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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Luther Tucker

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Chicago blues guitarist Luther Tucker. Enjoy!

^{Luther Tucker - Keep on Drinking}

"When I go around in America and I see the bulk of the white people, they do not feel oppressed; they feel powerless... and we understand the psychological genocide that they have already inflicted upon their own people."

-- John Trudell

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News and Opinion

Biden’s plan for “peace” through war and genocide

On Saturday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by US President Joe Biden explaining that the United States’ support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is part of an integrated plan of world domination through military violence. Entitled “The US Won’t Back Down From the Challenge of Putin and Hamas,” Biden’s op-ed is a collection of non-sequiturs and empty phrases. But its essential content is a megalomaniacal argument that any effort to stop the killing in either Gaza or Ukraine through ceasefire would mean a surrender of America’s global hegemony. ...

Biden’s op-ed should put to rest any claim that the US’s failure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza is a mistake or misunderstanding. Rather, the United States sees crushing the resistance of the Palestinian people as critical to the US’s global strategy. He writes:

As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace. To Hamas’s members, every cease-fire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would once more perpetuate its hate.

In Biden’s worldview, the precondition for “peace” is a total surrender by the Palestinians. While he refers to Hamas, what he really means is that so long as the Palestinians believe it is possible to resist an occupying force that has dispossessed them of their land and illegally occupies it, American imperialism will continue its efforts to arm Israel and bomb the Palestinians into submission. The logic of Biden’s argument is a state of permanent genocidal war, until the last Palestinian is either killed or expelled from Gaza and the West Bank. Biden’s motto is the Orwellian slogan: “war is peace.”

Having bluntly declared the US’s total support for Israel, Biden goes on to add, with consummate imperialist hypocrisy, “There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory.” This, as everyone knows, is precisely what the Israeli government is doing. Israeli officials have made clear that their aim is, in the words of Israel’s agriculture minister, “Nakba 2023,” or as Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said, to expel the Palestinian population to “tent cities” in the Sinai desert. As for a “siege or blockade,” that is already happening, with the support of the Biden administration. ...

Biden’s argument weaves support for Israel’s genocide into a reboot of the Cold War-era “domino theory.” If the United States relents in its efforts to bomb the Palestinians into submission, American hegemony will collapse. The president declares, “Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make—including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East—will determine the direction of our future for generations to come.” He concludes, “Both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests—and for the good of the entire world.” In Biden’s worldview, US “national security interests”—that is, the domination of American imperialism over the planet—is synonymous with the “good of the entire world.”

Biden's WAPO Op-ed

It’s Impossible To Bomb A Population Into Submission And Obedience

One of the many, many things that sucks about all this is knowing that when there is a violent retaliation for Israel’s actions in Gaza which kills Israeli civilians, Israel will look up with Bambi-eyed innocence and say “What did we ever do to them?? We just want to live in peace!”

And the entire western press will amplify the same message. They’ll once again frame it as an “unprovoked” attack and say there’s “no justification” for what was done, frame every conversation as though history began on the day of that attack, and demand that everyone who wants to say anything critical of Israel first preface that criticism with an adequately forceful condemnation of a small group of militants on the other side of the world who have nothing to do with the person who is speaking.

When this act of violence occurs (and it will), the ones behind it will have watched Israel murder children by the thousands in Gaza in 2023. Maybe they’ll be the orphans of parents killed in the massacre. Maybe they’ll have seen their sister ripped apart by military explosives, their brother’s head blasted in half, their neighbors crushed by a bombed building, their family’s bodies burnt to blackened skeletons. Or maybe they, like all the rest of us, will have simply watched it all unfold on electronic screens.

Whatever the case, the circumstances in late 2023, which planted the seeds of vengeance that we will necessarily see sprout some time later, will go unmentioned by the authorized narrative-makers of the western world. The fact that the violence is simply Israel’s chickens coming home to roost will be erased from the story.

Again.

Did you know that since the United States brought its “war on terror” to Africa, terrorist attacks on that continent have increased by 75,000 percent? That’s right: 75, then three zeros, percent. I learned this neat little stat from a new article by journalist Nick Turse, who also notes that “according to the Pentagon, terrorist attacks in the Sahel region alone have resulted in 9,818 deaths — a 42,500% increase.”

People have been documenting the way attempts to bomb terrorism out of existence actually creates more terrorism for many years. In 2010 Professor Robert A Pape wrote an article for Foreign Policy titled “It’s the Occupation, Stupid” about his study with University of Chicago which found that suicide bombings are the result not of Islamic fundamentalism but of foreign military occupations.

Some notable excerpts:

• “More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation.”
• “As the United States has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, which have a combined population of about 60 million, total suicide attacks worldwide have risen dramatically — from about 300 from 1980 to 2003, to 1,800 from 2004 to 2009.”
• “Over 90 percent of suicide attacks worldwide are now anti-American.”
• “Each month, there are more suicide terrorists trying to kill Americans and their allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Muslim countries than in all the years before 2001 combined. From 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired. Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91 percent against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.”

Step 1: Destroy nations and displace tens of millions of people.
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. https://t.co/XVRyEVToZy

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 9, 2020

Journalist Jonathan Marshall wrote the following in 2017:

The most authoritative new study of the sources of terrorism and insurgency on the continent, Journey to Extremism in Africa (September 2017), finds that what triggers many individuals to join violent groups are incidents of government-sponsored violence, such as “killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend.”

“These findings throw into stark relief the question of how counter-terrorism and wider security functions of governments in at-risk environments conduct themselves with regard to human rights and due process,” concludes the report, based on interviews with more than 500 former members of militant organizations.

“State security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather than the reverse. . . These findings suggest that a dramatic reappraisal of state security-focused interventions is urgently required.”

Numerous other experts have drawn similar conclusions from conflict zones in the Middle East and Asia. In 2008, a RAND Corporation report on Lessons for Countering al-Qa’ida warned the U.S. military to “resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment. . . . Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended: It is often overused, alienates the local population by its heavy-handed nature, and provides a window of opportunity for terrorist-group recruitment.”

Similarly, the Stimson Task Force on U.S. Drone Policy, composed of former senior officials of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department, warned in 2014 that U.S. strikes had strengthened radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.

In other words, there’s no better way to make people want to attack you in whatever way they can than bombing their neighborhoods, killing and displacing their loved ones, and dominating them with an oppressive military occupation. All of which Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for generations.

The context behind the war in Gaza

Mnar Adley examines the background to the current war. pic.twitter.com/Xnx96VIQIw

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) October 13, 2023

October 7 was a response to decades of oppression and abuse by the Israeli regime. Israel created that violence, in the same way it created the violence that will with absolute certainty come its way in retaliation for its actions in Gaza today. The official narrative makers always try to restart history at the moment of the last act of violence from Palestinians, because it is only by framing such violence as unprovoked that they can legitimize the idea that it’s possible to bomb a population into submission and obedience.

But of course, it is not possible to bomb a population into submission and obedience. Every atrocity you inflict upon them will only increase their desire for revenge — a desire Israelis should sympathize with since it has consumed them and turned them into crazed genocide cheerleaders since October 7. But their desire for vengeance is only made possible by the false mainstream narrative that the attack came from nowhere, completely unprovoked.

The actual crime that Palestinians are being punished for is refusal to submit. That’s all this conflict has ever been, from the very beginning. Palestinians refused to accept being thrown off their land and killed and forcibly displaced at the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, and that refusal has seen them hammered with tremendous amounts of violence and oppression from year to year and from decade to decade under the premise that it’s possible to bomb and tyrannize a population into obedience.

Nothing will radicalize you toward violence faster than seeing your neighbors and loved ones ripped apart by military explosives supplied by a globe-spanning empire. Nothing will ensure further violent resistance more certainly than murdering Palestinian children by the thousands in plain view of everyone. Which means that nothing but restitution, reparations and return of land to the Palestinians will end this nightmare once and for all.

Israel Repeatedly Strikes U.N. Schools Housing Refugees

Intensified Israeli Airstrikes Push Gaza Death Toll Over 13,000

Israeli airstrikes on Gaza reportedly killed more than 100 Palestinians on Saturday—including upwards of 80 people in the hard-hit Jabalia refugee camp—bringing the Palestinian death toll in the 44-day war to over 13,000 as the Biden administration refuted reports of a breakthrough in cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that a pair of Israeli airstrikes on the densely populated Jabalia camp—including on a United Nations school where thousands of people were sheltering from relentless bombardment—killed more than 80 people. Among the dead are reportedly 32 members of the Abu Habal family, including 19 children.

"Shelters are a place for safety. Schools are a place for learning. Tragic news of the children, women, and men killed while sheltering at al-Fakhouri school in northern Gaza," United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said on social media. "Civilians cannot and should not have to bear this any longer."

Philippe Lazzarini, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, lamented the "horrifying images" he saw of the bombing, while stressing that "a humanitarian cease-fire cannot wait any longer."

Previous Israeli attacks on Jabalia—including one last week that killed at least 126 Palestinians—more than half of them children—have been condemned by international experts as war crimes.

Meanwhile, Palestinian officials said Israeli bombardment of an apartment building in Khan Younis in southern Gaza—where Israeli authorities had directed Palestinians to flee for their lives—killed 26 people and injured 23 more. Six Palestinians were also reportedly killed in an Israeli attack on a house in Deir Al-Balah.

Gaza officials said that more than 13,000 Palestinians—including over 5,500 children and 3,500 women—have been killed during Israel's retaliatory war on the embattled enclave since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that left around 1,200 Israeli and others dead and approximately 240 people taken hostage

Inciting to GENOCIDE, Israeli Parliament's Deputy Speaker, Nissim Vaturi (Likud), says Israel has been "too humane" & must "Burn Gaza now no less!"

Apartheid Israel has leveled major parts of Gaza, murdering 11,470+ Palestinians, including at least 4,700 children.#GazaGenocide pic.twitter.com/toewBwpZV1

— BDS movement (@BDSmovement) November 18, 2023

Israel’s Raid on Al-Shifa Questioned as IDF Fails to Present Hard Evidence Linking Hamas to Hospital

Gaza’s main hospital has become a ‘death zone’, says WHO

Dar al-Shifa, the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, has become a “death zone”, the World Health Organization has said, with a mass grave at the entrance and only 25 staff left to care for 291 seriously ill patients after orders from the Israeli army to evacuate the complex. The WHO managed to access the medical centre in Gaza City on Sunday after it was raided by Israeli forces earlier this week. Israel alleged the militant group Hamas used al-Shifa as a command centre, identifying it as a key target in its military operation despite international outcry. ...

On Sunday, the WHO and Palestinian Red Crescent started evacuating those who were unable to flee on foot, including 32 babies in extremely critical condition, trauma patients with severely infected wounds due to a lack of antibiotics, and 29 patients with serious spinal injuries.

The babies were taken to the south of Gaza “in preparation for their transfer to the Emirates hospital in Rafah” in Egypt, the Palestinian Red Crescent said in a statement, through the Palestinian territory’s only connection to the outside world. Regarding the other patients, the WHO warned that facilities in Gaza’s south, which is supposedly safer than Gaza City, were already overwhelmed and an immediate ceasefire was needed given the extreme levels of suffering. ...

As reporters on the ground described seeing ambulances travelling north to Gaza City to assist with the Shifa hospital evacuations on Sunday, news emerged from the international NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) that one person was killed when a convoy carrying staff and family members came under attack on Saturday while evacuating from its clinic near al-Shifa, despite coordinating its passage with both sides.

At least 40 people, including eight premature babies, died this week at al-Shifa because of a lack of electricity to operate life-saving equipment such as incubators and dialysis machines, the UN has said.

Israel's war on hospitals

Good summary of main statements from Israeli officials on Gazapic.twitter.com/HmVR9kJqZy

— Bruno Maçães (@MacaesBruno) November 9, 2023

Al-Shifa Footage RELEASED; Hamas Brought Hostages To Hospital On Oct 7, Says IDF

‘It’s basically hell on earth’: Gaza City left totally bereft of healthcare

In the early hours of Saturday morning, over piles of concrete and rubble, crowds of doctors and patients walked miles through the destroyed streets of Gaza City, forced to evacuate on foot from what remained of its hospitals. Medics said they feared leaving critically ill patients behind in a city now largely reduced to rubble and overtaken by Israeli forces, where hospitals had been operating without power, fuel, water or food. “It’s basically hell on earth,” said William Schomburg, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza, describing what remained of life inside the city.

For weeks, tens of thousands of people had hoped that taking refuge in Gaza City’s hospitals would provide the closest thing to safety as the enclave endured intensifying bombardments. But as Israeli forces drew closer to their facilities and then raided Gaza’s largest hospital, Dar al-Shifa last week, thousands were displaced along with medical staff, walking through destroyed streets to the south of the enclave.

The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said Israeli forces demanded the evacuation of al-Shifa hospital on Saturday morning, three days after a raid on the facility. Medics said they were told they had an hour to evacuate the hospital, formerly the centrepiece of Gaza’s medical system.

Medhat Abbas, director general of the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza, recalled a conversation he had with orthopaedics specialist Adnan Al Borsh who left al-Shifa in the early hours of Saturday. He said Al Borsh wept as he described the experience of walking out of the hospital with other medics and displaced people. Israeli soldiers, he said, patrolled the complex, with snipers deployed around the perimeter. “We could hear the wounded. We couldn’t help them. People were dying,” Al Borsh said. “We were forced to walk. As we walked out of al-Shifa hospital we saw bodies in the streets. The hospital was destroyed; no water, no oxygen, no medicine and attacks on every building [in the complex].” ...

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied that they had ordered an evacuation. Instead, they said, “the director of Shifa hospital requested that the IDF help secure an evacuation route from the hospital. The IDF therefore agreed and assisted evacuation efforts. At no point did the IDF order the evacuation of patients or medical teams and in fact proposed that any request for medical evacuation will be facilitated by the IDF.”

Hostage DEAL For Women, Children Reached?

Just when you thought that your disgust and revulsion for Genocide Joe had peaked ...

US Says Israel Has ‘Right’ to Expand Military Operations in South Gaza But Wants a Delay

A US official said Sunday that Israel has the “right” to expand its military operations in southern Gaza but said the Biden administration is looking for a delay in the plan to account for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have fled fighting from the north.

“In the event that we believe that Israel is likely to embark on combat operations, including in the south, we believe both that they have the right to do that, but that there is a real concern, because hundreds of thousands of residents of Gaza have fled now from the north to the south at Israel’s request,” US Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer told CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” ...

Israel has been bombing southern Gaza throughout the war, even after telling Palestinians in the north to flee to the south. Now, Israeli officials are vowing to further expand the war in the south, and ground operations are expected. Reuters reported on Saturday that more civilian casualties are expected in a southern offensive but that Israel is not deterred by that fact.

Malta resolution moves UN closer to binding ceasefire

Haaretz: Israeli Helicopter Fire ‘Hit’ Music Festival Attendees on October 7

An Israeli military helicopter fired and “hit” attendees of the Nova music festival in southern Israel during the Hamas attack on October 7, Haaretz reported on Saturday, citing a police investigation of the incident.

The report reads: “According to a police source, the investigation also indicates that an IDF combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants.” ...

The Haaretz report is the latest evidence indicating the Israeli military was responsible for some of the civilian casualties incurred on October 7 and in the fighting that ensued in the days after the initial Hamas attack. A report from The Grayzone compiled evidence from Israeli media, including a report from the newspaper Yedioth Aharanoth that said helicopter pilots had “tremendous difficulty” distinguishing Hamas fighters from Israelis on the ground.

US FREAKS Over Israel Attacks on South Gaza

Deputy Knesset speaker calls for burning Gaza

A far-right Likud MK who also serves as deputy speaker of the Knesset calls for burning down Gaza.

“All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing. We are too humane. Burn Gaza now no less!” Nissim Vaturi tweets after the war cabinet approved the entry of two trucks of fuel per day to prevent the collapse of the sewage treatment system, which risked a mass-disease outbreak.

Myth Of "Western Civilization" Destroyed In 2 Minutes By U.N. Palestinian Representative

"Genocide Joe Lyin' Biden"

Biden writes two different letters on Gaza war, reflecting his US audience

United States President Joe Biden has delivered two different messages on the Israel-Hamas war to pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel Americans, NBC News has reported, based on copies of official White House correspondence.

While one letter showcased Biden’s support for Israel against Palestinian group Hamas’s “terrorism”, the other spoke about the US administration’s efforts to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip.

According to NBC, the letter sent to pro-Israelis invoked the Holocaust in relation to the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel. It also pledged continuous support to Israel and efforts to return the captives taken by Hamas and being held in Gaza. ... “The United States stands with Israel,” it continued. “We will continue to ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself against terrorism in accordance with international humanitarian law.”

On the other hand, Biden’s letter to pro-Palestinians focused on aid to Palestine and made no mention of the Holocaust or of US support for Israel. “We mourn the many innocent Palestinians who have been killed,” NBC reported Biden’s second letter saying, dated November 8. It added that the administration “is working closely with partners to ensure that life-saving assistance – including, food, water, and medicine can urgently reach innocent Palestinians in Gaza” and emphasised that “the United States stands unequivocally for the protection of civilians during conflict”.

While the two letters do not appear to contradict one another, or Biden’s policies, NBC reported that it was not common for the White House to craft different versions of a letter on the same topic that vary so much in their emphasis.

Argentina presidential election: far-right libertarian Javier Milei wins after rival concedes

Javier Milei, a volatile far-right libertarian who has vowed to “exterminate” inflation and take a chainsaw to the state, has been elected president of Argentina, catapulting South America’s second largest economy into an unpredictable and potentially turbulent future.

With nearly 99% of votes counted, the Mick Jagger impersonating TV celebrity-turned politician, who is often compared to Donald Trump, had secured 55.7% of the vote compared to Massa’s 44.2%.

“Today the reconstruction of Argentina begins. Today is a historic night for Argentina,” Milei told jubilant supporters at his campaign headquarters in Buenos Aires, calling his victory a “miracle”.

Milei promised “drastic changes” to tackle Argentina’s “tragic reality” of soaring inflation and widespread poverty.

2024 House Appropriations Bills Slash Vital Programs

The fiscal year 2024 appropriations bills approved by the House Appropriations Committee make major cuts in a wide range of domestic priorities. Among those hardest hit are programs crucial to the well-being of families with low incomes and their children, to public health, to job training and protection of workers’ rights, to a clean environment, and to fair administration of tax laws. The House bills are highly partisan and deviate sharply from the levels set in the bipartisan agreement to raise the federal debt limit in May.

In contrast, the Senate-passed appropriations bills are lean but include substantially fewer cuts and rescissions (which take back already enacted funding), are largely consistent with agreed-on levels, and have strong bipartisan support. They offer a better path toward funding that meets national needs, although there are some programmatic areas where the Senate levels are too low to meet those needs, such as with WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) and housing assistance.

As part of the debt limit deal, the House, Senate, and Biden administration agreed on defense and non-defense appropriations totals for 2024, calling for regular 2024 non-defense appropriations to be held to the same dollar total as in 2023. Reaching the 2023 non-defense level in 2024 requires not only setting appropriations at the cap established in the debt limit legislation but also adhering to the agreements negotiators had signed off on that provide offsets to accommodate additional funding. Such a freeze at last year’s level is fairly austere. It requires any increases that are necessary to meet rising costs, increasing needs, or new situations to be offset by cuts in other areas.

While the Senate’s 2024 appropriations bills generally adhere to that approach (with small deviations agreed to on a bipartisan basis), the House’s Republican majority began writing non-defense appropriations bills with severe cuts to vital programs, at a total that is roughly $153 billion lower than had been agreed on. In the bills drafted by the House Appropriations Committee, the House Republicans achieve those cuts in two basic ways: by reducing many 2024 appropriations by about $59 billion (7%) below the 2023 levels, and by rescinding $94 billion of already enacted funding, almost all from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

This report describes some of the serious cuts and shortfalls in the House appropriations bills, affecting areas such as education, child care, housing, job training, public health, medical research, nutrition assistance, environmental protection, renewable energy, enforcement of civil rights and worker protection laws, and operation of the Social Security system. It also describes the proposed rescissions of previously enacted funding, which include amounts that had been provided to fairly enforce tax laws and make sure that wealthy individuals and corporations pay their share, and to combat climate change, promote clean energy, and assist farmers.

Rosalynn Carter, wife of Jimmy Carter and former first lady, dies aged 96

Rosalynn Carter, wife of the 39th president Jimmy Carter, has died at the couple’s Georgia home aged 96. ...

On Friday, her family announced she had entered hospice care at home, joining her 99-year-old husband in end-of-life treatment in the Plains one-story residence they shared since before Jimmy Carter was elected a Georgia state senator in 1962.

The former president has been in hospice care there since February after declining further medical intervention for his own health issues.

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Biden UNELECTABLE After Support From Young Dems CRATERS; Israel Stance DOOMING REELECTION

RFK Jr BEATING ALL 2024 Democratic, Republican Primary Candidates: Harvard-Harris Poll

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Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1m homes

Twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of 2m homes, research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveals. The tycoons include the Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, the tech billionaires Bill Gates, Larry Page and Michael Dell, the inventor and social media company owner Elon Musk and the Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim.

Analysis by Oxfam and US researchers of their luxury purchases, which include superyachts, private jets, cars, helicopters and palatial mansions, combined with the impact of their financial investments and shareholdings reveals that they account for almost 17m tonnes of CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gas emissions annually. This is the same as the CO₂ and equivalent emissions from powering 2.1m homes or the emissions from 4.6 coal-fired power plants over a year, according to conversion data from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

The true scale of the investment emissions of these individuals is not generally systematically calculated or reported. Oxfam analysts working with two US academics, Beatriz Barros and Richard Wilk, used publicly available data to calculate the greenhouse gas impacts. “Billionaires generate obscene amounts of carbon pollution with their yachts and private jets – but this is dwarfed by the pollution caused by their investments,” said Oxfam International’s inequality policy adviser Alex Maitland.

“Through the corporations they own, billionaires emit a million times more carbon than the average person. They tend to favour investments in heavily polluting industries, like fossil fuels. ... The lifestyle emissions were estimated by examining the carbon footprint of the billionaires’ purchases, such as the $500m superyacht that Oceanco built recently for Bezos.

US industry disposed of at least 60m pounds of PFAS waste in last five years

US industry disposed of at least 60m pounds of PFAS “forever chemical” waste over the last five years, and did so with processes that probably pollute the environment around disposal sites, a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data finds. The 60m pounds estimate is likely to be a “dramatic” undercount because PFAS waste is unregulated in the US and companies are not required to record its disposal, the paper’s author, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), wrote.

Still, the findings “depict a vast, unregulated, spreading web of PFAS waste disposal in the United States”, Peer said. “These data show that we are steadily poisoning ourselves, our waters, and our food chain with extremely persistent toxic chemicals,” said Tim Whitehouse, Peer’s executive director and a former EPA attorney. ...

Peer identified over 10,300 PFAS waste shipments between June 2018 and June 2023. The most common disposal methods were incineration, landfilling, discharge into wastewater treatment systems, and deep well injection. Facilities disposing of the largest amounts of PFAS waste included a US Ecology plant in Nevada, a deep-well injection site near Houston, and an incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, just upwind from East Palestine, the site of a toxic Norfolk Southern train derailment in February.

Suck carbon from the air? US facility launches novel climate solution

Inside a vast new warehouse in the California town of Tracy, tall towers of trays containing a gray powder are stacked in neat rows. It’s all part of Heirloom, a company that promises to use limestone to directly remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it deep within concrete, keeping it out of the atmosphere. The facility – the first commercial direct air capture (DAC) plant in the US – opened last week.

Capturing and stowing away carbon from the air was once considered a far-fetched idea. Today, scientists and political leaders see it as an inevitable tool in mitigating the climate crisis. Money from both private and public sources is pouring in, and the Biden administration has committed to spending at least $3.7bn to kick-start DAC and other carbon-removal projects across the United States.

Heirloom’s facility uses limestone – the second most abundant mineral on Earth – to sponge up carbon from the air. The process begins when industrial kilns heat the limestone to 1,650F (899C), which breaks it down into carbon dioxide and calcium oxide. The carbon dioxide is then stored in con​​crete, which can be used for construction projects. The remaining powder – calcium oxide – is spread on trays that are sprayed with water and sit in the open air and absorb carbon, which naturally binds to the gas. The process then begins all over again, using heat to separate out the newly captured carbon. ...

Making a noticeable dent could take some time. The facility can absorb a maximum of 1,000 metric tons of CO2 per year – just a fraction of the annual emissions from a gas-fired power plant. The company hopes to remove 1bn tons of carbon dioxide by 2035, though Samala admits scaling up will be a challenge: to reach the company’s goals in the next 12 years, they’ll have to increase their capacity three times each year. ...

Heirloom says it’s powered by renewable energy from a local provider, and that it won’t take investments from oil and gas companies. One use for carbon captured from DAC plants is to enhance oil extraction by injecting carbon into oil wells to make them more productive, but that doesn’t align with the company’s values. “We felt the space needed leadership and values and we wanted to make sure that the carbon dioxide pulled from the air is not used as an excuse to put more CO2 into the air,” said Samala.

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Also of Interest

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

The War Machine Wants You to Condemn Hamas

Chris Hedges: Israel is Shutting Down its Human Laboratory in Gaza

Fifteen Things You Should Never Have To Say To A Country

Craig Murray: Activating the Genocide Convention

Israel Doesn’t Have A Gen-Z Problem, It Has A Morality Problem

Scott Ritter: The 2-State Solution’s Nuclear Option

Democrats clash over conditioning aid to Israel

Nakba generation relive trauma of displacement in Gaza

The fate of Hamas’ captives could tear Israeli society apart

Protesters Demanding Gaza Cease-Fire Shut Down California Democratic Convention

Alumni Withhold Donations Over University Responses to Pro-Palestine Protests

Michael Hudson: Were the Prophets Anti-Semitic? Debunking Netanyahu’s Distorted Biblical Justifications for Genocide

One Religion's War Against All Others

Viral PANIC As Bin Laden Letter Spreads on TikTok

CNN ROASTED For Silence on Insane Israel Guest Take

Ro Khanna Absolutely DESTROYED By Jewish Woman!

Restructuring of the Global Economy - Michael Hudson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

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A Little Night Music

Luther Tucker - Mean Old World

Luther Tucker - Sweet Home Chicago

Luther Tucker & The Ford Blues Band - L.T. Shuffle

Luther Tucker - Luther's tribute to Elmore

Luther Tucker - Playboy

James Cotton & Luther Tucker Live

Luther Tucker - Can't Live Without It

James Cotton & Luther Tucker - Worried Life Blues, This Woman Is Killing Me

Charlie Musselwhite, Luther Tucker, Bobby Murray

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