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This evening's music features blues guitar player Memphis Minnie. Enjoy!

"Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That's true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empire earlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future."

-- Cornel West

News and Opinion

Biden Lies at the United Nations

It takes a special kind of hubris for a president of the United States to speak at the United Nations, the place where international law is supposed to be upheld and defended. Yet the representative of the worst violator of international law predictably shows up every September when the United Nations General Assembly holds its annual session. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez got it right when he spoke in 2006:

“Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation, and pillage of the peoples of the world.”

Chavez is no longer with us, and Joe Biden is the third man to serve as U.S. president since George W. Bush was compared to the devil. But the words are as true now as they were then. This year Biden’s speech was replete with the usual drivel about the United States being some sort of guarantor of peace. Among other things, he said that permanent members of the Security Council should “...refrain from the use of the veto, except in rare, extraordinary situations, to ensure that the Council remains credible and effective.”

Perhaps Biden thinks that the rest of the world has amnesia. Every time the members of UN General Assembly condemn Israeli apartheid it is the U.S. that predictably steps in with a Security Council veto to protect its ally and partner in crime. Twelve of the 14 U.S. vetoes since 2000 were made on behalf of Israel. Any U.S. proposal calling for change in the Security Council structure is intended to weaken China and Russia’s veto power and to bring in its own puppets such as Germany and Japan.

Of course, Russia bashing was the focus of Biden’s speech with false claims of a nuclear threat, unprovoked attack, and accusations of war crimes. He didn’t mention well documented Ukrainian war crimes such as the shelling of civilians in Donetsk. Worse yet, there was no acknowledgement that Ukraine and Russia were negotiating until the U.S. and the U.K. intervened and scuttled the talks. Biden’s speech was full of projection and every condemnation leveled against Russia or Iran or Venezuela was instead an indictment of U.S. behavior in the world. ...

Biden did make one valid statement. “Because if nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequences, then we put at risk everything this very institution stands for.” It is unfortunate that the U.S. ignores the consequences of its own actions.

Nord Stream Operators: Authorities WON'T ALLOW US To Inspect Damaged Pipelines

It looks like it will take 20 days to clean up the Nordstream crime scene and remove any evidence that can finger the western perpetrators.

Nord Stream operator says unable to inspect damaged sections of gas pipeline

The operator of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany is unable to inspect damaged caused to the two-string link because it has not yet received the relevant approvals, it said late Oct. 4. ...

"As of today, Nord Stream AG is unable to inspect the damaged sections of the gas pipeline due to the lack of earlier requested necessary permits," it said in a statement.

Nord Stream AG said that in line with its expectations, the pressure in both lines of Nord Stream had stabilized as of Oct. 3. ...

Sweden, it said, had imposed a ban on shipping, anchoring, diving, the use of underwater vehicles, and geophysical mapping while it conducted a state investigation into the damage. In addition, Denmark had informed Nord Stream AG that the processing time of its request for a survey may take more than 20 working days.

Finally, Nord Stream AG said, the owner of the appropriately equipped survey vessel it had chartered still did not have approval from the Norwegian foreign ministry to depart.

German deindustrialization, transitioning to service based economy

Despite Calls for Diplomacy to End War, US Confirms More Weapons Headed to Ukraine

Proponents of a negotiated diplomatic solution to end Russia's invasion of Ukraine this week decried the Biden administration's latest military assistance package for the embattled country, warning that the longer the fight continues, the greater the chance of a catastrophic nuclear war.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday that the U.S. will deliver up to $625 million worth of additional armaments and ammunition to Ukraine following Russia's illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions last week, a move that prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to formally apply for NATO membership.

The new package includes four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and an unknown number of guided missiles; 16 155mm howitzers and 75,000 precision-guided artillery rounds; 1,000 155mm remote anti-armor mines; 16 105mm howitzers; 30,000 120mm mortar rounds; 200 MaxxPro mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles; 200,000 rounds of small arms ammunition; and other armaments.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the new aid—which comes on top of more than $15 billion in American military assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24—is "carefully calibrated to make the most difference on the battlefield and strengthen Ukraine's hand at the negotiating table when the time is right."

Peace advocates stressed that—with Russian President Vladimir Putin's repeated threats to use nuclear weapons—the right time is right now, and that the United States and NATO allies should stop trying to weaken Russia by prolonging the war.

"The longer the war goes on, the longer it's maintained, the more the prospects for a diplomatic settlement diminish," U.S. political dissident and professor Noam Chomsky told Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman in a Monday interview. "The longer the war continues, the more the window closes."

However, Chomsky noted that the United States and Britain "are keeping to the principle that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia—meaning no negotiated settlements, with all the consequences that follow."

Harry J. Kazianis, senior editor at 19FortyFive and president of the Rogue States Project, a bipartisan national security think tank based in Washington, D.C., wrote Monday for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft that "tensions are rising by the second," while "the chances of a nuclear war increase significantly every day that passes."

"Considering the stakes—among them, the possibility that Russia will feel so boxed in that it will turn to its arsenal of 6,400 nuclear warheads and try to end the Ukraine war on its own terms despite the risk of a nuclear holocaust—one would think talks would already be happening as we speak," Kazianis continued.

"Sadly," he added, "due to the Western narrative that Ukraine is 'winning' the war against Moscow, the Biden administration appears to believe it can put enough pressure on Putin with more weapons for Ukraine that he will give up his newly annexed territories and go home with his atomic tail between his legs."

According to recent polling by the Quincy Institute and Data for Progress, 49% of Americans want Biden to do more to seek a diplomatic solution to the war.

OPEC+ makes big oil cut to boost prices, pump costs may rise

Truss’s cabinet in open warfare over key policies and coup accusations

Liz Truss’s cabinet is in open warfare over the 45p tax U-turn and benefit cuts, with the home secretary accusing fellow Tory MPs of a coup against the prime minister. On another chaotic day at the Conservative party conference, ministerial discipline broke down, with cabinet colleagues disagreeing over key policies and bitter infighting over the decision to scrap plans to ditch the top rate of tax.

In some of the most provocative remarks, Suella Braverman said she was “disappointed” by the U-turn – and suggested Tory MPs were trying to overthrow Truss’s government. The home secretary was backed by Simon Clarke, the levelling up secretary, but criticised by Kemi Badenoch, the trade secretary, who said talk of a coup was “inflammatory”.

Braverman appeared to be taking aim at the former cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Grant Shapps, who dominated the first day of the Birmingham event by criticising the abolition of the 45p tax rate.

On Tuesday, Shapps suggested Truss had about 10 days to turn things around and signalled MPs may try to remove her if polls continued to show Labour on course for a landslide majority.

Worth a look:

The Limits of Change in Britain

There are two lessons to learn from the U.K.’s current economic meltdown — and commentators are obscuring both of them. The first, and more obvious conclusion, is that Britain has a completely dysfunctional political and media system. It has allowed two mediocre, clueless careerists like Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng to reach the pinnacle of the power pyramid — and then car-crash the economy because they refused to listen to economic advisers whose sole job was to stop them sabotaging a system carefully calibrated to maintain a transatlantic Ponzi scheme designed to enrich a wealthy elite while trashing the planet. ...

Truss’ elevation to prime minister, immediately in the wake of Johnson’s festival of cronyism and corruption, demonstrates that these filters no longer function. The system is breaking down ideologically just as surely as the infrastructure of supply chains and gas pipelines is breaking down materially. We are in store for a rocky ride at the hands of serial blunderers and conmen over the coming years.

The second lesson is in many ways the flip side of the first. Truss may have triggered the economic crisis through a toxic mix of ego, incompetence and ideological fervour, but we should be extremely wary of focusing exclusively on blaming her. She didn’t do the equivalent of jumping off a cliff on the assumption that she could defy gravity: the crisis was not caused because she violated some fundamental, scientific law of economics. The current crisis is manmade. She is being punished for doing things “the market” — meaning people who control our money — do not like.

Those functionaries of capitalism don’t sit around plotting how they will react to a budget like Kwarteng’s. They responded in unison much as a big shoal of fish suddenly and collectively take a new course. They operate as a hive mind. ... “The market” believes Truss is in danger of wrecking the system that upholds their privilege — by accruing too much debt while also starving the government of income by cutting taxation too much. Because economics is not a science but a kind of elite formation psychosis, the instinctual reaction of “the market” to Kwarteng’s budget was to … wreck Britain’s economy.

The Bank of England stepped in not to change the fundamentals of the economy but to “reassure the market.” You don’t need to reassure a law of nature.

[Much more at the link. - js]

Colombia to restart peace talks with the country’s largest active guerrilla group

Colombia’s government and the nation’s largest remaining guerrilla group have announced that they will restart peace talks next month for the first time since 2018. After meeting in Caracas, representatives of the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army issued a statement saying a start date for the peace talks would be announced after the first week of November. The statement added that Norway, Venezuela and Cuba would be “guarantor states” in the talks, and that the participation of civil society groups would be “essential” for the peace talks to succeed.

The ELN was founded in the 1960s by students, union leaders and Catholic priests inspired by Cuba’s revolution. The group is believed to have about 4,000 fighters in Colombia and is also present deep inside Venezuela where it runs illegal goldmines and drug trafficking routes....

In a press conference after the meeting between both sides, Colombia’s peace comissioner Danilo Rueda said that the ELN had shown changes in its behaviour which had enabled it to gain the government’s trust. Rueda said that the rebel group had recently released hostages and scaled back attacks against the Colombian military.

The ELN did not disclose any details on what it would seek in exchange for laying down its weapons. But the commander, García, hinted that the group was looking for political and economic changes. “The way to look for peace is not just by thinking about weapons but by attacking the root causes of this conflict which are inequality and the lack of democracy,” García said.

15-Yr-Old Girl KILLED While Running To Police For Help, Officers BLAME THE VICTIM

Civil liberties in decline:

Surveillance shift: San Francisco pilots program allowing police to live monitor private security cameras

Last week San Francisco city leaders approved a 15-month pilot allowing police to monitor live footage from surveillance cameras owned by consenting businesses and civilians without a warrant.

The 7-4 decision by the San Francisco board of supervisors was a major loss for a broad coalition of civil liberties groups that had argued the move would give police unprecedented surveillance powers. It also seemingly marked a departure from the progressive stance on surveillance the city’s leadership had previously maintained.

In May 2019, the board had made history by making the city the first to ban the use of facial recognition by any local government agency. At the time, supervisor Aaron Peskin said, the city had an “an outsize responsibility to regulate the excesses of technology”.

But more than three years, a pandemic and many protests against police injustice later, some members of the board now say they need to balance concerns for privacy with the need to allow law enforcement officials to “utilize certain technologies to make San Francisco safer”.

Privacy advocacy groups say the shift is part of a larger phenomenon in cities across the US, where fears of both perceived and real increases in crime have prompted police and elected officials to expand the use of surveillance technology, even if there isn’t always clear evidence those technologies are effective at deterring or solving crimes.

US supreme court hears case that could gut voting rights for minority groups

The supreme court’s conservative majority appeared unsettled on Tuesday on whether it would gut one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act in a case that has profound implications for the representation of Black Americans and other minority groups.

The case, Merrill v Milligan, centers on how much those who draw electoral districts should be required to consider race. It involves a dispute over the seven congressional districts Alabama drew last year. Only one of those districts has a majority-Black population, even though Black people make up a quarter of Alabama’s population. Earlier this year, a three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the configuration was illegal under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which guarantees minority groups equal opportunity to participate in the electoral process. It ordered Alabama to draw a second district with a minority population. The supreme court stepped in earlier this year and halted that order while the case proceeded.

The state’s solicitor general, Edmund LaCour, argued on Tuesday that the lower court’s ruling was incorrect because it required Alabama to consider race above traditional, race-neutral criteria. In order to require Alabama draw a second majority-minority district, he said, the plaintiffs should have first had to prove that such a map could exist without taking race into account at all. He argued that computer simulations programmed with race-neutral criteria never produced a map with a second majority-Black district.

Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s most conservative jurists, seized on that point repeatedly in support of Alabama’s argument. “How can it be reasonably configured if you can’t get that map with a computer simulation that takes into account all of the traditional race-neutral factors?” he said. But even Alito acknowledged that some of the arguments Alabama made were “far-reaching”. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another conservative justice, said at one point she would be “struggling in the same way others have about narrowing down exactly what your argument is”.

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson all seemed deeply skeptical about all of Alabama’s arguments. Embracing the state’s approach would upend how the court has long approached section 2 redistricting cases. Kagan said the case was a “slam dunk” case under the court’s existing precedent before laying out how she believed the lower court had correctly evaluated the facts. “It seems to me you’re coming here … and saying change the way we look at section 2 and its application,” she said.

California’s three-year drought continues with no relief in sight

California has witnessed its three driest years on record and the drought shows no signs of abating, officials said Monday. The dry spell set the stage for catastrophic wildfires and has strained water resources and caused conflicts over usage. “We are actively planning for another dry year,” said Jeanine Jones, drought manager for the state’s department of water resources, who was discussing California’s status at the conclusion of its water year, which ended 30 September.

This water year saw record rainfall in October and the driest January-to-March period in at least a century. Even these deluges, which at times produced flooding and debris flows, weren’t enough to combat the state’s dry spell. Drought-stricken landscapes do better with soft wetting rains than they do with surges, and it will take more than a few winter storms to ameliorate California’s water shortages.

Fueled by the climate crisis, which will both worsen dry conditions and spur stronger storms, this weather whiplash is likely to become more common as the planet warms, scientists say.

Spiking temperatures exacerbate and intensify drought conditions, baking moisture out of landscapes at the same time that plants, animals and people require more moisture to adapt to hot conditions. Meanwhile, the weather phenomenon La Niña, a pattern characterized by surface ocean temperatures that can cause heat increases and rainfall shortages, is also expected to occur for a third straight year, increasing the potential for less precipitation.

Another dry year would mean little to no water deliveries from state supplies to southern California cities beyond what’s needed for drinking and bathing. Farmers who rely on state and federal supplies would also see minimal water during another dry year, putting even greater strain on groundwater supplies often used as a backup to keep crops alive.

WALL STREET, EPA Are Behind Jackson's Water Crisis: Matthew Cunningham-Cook

Wall Street Is Behind Jackson’s Water Crisis

In August, clean water stopped flowing from residents’ taps in Jackson, Mississippi. The crisis lasted more than six weeks, leaving 150,000 people without a consistent source of safe water. The catastrophe can be traced back to a decision by a credit ratings agency four years ago that massively inflated the city’s borrowing costs for infrastructure improvements, most notably for its water and sewer system

n 2018, ratings analysts at Moody’s Investor Service — a credit rating agency with a legacy of misconduct — downgraded Jackson’s bond rating to a junk status, citing in part the “low wealth and income indicators of residents.” The decision happened even though Jackson has never defaulted on its debt.

Moody’s move jacked up the price of borrowing for Jackson, costing the cash-strapped city between $2 and $4 million per year in additional debt service costs — a massive financial roadblock to officials’ plans to fix the municipality’s aging water system. And since the state of Mississippi and the federal government refused to use their powers to address the city’s infrastructure problems, that meant Jackson was essentially powerless to stop the impending catastrophe.

The situation underscores how Wall Street works to prevent governments from fixing their public works and contributing to an infrastructure crisis nationwide. Such actions by ratings agencies are particularly harmful in majority Black and Brown areas like Jackson, which have tight budgets and often receive minimal federal support. ...

“The practices of the ratings agencies are often extremely racist,” Brittany Alston, research director at the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), told The Lever. “We did an analysis that showed that all the cities at the bottom of the ratings scale have been majority-minority. As I’ve been monitoring the reporting, I’ve noted how the local government is characterized, I’ve heard the term ‘mismanagement’ multiple times.”

Alston continued: “I think that term has been used to really vilify local governments who are working with what they have, and are struggling because they’re stuck in a system that has denied them federal support for decades.” The federal government’s share of contributions to water infrastructure fell from 31 percent in 1977 to just 4 percent in 2017.

Florida's Deadliest Hurricane in Years May Worsen Inequality, Housing Amid DeSantis's Culture War

Wax worm saliva rapidly breaks down plastic bags, scientists discover

Enzymes that rapidly break down plastic bags have been discovered in the saliva of wax worms, which are moth larvae that infest beehives.

The enzymes are the first reported to break down polyethylene within hours at room temperature and could lead to cost-effective ways of recycling the plastic.

The discovery came after one scientist, an amateur beekeeper, cleaned out an infested hive and found the larvae started eating holes in a plastic refuse bag. The researchers said the study showed insect saliva may be “a depository of degrading enzymes which could revolutionise [the cleanup of polluting waste]”.

Polyethylene makes up 30% of all plastic production and is used in bags and other packaging that make up a significant part of worldwide plastic pollution. The only recycling at scale today uses mechanical processes and creates lower-value products.

Chemical breakdown could create valuable chemicals or, with some further processing, new plastic, thereby avoiding the need for new virgin plastic made from oil. The enzymes can be easily synthesised and overcome a bottleneck in plastic degradation, the researchers said, which is the initial breaking of the polymer chains. That usually requires a lot of heating, but the enzymes work at normal temperatures, in water and at neutral pH.

Also of Interest

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

Ukraine - What Explains The Recent Russian Retreats?

Oil Traders Are Cashing In on Volatile Markets

Nobody Cares About The Labour Files

Mexico: reporters and activists hacked with NSO spyware despite assurances

Hypothermia deaths of unhoused people rise sharply in Los Angeles, records reveal

The Onion defends right to parody in very real supreme court brief supporting local satirist

Biden Promises Puerto Rico $60M for Hurricane Fiona. Will U.S. Repeat Mistakes of Hurricane Maria?

Left WAR For Deep State Control Under Biden

Ben & Jerry’s Founder Showing Up At Assange Rally!

80 Percent Of Twitter Accounts Are Bots!

A Little Night Music

Memphis Minnie - Shout the Boogie

Memphis Minnie - Bumble Bee

Memphis Minnie - I Hate To See The Sun Go Down

Memphis Minnie - I'm Selling My Pork Chops (but I'm Giving My Gravy Away)

Memphis Minnie - In My Girlish Days

Memphis Minnie - Joe Louis Strut

Memphis Minnie - Dirty Mother For You

Memphis Minnie - Pig Meat On The Line

Memphis Minnie & Little Walter - Lake Michigan

Memphis Minnie - Kissing In The Dark