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“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

A New Cold War Versus an Overheating World

In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China’s ever-expanding air, naval and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country’s current capabilities, which remain vastly inferior to those of the U.S., than the world they foresee in the 2030s and 2040s, when Beijing is expected to have acquired far more sophisticated weaponry. “China has invested heavily in new technologies, with a stated intent to complete the modernization of its forces by 2035 and to field a ‘world-class military’ by 2049,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testified in June.

The United States, he assured the Senate Armed Services Committee, continues to possess “the best joint fighting force on Earth.” But only by spending countless additional billions of dollars annually, he added, can this country hope to “outpace” China’s projected advances in the decades to come.

As it happens, however, there’s a significant flaw in such reasoning. In fact, consider this a guarantee: by 2049, the Chinese military (or what’s left of it) will be so busy coping with a burning, flooding, churning world of climate change — threatening the country’s very survival — that it will possess scant capacity, no less the will, to launch a war with the United States or any of its allies. ... In reality, as global temperatures rise, that country will be ravaged by the severe effects of the never-ending climate emergency and forced to deploy every instrument of government, including the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to defend the nation against ever more disastrous floods, famines, droughts, wildfires, sandstorms and encroaching oceans.

China will hardly be alone in this. Already, the increasingly severe effects of the climate crisis are forcing governments to commit military and paramilitary forces to firefighting, flood prevention, disaster relief, population resettlement and sometimes the simple maintenance of basic governmental functions. In fact, during this summer of extreme climate events, military forces from numerous countries, including Algeria, Germany, Greece, Russia, Turkey and — yes — the United States, have found themselves engaged in just such activities, as has the PLA.

And count on one thing: that’s just the barest of beginnings. According to a recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), extreme climate events, occurring with ever more frightening frequency, will prove ever more destructive and devastating to societies around the world, which, in turn, will ensure that military forces just about everywhere will be consigned a growing role in dealing with climate-related disasters.

“Mayhem”: Chaotic Scenes at Kabul Airport as Suicide Bombs Kill 110+ Afghans & U.S. Troops

At least 60 Afghans and 13 US soldiers dead after Kabul airport blasts

Multiple bomb blasts and at least one attack by a gunman in Kabul on Thursday killed dozens of civilians and at least 13 US service personnel, and plunged the evacuation of western forces from Afghanistan into deeper crisis. The US death toll rose from 12 to 13 and was likely to rise even higher, a US official told Reuters. More than a dozen were wounded.

The attacks are believed to be an Islamic State (IS) assault on departing coalition troops and a challenge to the Taliban’s grasp on power in Afghanistan.

It was the deadliest day for US forces in a decade and increased criticism of the president, Joe Biden. In an address to the nation, Biden described the US service personnel as “heroes” and insisted “we will not be deterred by terrorists”. He vowed to the assailants: “We will not forgive, we will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

Two suicide bombers and a gunman struck one of the main entrances to Kabul’s international airport just hours after western intelligence agencies warned of an imminent threat to the ongoing, urgent evacuation operation. Biden said he had asked commanders to strike back and that he stood by his decision to withdraw US troops. Asked how much responsibility he was willing to take for the way the withdrawal has unfolded, Biden said: “I bear responsibility for fundamentally all that’s happened of late,” he said. “But here’s the deal … you know as well as I do that the former president made a deal with the Taliban.”

Earlier the head of US Central Command, Gen Kenneth McKenzie, said the attack was carried out by IS and that cooperation with the Taliban had probably thwarted earlier attacks. He said that the cooperation would continue and that the Taliban had been asked to widen the security cordon around the airport and close some approach roads. ... On the dependence on the Taliban to help secure the perimeter of the Kabul airport, Biden said: “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of mutual self-interest.”

The ‘War On Terror’ Scam Continues

ISIS has reportedly claimed credit for an explosion near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. As of this writing there are around 90 dead including 13 US military personnel, though to read western mainstream media reports you’d think only US troops died and not scores of Afghans as well.

This was the deadliest attack in a decade on US troops in Afghanistan, which is odd to think about considering how many people the US military has killed during that time; just between January and July of this year the war killed 1,659 civilians. The way the US war machine has shifted to relying more on highly profitable missiles and bombs and unmanned aircraft to avoid the bad PR of flag-draped bodies flying home on jets is making the murder of foreigners a safer profession than working at a convenience store.

Because US military casualties of this size have become more rare despite their being spread throughout the world in nations whose people don’t want them there, news of those 13 deaths is being met with shock and astonishment instead of being regarded as a very normal part of foreign military occupations. People are acting like these were mall cops in Ohio and not military forces overseeing the tail end of a 20-year war overseas, and pundits and politicians are demanding more bombs and more military interventionism in response to people on the other side of the world attacking them in their own country.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement calling on the US to “redouble our global efforts” in the war on terror in response to the attack, seizing the opportunity to promote more “we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” nonsense.

“Terrible things happen when terrorists are allowed to operate freely. This murderous attack offers the clearest possible reminder that terrorists will not stop fighting the United States just because our politicians grow tired of fighting them,” McConnell said. “I remain concerned that terrorists worldwide will be emboldened by our retreat, by this attack, and by the establishment of a radical Islamic terror state in Afghanistan. We need to redouble our global efforts to confront these barbarian enemies who want to kill Americans and attack our homeland.”

Yep, yeah, that makes sense Mitch. My neighbor attacked me when she caught me in her house at night going through her valuables. This proves she’s always wanted to attack me in my home. I need to go fight her over there so I don’t have to fight her here.

What the US actually needs to do is get the absolute fuck out of the entire region and stop creating more and more violent extremists with insane acts of mass military violence for power and profit. The very last institution on earth who should be trying to do something about ISIS is the institution whose actions created ISIS in the first place.

But of course acting in accordance with that self-evident fact is too much to ask of the US government, and Biden has announced that he has ordered his commanders “to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities.”

So the US war machine will continue to rain down highly profitable explosives upon Afghanistan for as long as it likes, using this attack as justification for more military operations instead of taking it as yet another sign that what it has been doing is not working and keeps making things worse.

Step 1: Destroy nations, kill millions and displace tens of millions in military interventions for power and profit.

Step 2: Wait for some of those people to hate you and want to fight back.

Step 3: Use their desire to fight back as justification to repeat Step 1.

The “war on terror” is the greatest scam ever invented.

The Media Myth of ‘Once Prosperous’ and Democratic Venezuela Before Chávez

In his State of the Union address on February 6, 2019, Donald Trump said:

We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom—and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair.

Trump’s ridiculous comment was not considered controversial, because the Western media, including the anti-Trump outlets like the New York Times, have spent many years conveying a lie: that Venezuela had been very prosperous and democratic until Hugo Chávez, and then his successor Nicolás Maduro, came along and ruined everything. If readers believe that, then they may indeed wonder, “Why shouldn’t the US government help Venezuelans return to that prosperous state?”

But this attitude is the result of common deceptions about Venezuela’s economic history, and it ignores how the rise of Chávez actually brought democratic reform, not regression, to Venezuela. The story the Western media tell should instead make people wonder how Chavismo could have become the dominant political force if everything had once been wonderful in Venezuela.

This vague claim about Venezuela’s economic history, in various forms—“once prosperous,” “once the richest”—has become ubiquitous in the Western media. A Nexis search of English-language newspapers for “Venezuela” and “once prosperous” turned up 563 hits between 2015 and 2019.

The “once prosperous” claim cannot refer to Venezuela’s natural wealth: The huge oil and gold reserves are still there. The clear intent of describing Venezuela as “once prosperous” is to suggest that living conditions were “once” those of a rich country.

So by what measure was Venezuela “once” wealthy? When exactly was that? What is the ranking criteria being used to say it was one of the wealthiest? Was it once in the top 10% (by whatever measure)? The top 50%?

It’s always implied that Venezuela’s economic glory days were in the pre-Chávez era, but the financial journalist Jason Mitchell has made this claim explicitly. Writing for the UK Spectator (2/18/17), he said, “Twenty years ago Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the world.” So Venezuela had supposedly enjoyed its wealthy status in 1997, the year before Hugo Chávez was first elected. That’s utter nonsense.

In reality, when Chávez was first elected in 1998, Venezuela had a 50% poverty rate, despite having been a major oil exporter for several decades. It started exporting oil in the 1920s, and it was only in the early 1970s that the biggest Middle Eastern oil producers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, surpassed Venezuela in production. In 1992, the New York Times (2/5/92) reported that “only 57% of Venezuelans are able to afford more than one meal a day.” Does that sound like “one of the richest countries in the world”? Obviously not, but it is worth saying more about the statistics that can be used to mislead people about Venezuela’s economic history.

Economists typically use GDP per capita to assess how rich a country is. It is basically a measure of the average income per person. If journalists cared to be at all precise when they say that Venezuela had once been “rich,” then that’s a statistic they’d cite.

The chart below [click article link above to see chart. - js] shows World Bank data for Venezuela’s real (inflation-adjusted) GDP per capita since 1960, and it contradicts Western media’s relentlessly insinuated story that a transition from prosperity to poverty took place because of Chavismo. Real GDP per capita peaked in 1977, near the end of an oil boom, then went into a long-term decline. When Chávez took office in 1999, it was at one of its lowest points in decades. Then it was driven even lower by the first two attempts to oust Chávez: the April 2002 coup and, several months later, a shutdown of the state oil company—the “oil strike.” By 2013, real GDP per capita recovered dramatically, nearly reaching its 1977 peak.

Under Chávez, the poverty rate was cut in half, so there certainly is a correlation between GDP per capita and living conditions in Venezuela. But a country’s GDP per capita, by itself, says nothing about how income is distributed. And that can also make international comparisons very misleading.

For example, 1980 was very close to Venezuela’s historic peak in real GDP per capita, which ranked 32nd in the world that year when adjusted for purchasing power parity, as economists recommend for international comparisons. But its infant mortality rate ranked 58th in the world, far below Cuba, whose infant mortality rate was 28th that year. Infant mortality is a basic health indicator that helps reveal the extent to which a country’s wealth is actually being used to benefit its people. In fact, Venezuela’s infant mortality rate in 1980 was more than twice as high as that in Cuba.

Another revealing year is 1989, when the massacre of poor demonstrators later known as the Caracazo took place. In terms of GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity), Venezuela ranked highest in Central and South America—while its government perpetrated the most infamous slaughter of poor people in its modern history.

The massacre exposed the essentially fraudulent nature of Venezuela’s prosperity and democracy. It explains the rise of Chávez, and also reveals how the US government and media reflexively helped the Venezuelan government that perpetrated the massacre.

It began on February 27, 1989. Venezuelan security forces killed hundreds, and possibly thousands, of poor people over a five-day period. The poor had risen up in revolt against an IMF-imposed “structural adjustment” program that involved stiff hikes to fuel prices and bus fares. The program was imposed by President Carlos Andres Pérez, a man who had campaigned saying that IMF programs were like a “neutron bomb that killed people but left buildings standing.”

US President George H. W. Bush called Pérez on March 3, 1989, while the Caracazo massacre was still taking place, to commiserate with Pérez and offer Venezuela loans. The US media’s Venezuela narrative suited Bush’s foreign policy. A New York Times article (11/11/90) about Venezuela by Clifford Krauss described Pérez as “a charismatic social democrat.” Not a word was written about the Caracazo massacre. The article focused on Bush’s gratitude toward Pérez for, among other things, boosting Venezuela’s oil output to help protect the United States from negative economic consequences after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

On February 5, 1992, Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez first became widely known to Venezuelans by attempting a military coup. The day Chávez’s coup failed, a news article in the New York Times (2/5/92) referred to Venezuela as “one of Latin America’s relatively stable democratic governments,” and to Pérez himself as “a leading democrat,” despite the Caracazo massacre only three years earlier, which is never mentioned. The Times also quoted then–President Bush calling Pérez “one of the great democratic leaders of our hemisphere.”

When Chávez first took office after elections in 1999, the US government did not go immediately on the attack. When you consider the flashy anti-IMF campaign rhetoric of Carlos Andres Pérez—the president who then massacred people to implement an IMF austerity plan—it’s unsurprising that the US would feel Chávez out for a while. Maybe Chávez would be similarly phony—and therefore worthy of US support.

By 2001, the US government realized that Chávez was not going to be like Pérez, who made a sick joke of his anti-IMF rhetoric once he was in office. Chávez was actually going to try to follow through on his promises to change the system and assert his country’s sovereignty. Chávez aggressively opposed the US invasion of Afghanistan, and even said that the US ambassador came calling and disrespectfully asked him to reverse his position. That provoked Chávez to order the ambassador out of the room. This was a key event in the souring of Venezuela/US relations (Bart Jones, Hugo!, Steerforth Press, 2007, p. 297).

Domestically, Chávez also had a short honeymoon period with Venezuela’s old elite and middle class. As Gregory Wilpert put it in Changing Venezuela by Taking Power (Verso, 2006, p. 20):

When Chávez first took office, he enjoyed approval ratings of 90%, which would suggest that racism and classism for eventual middle-class opposition to Chávez could not be an important factor.

Venezuela’s middle class had been sliding into poverty for two decades and supported Chávez in 1998 because they were desperate for change.

But soon enough, the old political elite, like the US ambassador, deeply resented Chávez asserting his authority. They had expected Chávez’s deference. His African and Indigenous roots, and his working-class origin, could be overlooked, until he shunned the usual power brokers when making his cabinet appointments.

The conflict intensified when a constituent assembly, elected by voters, drafted a new constitution which was then approved in a referendum. Transitional authorities were appointed under the new democratic order. As Wilpert described it (Changing Venezuela, p. 20):

The old elite then used its control of the country’s mass media to turn the middle class against Chávez, creating a campaign that took advantage of the latent racism and classism in Venezuelan culture.

By 2004, predictably, Chávez relied much more heavily on the support of poor people to win elections (Changing Venezuela, p. 268–269).

In the first year he took office, Chávez initiated a three-step process to give Venezuela a new constitution. In April 1999, he went to voters asking if they wanted to initiate the process by electing a constitutional assembly, and if they approved of the rules specifying how the assembly would be elected. His side won that referendum with 92% of the vote on the first question, and with 86% on the second (which specified basic electoral rules) (Changing Venezuela, p. 21).

Elections were held in July to choose the members of the assembly. Chávez supporters won 125 of the assembly’s 131 seats. The assembly then drafted a constitution and, four months later, it was approved by 72% of voters in another referendum.

The assembly also appointed a transitional body, known as a Congressillo (small congress), that appointed a new attorney general, human rights defender, comptroller general, national electoral council and supreme court.

In July 2000, Chávez went to voters again for a fresh presidential mandate under the new constitution and prevailed easily with 59.8% of the vote. But these were “mega-elections,” as Wilpert (Changing Venezuela, p. 22) put it, ones that “eliminated the country’s old political elite almost entirely from the upper reaches of Venezuela’s public institutions”:

Thirty-three thousand candidates ran for over 6,000 offices that day. In the end, Chávez was reconfirmed in office with 59.8% of the vote. Chávez’s supporters won 104 out of 165 National Assembly seats and 17 out of 23 state governorships. On the local level, Chávez candidates were less successful, winning only about half of the municipal mayors’ posts.

Ominously, a New York Times editorial in August 1999 already presumed to lecture Venezuelans and distort a very democratic reform process as a power grab:

They should be very wary of the methods Mr. Chávez is using. He is drawing power into his own hands, and misusing a special constitutional assembly meeting now in Caracas that is composed almost entirely of his supporters.

Mr. Chávez, a former paratroop commander who staged an unsuccessful military coup in 1992, has so far shown little respect for the compromises necessary in a democracy, which Venezuela has had for 40 years.

Clearly, any genuine reform process in Latin America was going to be vilified by liberal outlets like the New York Times.

The lies peddled about Venezuela’s past make US aggression against it possible in the present. It is worth summing up some of these key lies:

Venezuela was “once prosperous” and ruined by socialism. In fact, Venezuela was an unequal country in which most people were poor despite the country’s oil wealth, which had generated huge export revenues since the 1920s.

Venezuela was a democracy before Chavismo. In fact, Venezuela’s democracy was a gravely flawed system in which politicians alternated holding power according to an undemocratic agreement, and rammed austerity down the throats of Venezuela’s poor by committing massacres, such as the Caracazo.

Chavismo ruined Venezuela’s democracy. Chávez indeed attempted to carry out a coup in 1992, but he came to power through an election in 1998, and afterward made changes through extensive democratic processes.

US Covid hospitalisations rise above 100,000 for first time since January

The number of people hospitalised with Covid-19 in the US has risen above 100,000 for the first time since January, when the mass vaccination campaign was just getting under way. Figures from the US Department of Health and Human Services show that 100,317 inpatient hospital beds are now occupied by Covid patients.

The return to January levels of hospitalisations underscores the devastating surge of infection from the highly contagious Delta variant of coronavirus which is spreading rapidly among unvaccinated people, especially in the US south.

A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) highlights the mortal danger that unvaccinated Americans are now facing. It shows that people without the vaccine are about 29 times more likely to end up in hospital with Covid than those who are fully vaccinated.

Unvaccinated people are also almost five times as likely to become infected as those who get the shots, the study found, basing its conclusions on data from Los Angeles county in California.

Hospitalisations are particularly high in Texas and Florida. This week the death rate in Florida was higher than it has ever been throughout the pandemic. According to the New York Times database the state is suffering a seven-day average of 228 new reported deaths, which is substantially worse than its two previous peaks in August 2020 and January this year. ... US deaths are running at more than 1,100 a day, the highest level since mid-March, and new cases per day are averaging over 152,000.

Arkansas jail dosing inmates with ivermectin in spite of FDA warnings

Inmates at a north-west Arkansas jail have been prescribed a medicine for treating coronavirus that is normally used to deworm livestock, despite federal health warnings to the public in exasperated tones.

Washington county’s sheriff confirmed this week that the jail’s health provider had been prescribing the drug.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal drugs regulator, issued a warning via Twitter last weekend.

“You are not a horse,” it said. “You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” ...

Ivermectin has been touted by some Republican lawmakers in Arkansas as a potential Covid treatment.

Health officials in Arkansas and Mississippi this week warned people not to take the veterinary formulation of the drug after seeing an uptick in calls to their poison control centers.

U.S. Supreme Court ends CDC's pandemic residential eviction moratorium

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ended the pandemic-related federal moratorium on residential evictions imposed by President Joe Biden's administration in a challenge to the policy brought by a coalition of landlords and real estate trade groups.

The justices, who in June had left in place a prior ban that expired at the end of July, granted a request by the challengers to lift the moratorium by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that was to have run until Oct. 3.

The challengers argued that the law on which the CDC relied did not allow it to implement the current ban.

"It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts," the court said in an unsigned opinion. "If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it," the court added.

The three liberal justices on the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, all dissented.

David Sirota: House Dems BANKROLLED by big oil, Big Pharma obstructed budget reconciliation bill

Planned Expansion of Facial Recognition by US Agencies Called 'Disturbing'

Digital rights advocates reacted harshly Thursday to a new internal U.S. government report detailing how ten federal agencies have plans to greatly expand their reliance on facial recognition in the years ahead.

The Government Accountability Office surveyed federal agencies and found ten have specific plans to increase their use of the technology by 2023—surveilling people for numerous reasons including to identify criminal suspects, track government employees' level of alertness, and match faces of people on government property with names on watch lists.

The report (pdf) was released as lawmakers face pressure to pass legislation to limit the use of facial recognition technology by the government and law enforcement agencies.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (D-Ky.) introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act in April to prevent agencies from using "illegitimately obtained" biometric data, such as photos from the software company Clearview AI. The company has scraped billions of photos from social media platforms without approval and is currently used by hundreds of police departments across the United States.

The bill has not received a vote in either chamber of Congress yet.

The plans described in the GAO report, tweeted law professor Andrew Ferguson, author of "The Rise of Big Data Policing," are "what happens when Congress fails to act."

Six agencies including the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Justice (DOJ), Defense (DOD), Health and Human Services (HHS), Interior, and Treasury plan to expand their use of facial recognition technology to "generate leads in criminal investigations, such as identifying a person of interest, by comparing their image against mugshots," the GAO reported.

DHS, DOJ, HHS, and the Interior all reported using Clearview AI to compare images with "publicly available images" from social media.

The DOJ, DOD, HHS, Department of Commerce, and Department of Energy said they plan to use the technology to maintain what the report calls "physical security," by monitoring their facilities to determine if an individual on a government watchlist is present.

"For example, HHS reported that it used [a facial recognition technology] system (AnyVision) to monitor its facilities by searching live camera feeds in real-time for individuals on watchlists or suspected of criminal activity, which reduces the need for security guards to memorize these individuals' faces," the report reads. "This system automatically alerts personnel when an individual on a watchlist is present."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the government's expanded use of the technology for law enforcement purposes is one of the "most disturbing" aspects of the GAO report.

"Face surveillance is so invasive of privacy, so discriminatory against people of color, and so likely to trigger false arrests, that the government should not be using face surveillance at all," the organization told MIT Technology Review.

According to the Washington Post, three lawsuits have been filed in the last year by people who say they were wrongly accused of crimes after being mistakenly identified by law enforcement agencies using facial recognition technology. All three of the plaintiffs are Black men.

A federal study in 2019 showed that Asian and Black people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified by the technology than white men. Native Americans had the highest false identification rate.

Maine, Virginia, and Massachusetts have banned or sharply curtailed the use of facial recognition systems by government entities, and cities across the country including San Francisco, Portland, and New Orleans have passed strong ordinances blocking their use.

But many of the federal government's planned uses for the technology, Jake Laperruque of the Project on Government Oversight told the Post, "present a really big surveillance threat that only Congress can solve."

Capitol police officers sue Trump and far-right groups over 6 January attack

Capitol police officers who were attacked and beaten during the insurrection at the US Congress on 6 January by extremist supporters of Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the former Republican president, his ally Roger Stone and members of far-right extremist groups. The officers accused them of intentionally sending a violent mob to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election.

The suit in federal court in Washington DC alleges Trump “worked with white supremacists, violent extremist groups, and campaign supporters to violate the Ku Klux Klan Act, and commit acts of domestic terrorism in an unlawful effort to stay in power”. The suit was filed on behalf of the seven officers by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“Trump’s and his co-conspirators’ repeated cries of election fraud caused many of his supporters, including other defendants, to plan to employ force, intimidation and threats on his behalf to keep him in office, should he lose the election,” the lawsuit alleges.

“Because of defendants’ unlawful actions, plaintiffs were violently assaulted, spat on, teargassed, bear-sprayed, subjected to racial slurs and epithets, and put in fear for their lives. Plaintiffs’ injuries, which defendants caused, persist to this day,” the lawsuit added.

It names the former president, the Trump campaign, Stone and members of the extremist far-right groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, some of whose members were involved at the Capitol attack. Roger Stone is understood to have links to some of the far-right individuals who have been charged as a result of the riot in Washington DC.

Michigan judge sanctions pro-Trump lawyers who sought to overturn state’s 2020 elections

A federal judge in Michigan has sanctioned a team of nine pro-Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, who sought to overturn the state’s 2020 elections as part of a sweeping effort across the nation to challenge Joe Biden’s presidential victory via court action.

In a 110-page ruling released on Wednesday, judge Linda Parker of the federal district court in Detroit ruled that the attorneys who alleged widespread election fraud in Michigan presented unsubstantiated claims and abused the justice system.

“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” Parker wrote. “This case was never about fraud – it was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so,” she added.

Parker ordered the lawyers to pay legal fees to the city of Detroit and state of Michigan, and will require them to attend legal education classes on pleading standards and election law within six months.

She also referred the lawyers to the Michigan attorney grievance commission and other appropriate disciplinary authorities, where they could face further investigation and potential suspension or disbarment in the state.

California Recall: Right-Wing Radio Host Who Once Mentored Stephen Miller Could Replace Gov. Newsom

Larry Elder is a Nightmare (and Gavin Newsom's Fault)

Fukushima operators to build undersea tunnel to dump contaminated water

Operators of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant have unveiled plans to construct an undersea tunnel to release more than a million tonnes of treated water from the site into the ocean. Plans for the 1km tunnel were announced on Wednesday after the Japanese government decided in April to release the accumulated water in two years’ time.

Ministers say the release is safe because the water will have been processed to remove almost all radioactive elements, and will be diluted.

But the April decision triggered a furious reaction from neighbouring countries, and fierce opposition from local fishing communities.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said it would start building the tunnel by March 2022 after carrying out feasibility studies and obtaining approval from authorities. It will have a diameter of about 2.5 metres and stretch east into the Pacific from tanks at the plant containing around 1.27m tonnes of treated water.

That includes water used to cool the plant, which was crippled after going into meltdown following a huge 2011 tsunami, as well as rain and groundwater that seeps in daily.

Worth a full read:

Suckers, trash fish and the fight over food traditions in Oregon’s Klamath Basin

In the Klamath Basin, where periodic droughts expose fraught relations between farmers and Indigenous peoples, fish are also proxies for racism in the area, according to tribe members. “The fish are worthless and the tribes are worthless because they care about the fish,” said Don Gentry, the Klamath Tribes chairman, paraphrasing local sentiments he has come across. “I can see that in folks’ minds.” The C’waam and Koptu are tough species that live for decades – the oldest discovered C’waam was 57 years old. The C’waam, the bigger of the two, is also known as the Lost River suckerfish, and the Koptu as the shortnose suckerfish. Both have blunt heads and an earthy-grey coloration that fades into white bellies and large protruding lips. They are not only a historical food source but part of the creation story of the Klamath tribes.

Most of the fish spawn in the spring, migrating every year from Upper Klamath Lake into a series of tributary rivers to do so. They probably numbered in the millions in the 1800s, and their spring migration would blanket riverbeds and signal the end of winter for the Modoc, Klamath and Yahooskin people – the three Klamath Tribes. According to one account from 1883, the spawning events were so large that a Modoc fisherman could easily catch 100 fish a day by plunging a spear into the water with a sharpened hook at the end. Today, the C’waam and Koptu population has dwindled to an estimated 25,000 and 3,400 respectively. Poor water quality and the destruction of spawning habitat by decades of cattle grazing, dam building and water diversions have brought the species years away from extinction, said Alex Gonyaw, the Klamath Tribes’ senior biologist.

During summertime in the Upper Klamath Lake, corpses of 30-year-old C’waam appear on the lake’s surface – they hail from the last successful round of reproduction in the early 1990s. Current water levels are only high enough to keep elderly fish on life support, said Gonyaw, and suckerfish larvae now never reach maturity. The lake’s current water level is “the absolute bare minimum to prevent extinction”, he said.

As C’waam and Koptu’s numbers have dwindled, so has the image of these fish among the public. ... In Klamath Basin, when water runs low and suckerfish are kept alive at the expense of farmers’ livelihoods, tribe members say simmering racist attitudes bubble to the surface. During the last major water shutoff in 2001, three men drove into the tribal town of Chiloquin firing shotguns and yelling “sucker lovers”. Now the vitriol is mostly confined to social media and glares at local restaurants in the town of Klamath Falls, tribe members said. Gonyaw, the biologist, who is not a tribal member, said he believed that rhetoric surrounding the C’waam and Koptu reflects often unspoken views about the Klamath Tribes. “They call them trash fish because they know they can’t publicly talk that way about the tribes,” he said. “These fish are surrogates for how people feel about Native Americans.”

Caldor fire bears down on Lake Tahoe as communities clouded in smoke

A wind-driven wildfire continued to advance towards Lake Tahoe, clouding the alpine vacation and tourist spot in a sickly yellow layer of smoke, as more than 14,000 firefighters battled wildfires up and down California. As the weather heated up and winds shifted, the Caldor fire, the nation’s top-priority for firefighting resources, grew to more than 213 sq miles (551 sq km) south-west of the lake but containment remained at 12%, officials said. ...

Meanwhile, a wildfire that burned several homes near Los Angeles may signal that that region, too, is facing the same dangers that have scorched the northern parts of the state this summer. The South fire in San Bernardino county erupted on Wednesday afternoon, quickly burned several hundred acres and damaged or destroyed at least a dozen homes and outbuildings in the foothills north-east of Los Angeles, fire officials said. Crews used shovels and bulldozers and mounted an air attack to keep the fire from the tiny communities of Lytle Creek and Scotland.

By nightfall Wednesday, firefighters appeared to have gained the upper hand and few flames were seen. But the blaze was worrying because southern California’s high fire season typically comes later in the year when strong, dry Santa Ana winds blast out of the interior and blow toward the coast. After a few cooler days, the region was expected to experience a return of hot weather into the weekend that could increase wildfire risks. ...

The Dixie fire, the second-largest in state history at 1,160 sq miles, was 45% contained.

Also of Interest

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

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Ex-Pence Aide: Stephen Miller’s “Racist Hysteria” Made It Harder for Afghan Allies to Get Visas

The Troglodyte property boom: Spanish cave-homes in high demand

A Little Night Music

Dr. John - Iko Iko

Dr John - I Walk On Guilded Splinters

Dr John - Basin Street Blues

Dr. John - Goin' Back To New Orleans

Everlasting Arms feat. Dr. John | Playing For Change

Dr John & Eric Clapton - VH1 Duets

Dr. John (featuring Nicholas Payton and The Blind Boys of Alabama) - What A Wonderful World

Dr. John - Pine Top Boogie

Dr John - Junko Partner

Dr. John - Goodnight Irene

Dr John - There Must Be A Better World Somewhere

Dr. John - Full Concert - 08/13/06 - Newport Jazz Festival