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"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between."

-- Oscar Wilde

News and Opinion

Germany Denounces The United States Under Trump’s Leadership, Releases Historic Statement

Germany’s top diplomat has just informed the United States that they no longer see the United States as the ally they once were, saying that leadership from President Donald Trump has led Europe on a path toward nuclear war. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel told the Berlin Foreign Policy Forum that Germany would start to go after its own agenda, whether the U.S. likes it or not because the West was losing influence around the world now that Trump is president.

“The U.S. no longer sees the world as a global community but as a fighting arena where everyone has to seek their own advantage,” Gabriel said, according to Deutsche Welle. “Germany can no longer simply react to U.S. policy but must establish its own position…even after Trump leaves the White House, relations with the U.S. will never be the same.”

Since taking office, Trump has attacked Germany (one of the United State’s closest allies) over Iran and North Korea, has denounced their trade surplus with us (even though it was wildly inaccurate) and accused Germany and other allies in NATO of owing vast amounts of money to the United States. We didn’t even mention the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, which caused the United States to become the only major country on the planet to not be apart of the deal.

[According to] Reuters:

The traditional view of the United States as having a protecting role was beginning to “crumble”, Sigmar Gabriel told an audience of politicians and government representatives at the Koerber Foundation. “The U.S.’s retreat (from its international role) is not due to the policies of only one president. It will not change fundamentally after the next elections,” he said.

Donald Trump's decision on Israel will seriously harm US influence in the Muslim world

President Trump has previously provoked anger in important countries allied to the US since the Second World War such as the UK, Japan, Australia and Germany, but they have tried to continue their past relationship and ignore or play down Mr Trump’s explosive tweets and departure from international treaties. But this time round expressions of extreme disagreement are more than usually mixed with scorn and bemusement at a move which may help Mr Trump in US domestic politics but will seriously damage US political primacy in the region. Even steadfast US allies do not want to become collateral damage.

The fury is greatest in Muslim states: the Turkish government’s spokesman said on Wednesday said that the US decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel will plunge the region and the world into endless conflict. Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Twitter that “declaring Jerusalem a capital is disregarding history and the truths in the region, it is a big injustice/cruelty, short-sightedness, foolishness/madness, it is plunging the region and the world into a fire with no end in sight.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said President Trump’s action would be a “red line for Turkey” and could lead to Ankara cutting diplomatic ties with Israel. Turkey’s relations with the US have been in decline for several years, but even Saudi Arabia, which Mr Trump visited and has gone out of his way to praise and support, was very negative about his reversal of traditional US policy on Jerusalem. ...

Mr Trump’s actions will be a serious blow to US influence in the Muslim world and particularly in the Middle East. They will persuade other states around the world that US foreign policy has imploded and will in future be determined by Mr Trump’s policy of self-isolation and political priorities at home. The US ability to shape events internationally is becoming increasingly limited.

Protests across Palestine against US Jerusalem move

Palestinian shot dead in Gaza as UN meets to discuss Trump speech

A Palestinian has been shot dead in Gaza by the Israeli army, the first person killed in clashes that began after Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Palestinian protesters clashed with Israeli troops across the West Bank as worshippers throughout the Muslim world took to the streets after the weekly Friday midday prayers to protest against Trump’s decision.

Despite calls for a day of rage, Palestinian protesters turned out in smaller numbers than they had on Thursday in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s controversial speech, allowing reinforced Israeli troops, who had been anticipating clashes, to manage the confrontations with ease. ...

Francois Delattre, the UN’s French representative, warned Trump’s unilateral decision was in breach of international law and “carried the risk of taking a political conflict and seeing it morph into an insurmountable religious conflict”. Underlining the extent to which France has lost patience with the US handling of the Palestine issue, the country’s foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said America had excluded itself as a Middle East mediator.

Britain Ambassador at the UN: "We disagree with the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem"

Snark:

Palestinians recognize Texas as part of Mexico

In response to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, the Palestinian National Authority has announced that it will recognize Texas as a state of Mexico since it was violently annexed by the United States in the 1840s.

“The territory north and east of the Rio Grande is very important to the Mexican people,” explained a PNA spokesperson. “Before American settlers showed up and implemented slavery, Mexico oversaw this land. Then, President Polk sent his armies to invade the rest of these Mexican territories, and force the country to give up California, New Mexico, most of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. We may soon recognize these states as part of Mexico too.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says that this is a new approach to Mexican-US relations, and hopes it will help ease the tension between the two countries over security and immigration.

Defector says thousands of Islamic State fighters left Raqqa in secret deal

A high-level defector from Kurdish-led forces that captured the Syrian city of Raqqa from Islamic State has recanted his account of the city’s fall, saying thousands of IS fighters - many more than first reported - left under a secret, U.S.-approved deal. Talal Silo, a former commander in the Syrian Democratic Forces, said the SDF arranged to bus all remaining Islamic State militants out of Raqqa even though it said at the time it was battling diehard foreign jihadists in the city.

U.S. officials described Silo’s comments as “false and contrived” but a security official in Turkey, where Silo defected three weeks ago, gave a similar account of Islamic State’s defeat in its Syrian stronghold. Turkey has been at odds with Washington over U.S. backing for the Kurdish forces who led the fight for Raqqa.

Silo was the SDF spokesman and one of the officials who told the media in mid-October - when the deal was reached - that fewer than 300 fighters left Raqqa with their families while others would fight on. However, he told Reuters in an interview that the number of fighters who were allowed to go was far higher and the account of a last-ditch battle was a fiction designed to keep journalists away while the evacuation took place.

He said a U.S. official in the international coalition against Islamic State, whom he did not identify, approved the deal at a meeting with an SDF commander. At the time there were conflicting accounts of whether or not foreign Islamic State fighters had been allowed to leave Raqqa. The BBC later reported that one of the drivers in the exodus described a convoy of up to 7 km (4 miles) long made up of 50 trucks, 13 buses and 100 Islamic State vehicles, packed with fighters and ammunition.

North Korea ready to open direct talks with US, says Russia's Sergei Lavrov

North Korea is open to direct talks with the US over their nuclear standoff, according to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who said he passed that message to his counterpart, Rex Tillerson, when the two diplomats met in Vienna on Thursday.

There was no immediate response from Tillerson but the official position of the state department is that North Korea would have to show itself to be serious about giving up its nuclear arsenal as part of a comprehensive agreement before a dialogue could begin.

Lavrov conveyed the apparent offer on the day a top UN official, Jeffrey Feltman, met the North Korean foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, in Pyongyang, during the first high-level UN visit to the country for six years. Feltman is an American and a former US diplomat, but the state department stressed he was not in North Korea with any message from Washington.

“We know that North Korea wants above all to talk to the United States about guarantees for its security. We are ready to support that, we are ready to take part in facilitating such negotiations,” Lavrov said at an international conference in Vienna, according to the Interfax news agency. “Our American colleagues, [including] Rex Tillerson, have heard this.”

No Democracy Here: Ousted Honduran Pres. Zelaya Says 2009 U.S.-Backed Coup Led to Election Crisis

Ashamed Brazilian clown to leave Congress in disgust at colleagues

A clown who has twice been elected to Brazil’s Congress under the slogan “It can’t get any worse” has said he is too embarrassed by his fellow politicians to run again. Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva, known as Tiririca, this week has said he is ashamed of his colleagues – more than half of whom are reportedly under investigation for corruption – and will not run again in 2018. As a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Tiririca had continued working in a circus on weekends and he said he was returning to clowning full-time.

Tiririca won office in 2010 with more than 1.3 million votes, outpolling every other candidate in Brazil’s largest state, São Paulo. He was re-elected by a landslide in 2014. Tiririca used his speech to Congress to blast the sloth and corruption of many of his 513 colleagues. “We are well paid to work, but only eight of 513 actually show up here often. I am one of those eight and I am a clown,” he said.

The surprising factors driving murder rates: income inequality and respect

A 17-year-old boy shoots a 15-year-old stranger to death, apparently believing that the victim had given him a dirty look. A Chicago man stabs his stepfather in a fight over whether his entry into his parents’ house without knocking was disrespectful. A San Francisco UPS employee guns down three of his co-workers, then turns his weapon on himself, seemingly as a response to minor slights.

These killings may seem unrelated – but they are only a few recent examples of the kind of crime that demonstrates a surprising link between homicide and inequality. While on the surface, the disputes that triggered these deaths seem trivial – each involved apparently small disagreements and a sense of being seen as inferior and unworthy of respect – research suggests that inequality raises the stakes of fights for status among men.

The connection is so strong that, according to the World Bank, a simple measure of inequality predicts about half of the variance in murder rates between American states and between countries around the world. When inequality is high and strips large numbers of men of the usual markers of status – like a good job and the ability to support a family – matters of respect and disrespect loom disproportionately.

Inequality predicts homicide rates “better than any other variable”, says Martin Daly, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario and author of Killing the Competition: Economic Inequality and Homicide. ...

According to the FBI, just over half of murders in which the precipitating circumstances were known were set off by what is called the “other argument” – not a robbery, a love triangle, drugs, domestic violence or money, but simply the sense that someone had been dissed.

Proposed rule would protect employers who steal workers’ hard-earned tips

Today the Trump administration took their first major step towards allowing employers to legally take tips earned by the workers they employ. The Department of Labor released a proposed rule rescinding portions of its tip regulations, including current restrictions on “tip pooling”—which would mean that, for example, restaurants would be able to pool the tips servers receive and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers. But, crucially, the rule doesn’t actually require that employers distribute pooled tips to workers. Under the administration’s proposed rule, as long as the tipped workers earn minimum wage, the employer can legally pocket those tips.

Recent research suggests that the total wages stolen from workers due to minimum wage violations exceeds $15 billion each year, and workers in restaurants and bars are much more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than workers in other industries. With that much illegal wage theft currently taking place, it seems obvious that when employers can legally pocket the tips earned by their employees, many will do so

Silicon Valley Is Sneaking Models Into This Year’s Holiday Parties

Along with a seemingly endless string of harassment and discrimination scandals, Silicon Valley’s homogeneity has a more trivial side effect: boring holiday parties. A fete meant to retain all your talented engineers is almost certain to wind up with a rather same-y crowd, made up mostly of guys. At this year’s holiday parties, however, there’ll be a surprising influx of attractive women, and a few pretty men, mingling with the engineers. They’re being paid to.

Local modeling agencies, which work with Facebook- and Google-size companies as well as much smaller businesses and the occasional wealthy individual, say a record number of tech companies are quietly paying $50 to $200 an hour for each model hired solely to chat up attendees. For a typical party, scheduled for the weekend of Dec. 8, Cre8 Agency LLC is sending 25 women and 5 men, all good-looking, to hang out with “pretty much all men” who work for a large gaming company in San Francisco, says Cre8 President Farnaz Kermaani. The company, which she wouldn’t name, has handpicked the models based on photos, made them sign nondisclosure agreements, and given them names of employees to pretend they’re friends with, in case anyone asks why he’s never seen them around the foosball table. ...

While this sounds crazy after a year packed with harrowing stories of sexual harassment, abuse, and discrimination—a tidal wave that started in San Francisco, with Uber Technologies Inc.—it’s part of an older trend. Tech companies have long used models to run their booths at trade shows such as CES in Las Vegas, hype up crowds at product launches, and direct foot traffic at conferences. That said, this year’s record-setting requests for the minglers, known as “ambiance and atmosphere models,” are a step beyond what the industry has seen before, says Chris Hanna, who’s run TSM Agency since 2004 and counts among his clients “one of the largest search engines in the world.”

Rep. Trent Franks to resign after discussing surrogacy with female staffers

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) announced Thursday that he would resign from office as of Jan. 31, 2018, after discussing surrogacy issues with female staffers.

“I have recently learned that the Ethics Committee is reviewing an inquiry regarding my discussion of surrogacy with two previous female subordinates, making each feel uncomfortable,” he said in a statement. “I deeply regret that my discussion of this option and process in the workplace caused distress.”

Franks’ announcement shocked Capitol Hill. He has been a vocal social conservative since being elected to Congress in 2002, and has authored numerous anti-abortion bills. He is married, with twin children.

In a statement, Speaker Paul Ryan’s office said Thursday that the speaker learned of “credible claims of misconduct” against Franks in the middle of last week.

“The next day, the speaker presented Rep. Franks with the allegations, which he did not deny,” according to Ryan’s office. “The speaker told Rep. Franks that he intended to refer the allegations directly to the House Ethics Committee and told him that he should resign from Congress. The allegations were filed with the Ethics Committee last Friday. And today, the speaker accepted a letter of resignation.”

As Franken Steps Aside, Nurses Back Call for Keith Ellison to Fill Senate Vacancy

On the heels of Sen. Al Franken's announcement Thursday that he will resign following accusations of sexual harassment by several women, National Nurses United (NNU) began circulating a petition calling on Minnesota's Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton to appoint Rep. Keith Ellison to fill Franken's soon-to-be vacant Senate seat.

"At a time when the Senate is poised to enact a disgraceful tax bill that shifts more resources from working people to big corporations and the one percent, on top of repeated attacks on health coverage, environmental and workplace protections, and other critical fights, we need the proven progressive voice of Keith Ellison in the Senate," NNU co-president and Minnesota resident Jean Ross, RN, said in a statement.

According to news reports, Ellison is on Dayton's short list of possible candidates, alongside Lt. Gov. Tina Smith and Rep. Tim Walz. Because Franken did not specify the precise date of his departure, it is unclear when Dayton will announce his replacement. Whoever is chosen will face a special election in November of next year.

A "Progressive Republican"? Running For Ohio's 1st District

Trump and son 'received pre-election email offering hacked WikiLeaks files'

An encryption key to unlock hacked material hosted by WikiLeaks was emailed to Donald Trump and aides two months before the presidential election, it was reported on Friday.

It is not clear that the recipients of the email, who included the president, Donald Trump Jr and others, ever used the key to access hacked documents. Congressional investigators asked Trump Jr about the email – which came from an unknown person called “Mike Erickson” – during a closed-door, daylong interview on Wednesday, CNN reported.

Trump Jr reportedly told the House intelligence committee that he did not remember the email. A lawyer for Trump Jr said his client did not remember the email or act on it. ... The email with the link to WikiLeaks material was sent to the Trumps on 4 September 2016, three weeks before Trump Jr began exchanging direct messages about the election on Twitter with WikiLeaks, as a leak of the correspondence revealed last month.

As World Warms, Heart-Breaking Video Shows What It Looks Like When a Polar Bear Starves

A video of a starving polar bear led to calls for climate change denialists to confront the real-world effects of global warming this week. Taken by a Canadian conservationist and photographer and posted to social media, the video offered a stark visual of the drastic impacts of climate change that have already begun taking root.

Paul Nicklen was traveling with the conservation group Sea Legacy in Canada's Baffin Islands, located in the Arctic, when he spotted the emaciated animal struggling to walk across the dry land—historically covered with ice in December and home to seals that polar bears rely on for food. The bear searched in vain for sustenance in a trashcan before collapsing.

"When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like," said Nicklen in an interview with National Geographic. "Bears are going to starve to death. This is what a starving bear looks like."

This polar bear is starving to death, to the point where it’s hard for him to even get up/move around. If this hurts to see, then take a step back and acknowledge that if you consume animals you’re contributing to this polar bears suffering- pic.twitter.com/SqLQj5Ogci

— (@figsoverpigs) December 7, 2017

Nicklen received some criticism for filming the bear instead of feeding it, but he argued that sharing the image of the impact of global warming with the largest audience possible would be more productive than intervening by ending the animal's life or feeding it a small amount of food. "There is no band aid solution. There was no saving this individual bear," he wrote on Instagram where he orginally posted the video. In his interview with National Geographic, Nicklen added, "it's not like I walk around with a tranquilizer gun or 400 pounds of seal meat."

GOP Tax Scam Attacks Renewables While Nurturing Nuclear and Fossil Fuel Industries

Several provisions in the GOP tax plan threaten the future of renewable energy in the United States while bolstering support for nuclear reactors and the fossil fuel industry, according to a New York Times analysis. ... "In different ways, direct and indirect, the House and Senate bills each imperil elements of" renewable energy's rise, Brad Plumer and Jim Tankersley write for the Times. The two bills will undergo a reconcilation process with the intention of sending a final version to the president's desk before the new year.

During the conference panel to finalize the bill, lawmakers will review the multiple measures expected to curtail U.S. renewable energy production, as the Times details:

A Senate bill provision intended to stop multinational companies from shifting profits overseas could unexpectedly cripple a key financing tool used by the renewable energy industry, particularly solar, by eroding the value of tax credits that banks and other financial institutions buy from energy companies.

The House bill's effects would be more direct, rolling back tax credits for wind farms and electric vehicles, while increasing federal support for two nuclear reactors under construction in Georgia....

The wind industry has warned that the House language, which would reduce the wind tax credit to 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, from 2.4 cents, and change eligibility rules, could eliminate over half of the new wind farms planned in the United States.

... Although the Senate bill would not cut the vital tax credits for wind and solar, the Senate's Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax—which aims to stop companies from shifting profits abroad—would impose restrictions on renewable energy companies that sell credits to banks and investors, cutting off the companies from vital financing, thereby jeopardizing wind and solar farms nationwide.

The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, is "under little pressure in either bill;" in fact, producers of oil and gas are expected to benefit from the final bill.

More Climate Change Refugees Means More Walls

When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated to try to board La Bestia (“the Beast”), the nickname given to the infamous train that has proven so deadly for those traveling north toward the United States. ...

When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”) In their community, without rain, there had been neither crops, nor a harvest, nor food for their families, an increasingly common phenomenon in Central America. In 2015, for instance, 400,000 people living in what has become Honduras’s “dry corridor” planted their seeds and waited for rain that never came. As in a number of other places on this planet in this century, what came instead was an extreme drought that stole their livelihoods.

For Central America, this was not an anomaly. Not only had the region been experiencing increasing mid-summer droughts, but also, as the best climate forecasting models predict, a “much greater occurrence of very dry seasons” lies in its future. Central America is, in fact, “ground zero” for climate change in the Americas, as University of Arizona hydrology and atmospheric sciences professor Chris Castro told me. And on that isthmus, the scrambling of the seasons, an increasingly deadly combination of drenching hurricanes and parching droughts, will hit people already living in the most precarious economic and political situations. Across Honduras, for example, more than 76% of the population lives in conditions of acute poverty. The coming climate breakdowns will only worsen that or will, as Castro put it, be part of a global situation in which “the wet gets wetter, the dry gets drier, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Everything gets more extreme.”

Talking with those farmers in the Tenosique train yard felt, in a way, like a scene from a sequel to the movie The Road in which a father and son walk across a post-apocalyptic North America devastated by an unknown cataclysm. In reality, though, I was just in a typical border zone of the Anthropocene, the proposed new geologic era characterized by human activity as the dominant force on the climate and environment.  And these young, unarmed farmers with failing harvests are now facing the only welcome this planet presently has to offer for such victims of climate change: expanding border regimes of surveillance, razor-wire walls, guns, and incarceration centers.

California wildfires: 120,000 forced to flee as blazes tear through south of state

Wildfires driven by strong desert winds continue to rage through southern California, destroying hundreds of buildings and forcing 120,000 people to flee a phenomenon that could last until Christmas. Donald Trump approved California’s request for an emergency declaration on Friday, speeding federal help to firefighters and communities who are battling multiple blazes with fleets of aircraft, fire engines and garden hoses.

“It’s wind event after wind event,” said Stan Ziegler, a fire captain in Ventura County, which has been ravaged by the most destructive blaze, the Thomas fire. The blaze has grown to 180 sq miles (466 sq km) and destroyed 430 buildings since it broke out on Monday. Dry, desert winds from the east known as Santa Anas, which fanned the flames, gave way to a respite of cooler onshore winds, then the easterlies roared back, said Ziegler.

Fire officials said they could be battling blazes for several more weeks because of the speed at which the wind is causing them to spread, raising the highly unusual prospect of a Christmas of wildfires, which in California traditionally end in November. Swaths of Los Angeles have choked on air filled with ash and smoke, prompting hundreds of schools to close. Along the coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara tiny beach communities were under siege as fires leapt from steep hillsides across US highway 101.

Also of Interest

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

U.S. Courts Have Been Treating Muslims Differently for a Very Long Time

When Washington Cheered the Jihadists

Syrian City’s Survivors Describe Three Years of Siege Under the Islamic State

New Report Looks at How Obama’s Housing Policies Destroyed Black Wealth

The Burning Earth Bears Witness in California

Ventura county is burning. My hometown is climate change's latest victim

Horrific video shows cop killing man who begged for his life

‘We were just a normal family’: Che Guevara’s daughter remembers her father

A Little Night Music

Tower Of Power - What Is Hip?

Tower of Power - So Very Hard To Go

Tower of Power - Diggin' On James Brown

Tower Of Power - You Got To Funkifize

Tower of Power w/Sam Moore - I Thank You

Tower of Power - Pocketful Of Soul

Tower Of Power - Oakland Stroke/Havin' Fun

Tower of Power - Estival Jazz Lugano 2010