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“We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.”

-- Bertolt Brecht

News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

The Precipitous Barbarisation of Our Times

When all is said and done, it appears that Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher who had a dire vision of man, was not totally wrong. From the frivolous to the serious, in just a week we have had four items of news which would not happen in a normal world. An English porn beauty with 86,000 followers on social media has put bottles of the water she bathes in on sale at 30 pounds a bottle and has sold several thousand bottles.

A survey in Brazil found out that 7 percent of citizens believe that the Earth is flat (40 percent of American schools teach that the world was created in a week, according to the Bible, so there cannot be ancient civilizations). Another survey, this time of members of the British Tory party, who just elected Boris Johnson as prime minister (not exactly a triumph of reason) are so in favor of a “hard” Brexit that they do not care if this means the exit of Scotland and the end of the United Kingdom. Finally, in order to win election, U.S. President Donald Trump has made racism one of his banner issues and, in a country of immigrants, this has given him an increase of 5 points in opinion polls.

There are so many signs of barbarisation that they would fill a book… and, as Euripides famously wrote: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” It is not a popular task, but we have to look at the reality and observe that, in the most scientifically and technologically developed period of history, we are living in times of precipitous barbarisation.

Social inequality has become the basis for the new economy. ... Today, for many, a salary means survival, not a dignified life. The new economy has developed the so-called gig economy: you work to distribute food, but you are a co-entrepreneur without any of the rights of an employee, for an amount that will never allow you to marry. Children have grown accustomed to look at phenomena such as poverty or war as natural. And now politics are not based on ideas but on how you can successfully exploit the guts of the people, waving banners against immigrants (when we are witnessing a rapid fall in the birth rate) and splintering countries between ”We” who represent the people and “You” enemy of the country. The United States is the best example, where Republicans consider Democrats enemies of the United States. And this brings us to a central question: have Trump, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and company not been elected democratically? And they are the symptom or the cause of the “populocracy” which is replacing democracy? ...

This process of barbarisation should not obscure an old proverb: every country has the government it deserves. It is called democracy.

How To Inoculate Yourself From Establishment Bullshit

8 years. No scandals. No mistresses. No impeachment hearings. Just class and grace, personified. I sure am going to miss this family. pic.twitter.com/TmLwUyBytn

— T (@HolevasT) October 29, 2016

Of course, the only reason anyone can attempt to claim that Barack Obama had “no scandals” is because in our bat shit crazy world, murdering, oppressing and exploiting large numbers of people isn’t considered scandalous.

In a sane, healthy world, a presidency like Obama’s would be looked upon with abject horror. Actually in a sane, healthy world a warmongering Wall Street crony like Obama would never have been elected in the first place, but if you were to show the members of a healthy, harmonious society the way that president used his power to do what he did to Libya and Syria, to continue and expand all of Bush’s most evil policies, to divert the push for economic justice into a neoliberal orgy for eight years, those people would recoil in absolute revulsion.

The only reason liberals think Obama had a low-key, drama-free presidency is because that presidency was normalized for them by the establishment narrative managers of the political/media class. If that class had been shrieking about Obama’s warmongering, surveillance expansion, persecution of whistleblowers, crony capitalism etc in the way that it’s been shrieking about Trump’s nonexistent Russia ties or his obnoxious tweets, these same people would see Obama as a horrible monster. But the propagandists didn’t do that, because it would hinder the cause of bloodthirsty imperialism abroad and crushing austerity at home.

The plutocrat-owned media and the plutocrat-owned politicians have the ability to control what people view as normal and what they view as weird, just by not reacting with alarm to occurrences they want normalized and reacting hysterically to occurrences they want rejected. ... The way to rob the narrative managers of their ability to manipulate our sense of normalcy is to create an image of a sane and healthy world for ourselves to hold onto at all times, and to make that image into our own personal sense of what normal is. By having a vivid picture of what a sane and healthy world would look like in your mind, the false normal that the propagandists are trying to sell you will have no purchase. ...

This is worth setting aside an hour or two and investing some serious mental energy into. Once you’ve got a positive image of a healthy and harmonious world, and once you have a really clear image of what it would be like to live in that world, it’s kind of like you become someone from that imaginary world who stepped into this one and gets to see it for the first time. You get to see life through the eyes of someone for whom “normal” isn’t endless violence, oppression, exploitation and degradation, but for whom normal is the absence of those things. This makes all of the insanity in this world stand out like a black fly on a white sheet of paper, and gives you the ability to clearly see and describe precisely what needs to change about our situation here.

'Unprecedented, Wasteful, and Obscene': House Approves $1.48 Trillion Pentagon Budget

In a bipartisan deal that one anti-war critic said demonstrates how thoroughly "broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon," 219 House Democrats and 65 Republicans on Thursday voted to approve a budget agreement that includes $1.48 trillion in military spending over the next two years.

Just 16 Democrats — including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) — voted against the two-year, $2.7 trillion budget agreement. Largely due to expressed concerns about the deficit, 132 Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) also voted no.

The final vote was 284-149. (See the full roll call.)

The House passage of the budget deal, which President Donald Trump quickly applauded on Twitter as a victory for the military, comes after the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatened in April to tank the measure in opposition to its out-of-control Pentagon outlays.

But most of the Progressive Caucus voted for the agreement on Thursday, pointing to increases in domestic spending.

"It's not a perfect deal by any means," Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus, said in a statement ahead of the vote. "This deal does not address the bloated Pentagon budget, but it does begin to close the gap in funding for families, by allocating more new non-defense spending than defense spending for the first time in many years."

Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, took issue with the latter claim in a series of tweets Thursday. "You're no doubt hearing a lot of crowing from Democrats about how the deal they struck with Trump gives more money to 'non-defense' spending than to 'defense,'" Miles wrote. "Let's be clear that by every measure, save the one they're using, that's simply not true."

Wanna know how broken and captured Washington is by the Pentagon and the corruption of our nation's "defense" budget? Well, look no further than the soon to be enacted budget "deal." Let me explain. <long thread>

— Stephen Miles (@SPMiles42) July 25, 2019

Under this deal, the Pentagon and its affiliated programs will get $1.48 TRILLION dollars over the next two years. The entire rest of gov't, including the VA btw, will get $1.30 trillion. That's $178.6 BILLION more for the Pentagon than the whole rest of gov't. 28/

— Stephen Miles (@SPMiles42) July 25, 2019

Senate to vote Monday on overriding Trump's Saudi arms deal vetoes

The Senate will vote Monday evening to try to override President Trump's vetoes of resolutions blocking his arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

Senators locked in the override votes Thursday as they wrapped up their work for the week. Under the deal, senators will vote on the three vetoes on Monday evening starting at 5:30.

The veto override attempts are widely expected to fall short after the initial resolutions of disapproval passed with 51 and 53 votes — well short of the 67 votes needed to override a veto.

Iran Successfully Tests Medium-Range Missile

According to US officials familiar with the situation, Iran successfully tested a Shahab-3 missile on Wednesday. The missile was fired from the country’s south toward an area near the capital of Tehran, and traveled about 600 miles.

Analysts say they believe the test of the medium-range ballistic missile by Iran is intended to improve its accuracy. At the same time, some Western officials are seeing the test as a provocation.

Ukraine detains Russian tanker in Black Sea port

Ukraine seizes Russian tanker in Danube port city of Izmail

Ukrainian authorities have seized a Russian tanker moored in a river port near the Black Sea in apparent retaliation for Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian vessels and arrest of 24 sailors in November last year.

Ukraine’s SBU security service said in a Facebook post on Thursday it had seized the Russian tanker Nika Spirit in Izmail, a port on the Danube River near the country’s border with Romania.

The SBU said it had seized documents from the ship and questioned its crew. It also released a video showing its officers and those from the military prosecutor’s office boarding the vessel.

The Russian foreign ministry threatened a swift retaliation if arrests were made, but later a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Kyiv told news agencies that while the vessel remained impounded, the crew were on their way back to Russia. ...

The SBU said the vessel had previously been called Neyma and had taken part in blocking the three Ukrainian ships in the Kerch strait last year, with the owners apparently changing its name to Nika Spirit to avoid detection.

Chelsea Manning’s lawyer refutes conspiracy allegation against Julian Assange

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s lawyer Nancy Hollander this week unequivocally rebutted accusations that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange enticed or collaborated with Manning to obtain the thousands of secret documents that WikiLeaks published in 2010, revealing the war crimes and other abuses committed by the US and its allies around the world. Interviewed for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Four Corners” program, Hollander emphasised that Manning, then a 21-year-old US military intelligence private, had initiated the contact with WikiLeaks after no corporate media outlet would even return her calls about the damning information she had obtained. ...

Hollander’s statements themselves constitute a significant exposure of the case concocted against Assange by the Trump administration, which is seeking to extradite him on charges under the US Espionage Act. On the basis of the charges already filed, Assange faces a prison term of 175 years. Assange is accused of not just publishing the massive caches of material leaked by Manning—known as the Afghan Files, the Iraq Files and Cablegate—but actively conspiring with Manning to obtain the documents. Yet Hollander explained that Manning already had downloaded the files before she contacted WikiLeaks. ...

What Manning released, and WikiLeaks equally courageously made available to the people of the world, was devastating for the Obama administration, the Pentagon, the CIA and all their partners in allied governments around the globe. Posted online without being censored or filtered, the documents laid bare US-instigated war provocations, regime-change operations, diplomatic conspiracies, phone-bugging of foreign government leaders and mass surveillance. As the “Four Corners” program records, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard vehemently denounced Assange as a criminal and immediately set the police and intelligence agencies to work to find means to silence him forever.

Today, the ferocity with which the Trump administration is persecuting both Assange and Manning must be taken as a warning. Washington and its partners are perpetrating and preparing even greater crimes, intent on keeping their activities shielded from media and public scrutiny. The US is being assisted by the British government, which arrested and jailed Assange on April 11, and the Australian government, which refuses to object to the frame-up and extradition of Assange, an Australian citizen.

Brussels repels Boris Johnson's quest for new Brexit deal

Brussels has roundly rebuffed Boris Johnson after he laid down tough conditions for the new Brexit deal he hopes to strike over the summer.

Speaking to the House of Commons for the first time as prime minister on Thursday, Johnson reiterated his campaign pledge of ditching the Irish backstop and promised to ramp up preparations for a no-deal Brexit immediately. “I would prefer us to leave the EU with a deal,” he said. “I would much prefer it. I believe that it is possible even at this late stage, and I will work flat-out to make it happen.

“But certain things need to be clear: the withdrawal agreement negotiated by my predecessor has been three times rejected by this house; its terms are unacceptable to this parliament and to this country.”

In a phone call later in the day, the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, signalled the EU27’s determination to stick with the deal negotiated with Theresa May’s government – which includes the backstop. ...

In a speech that was loudly cheered by many Conservative MPs, he said all members of his new cabinet were committed to leaving the EU on 31 October “whatever the circumstances – and to do otherwise would cause a catastrophic loss of confidence in our political system”. He also said he would ramp up no-deal preparations, which his official spokesman later confirmed was likely to include additional spending, and a significant public information campaign. Michael Gove will coordinate no-deal planning across the government.

The Irish government expressed concern at Johnson’s approach to Brexit as tension began to mount over the increased risk of no deal. Michael Creed, Ireland’s agriculture minister, described the new government’s stance, and the composition of Johnson’s top team, as “alarming”.

Facebook Misled Journalists About How Bad the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Was

Facebook repeatedly lied to journalists about the severity of the Cambridge Analytica scandal as part of an alleged coverup of a privacy breach that gave up to 87 million users’ personal data to the Trump-linked political firm.

Company officials allegedly pointed reporters to false statements published by Cambridge Analytica itself. They feigned a lack of awareness of how the firm improperly harvested tens of millions of users’ data. And they publicly said that an internal inquiry into the data breach had found no wrongdoing when it had.

Securities and Exchange Commission officials leveled the accusations in a complaint detailing how Facebook misled investors about the scope of Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of user data. But the feds’ claims that the company repeatedly lied to the public as well make its latest apology tour even more awkward.

The SEC released the complaint Wednesday as part of a $100 million settlement with Facebook in which the company admitted no wrongdoing. The report details how the tech giant did everything in its power to avoid public scrutiny.

Democrat’s Next Big Move: Haul Trump’s Inner Circle to Capitol Hill

President Trump and his Republican foot soldiers on Capitol Hill are claiming the Mueller investigation is over — and they won. “We closed the book on this investigation,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared after former special counsel Robert Mueller left the Capitol.

But Democrats warned they’re just getting started, and that means they’re redoubling their efforts to drag current and former members of Trump’s inner circle before Congress. While the Mueller hearings may not have produced a smoking gun, they did give the Democrats a road map to haul many of Mueller's witnesses to the Hill to testify about things that aren't necessarily in the report.

“Mueller came out and said the president is not exonerated. That tells me we’ve got to continue doing our investigation, we’ve got to continue to dig,” Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.), who serves on the Judiciary Committee, told VICE News at the Capitol after the hearings. “It motivates me to do additional oversight.” ...

“The Mueller report in and of itself is insufficient evidence to walk into the Senate for a trial,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters after the hearing. “We can collect the evidence without declaring an impeachment.”

In less than 16 days from the time the first news broke of his horrible and hateful comments, Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló is expected to resign after mass protests.

I can't even recall all the horrible shit Trump has done in the last 16 days.

Well done, Puerto Rico.

— Charlotte Clymer (@cmclymer) July 24, 2019

Want to get rid of corrupt, criminal, racist, traitor President @realDonaldTrump before the November 2020 elections?

Fill the streets of the US mainland with nonviolent protesters, demanding his resignation, like they are doing right now in Puerto Ricohttps://t.co/Tt05n9m35e

— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) July 24, 2019

‘We’ve been strangled by US’: Puerto Rico governor resigns, but crisis still needs to be resolved

US government to pay farmers hurt by China trade war $16bn

The US government will pay American farmers hurt by the trade war with China between $15 and $150 per acre in an aid package totaling $16bn with farmers in the South poised to see higher rates than in the midwest.

As US and Chinese negotiators prepare to meet face-to-face for the first time since talks on the dispute collapsed in May, the agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, said the package showed that Donald Trump knew farmers were “fighting the fight”.

The assistance, starting in mid-to-late August, follows the president’s $12bn package last year that was aimed at making up for lower farm good prices and lost sales.

US farmers, one of Trump’s key constituencies, have been among the hardest hit in the year-long trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Shipments of soybeans, the most valuable US farm export, to top buyer China sank to a 16-year low in 2018.

'No One Should Retire Into Poverty': At Historic Hearing, Progressives Make Case for Expanding—Not Cutting—Social Security Benefits

Progressive advocates and experts made the case for expanding Social Security during a historic House committee hearing on Thursday, providing a stark contrast to President Donald Trump's call for billions of dollars in cuts to the popular New Deal-era program in his 2020 budget proposal. The Ways and Means hearing on Rep. John Larson's (D-Conn.) Social Security 2100 Act—which would boost benefits by hiking taxes on the rich and ensure the program's solvency through the end of the century—represents the first time a congressional committee has considered legislation to expand Social Security in nearly 50 years.

Nancy Altman, president of advocacy group Social Security Works, called the event a "critical milestone in the fight to increase, not cut, Social Security's modest benefits." During her testimony in support of the Social Security 2100 Act on Thursday, Altman said the legislation would help solve America retirement income crisis. ...

Contrary to continued right-wing fearmongering about the looming collapse of Social Security, recent analyses have found the program is in good financial shape. But, as Altman wrote for Forbes Thursday, the program's benefits "are modest by virtually any measure" and should, in fact, be increased.

Larson's legislation—which was introduced in January, on FDR's 137th birthday—would increase Social Security benefits for all current and future recipients, set the minimum benefit level to 25 percent greater than the federal poverty line, and improve the annual cost of living adjustment to ensure benefits are not eroded by inflation. To finance the benefit expansion, Larson's bill would subject all earnings above $400,000 to a payroll tax.

[Full hearing:]

U.S. Citizen Held by Border Patrol Says He Lost 26 Pounds and Couldn’t Shower for 23 Days

A Texas-born teen wrongly held at a South Texas Border Patrol facility for 23 days says conditions there were so bad that he almost decided to self-deport — even though he’s a U.S. citizen.

Francisco Erwin Galicia spent more than three weeks in Customs and Border Protection custody after being arrested at a Border Patrol checkpoint in late June along with his brother. He lost 26 pounds during his 23-day detention in the South Texas Detention Facility in Pearsall, Texas, because officers didn’t give the detainees enough food, Galicia told the Dallas Morning News, which first broke the story of his arrest.

“It was inhumane how they treated us,” said 18-year-old Galicia. “It got to the point where I was ready to sign a deportation paper just not to be suffering there anymore. I just needed to get out of there.”

Galicia told the News he was held in a holding area with 60 other men, many of whom were sick. The group was forced to sleep on the floor because there were no beds in the station. Galicia wasn’t allowed to shower throughout the duration of his stay.

Galicia and his brother, Marlon, were arrested by Border Patrol agents after being stopped at a checkpoint on their way to a soccer scouting event. Marlon and another person in the car didn’t have legal status, but Galicia, a U.S. citizen, showed the officers his state ID, Social Security card, and a small birth certificate. He was detained anyway.

Judge Halts Trump’s Asylum Ban That Represents a “Relentless Attack on the Very Idea of Asylum”

In Letter to ICE, Sen. Chuck Grassley Joins Call for Answers on Solitary Confinement

On Wednesday, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent a letter to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asking “what steps ICE has taken to document and justify the use of segregation.” The letter was spurred by “recent allegations of the misuse of solitary confinement” in ICE detainment centers, the senators wrote, citing an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Intercept, NBC News, and other reporting partners.

The ICIJ investigation, which involved a review of more than 8,400 reports describing placement in solitary confinement from 2012 to early 2017, found that ICE uses isolation as a go-to tool, rather than a last resort, to punish vulnerable detained immigrants.

Our reporting also included interviews with Ellen Gallagher, a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower who sounded the alarm about ICE’s misuse of solitary confinement for years before going public with her concerns for the first time in interviews with the reporting consortium. Gallagher’s attempts at whistleblowing, which date back to 2014, included outreach to congressional offices. Grassley, along with then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., took perhaps the most serious step in response to Gallagher’s complaints, sending a June 2015 letter to then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, citing her findings about the use of solitary confinement and demanding an explanation. ...

Grassley and Blumenthal both sit on the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight over ICE. Grassley is the first Republican on the panel to publicly respond to our investigation; though he has not called for a hearing on the issue, a reaction from him could carry more weight than demands by the panel’s Democrats, who do not have the power to independently convene a hearing in the GOP-held Senate.

A 44-Year-Old Man Is the 7th Person to Die in ICE Custody Since October

Another person has died in ICE custody.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has confirmed that Pedro Arriago-Santoya, a 44-year-old Mexican national, died in federal custody Wednesday afternoon. His death was first reported by BuzzFeed News.

Arriago, who according to ICE went by multiple aliases, had been in ICE custody since late April. He'd received a removal order on June 6 and was being held at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, a 2,000-person facility owned and operated by the for-profit company CoreCivic. That facility has faced instances of drug smuggling, medical staff shortages, and safety problems, according to the AJC. One employee reportedly called Stewart a “ticking time-bomb.”

Arriago spent more than a month at the facility pending his deportation to Mexico and began having medical problems in late July, according to the ICE statement. He complained to staff of stomach pain on July 20 and was referred to the Southwest Georgia Regional Hospital by a nurse practitioner at Stewart.

Arriago was transferred to another Georgia hospital, the Piedmont Midtown Medical Center in Columbus, for a surgery consultation the following day. He went into cardiac arrest on July 22 and was resuscitated, but then went into cardiac arrest once more on July 24.

John Paul Stevens Left “Profound” Legacy Challenging Death Penalty, Gun Laws & Executive Power

Pro-Trump Republican aiming to unseat Ilhan Omar charged with felony theft

A pro-Trump Republican candidate for Congress who is aiming to unseat Ilhan Omar in Minnesota has been charged with a felony after allegedly stealing from stores.

Danielle Stella was arrested twice this year in Minneapolis suburbs over allegations that she shoplifted items worth more than $2,300 from a Target and goods valued at $40 from a grocery store. She said she denied the allegations.

Stella, a 31-year-old special education teacher, was reported this week to be a supporter of the baseless “QAnon” conspiracy theory about Donald Trump battling a global cabal of elite liberal paedophiles.

Stella is accused of stealing 279 items valued at $2,327.97 from a Target store in Edina, to the south-west of Minneapolis, on 8 January this year. She was arrested for the alleged theft after security staff called the police. A criminal complaint filed to Hennepin county district court alleged Stella was seen leaving the store without paying for most of her haul, after “scanning only a few other items” that were valued at about $50.

Tulsi Gabbard sues Google for blocking her campaign ads

Alleging Censorship and Condemning Outsized Power, Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for 'Threat to Free Speech, Fair Elections, and Democracy

Arguing Google's singular dominance over internet searches presents a danger to democracy, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard filed a lawsuit Thursday in California against the tech giant over its alleged censorship of her campaign. Gabbard says that for about six hours after the first Democratic presidential debate on June 27, Google suspended her campaign's ad account without warning, making it impossible for the campaign to advertise during a spike in internet searches related to the Hawaii Democrat.

Google says the campaign's account was automatically suspended due to a billing discrepancy, but Gabbard maintains that the company was intentionally blocking her access to voters through search engine ads. Gabbard has been outspoken about her goal to break up large tech companies, her support for net neutrality, and what she views as Silicon Valley's threats to democracy. "Google's discriminatory actions against my campaign are reflective of how dangerous their complete dominance over internet search is, and how the increasing dominance of big tech companies over our public discourse threatens our core American values," Gabbard said in a statement. "This is a threat to free speech, fair elections, and to our democracy, and I intend to fight back on behalf of all Americans."

Searches related to Gabbard rose during and after the debate, but the campaign's account was blocked from 9:30pm that evening until 3:30am, leaving it unable to buy ads that would show up in search results. Gabbard "had no ability to really speak to the people who wanted to hear from her" while many viewers of the debate were taking an interest in her, her attorney, Brian Dunne, told Politico.

Other candidates have strongly supported net neutrality and called for big tech companies to be broken up as well, but the campaign argued the Google saw Gabbard as a rising threat when her traffic spiked. "You have a candidate who's been outwardly adverse towards Google, and is not necessarily seen as a champion of their favorite policy interests, who was reaching never before seen popularity," Dunne added. "The timing is too coincidental."

The company has also directed emails from Tulsi Now, Inc., Gabbard's campaign committee, into spam folders in users' inboxes at "a disproportionately high rate," the lawsuit alleges.

Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping point'

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover. The sharp rise – following year-on-year increases in May and June – confirms fears that president Jair Bolsonaro has given a green light to illegal land invasion, logging and burning.

Clearance so far in July has hit 1,345 sq km, a third higher than the previous monthly record under the current monitoring system by the Deter B satellite system, which started in 2015. With five days remaining, this is on course to be the first month for several years in which Brazil loses an area of forest bigger than Greater London.

The steady erosion of tree cover weakens the role of the rainforest in stabilising the global climate. Scientists warn that the forest is in growing danger of degrading into a savannah, after which its capacity to absorb carbon will be severely diminished, with consequences for the rest of the planet.

“It’s very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away,” said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research. “We can’t see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem.”

In his first seven months in power, Bolsonaro, who was elected with strong support from agribusiness and mining interests, has moved rapidly to erode government agencies responsible for forest protection. He has weakened the environment agency and effectively put it under the supervision of the agricultural ministry, which is headed by the leader of the farming lobby. His foreign minister has dismissed climate science as part of a global Marxist plot. The president and other ministers have criticised the forest monitoring agency, Ibama, for imposing fines on illegal land grabbers and loggers. The government has also moved to weaken protections for nature reserves, indigenous territories and zones of sustainable production by forest peoples and invited businesspeople to register land counter-claims within those areas.

Is it Time to Nationalize the Fossil Fuel Industry?

While Global Temps Soared, Study Shows US Media Coverage of Right-Wing Think Tanks' Climate Lies Actually Rose Over Past 5 Years

A new Public Citizen analysis shows that over the past five years—as rising global temperatures repeatedly set records—national television news networks and the 50 most widely circulated newspapers in the United States increased their coverage of right-wing think tanks denying the climate emergency or that the global crisis is the result of unsustainable human activity.

"Amazingly, coverage of the deniers' messages has risen over the past five years as the climate crisis has worsened, with much of it being uncritical," Allison Fisher, outreach program director for Public Citizen's climate program, said Thursday. "The media should not give these organizations a platform, and if they must cover them, do a better job of alerting readers and viewers who is funding them."

The consumer advocacy group released its new study ahead of the 13th annual conference of the Heartland Institute—the self-described "leading think tank promoting skepticism of the theory there is a human-caused climate crisis"—which kicked off at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. The study focuses on coverage of the Heartland Institute and the four other think tanks associated with the conference—the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation—from 2014 through mid-June 2019.

According to Public Citizen:

The number of media mentions featuring the think tanks and published op-eds by them rose over the five years, hitting a peak in 2017 (in the wake of President Donald Trump's inauguration) and remaining steady over the course of 2018, Public Citizen found. Many outlets cited the deniers to provide "balance"—even though the deniers' positions have been widely debunked. Most outlets didn't inform viewers or readers that the think tanks receive fossil fuel money.

Public Citizen analyzed transcripts from six television networks—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and NBC—as well as articles and op-eds in newspapers that included the Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the Detroit Free Press, the Houston Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, the New York Post, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today,The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Of all the reviewed papers, The New York Times mentioned the think tanks the most—in 84 pieces over the five-year period. ... The Wall Street Journal published the most op-eds of any newspaper—18 of the collective 84—and mentioned the think tanks 44 times. ... On the television side, Public Citizen documented 62 segments that featured the positions of or a representative from one of the think tanks. The large majority of segments—89 percent—aired on Fox News Network and CNN.

All-time temperature records tumble again as heatwave sears Europe

Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium have recorded all-time national temperature highs for the second day running and Paris has had its hottest day ever as the second dangerous heatwave of the summer sears western Europe. The extreme temperatures follow a similar heatwave last month that made it the hottest June on record. Scientists say the climate crisis is making summer heatwaves five times more likely and significantly more intense.

Wednesday’s Dutch record of 39.3C (102.7F), set in Eindhoven, lasted less than 24 hours, with the mercury at a weather station at the southern Gilze-Rijen airbase climbing on Thursday afternoon to 40.4C, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) said. After recording a new high of 40.2C at Angleur on Wednesday, Belgium’s Royal Meteorological Institute (KMI-RMI) said the temperature at Kleine Brogel near the Dutch border rose on Thursday to 40.6C. The previous records in both countries dated back to the 1940s.

“This is the highest recorded temperature for Belgium in history – since the beginning of measurements in 1833,” said the KMI-RMI’s Alex Dewalque. Britain also set a new temperature record for July and was on course to register an all-time high.

Germany’s national DWD weather service said it measured 41.5C in the north-western town of Lingen on Thursday, the first time the temperature has been recorded above 41C in the country. It came a day after an all-time national high of 40.5C was recorded in Geilenkirchen in North Rhine-Westphalia. Météo-France said the mercury at its Paris-Montsouris station in the French capital surpassed the previous high of 40.4C, set in July 1947, soon after 1pm and continued to climb, reaching 42.6C soon after 4pm. “And it could climb even higher,” the service said, noting that 43C in the shade “is the average maximum temperature in Baghdad, Iraq in July”.

Also of Interest

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

Ilhan Omar: It Is Not Enough to Condemn Trump’s Racism

US and Iran Stuck on Negotiation Ground Zero

As Immigrants Become More Aware of Their Rights, ICE Steps Up Ruses and Surveillance

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A Little Night Music

Detroit Jr - The Way I Feel

Detroit Junior - Call My Job

Detroit Jr. - Too Poor

Detroit Jr. - Come On In

Detroit Junior - It's Bad To Make A Woman Mad

Detroit Junior - All Through With Love

Detroit Junior - Don't Get in My Shape

Detroit Junior - I Got Money

Detroit Jr. - Rockin' After Midnight

Detroit Junior - If I Hadn't Been High