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This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Byther Smith. Enjoy!

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."

-- Malcolm X

News and Opinion

An interesting take on the way power is taken and exercised. Are neocons like John Bolton and Nikki Haley just delusional creeps or Bill Cosby with a different fetish? Worth a full read.

If Society Understood Sovereignty, It Would End Rape Culture, Imperialism, And Propaganda

Power, when you get right down to it, is ultimately about control. The ability to control other human beings and decide what happens to them. The more control you have over human lives, the more power you have. Some exert totalitarian control over their spouse and their children, and within their homes they are all-powerful. Some exert control over entire groups of nations, and have the power of life and death over entire populations. Those individuals are the most powerful people in the world. But in order to have control over another person, you must necessarily violate their personal sovereignty. You must find a way to get your will to override their own will for their own lives in order to control them, be it by physical force, legal compulsion, psychological manipulation, or rape drugs. This is why power-facilitating narratives advanced by governments, religions, education/indoctrination systems, and mass media outlets have aways explained to their audiences why it is in their best interest to subvert their personal sovereignty over their lives, their bodies, their reproductive systems, and their minds.

President Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton is a PNAC founder, a lead architect of the Iraq invasion, and once threatened to murder a diplomat’s sons for standing in the way of the rape of Iraq. He is the neocon’s neocon, and his respect for both national and personal sovereignty is so nonexistent that I would not be the slightest bit surprised to learn that he has raped his wife or anyone else. Sovereignty is such a non-thing in Bolton’s reality tunnel that he recently claimed that Russia giving Syria air defense systems to defend its own airspace “would be a significant escalation by the Russians,” and added that US troops are going to remain in Syria “as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.” To be clear, the US military is in Syria without the permission of the Syrian government, while the Iranian military and its so-called proxies are there at the invitation of the Syrian government to help combat the terrorist forces which have overrun the nation with the help of the US-centralized empire. ...

The gall it takes to say that your military will continue illegally occupying a sovereign nation for as long as its allies continue to do the thing that allies do is such a grotesque perversion of the concept of sovereignty that if more Americans had a better understanding of that concept John Bolton would have caused national outrage by saying it. But of course he didn’t, because they don’t. It’s just assumed that America is entitled to decide what sovereign nations do with their own allies, and that it is allowed to invade and occupy their land to force them to comply.

Americans accept this gross violation of sovereignty because they have been propagandized to accept it by the mass media machine which spends all day every day manufacturing support for the agendas of those who control the most humans. But this is a violation of Americans’ mental sovereignty, in exactly the same way slipping a rape drug into a woman’s drink is a violation of her sexual sovereignty. Just as Bill Cosby made it his life’s mission to try and manufacture the illusion of sexual consent from women using rape drugs, the most powerful people in the world have been using the mass media to try and manufacture the illusion of consent for their agendas of war, oppression and ecocide. ...

Power depends on systematic and relentless violations of sovereignty in myriad forms around the world, which is why powerful people act like such disgusting, rapey creeps all the time.

Facebook’s New Propaganda Partners

Media giant Facebook recently announced (Reuters, 9/19/18) it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank (FAIR.org, 5/21/18). ...

The Washington, DC–based NDI and IRI are staffed with senior Democratic and Republican politicians; the NDI is chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while the late Sen. John McCain was the longtime IRI chair. Both groups were created in 1983 as arms of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Cold War enterprise backed by then–CIA director William Casey (Jacobin, 3/7/18). That these two US government creations, along with a NATO offshoot like the Atlantic Council, are used by Facebook to distinguish real from fake news is effectively state censorship.

Facebook’s collaboration with the NED organizations is particularly troubling, as both have aggressively pursued regime change against leftist governments overseas. ... Soon after it partnered with the Atlantic Council, Facebook moved to delete accounts and pages connected with Iranian broadcasting channels (CNBC, 8/23/18), while The Intercept (12/30/17) reported that in 2017 the social media platform met with Israeli government officials to discuss which Palestinian voices it should censor. Ninety-five percent of Israeli government requests for deletion were granted. Thus the US government and its allies are effectively using the platform to silence dissenting opinion, both at home and on the world stage, controlling what Facebook‘s 2 billion users see and do not see.

Trump’s ‘Dissociation from Reality’ at UN

Trump is risking more than a war of words with Iran

Despite the giggles that greeted Donald Trump at the UN this week, the threats and insults he hurled at Iran are no laughing matter. The US president is pursuing a deliberate, premeditated and high-risk campaign to provoke, intimidate and ultimately overthrow the Tehran regime. His verbal assaults are matched by damaging US sanctions that hurt ordinary Iranians and will culminate in November with a global embargo on Iran’s crucial oil exports. At that point, Iran’s hardliners, more or less restrained until now by President Hassan Rouhani, may take matters into their own hands. The dire prospect of direct armed confrontation in the Gulf is increasing by the day. ...

Trump, a novice in international affairs, has undoubtedly bought into the simplistic anti-Iran narrative peddled by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s hawkish prime minister, and some US-based supporters of Israel. Netanyahu routinely portrays Iran as an existential threat to his country, and has advocated military action in the past. Trump’s new comrades-in-arms in the Saudi royal family and other Sunni Muslim Gulf monarchies have also won his unthinking support for their age-old, region-wide struggle for influence with Shia Tehran.

But there are other factors in play. Like Netanyahu, Trump may see political advantages in playing up the Iranian “menace”. His UN speech, bragging of his achievements, was aimed more at a domestic than an international audience. Trump certainly had November’s congressional midterm elections in mind, since victory for the Democrats potentially threatens his presidency. The springing of an “October surprise” is an old tradition in US electoral politics. If things are going badly, Trump is not above manufacturing an international crisis next month to rally the country behind his shabby banner. Iran is being set up as target of choice.

Trump’s boundless ego is another negative element influencing events. Naively, he seems to believe Rouhani or even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, can be brought to the negotiating table under duress – and then convinced to mend their ways by his unsurpassed personal charm, as with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Yet there is no real parallel with Kim who, working from an infinitely weaker position, deftly exploited Trump’s vanity in Singapore last summer. Such thinking betrays, in any case, a fatal ignorance of Iranian history, character and political culture. ... On the Iran question, the US has alienated European friends and Russian and Chinese rivals alike, spurning their advice and threatening their trade. Trump is busy burning bridges, not building them. Unless something changes soon, by accident or by design, he will have his war.

Netanyahu claims Israel has found Iran's 'secret atomic warehouse'

Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that Israel had identified a “secret atomic warehouse” in Tehran, containing nuclear equipment and radioactive material. Israel’s prime minister called for new sanctions against Iran and accused European leaders of “appeasement” for opposing them. In a speech to the UN general assembly on Thursday, Netanyahu said he was revealing the existence of the “atomic warehouse” for the first time in public.

As he has in past presentations, Netanyahu brought visual aids to illustrate his claims.

He held up a satellite image which he said showed where the warehouse was located in Tehran, and a photograph of a non-descript wall and metal gate, which he said showed of the exterior of warehouse. Netanyahu described the facility as a “secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and materiel from Iran’s secret nuclear weapons programme”, but gave no further details, other than to allege that government officials had spread 15kg of the radioactive material around the streets of Tehran in an attempt to dispose of it. He said a nearby rug-cleaning business should check its wares for radioactivity.

Tehran is party to a 2015 agreement curbing its nuclear activities in return for sanctions relief. As part of the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA) it dismantled uranium-enriching centrifuges and a reactor and exported most of its stockpile of enriched uranium. It is not clear, even if some surplus equipment was stored in a Tehran warehouse, whether it would represent a violation of the JCPOA. Dismantled centrifuges were to be stored in specified locations under international monitoring, but there not specific stipulations on the storing of other ancillary pieces of hardware. Since 2015, the nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly certified that Iran is abiding by the terms of the JCPOA. But Netanyahu urged the IAEA director general, Yukiya Amano, to investigate the warehouse Israeli intelligence had identified.

Trump Threatens Venezuela With New Sanctions Even as it Faces Economic & Humanitarian Crisis

'All Options on the Table, Every One': Trump Doubles-Down on Overthrowing Maduro in Venezuela

A day after suggesting that he could overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, President Donald Trump indicated that a meeting between the two leaders could be possible at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)—but didn't rule out military action. "All options are on the table, every one," Trump told the press Wednesday. "The strong ones and the less than strong ones and you know what I mean by strong. Every option is on the table with respect to Venezuela."

JUST IN: President Trump at the UN on pressuring Venezuela and President Maduro:

“All options are on the table. Every one. The strong ones, and the less than strong ones. Every option -- and you know what I mean by strong.” pic.twitter.com/FikCAqqViz

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 26, 2018

The statement, doubling down on Trump's earlier threat that Venezuela "could be toppled very quickly by the military if the military decides to do that," was just the latest threat of violent action against a foreign country by the Trump administration, coming a day after the president's speech on Iran.

Venezuela's Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza quickly denounced Trump's earlier threat as "grotesque."

"Of course, because it isn't his family that's going to die, it's easy for [Trump] to promote violence and the assassination of leaders in a country," Arreaza said.

War drums. Trump wants a military intervention in Venezuela. It would be disastrous, prolonged and likely unsuccessful. A crime of aggression.

— Eva Golinger (@evagolinger) September 21, 2018

The Guardian is at it again:

Ecuador gave Julian Assange diplomatic role at its Moscow embassy, says MP

Ecuador went as far as appointing Julian Assange to a diplomatic position at its embassy in Moscow as part of its failed plan to get him out of the UK, the Guardian has learned. The WikiLeaks founder was named as a councillor in Ecuador’s embassy to Russia on 19 December 2017, just days after he was granted Ecuadorean citizenship as part of the aborted escape plan revealed by the Guardian last week. However, the nomination was later withdrawn after the UK refused to recognise his diplomat status.

A classified document signed by Ecuador’s then-deputy foreign minister José Luis Jácome appeared to corroborate information from multiple sources that Russia would have been the ultimate destination for Assange if the plan had been successful.

The involvement of Russia – a country from where Assange would not be at risk of extradition to the US – raised new questions about his ties to the Kremlin. ...

The Russian embassy in London denied any involvement in an escape plan for Assange in a letter published in the Guardian on Monday.

Argentina gets biggest loan in IMF's history at $57bn

Argentina has received the biggest loan package ever from the International Monetary Fund, aimed at shoring up the country’s ailing finances: a whopping $57.1bn that will be disbursed over the next three years. ... Christine Lagarde said that as part of the deal, Argentina’s central bank had agreed to intervene in currency markets only in case of extreme circumstances and that the new amount would help Argentina’s government face its challenges.

Thousands of Argentinians joined in a nationwide strike on Tuesday to protest against economic turmoil and Mauricio Macri’s austerity measures. Most Argentinians blame the international lending institution for encouraging policies that led to the country’s worst economic crisis, in 2001, which pushed millions into poverty. The IMF has admitted it made a string of mistakes that contributed to the economic implosion.

The Government Wants Airlines to Delay Your Flight So They Can Scan Your Face

Omnipresent facial recognition has become a golden goose for law enforcement agencies around the world. In the United States, few are as eager as the Department of Homeland Security. American airports are currently being used as laboratories for a new tool that would automatically scan your face — and confirm your identity with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — as you prepare to board a flight, despite the near-unanimous objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians, who call such scans invasive and pointless.

According to a new report on the Biometric Entry-Exit Program by DHS itself, we can add another objection: Your flight could be late.

Although the new report, published by Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, is overwhelmingly supportive in its evaluation of airport-based biometric surveillance — the practice of a computer detecting your face and pairing it with everything else in the system — the agency notes some hurdles from a recent test code-named “Sprint 8.” Among them, the report notes with palpable frustration, was that airlines insist on letting their passengers depart on time, rather than subjecting them to a Homeland Security surveillance prototype plagued by technical issues and slowdowns. ...

DHS, apparently, is worried that it could be habit-forming for the airlines: “Repeatedly permitting airlines to revert to standard flight-boarding procedures without biometric processing may become a habit that is difficult to break.”

Silicon Valley finally pushes for data privacy laws at Senate hearing

It seems Silicon Valley and Congress can finally agree on something after all – the need for data privacy regulation. On Wednesday, representatives from Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Charter, Google and Twitter appeared before the Senate commerce committee to endorse the notion of new federal data protection laws. But whether such legislation will come to pass, exactly what it will look like and who it may end up favoring is a long way from being determined.

That Congress is now considering passing privacy legislation after more than a decade of debate and delay is a positive development, says Amie Stepanovich, the US policy manager for digital rights organization Access Now. But with a panel consisting entirely of major internet companies, consumer voices were sorely lacking.

“It’s really good that we’re seriously considering data protection in the United States with an eye toward a federal law,” she says. “That said, the exclusion of any non-corporate interests from the hearing … prevents members of Congress from receiving an in-depth picture of what the situation really is.” Committee chair John Thunes, a Republican of South Dakota, opened the session by acknowledging that a second hearing that will include consumer advocates would take place in about a month. But Stepanovich expressed skepticism that Congress would give equal weight and attention to the testimony of groups that wield less influence in Washington than their corporate counterparts.

By and large, Silicon Valley companies usually favor self regulation over legislation. But in May the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect, offering Europe’s citizens far greater control over how their personal data is collected and used. The following month, California passed its own version of GDPR, which has been dubbed the strongest privacy bill in the nation but has also been criticized by the state’s own attorney general for being “unworkable”. All of the witnesses before the committee objected to some elements of GDPR and the California law, and all favored a federal law that pre-empts existing and pending state regulations.

Uber fined $148m for failing to notify drivers they had been hacked

Uber will pay $148m and tighten data security after the ride-hailing company failed for a year to notify drivers that hackers had stolen their personal information, according to a settlement announced on Wednesday. The company reached the agreement with all 50 states and the District of Columbia after a vast data breach in 2016. Instead of reporting it, Uber hid evidence of the theft and paid ransom to ensure the data wouldn’t be misused.

“This is one of the most egregious cases we’ve ever seen in terms of notification; a yearlong delay is just inexcusable,” Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, told the Associated Press. “And we’re not going to put up with companies, Uber or any other company, completely ignoring our laws that require notification of data breaches.”

Uber learned in November 2016 that hackers had accessed personal data, including driver’s license information, for roughly 600,000 drivers in the US. The on-demand ride company acknowledged the breach in November 2017, saying it had paid $100,000 in ransom for the stolen information to be destroyed.

The hack also took the names, email addresses and cellphone numbers of 57 million riders around the world. After significant management changes in the past year, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer, said the decision by current managers was “the right thing to do”.

Google presents the Senate comedy hour.

Google Executive Declines to Say If China Censors Its Citizens

Eight years ago, when Google announced that it would pull out of China, the company released a statement explaining that the Chinese government had been “crystal clear” that “self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement” for operating in the country. But now that the firm is considering a relaunch in China with a new search platform, an initiative codenamed Project Dragonfly, Google is hedging on whether they believe the Chinese government censors its citizens.

Keith Enright, Google’s chief privacy officer, discussed the China project under questioning from several senators during a commerce committee hearing on Wednesday. “In your opinion, does China engage in censoring its citizens?” asked Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., during the hearing. “As the privacy representative of Google,” said Enright, “I am not sure I have an informed opinion on that question.” ...

During the hearing yesterday, Enright repeatedly gave the same talking point, describing Dragonfly as simply as a project whose status remains “unclear.” He delivered nearly identical lines to both Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., when asked about the China search engine project. When Enright gave the same line to Cruz, the Texas senator chortled that the Google executive was not responding to his actual questions.

Finally, Enright relented, and at least confirmed the existence of Dragonfly, though he said he could not explain “contours of what is in scope or what is out of scope for that project.”

'Unions Are Lying, Cheating Rats': Leaked Video Reveals Amazon's Belligerent Anti-Worker Tactics

As Amazon works to combat its public image as a starvation-wage employer by doling out mere pennies in pay hikes and deploying an army of workers to sing the company's praises on Twitter, a video leaked on Wednesday revealed that the trillion-dollar company is continuing to work feverishly behind the scenes to crush any attempts by workers to unionize and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions.

The 45-minute training video—which, according to Gizmodo, was sent to managers of the Amazon-owned Whole Foods last week—instructs company leaders on how to detect "early warning signs of potential organizing," which include workers "suddenly hanging out together" and using "union words" like "living wage."

It speaks volumes to how Amazon views its workers when they use paranoid rhetoric toward unionizing like "unusual group behavior" pic.twitter.com/Ope6Ur53tb

— Michael Sainato (@msainat1) September 27, 2018

Amazon's aggressively anti-union video—which recommends tactics that one commentator said "should be illegal"—was sent to Whole Foods managers just weeks after employees of the grocery chain took initial steps toward unionizing in an effort to achieve a higher minimum wage and better benefits.

The unbearable corporate spin pic.twitter.com/Fi0b3M7DUR

— Michael Sainato (@msainat1) September 27, 2018

How Certain Is Christine Blasey Ford That Brett Kavanaugh Was the Person Who Assaulted Her? "100 Percent"

Asked by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il.) during Wednesday's hearing how certain she was that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was the individual who sexually assaulted her during a high school social gathering in the early 1980's, Christine Blasey Ford did not hesitate and responded confidently: "100 percent."

DURBIN: I'm asking you to address this new Republican defense of mistaken identity directly. Dr. Ford, with what degree of certainty do you believe Brett Kavanaugh assaulted you?

FORD: 100 percent. pic.twitter.com/52DBPveSiZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 27, 2018

It was a striking moment during the first portion of Dr. Ford's questioning that has so far left many observers remarking just how powerful her testimony has been. In a separate exchange, asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) what memory sticks out most about the attack by Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, Dr. Ford responded by saying it was the "laughter" of the two boys while they were on top of her:

Sen. Leahy: What is your strongest memory of the incident?

Dr. Ford: "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two." pic.twitter.com/OpmSolmXDV

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 27, 2018

NEW #KAVANAUGH POLL:
• Net support for Supreme Court nominee dropped 18 points among GOP women.
@realDonaldTrump approval fell 19 points among GOP women, with 68% approving and 26% disapproving.https://t.co/aPTiYqJszy pic.twitter.com/2qUT0xHvis

— Eli Yokley (@eyokley) September 26, 2018

Alaska declares emergency for Native American languages

Alaska has declared an emergency for Native American languages, aiming to promote and preserve all 20 recognized indigenous tongues in the state before they die out. The order signed this week by the state governor, Bill Walker, directs the state education commissioner to work with partners to promote indigenous languages in public education, KTOO Public Media in Juneau reported.

It also directs the state to use traditional Alaska Native place names on public signs. The order instructs state commissioners to designate a tribal liaison tasked with producing a plan to boost collaboration with Alaska Native partners. The governor’s order was prompted by a report this year by the Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council, warning that the languages could become extinct by the century’s end. The state legislature had passed a resolution in April urging the governor to make such a declaration.

Back from the brink: the global effort to save coral from climate change

As an ocean early warning system, coral reefs have been sounding the alarm for years. They have been bleached white by marine heatwaves and killed off en masse by a combination of factors including pollution, overfishing, acidification and climate change. But now scientists in Florida, and other tropical locations worldwide, are attempting to stop the rot by creating coral “nurseries” in which young populations can be raised in controlled conditions before being planted on denuded reefs. Off the southern tip of Florida, a sprawling marine farming operation has been established in which corals are painstakingly grown on anchored fibreglass trees and then planted on the barrier reef.

“The idea is to do as much as we can now to give these coral populations a fighting chance,” says Jessica Levy, programme manager at the Coral Restoration Foundation. “If you don’t put back the material and diversity that has been lost, the populations are going to crash and become extinct. For reefs, you’re looking at a global extinction of the ecosystem if things don’t change quickly.”

Florida has the world’s third largest barrier reef, with nearly 1,400 species of plants and animals and 500 species of fish, but the reef is vanishing fast. Research found that roughly half of the reef has disappeared over the past 250 years. Coverage of acropora, the primary genus of reef-building corals, has plummeted by 97%. “The reef is pretty barren right now,” says Levy.

The maladies are numerous and stretch back decades. A burgeoning Floridian population and mass tourism have led to water pollution and direct damage to corals, while agriculture has sent torrents of nutrients flowing on to the reef. Although regulations have curbed some of these local risks, climate change remains a big threat. In 2014 a spike in water temperatures led the Florida corals to bleach – when a reef expels its symbiotic algae under heat stress, whitens and potentially dies. It happened again in 2015, as a prolonged global bleaching event gripped the planet’s corals. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was cooked to the point that it reportedly smelled of death.

The Coral Restoration Foundation has increased the replanting of corals as the situation has deteriorated, and the foundation’s underwater trees are becoming sought-after items for stressed reefs around the world. Partnerships have formed to provide trees to places such as Jamaica and Colombia. A chartered fishing operation in Mexico is in talks to do the same. This month, it was announced that 100 corals had been successfully planted on the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest living structure, using the coral tree frames.

Climate Activists Target $6 Trillion Asset Manager BlackRock

Orca 'apocalypse': half of killer whales doomed to die from pollution

At least half of the world’s killer whale populations are doomed to extinction due to toxic and persistent pollution of the oceans, according to a major new study. Although the poisonous chemicals, PCBs, have been banned for decades, they are still leaking into the seas. They become concentrated up the food chain; as a result, killer whales, the top predators, are the most contaminated animals on the planet. Worse, their fat-rich milk passes on very high doses to their newborn calves.

PCB concentrations found in killer whales can be 100 times safe levels and severely damage reproductive organs, cause cancer and damage the immune system. The new research analysed the prospects for killer whale populations over the next century and found those offshore from industrialised nations could vanish as soon as 30-50 years. Among those most at risk are the UK’s last pod, where a recent death revealed one of the highest PCB levels ever recorded. Others off Gibraltar, Japan and Brazil and in the north-east Pacific are also in great danger. Killer whales are one of the most widespread mammals on earth but have already been lost in the North Sea, around Spain and many other places.

“It is like a killer whale apocalypse,” said Paul Jepson at the Zoological Society of London, part of the international research team behind the new study. “Even in a pristine condition they are very slow to reproduce.” Healthy killer whales take 20 years to reach peak sexual maturity and 18 months to gestate a calf. The new research, published in the journal Science, examined PCB contamination in 351 killer whales, the largest analysis yet. The scientists then took existing data on how PCBs affect calf survival and immune systems in whales and used this to model how populations will fare in the future. “Populations of Japan, Brazil, Northeast Pacific, Strait of Gibraltar, and the United Kingdom are all tending toward complete collapse,” they concluded.

World 'nowhere near on track' to avoid warming beyond 1.5C target

The world’s governments are “nowhere near on track” to meet their commitment to avoid global warming of more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial period, according to an author of a key UN report that will outline the dangers of breaching this limit.

A massive, immediate transformation in the way the world’s population generates energy, uses transportation and grows food will be required to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C and the forthcoming analysis is set to lay bare how remote this possibility is.

“It’s extraordinarily challenging to get to the 1.5C target and we are nowhere near on track to doing that,” said Drew Shindell, a Duke University climate scientist and a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which will be unveiled in South Korea next month.

“While it’s technically possible, it’s extremely improbable, absent a real sea change in the way we evaluate risk. We are nowhere near that.”

Shindell would not share exact details of the IPCC report, but he said that the more ambitious 1.5C goal would require a precipitous drop in greenhouse emissions triggered by a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels, particularly coal, mass deployment of solar and wind energy and the eradication of emissions from cars, trucks and airplanes. Even then, emerging technology will be required on a global scale to capture emissions at the source and bury them in the ground or remove carbon directly from the air.

Also of Interest

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

Joseph Stiglitz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Talk Social and Economic Justice

What Syria Continues to Teach Us

Pentagon Stands by Cameroon — Despite Forensic Analysis Showing Its Soldiers Executed Women and Children

New research shows the world’s ice is doing something not seen before

Extremely long, what I read looked good, but will have to wait for the weekend for the rest:

Being Julian Assange

A Little Night Music

Byther Smith - I'm a Honey Bee

Byther Smith - Walk The Streets at Midnight

Byther Smith & The Night Riders - I Don't Know Where You Go

Byther Smith - Come On In This House

Byther Smith - Look Over Your Shoulder

Byther Smith - Every Woman I Meet

Byther Smith - Addressing The Nation With The Blues

Byther Smith - She's a Good 'Un