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This evening's music features r&b singer LaVern Baker. Enjoy!

"The Iraq invasion is unforgivable. It warped what we are as a species. It stained us. Nobody who helped inflict this murderous abomination upon our world should have been permitted to work in politics, government or media ever again, and its primary facilitators should be in prison for war crimes. The fact that its chief architects remain not just free but celebrated members of society proves that we are ruled by a sociopathic empire."

-- Caitlin Johnstone

News and Opinion

Look at what floats to the top:

Democratic Congressional Candidate Built Lucrative Career Spying on Left-Wing Activists

Patrick Ryan, a congressional candidate from New York, is leaning on his experience as a small business entrepreneur to establish his readiness for office, but he has curiously failed to mention the business he used to work in: domestic surveillance.

Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions, hoping business lobbyists would pay top dollar to monitor and disrupt the actions of activist groups across the country. At one point, the proposal included the idea to spy on the families of high-profile Democratic activists and plant fake documents with labor unions in a bid to discredit them.

The pitch, a joint venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it was exposed in a series of news reports.

Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter. ...

The candidate has the backing of some of the more conservative elements of the Democratic Party. His campaign has won financial support from The New Democrat Coalition PAC, a group that supports business-friendly Democrats for Congress. The PAC is hoping to dramatically expand the number of moderate and conservative-leaning Democrats on Capitol Hill next year and, along with the Blue Dog PAC, is working aggressively to counter more populist and progressive candidates running in Democratic primaries for the midterm elections. Ryan, who served as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq, also won support from Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who has helped raise cash and build political support for a group of veterans and mostly moderate Democrats running for office this year.

On The Iraq War’s 15th Anniversary, Make The World Remember Its Lessons

US and coalition forces began their “shock and awe” bombing campaign on March 20th, 2003. That’s less than fifteen years. It just happened, and people have already forgotten about it. Fifteen years. I still have unused art supplies that are older than that. And yet when politicians and intelligence agencies say that Russia has committed an act of war against the US and Bashar al-Assad needs to be removed from power in Syria, mainstream Americans say “Yup, sounds about right, no further evidence required.”

This needs to stop. We must all use this landmark anniversary to remind the world of the depravity of the US-centralized empire, and how we know for a fact that it will happily use lies and mass media propaganda to manufacture support for acts of military violence which unleash unspeakable horrors into our world. The Iraq invasion is unforgivable. It killed a million Iraqis, gave rise to murderous terrorist factions, and destabilized the entire region in a way that it continues to suffer from to this day. The destruction and human misery it caused are immeasurable. If every war hawk in Washington were forced to truly witness and experience every last horror the war inflicted with their eyes pried open a la Clockwork Orange, they would be forever shattered and rendered incapable of doing any more harm. ...

The Iraq invasion is unforgivable, and absolutely nothing has been done to prevent it from happening again. Nobody suffered any consequences, no changes have been made, no transparency measures or checks and balances put in place to ensure that the US war machine is never again permitted to paint the earth red with the blood of the innocent in an act of mass murder justified with lies.

Nothing has been done to prevent this from happening again, and indeed it is happening again. The US war machine has been lying to us about what is going on in Syria, Iraq’s next-door neighbor. It has been funneling money and weapons to known terrorist factions in that country for years. It has established a permanent military presence there with the stated goal of effecting regime change. Half a million people have died already because of the empire’s relentless destabilization campaigns in that country. And, just like Iraq, it is done under the pretense of humanitarianism while really being all about resources. The only difference is it’s being done predominantly with violent militia groups and drones this time, to prevent people from remembering Iraq.

Trump aides say U.S. forces can legally stay in Syria, Iraq indefinitely

President Trump has all the legal authority he needs to keep U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq indefinitely, the Pentagon and State Department said in a pair of letters released on Thursday. The letters also warned that the United States reserves the right to take military action to defend its anti-ISIS allies in Syria, potentially setting the stage for new clashes with regime forces and their Russian partners.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., to whom the letters were addressed, sharply criticized the administration’s reasoning and said in a statement that Trump risks “acting like a king by unilaterally starting a war.”

Borrowing arguments first advanced by the Obama administration, the Pentagon and State Department argued that the undeclared war on ISIS — and the presence of some 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria and 5,200 more in Iraq — is legal under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and the 2002 AUMF that set the stage for the invasion of Iraq. In late January, the Trump administration signaled that it would not seek a new vote to authorize the mission in Syria.

Like Obama, Trump contends that, because of its origins as an al-Qaida offshoot, the so-called Islamic State is covered by the 2001 legislation. The 2002 AUMF gave the president the power to use force to confront “the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”

“Now the Trump administration is going even further, claiming that the 2001 AUMF also allows the U.S. military to strike pro-Assad forces in areas devoid of ISIS to protect our Syrian partners who seek Assad’s overthrow,” Kaine said Thursday. “It is clear the Trump administration is crossing a constitutional line.”

Time to Admit the Afghan War is ‘Nonsense’

Whatever happened to the Donald Trump who tweeted in 2013, “Let’s get out of Afghanistan … we waste billions there. Nonsense!” And whatever happened to the reality TV star who used to tell under-performers, “you’re fired”? Today, as commander in chief, President Trump is indefinitely extending the Afghan war’s record as the longest in U.S. history. He’s wasting $45 billion to wage it this year alone. And he’s not even thinking of firing his huckster generals who claim that sending a few thousand more troops and stepping up the bombing will be a “game changer.”

Much like the Vietnam War, every day’s news of war from Afghanistan puts the lie to optimistic claims of a military solution. A recent BBC study concluded that Taliban forces are now active in 70 percent of the country, more than at any time since the end of 2001. Unofficial U.S. estimates of their strength have soared from about 20,000 in 2014 to at least 60,000 today. Afghan government forces number several times as many, but—like their counterparts in the Vietnam War—they “lack the one thing the U.S. cannot provide: the will to fight a protracted campaign against a committed enemy,” in the words of Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal at the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The Taliban have proven that no place in Afghanistan is safe from their long arm. At the beginning of February, they infiltrated a bomb-laden ambulance into Kabul, just blocks from a meeting at the Afghan Ministry of Defense with the head of the U.S. Central Command. Its blast killed more than 100 people and injured 235. It followed only days after Taliban gunmen stormed the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, killing at least 20 people, including four Americans.

The latest Inspector General report on the status of “Operation Freedom’s Sentinel,” issued Feb. 18, declares that U.S. and Afghan government forces made no progress last year in expanding their control of the country or in forcing the Taliban to the peace table, one of the administration’s stated goals.

Syria Sends More Fighters to Afrin in High-Stakes Standoff With Turkey

The first of Syria’s pro-government fighters arrived in the Afrin District Tuesday to support the Kurdish YPG in resisting a Turkish invasion. The fighters immediately were attacked by Turkish artillery. On Wednesday, yet more fighters loyal to various “popular forces” Shi’ite militias pushed into Afrin to join the effort, vowing they would continue to support the local Kurds against the “continued aggression of the Turkish regime.”

Turkey’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin warned that any attempt by anyone to enter Afrin to resist them would “surely have serious consequences,” Strikes against Syrian forces risk having a massive impact on the entire Syrian War.

This could be the last siege of the Syrian war

Syrian artillery and aircraft are bombarding Eastern Ghouta, the last big rebel enclave which is just to the east of Damascus. Some 127 people were reported to have been killed on Monday alone. By Tuesday evening that figure was said to have doubled. The strength of the attack by shellfire, bombs and missiles is more intense than anything seen in the area for several years, suggesting that an all-out ground assault is in prospect or, as in East Aleppo just over a year ago, there will be a last minute attempt to negotiate a mass evacuation.

The siege of Eastern Ghouta could be the last of the big sieges that have characterised the war in Syria for the last five or six years and has made it such a destructive conflict. Early on in the war, government forces adapted the strategy of abandoning opposition strongholds, surrounding them and concentrating pro-government forces in defence of loyalist areas, essential roads and important urban areas. The rebel enclaves were sealed off with checkpoints and the people inside were subjected to regular bombardment. ...

The government has been advancing all over Syria since Russian military intervention in 2015. Besieged rebel areas have been falling one by one, the fighters and the civilian population sympathising with them often going to Idlib in northwest Syria. In Daraya, they left in the summer of 2016 and East Aleppo fell at the end of the same year. Eastern Ghouta has held out longest because it was large, strongly held and could grow part of its own food. But the rebel factions in control were divided, occasionally fought each other and had no strategy to counter the Syrian army’s steady advances other than firing mortars into pro-government districts like Christian Bab Touma in the Damascus Old City.

With Syrian government forces either victorious or not engaged in full scale combat in much of the country, it has more soldiers and air power to concentrate on remaining rebel strongholds in Eastern Ghouta and Idlib. But there is a growing confrontation between President Bashar al-Assad and Turkey in the northern Kurdish enclave of Afrin. Turkish artillery has been shelling on Tuesday the government held entry point to Afrin down which pro-government fighters armed with heavy machine guns have been driving as part of their new alliance with the Kurds.

The Syrian and – to a lesser extent – the Iraqi wars have been wars of sieges in which limited numbers of ground troops are deployed, but are supported by massive air power. This was true of the Syrian government and Russians against Isis, al-Qaeda linked groups and jihadi rebels. But it was also true of the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) backed by US airpower in the four month siege of Raqqa and the Iraqi Army, also backed by the US air force and its own artillery, in the nine-month siege of Mosul. The latter was probably the bloodiest of all these sieges because of the size of the city, the ferocity of the fighting and the refusal of Isis to allow the civilian population to escape from West Mosul and from the close-packed Old City.

Iraqis still want Turkey out of their country:

Turkish forces in Iraq “invaders” – Iraqi envoy

The Iraqi ambassador to Moscow Haydar Hadi has described the presence of Turkish forces on Iraqi soil as an “invasion”, the Russian news site Sputnik Türkiye reported on Tuesday.

“We see the Turkish soldiers’ presence in Iraq as an invasion, and have sent a message of protest on the topic,” said Hadi at a press conference in Moscow, adding that countries from the Arab League had supported Iraq’s stance.

Turkish forces entered Iraq in 2015 to help the international coalition to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS), the extremist jihadist organisation that declared itself a caliphate in 2014 after seizing the Iraqi city of Mosul.

The Turkish parliament voted to extend the deployment of troops at a military base in the town of Bashiqa for another year in September 2017, even though its stated objective of forcing ISIS out of Mosul had been achieved.

Schools are threatening to discipline students who want to protest for gun control

In the week since the Parkland, Florida shooting that left 17 dead, students at schools across the country have transformed into activists. They’ve left class, marched for miles with locked arms, and made speeches on national television — all to protest the United States’ gun laws and mourn the 17 people killed last Wednesday in one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings in modern history. Without gun control, these students say, another gunman will soon walk into yet another American school and open fire.

But not every school is supporting their students’ cause. The Houston, Texas-area Needville Independent School District, for example, threatened students who walked out of school with a three-day, out-of-school suspension.

“There is a ‘movement’ attempting to stage walkouts/disruptions of the school through social media and/or other media outlets,” Superintendent Curtis Rhodes wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday. “Life is all about choices and every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative. We will discipline no matter if it is one, fifty, or five hundred students involved.” ...

A Waukesha, Wisconsin school district also initially threatened students who joined the nationwide protests with disciplinary action. However, in an amended email, Superintendent Todd Gray said that parents would be allowed to write a note for protesting students to excuse them from school.

“The Time to Act Is Now”: Florida School Shooting Survivors Confront Trump, Rubio on Gun Control

Trump proposes arming teachers while meeting with school shooting survivors

In an attempt to assuage claims that he isn’t serious about the work needed to keep American children safe in schools, President Donald Trump asked survivors of last week’s shooting in Parkland, Florida, the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and the 1999 Columbine, Colorado school shooting to attend a White House listening session Wednesday.

Though the guests did most of the talking, it was easy to get a read on the Trump administration's take: Trump brought a list of talking points that included a note reminding him to actually listen to gun violence survivors.

President Donald Trump holds notes during a White House listening session with students and parents affected by school shootings. (AP Photo by Carolyn Kaster) pic.twitter.com/Z0lZbSVaoF

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) February 21, 2018

There was a lot for the president to take in as friends and family members of slain students implored Trump to ensure children’s safety going forward. ... During the meeting, Trump also suggested that teachers be armed with concealed firearms, and asked for people to raise their hands if they supported the idea. The room reportedly gave the idea a mixed reception.

Betsy DeVos is Helping Puerto Rico Re-Imagine Its Public School System. That Has People Deeply Worried.

Puerto Rico, in the midst of the chaos and instability following Hurricane Maria, is moving quickly forward with plans to institute a wide swath of education reforms, with the help of the aggressively ideological federal education department, helmed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Puerto Rico’s governor and education secretary have expressed openness to the concerns raised by parents, teachers and community members, and stress they are not looking to implement an extreme version of privatization. Yet at the same time, they have stoked fears by pushing forward a notably vague charter law that does little to address what people are most worried about. This “trust us” mentality has not been helped by the engagement of DeVos, nor by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s recent visit to a notorious charter chain in Philadelphia last week — a prime example of the kind of low-performing, fiscally reckless charter that school advocates warn about.

At a time when the island is starved of investment and inching slowly through a storm recovery, many Puerto Ricans worry that the government is treating this more as an opportunity to disrupt education, rather than stabilize it — while also potentially opening the doors for supercharged corruption.

Here Are The Russian Memes That “Swung The Election”

GOP Senator Says Impeachment of Judges Who Struck Down Gerrymandered Map Is “A Conversation That Has to Happen”

In the wake of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court order that struck down a Republican congressional map as unconstitutionally gerrymandered, Sen. Pat Toomey said that impeachment of the justices is “a conversation that has to happen.”

The GOP map had given Republicans a nearly 3-1 congressional majority in a state that leans Democratic; the court’s new map will still give Republicans a significant advantage, but slightly less of one. For Toomey, that amounted, he said, to a “blatant, unconstitutional, partisan power grab that undermines our electoral process.”

“I think state House members, state senators, are going to be speaking among themselves and their constituents,” Toomey said. “Does that rise to the level of impeachment? That’s ultimately their decision but it’s a conversation that has to happen.” The new map means several Republican incumbents now risk losing their seats, and a half-dozen competitive Republican-held congressional districts move left.

Blue-sky thinking: how China's crackdown on pollution is paying off

The photographs on display at Wu Di’s Beijing studio imagine China and Beijing at their dystopian worst. ... But while the interior of Wu’s atelier offers a desolate panorama of China’s pollution crisis, outside, a different, brighter side to the country is, for once, on show. Beijing’s skies, so often noxious and smoggy, are a perfect and perplexing cerulean blue.

“It’s 26 today,” said Wu, a visual artist and documentary photographer, checking his smartphone’s pollution app to confirm the uncommonly low levels of PM2.5, an airborne particulate linked to lung cancer, asthma and heart disease. “In the past, we made money first and could only talk about the environment later. But it’s clear the government has changed its mind,” he said. “We can see everything is starting to move in the right direction.”

Traditionally, winter is Beijing’s smoggiest season, as coal burning ramps up to keep millions of residents warm. But the skies over China’s capital have been almost inconceivably clear of late, thanks partly to a government crackdown on the use of the fossil fuel. Beijing enjoyed a record 226 days of “good” air quality last year and endured 23 heavily polluted days, compared with 58 in 2013, state media announced last month. The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, greeted the recovery with the incredulous headline: “How did Beijing become one of China’s top cities for air quality?”

Hu Xijin, the editor of the party-controlled Global Times, tweeted alongside a photograph of Beijing’s azure-framed CCTV headquarters: “Isn’t it good to have a ruling party that can honour its promise?” Lauri Myllyvirta, a Greenpeace campaigner, said China’s leaders could rightly claim credit for making Beijing blue again, temporarily at least, even if favourable weather conditions had played a major role in the exceptionally good spell. ...

There are also fears that the crackdown around Beijing is forcing polluting industries to migrate south to regions such as the Yangtze river delta around Shanghai, where smog levels are rising. “The ‘war on pollution’ is far from over … few people harbour illusions,” Myllyvirta said. “But there is also no reason for cynicism as there’s clear evidence the measures worked.”

Half of world's oceans now fished industrially, maps reveal

More than half the world’s oceans are being fished by industrial vessels, new research reveals.

The maps based on feedback from more than 70,000 vessels show commercial fishing covers a greater surface area than agriculture, and will raise fresh questions about the health of oceans and sustainability of trawler fishing.

The data, published in the journal Science, also shows how fishing declines sharply at weekends, and celebrations like Christmas and Chinese new year.

The data also helps to explain the extreme decline in some fish stocks: the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says one-third of commercial fish stocks are being caught at unsustainable levels.

Debt for dolphins: Seychelles creates huge marine parks in world-first finance scheme

The tropical island nation of Seychelles is to create two huge new marine parks in return for a large amount of its national debt being written off, in the first scheme of its kind in the world. The novel financial engineering, effectively swapping debt for dolphins and other marine life, aims to throw a lifeline to corals, tuna and turtles being caught in a storm of overfishing and climate change. If it works, it will also secure the economic future of the nation, which depends entirely on tourism and fishing. With other ocean states lining up to follow, the approach could transform large swaths of the planet’s troubled seas. ...

The biodiversity jewel in the Seychelles crown is the Aldabra archipelago, which rivals the Galapagos in ecological importance. Spinner dolphins, manta rays, humpback whales and nurse, lemon and tiger sharks share the waters with hawksbill and green turtles, and seabirds from some of the world’s largest colonies soar above. Dugongs - or sea cows - are the most endangered species in the Indian Ocean and shelter here, while 100,000 rare giant tortoises slowly roam the land.

The new protected area around Aldabra is 74,000 square kilometres - almost the size of Scotland - and bans all extractive uses, from fishing to oil exploitation. The second new protected area is 134,000 sq km, centred on the main Seychelles island of Mahe. It allows controlled activities but is, for example, banning “fish aggregating devices” – rafts that concentrate fish but drive up bycatch.

Together, the parks cover 15% of the Seychelles ocean and the government will double this by 2021, putting it far ahead of an international target of 10% by 2020. The parks resulted from the first ever debt-swap deal for marine protection in which $22m of national debt owed to the UK, France, Belgium and Italy was bought at a discount by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the NGO that has assisted the Seychelles.

Also of Interest

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

20 Companies Profiting the Most From War

U.S. Empire Still Incoherent After All These Years

My First Day as CIA Director

Blue Cross Executives Are Working Hard Against a Pro-Single Payer Candidate for Governor

Catharsis For Progressives - Caitlin Johnstone’s New Book “Woke”

Neanderthals – not modern humans – were first artists on Earth, experts claim

A Little Night Music

LaVern Baker - Jim Dandy

Miss Sharecropper (LaVern Baker) - How Long

LaVern Baker - So High So Low

LaVern Baker - Tweedlee Dee

Lavern Baker - Ain't Gonna Cry No More

Lavern Baker - Love Me Right In The Morning

LaVern Baker & Jimmy Ricks - You're The Boss

La Vern Baker - Tra La La

LaVern Baker - Soul On Fire

LaVern Baker - Bop-Ting-A-Ling

LaVern Baker - Jim Dandy Got Married

Lavern Baker - Saved

LaVern Baker - Voodoo Voodoo

LaVern Baker - I'm The One To Do It

LaVern Baker - Bumble Bee

Lavern Baker - Batman to the rescue