.

“The major issue of our time is the rapid movement toward international oligarchy in which a handful of billionaires own and control a significant part of the global economy. The Paradise Papers shows how these billionaires and multinational corporations get richer by hiding their wealth and profits and avoid paying their fair share of taxes,” the US senator from Vermont said.

Paradise Papers: Millions of Leaked Docs Reveal Shady Ties & Tax Evasion by Trump’s Inner Circle

Learning to Love McCarthyism

On Monday ... the Times ran two front-page articles under the headline: “A Complex Paper Trail: Blurring Kremlin’s Ties to Key U.S. Businesses.” The two subheads read: “Shipping Firm Links Commerce Chief to Putin ‘Cronies’” and “Millions in Facebook Shares Rooted in Russian Cash.” The latter story, which meshes nicely with the current U.S. political pressure on Facebook and Twitter to get in line behind the New Cold War against Russia, cites investments by Russian Yuri Milner that date back to the start of the decade.

Buried in the story’s “jump” is the acknowledgement that Milner’s “companies sold those holdings several years ago.” But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one article entitled, “9 in Trump’s orbit had contacts with Russians.”

The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that’s obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading “Russian propaganda.” We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket after Clinton’s public fainting spell and worries about her health. Though there was a video of Clinton’s collapse on Sept. 11, 2016, followed by her departure from the campaign trail to fight pneumonia – not to mention her earlier scare with blood clots – the response from a group of 100 Clinton supporters was to question Brazile’s patriotism: “It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponents about our candidate’s health.”

In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT. ...

I used to think that liberals and progressives opposed McCarthyism because they regarded it as a grave threat to freedom of thought and to genuine democracy, but now it appears that they have learned to love McCarthyism.

Maine’s Legislature Is Blocking Ranked-Choice Voting. But Voters Have One Chance To Save It.

Maine's voters took an extraordinary step during last year’s November election, passing a referendum that would make the state the first in the nation to use ranked-choice voting for statewide elections. ... Last week, the legislature took the unusual step of delaying the law’s execution until 2021. Republicans largely supported the delay while Democrats were split. Independents opposed it.

Lawmakers will have until the 2022 elections to amend the law to make it constitutional or else face a full repeal. The vote was widely interpreted in the state as an attempt by the legislature to kill the measure. ...

The campaigners who successfully convinced voters to support ranked-choice voting last year are not giving up. Four days after the legislature’s vote, the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting Maine, or RCV Maine, submitted an application to the secretary of state to trigger what is called a “people’s veto.”

The people’s veto is a Maine-specific procedure that allows voters to authorize a referendum to overturn laws recently passed by the legislature. In order to trigger the veto, campaigners must collect 10 percent of the votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election. In this case, that’s 61,123 valid signatures. The tricky part is that the law requires that these signatures be collected and submitted within 90 days of the adjournment of the legislature — which gives RCV Maine until about early February to get it done. ... If they succeed, voters will use ranked-choice voting in Democratic and Republican primaries for congressional races and the governor’s race in June 2018. They will also use the people’s veto to weigh in on whether to continue using the ranked-choice voting system.

2017 set to be one of top three hottest years on record

2017 is set to be one of the hottest three years on record, provisional data suggests, confirming yet again a warming trend that scientists say bears the fingerprints of human actions. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said temperatures in the first nine months of this year were unlikely to have been higher than 2016, when there was a strong El Niño weather system, but higher than anything before 2015.

Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the WMO, said: “The past three years have all been in the top three years in terms of temperature records. This is part of a long term warming trend. We have witnessed extraordinary weather, including temperatures topping 50C in Asia, record-breaking hurricanes in rapid succession in the Caribbean and Atlantic reaching as far as Ireland, devastating monsoon flooding affecting many millions of people and a relentless drought in East Africa.”

He said further detailed scientific studies would be carried out, but that it was already possible to say many “bear the tell-tale sign of climate change” caused by increased greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities, such as burning fossil fuel and deforestation.

This recent increase in average global temperatures confirms a renewed warming trend in recent years, which had slowed its pace slightly in the previous decade, leading some climate sceptics to claim global warming had “paused”.

Chanting 'Keep It In the Ground,' Thousands Descend on German Coalfields

Demanding an end to coal and all forms of dirty energy extraction, over 4,000 activists descended on the Rhineland coalfields in Germany early Sunday in a mass demonstration just a day before COP23 climate talks are set to kick off.

"On the international stage, politicians and corporations present themselves as climate saviors, while a few miles away, the climate is literally being burned," Janna Aljets, a spokesperson for the environmental alliance Ende Gelände, which helped organize the action, said in a statement. "We do not want to be world champions in extracting and burning lignite anymore. We want to fulfill our historic responsibility. That's why we go to the coal mines, to protect the climate there."

"Fossil fuels must stay in the ground," Aljets added. "We are here at the scene of destruction to send out a clear signal for climate justice. Together we are many, together we are determined and strong."

Remarkable images and footage of the mass action quickly spread on social media, with environmentalists hoisting signs calling for "system change, not climate change" and chanting "keep it in the ground!"

Unverhältnismäßig und eskalierend: @Polizei_NRW_AC setzt Pfefferspray gegen sitzende friedliche Aktivist*innen ein #endegelaende pic.twitter.com/BCKti0bB6z

— Ende Gelände (@Ende__Gelaende) November 5, 2017

The Rhineland mines have long been targeted by activists due to the millions of tons of carbon dioxide they emit per year. Activist and author Naomi Klein has called the coalfields "an existential threat to humanity."

Also of Interest

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

Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That Are False

Israeli-Saudi Tandem Adjusts to Syria Loss

How it became a crime to be poor in America

The Legacy of Dennis Banks

Leaked documents and public records reveal a troubling fusion of private security, public law enforcement, and corporate money in the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline.

South Dakota's secret nuclear missile accident revealed

A Little Night Music

Louis Myers & The Aces - Take a Little Walk with Me

Louis Myers & The Aces - Just Whaling

Louis Myers - Woman Trouble

Louis Myers - Rock Me

Louis Myers & The Aces - Don't Throw Your Love On Me So Strong

Louis Myers - Southbound Blues

Carey Bell & Sons with Louis Myers - One Day, Train Ticket

Louis Myers - Old Black Mattie

The Aces - That's Allright

Louis Myers - Top Of The Harp