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This evening's music features Texas blues guitarist and singer Andrew "Smokey" Hogg. Enjoy!

“…the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”

-- George Orwell

News and Opinion

Kazakhstan protests: Moscow-led alliance sends ‘peacekeeping forces’

“Peacekeeping forces” from a Russia-led military alliance will be sent to Kazakhstan to help the country’s president regain control, it was announced on Wednesday night, as violent clashes continued after fuel price rises triggered widespread protests. Armenia’s prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, said the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) – an alliance of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – would dispatch forces to “stabilise” the Central Asian country.

The announcement came after Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, appealed to the bloc for help, decrying the actions of “terrorists” and alleging the country had been the victim of “attacks” by foreign-trained gangs.

On Wednesday, demonstrators took over government buildings and reportedly stormed the airport in Almaty, the country’s commercial capital and largest city. “Almaty was attacked, destroyed, vandalised, the residents of Almaty became victims of attacks by terrorists, bandits, therefore it is our duty … to take all possible actions to protect our state,” said Tokayev, in his second televised address in a matter of hours.

The Kazakh events come at a time when all eyes have been on a possible Russian intervention in Ukraine. Images of police being overpowered by protesters are likely to cause alarm in Moscow, as another country neighbouring Russia succumbs to political unrest. Kazakhstan is part of an economic union with Russia and the two countries share a long border. It was not clear how many troops the CSTO would send and how long they would stay in the country.

Kazakhstan: Russian troops arrive to put down uprising

Kazakhstan unrest | Anti-terror op launched, CSTO peacekeepers arrive in country

US sanctions Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik for ‘destabilizing activities’

The US has imposed new sanctions on the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, a television station under his control and two other officials for “significant corruption and destabilizing activities”.

The sanctions, involving asset freezes and visa bans, follow Dodik’s threat to withdraw Serbs from the Bosnian national army and other state-level institutions, potentially destroying the 1995 Dayton peace treaty and opening the way for a return to conflict.

Official statements accompanying the sanctions focus on the corruption which US officials say underpin Dodik’s political posturing. “His divisive ethno-nationalistic rhetoric reflects his efforts to advance these political goals and distract attention from his corrupt activities,” a Treasury statement said. ...

It said Dodik had handed government contracts and monopolies in the Serb-run half of Bosnia, Republika Srpska (RS) to close business associates. “With his corrupt proceeds, Dodik has engaged in bribery and additional corrupt activities to further his personal interests at the expense of citizens in the RS,” the Treasury said.

Dodik has already been sanctioned in 2017, for obstruction of the Dayton accord. The new measures are wider, criminalizing financial donations to him, and targeting Alternativna Televizija, a television station based in Banja Luka, the biggest town in the RS. The channel is privately owned by a company closely linked to Dodik’s family, the Treasury said, and operates as Dodik’s personal propaganda outlet.

US war lobby fuels conflict in Russia, Ukraine, and Syria: ex-Pentagon advisor

UK Deployed 31 Nuclear Weapons During Falklands War

The revelation is contained in a new file released to the National Archives. Marked “Top Secret Atomic,” it shows that the presence of the nuclear weapons caused panic among officials in London when they realized the damage, both physical and political, they could have caused. The military regime in Argentina claimed the Falkland islands and invaded on April 2, 1982. The U.K. government under Margaret Thatcher dispatched a naval task force to the South Atlantic to retake the islands.

A Ministry of Defence (MoD) minute, dated April 6, 1982, referred to “huge concern” that some of the “nuclear depth bombs” could be “lost or damaged and the fact become public.” The minute added: “The international repercussions of such an incident could be very damaging.”

Nuclear depth bombs are deployed from navy ships to attack submerged submarines.

A plan to offload the weapons at the British base on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean was rejected by the Navy. It said this would delay the passage of the task force to the Falklands and that the operation would not be kept secret. Instead, the weapons were transferred from the frigates and destroyers to the larger aircraft carriers, HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, where the weapons could be better protected. ...

The Foreign Office was also anxious about the presence of the nuclear weapons because of the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco. This established a nuclear free zone in Latin America and surrounding waters, including the Falklands. Although Britain had signed and ratified the treaty’s protocols other countries, including Argentina, had not done so. According to Freedman, Margaret Thatcher insisted that no ship carrying nuclear weapons would enter the three-mile territorial waters around the Falklands which would be a “potential breach” of the Tlatelolco treaty.

The MoD admitted in 2003 that British ships in the task force carried nuclear weapons and that a weapon container had been damaged. But the number of weapons had not been revealed before this document was transferred to the National Archives in Kew, south west London.

After 7 Years, Anti-War Group That Fed the Hungry Wins Fight With Fort Lauderdale

Anti-hunger and anti-war activists in Florida have reportedly won their protracted legal fight against the city government of Fort Lauderdale, which agreed to compensate the local chapter of Food Not Bombs after spending years trying to prevent the group from sharing free food with people in need at a downtown park.

"It took seven years, but Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs' federal civil liberties lawsuit against Fort Lauderdale for banning food sharings is finally concluding," the group said Monday in a statement. "After we won our second appeal in August 2021, the city has accepted a settlement that admits they were wrong to enforce the park rule against us and will pay us a small amount of damages. They will also have to pay our lawyers a great deal more!"

Last August, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th District ruled unanimously that "a rule limiting food-sharing inside Fort Lauderdale parks is unconstitutional as applied to Food Not Bombs' hosting of free vegan meals for the homeless," the Courthouse News Service reported at the time.

According to the outlet:

A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court overturned a Florida federal court's summary judgment in favor of the city, finding that a rule which banned the sharing of food as a social service in city parks without written permission violated Food Not Bombs' First Amendment rights.

Fort Lauderdale Park Rule 2.2 requires city permission for social service food-sharing events in all Fort Lauderdale parks and allows officials to charge as much as $6,000 for the permitting process.

In a 64-page ruling issued Tuesday, the panel determined the rule cannot lawfully qualify as a "valid regulation" of Food Not Bombs' expressive conduct due to its "utterly standardless permission requirement."

In its statement, Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs said that the favorable settlement is "on top of the victories this lawsuit already accomplished in years' prior, including the 2018 appeals ruling that ruled that the original sharing ban law was unconstitutional—[...] creating a strongly worded precedent about sharing food as protected free speech."

"We had to bite our tongues a lot over the years to see how this would play out, but no more," the group continued. "We outlived and outmaneuvered the old mayor, city manager, and city attorney, who were all intent on policing us and the homeless out of existence."

"Let's not forget multiple FLPD chiefs and captains who sent their goons to stalk and arrest us, all gone now!" the group added. "Nuts to all the narrow-minded fools who wanted to be rid of us."

Decrying government efforts to crack down on those who feed the poor, Keith McHenry—co-founder of Food Not Bombs, which uses surplus ingredients that would otherwise be thrown away to provide vegetarian meals to people in more than 1,000 cities in 65 countries across the world—told the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday that "sharing free food with the hungry is an unregulated gift of love."

McHenry—currently in Houston, where another local chapter is risking arrest by refusing to comply with a city ordinance that seeks to move meal distribution from outside the downtown library to a parking lot near the courthouse—noted that in addition to worsening poverty, the coronavirus crisis has made obtaining assistance more difficult, underscoring the importance of Food Not Bombs.

"While most indoor soup kitchens shut down during the pandemic," he said, "Food Not Bombs continued to share with the unhoused."

RECORD Number Of Americans Tells Bosses SCREW YOU

Joe Biden needs to stand up and fight Manchin like our lives depend on it

If Build Back Better fails, Joe Manchin may well be remembered as the man who killed the planet. Given the prospect of having to one day explain to his grandchildren why they can’t go outside in the summer, you think he’d at least attempt to marshal some plausible justifications. But his arguments collapse under the lightest scrutiny. His inflation fears have been thoroughly debunked, including by Larry Summers, the patron saint of inflation anxiety. His climate arguments are fundamentally unserious, anti-science propaganda copied straight from the big coal playbook. ...

So Biden needs a new strategy, and fast. There are two basic options. The first is to take off the kid gloves and start playing hardball. If he doesn’t have any leverage, then he needs to get some, especially if Manchin is acting in bad faith. That means channeling Lyndon B Johnson and pairing noble intent with sharp elbows. Threaten targeted federal regulations that would cripple Manchin’s benefactors in big coal. Use the bully pulpit to call them out by name: Michelle Bloodworth, Chris Hamilton, Joe Craft, Jim McGlothlin – all the special interests ready to sacrifice my generation on the altar of their quarterly returns. Have the justice department revisit allegations that Manchin’s daughter, former Mylan chief Heather Bresch, played a personal role in criminally inflating the price of life-saving EpiPens (as if corporate fealty and misanthropic greed were a sort of family tradition). Dare him to defect to the Republican party, where he’ll either kiss the ring of the autocrat he voted twice to impeach or be eaten alive as a Republican in Name Only, or Rino.

The second option is to publicly accept Manchin’s private counteroffer, get it to the Senate floor for a vote, and then dare him to renege. The $1.8tn counter-offer – which reportedly included universal pre-K, an expansion of the Affordable Care Act and $500 to 600bn in clean energy incentives – would fall short of what working people need. But it would offer some crucial support, while keeping America’s climate commitments alive. There’s a chance Biden could still circumvent Manchin on extending the child tax credit, which would lift millions of American children out of poverty. No state has benefited from the popular policy more than Utah, and Mitt Romney has indicated a willingness to negotiate. Progressives could blanket his state in ads on child poverty while the administration buttonholes him on specifics.

Whichever path the administration chooses, they need to abandon their fixation on “projecting normalcy”. We are not living in normal times, and every American knows it. With each new failure, their genteel posture reads less like a steady hand and more like a form of sleepwalking.

78% of Democrats Support Child Tax Credit Effectively Killed Off by Manchin: Poll

Three weeks after Sen. Joe Manchin's opposition to the expanded Child Tax Credit ended his Democratic Party's hopes of passing the Build Back Better Act before the end of 2021, a new poll out Wednesday shows a majority of voters still support the measure that has lifted millions out of poverty.

A survey by Fighting Chance for Families, a project of progressive think tanks Groundwork Collaborative and Data for Progress, showed Thursday that 57% of all voters—and 78% of Democrats—support expanding the Child Tax Credit (CTC).

Just over half of independent voters support the expanded CTC, which from July to December 2021 provided monthly payments of up to $300 per child for 35 million families, and about one-third of Republicans back the program.

The widespread support for the CTC, suggested Fighting Chance for Families, is due to the fact that millions of children have experienced concrete benefits from what one advocate called "the most transformational investment in children and families in the history of the United States."

'To Restore American Democracy,' House Progressives Endorse Adding 4 New Seats to Supreme Court

The push to reform the U.S. Supreme Court got a significant boost Wednesday as the Congressional Progressive Caucus voted to officially endorse the Judiciary Act of 2021, which would add four seats to the bench and restore balance to what critics call a "hyperpartisan 6-3 stolen court."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who chairs the caucus, announced that following a number of rulings in the past several years attacking reproductive rights, voting rights, and other key tenets of a healthy democracy, its members have "determined that the urgent work to restore American democracy must include expanding the Supreme Court."

"The current bench was filled by a partisan, right-wing effort to entrench a radical, anti-democratic faction and erode human rights that have been won over decades," Jayapal said in a statement Wednesday. "As a co-equal governing body, Congress cannot sit by while this attack on the Constitution continues unchecked. I am proud that our caucus is joining the fight to expand the court and restore balance to the bench."

The official endorsement of the Judiciary Act—proposed in the House by Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), and Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) and in the Senate by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)—comes four months after the Supreme Court outraged reproductive rights advocates when it allowed Senate Bill 8, Texas' extreme forced-pregnancy law, to go into effect. ...

With a conservative majority, the high court in recent years has gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating a provision that prevented discriminatory voting laws; weakened labor unions by ruling that public sector bargaining units cannot collect fees from all workers; and upheld Trump's travel ban targeting people from majority-Muslim countries.

Such rulings have destroyed the court's "own legitimacy," said Johnson, and have upended "decades of precedent and progress in this nation."

California bill would hold gunmakers liable for injuries or deaths

Some Democratic California lawmakers want to make it easier for people to sue gun companies for liability in shootings that cause injuries or deaths, a move advocates say is aimed at getting around a US law that prevents such lawsuits and allows the industry to act recklessly. In general, when someone is injured or killed by gunfire it’s very hard for the victim or their family to hold the gun manufacturer or dealer responsible by suing them and making them pay damages. A federal law prevents most of those types of lawsuits.

But US law does permit some types of liability lawsuits, including when gunmakers break state or local laws regarding the sale and marketing of their products. Last year, New York approved a first-in-the-nation law declaring such violations a “public nuisance”, opening up gunmakers to lawsuits. On Tuesday, the California assembly member Phil Ting of San Francisco unveiled a bill modeled after the New York law. ...

The New York bill is already being challenged in court by gunmakers. And critics were swift to denounce the California proposal as well.

Glenn Greenwald: How Deep State Has WEAPONIZED January 6th

Tree-mendous news: noisy gas-powered leaf blowers banned in Washington DC

A roaring and often harmful cacophony that has long afflicted Washington DC has finally been silenced. Not the roar of politicians sounding off, alas, but the use (and sale) of gasoline-powered leaf blowers, banned since New Year’s Day. Anyone using the blowers, which have been blamed for ear-splitting noise and a stew of air pollution, risks a fine of up to $500.

People who still want to rearrange the natural fall of leaves from trees have been offered rebates for quieter electric blowers. The push to ban gas leaf blowers was led by local resident James Fallows, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter who has blamed the anti-social implements for producing “the secondhand smoke of this era”.

It is just the latest crackdown on leaf blower use across the US. Last year, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, signed a law prohibiting gasoline-powered lawn equipment, including leaf blowers and lawnmowers, from 2024. More than 100 cities in various states have already banned gas leaf blowers, with Dallas and Portland the latest major urban areas to mull new restrictions. ...

The inefficiency of such engines also causes enormous levels of air pollution: a 2011 study found that just 30 minutes of using a leaf blower in the yard can emit the same amount of hydrocarbons as driving a pickup truck from Texas to Alaska. Michael Leamy, an expert in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, said the amount of air pollution from such a relatively small device was “astounding”.

Fossil fuel firms among biggest spenders on Google ads that look like search results

Fossil fuel companies and firms that work closely with them are among the biggest spenders on ads designed to look like Google search results, in what campaigners say is an example of “endemic greenwashing”. The Guardian analysed ads served on Google search results for 78 climate-related terms, in collaboration with InfluenceMap, a thinktank that tracks the lobbying efforts of polluting industries.

The results show that over one in five ads seen in the study – more than 1,600 in total – were placed by companies with significant interests in fossil fuels.

Advertisers pay for their ads to appear on the search engine when a user queries certain terms. The ads are appealing to businesses because they are very similar in appearance to search results: more than half of users in a 2020 survey reported they could not tell the difference between a paid-for listing and a normal Google result.

ExxonMobil, Shell, Aramco, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs were among the top-20 advertisers on the search terms, while a number of other fossil fuel producers and their financiers also placed ads.

Jake Carbone, senior data analyst at InfluenceMap, said: “Google is letting groups with a vested interest in the continued use of fossil fuels pay to influence the resources people receive when they are trying to educate themselves. “The oil and gas sector has moved away from contesting the science of climate change and now instead seeks to influence public discussions about decarbonisation in its favour.”

Also of Interest

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

Meet Jed Rakoff, the Judge Who Exposed the “Rigged Game”

Only Fuzzbrained Human Livestock Fret About Communism

Canada’s Pathetic Preparations For US Collapse Or Fascist Takeover

The War on Terror Is a Success — for Terror

Is the Doom of Humanity Really Inevitable? Maybe Not.

China's Excellent, Very Good Year

Craig Murray: Your Man in Saughton Jail

Bernie Sanders to Hold Coast-to-Coast Town Hall With Nation's Striking Workers

Homer Plessy, US civil rights pioneer, receives pardon 130 years on

Paraguay’s new Chaco highway threatens rare forest and last of the Ayoreo people

VA Gov Blames DRIVERS For 30 Hour Road Blockade

Possible FOURTH Covid Stimulus Package In Talks. Are Walmart And Kroger Price-Gouging Testing Kits?

A Little Night Music

Andrew "Smokey" Hogg - Kind-Hearted Blues

Smokey Hogg w/ Frankie Lee Sims - Hard Times

Smokey Hogg - She's Always On My Mind

Andrew “Smokey” Hogg - He Knows How Much We Can Bear

Smokey Hogg - When the Sun Goes Down

Smokey Hogg - Crawdad

'Smokey' Hogg - Dirty Mistreater

Smokey Hogg - Key To My Door

Smokey Hogg - Wanna Stay Home

Smokey Hogg w/ Frankie Lee Sims - Goin' Back Home

Smokey Hogg & his Guitar - What's On Your Mind?