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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Furry Lewis

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Memphis bluesman Walter "Furry" Lewis. Enjoy!

^{Furry Lewis - Furry's Blues}

"Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities."

-- Harriet Ann Jacobs

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News and Opinion

Theatre of Cruelty—And Its Double: From Aaron Bushnell to Biden's Gaza Airdrop

The head of Save the Children described the Biden Administration’s recent airdrop of food into Gaza airdrop as “theater.” That it is. So is the Vice President’s sudden “demand” for a six-week ceasefire. For that matter, so is the ceasefire itself — if it happens. It’s likely to be characterized by ongoing immiseration and slow death, to be followed by the faster forms of killing.

It’s an American theater of cruelty whose real purpose is to deliver votes for the president, not meals for the starving. It will end as it began: in fire. The question is, what kind of fire and for whom?

The American airdrop consisted of 38,000 “MRE’s,” or “Meals Ready to Eat,” those unwholesome feed bags the US military buys by the millions to feed its underpaid and undervalued soldiers. To call this gesture a publicity stunt is unfair to publicity stunts, which are hollow but rarely lethal. It’s part of a killing strategy of deflection and deception.

More than 2,100,000 people are starving in Gaza; the children are already dying. If divided evenly, every person in Gaza would receive precisely 1.8 percent of each bag pictured above – that is, if they got any of it, which is unlikely amidst all the US-backed chaos. Hunger can’t be cured homeopathically, with microscopic doses.

The average weight of an MRE is 22 ounces. (I looked it up.) That means this airdrop provided roughly one-third of an ounce of food for every man, woman, and child. That’s like a bird hunter scattering breadcrumbs for pigeons before he starts killing them again.

At the going price for MREs (I looked that up, too), the retail cost of the food dropped comes to $617,405. That’s 29 cents for every starving person in Gaza (which is pretty much all of them.) And the military probably got a discount.

Perhaps the cost should be billed to the Biden campaign. Its real purpose is to offset the growing backlash against the administration’s support for mass slaughter, which was quantified in the Michigan primary’s surge of anti-Biden “uncommitted” votes. The president has seemed publicly insensate to the deaths of children, but even his dimming organs of perception can smell unfriendly votes. And whatever he doesn’t catch, his advisors presumably will.

Meanwhile, the president and his party continue to push a bill that would provide $14 billion in military aid to Israel. That’s more than twenty-two thousand times as much as the US spent on this food drop. Roughly $10 billion of that would consist of weapons for the IDF, including “advanced weapons systems” like the ones that are currently destroying apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals.

That cost should be billed to the American conscience.

From the Washington Post: “Critics say airdrops are expensive and ineffective, and argue diplomatic efforts should be focused on opening Gaza’s border crossing to allow aid convoys access.” But that would require confronting Israel, which the Biden Administration has yet to do in any meaningful way.

The United States could send food aid on ships to the Gaza shore with troops through the Rafah Crossing. It could confront Israel with a simple choice: fire on our military, or accept that the policy of mass starvation has come to an end. The fact that it doesn’t means that the dying will continue.

The same inaction gives the lie to Kamala Harris’ belated discovery that “people in Gaza are starving” and her lofty call for “an immediate ceasefire” – which sounds good, except that the administration is absolving Israel of all responsibility for the deaths and for the lack of a ceasefire.

The latest evidence for that was a press briefing in which two unnamed “senior administration officials” spoke on conditions of anonymity (conditions which the media should not have accepted, according to the professional standards of journalism.)

“Can you say broadly whether you feel that Israel is cooperating enough on getting aid into Gaza?” they were asked. “Do you feel that having done this, having had to do this airdrop today, is a statement at all on their cooperation?”

“The challenge is from various sources.” Replied “Senior Administration Official,” but “it is not a reflection on Israel or Israeli practices. It's a reflection on need. The need is there.”

Got that? Israel had nothing to do with it. “The need” just appeared and is now simply “there.”

Palestine is the land of biblical miracles, but that’s a new one.

Robert Ford, a much-decorated career diplomat and former ambassador to Syria, tweeted:

“I've seen Israel humiliate previous US administrations, but … forcing USA to do airdrops of aid to Gaza as if USA is no better than Egypt & Jordan is Israel's worst humiliation of USA i've ever seen.”

Even now, Biden responds to this humiliation with more acts of submission and collaboration. His unnamed officials blamed the ongoing violence solely on one party, saying it continues

“because a terrorist group holding hostages, including Americans, is continuing to fight and attack. They could stop this -- Hamas could -- tonight, instantly, and allow the free movement of assistance, medicine, care to go to the civilians of Gaza with whom, under whom, in whose homes they have embedded themselves for these past 17 years.”

This is Netanyahu’s rhetoric. But even if all these claims are true (they’re highly disputable), none justify the ongoing, criminal violence being waged on a civilian population.

The anonymous officials also proclaimed that Hamas is holding up a ceasefire agreement but insisted that Israel has “more or less” agreed to it. Hamas showed up the following day for a negotiation session; Israel did not. That was no surprise. Anyone who has done any deals at all knows that people either agree or they don’t. “More or less” is the language of the huckster, not the diplomat.

No wonder those officials remained anonymous. Perhaps they, unlike their boss, retain a vestigial sense of shame.

But I doubt it.

Neither the president nor his newly high-minded VP have renounced their own Senate bill, which provides billions to the Israeli war machine while ending all support for UNRWA — the most vital aid agency in Gaza — and pledging no minimum amount of aid in return.

Even the European Union, whose actions have largely been shameful on this issue, has reversed itself on UNRWA. Its top diplomat, Josep Borrell, has acknowledged that UNRWA is an “irreplaceable actor.”

The EU is still holding back some funds, regrettably, but it has released $54 million and has promised additional funding after certain conditions are met. Biden and his party have yet to change their position, even as more children die of starvation.

Which brings us to an update on the sacrifice of airman Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself outside the Israeli Embassy while shouting “Free Palestine!” A law enforcement officer shouted, “I don't need guns, I need fire extinguishers.”

That phrase should become the guiding principle of American foreign policy.

I’ve been reluctant to write about Bushnell’s act. Not because I don’t admire it — I do — but because those of us who have struggled with depression have an intimate relationship with suicide. Perhaps too intimate to be objective.

But this wasn’t suicide. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965. In his letter, he explains the actions of the monks who immolated themselves during the Vietnam War. One sentence struck me then, just as it strikes me now:

“The importance is not to take one’s life, but to burn.”

He continued:

“To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.”

My fear – and, frankly, my expectation – was that Bushnell’s sacrifice would be ignored. Instead, it has resonated. His memory has been kept alive in the discourse. Maybe, just maybe, something is awakening in the American conscience.

The French actor and playwright Antonin Artaud developed the concept of a “theater of cruelty” as a way to awaken audiences with “the fiery magnetism of its images,” until it becomes “a spiritual therapeutics whose touch can never be forgotten.”

One of Artaud’s dramas was intended to reflect “the Fall of Jerusalem, according to the Bible and history; with the blood-red color that trickles from it and the people's feeling of abandon and panic visible even in the light.”

History repeats itself, as the indigenous people of the region once again feel a sense of abandon and panic that is almost “visible in the light.”

Artaud was also fascinated by the story of Rabbi Shimon, a pioneer in the same mystical tradition that must have guided my great-grandfather as a rabbinical judge in 19th-century Russia-Ukraine.

The story of Shimon’s death as it has been sent down goes like this, as summarized in a Jewish Kabbalist website:

“On that day fire surrounded the house of Rabbi Shimon ... fire from the heavens descended and surrounded Rabbi Shimon. It gave him protection and opened a pure path for his soul ascending the upper worlds.”

Artaud wrote that Shimon’s mystical story “has the ever-present violence and force of a conflagration.” The story of the rabbi “who burns like fire,” he wrote, “is as immediate as fire itself.”

The fiery magnetism of Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice has touched the world. The theater of cruelty, which was not designed to be cruel, has found its mirror image in love and sacrifice. I’m no theologian, but who knows? Maybe the fire that took Aaron’s life will provide protection and a pure path – for him, and those for whom he died.

But it’s not enough to hope. Action is needed now, before it’s too late, because fire comes in many forms. It can burn slowly, giving light and warmth. Or it can arise suddenly, unexpectedly, assuming the shape of inescapable justice as it moves among us.

Israel's flour massacre shocks the world

Aid corridor needed urgently to prevent famine in north Gaza, says WFP official

The deaths of more than 100 people when Israeli forces opened fire near an aid convoy in Gaza was a tragedy that should have been foreseen and could have been prevented, the World Food Programme country director for Palestine has said.

Matthew Hollingworth also said an aid corridor into northern Gaza was needed urgently to prevent a “man-made” famine there after Palestinians were starved of food at terrifying speed and scale.

“To have a situation today with half a million people facing famine in just five months is extraordinary at that scale,” he said. “There’s nowhere else in the world today with this many people at risk of famine. Nowhere. And it’s all man-made.” ...

Hollingworth said the north of the territory would need to be flooded with aid to stabilise the situation. People would only stop risking their lives for aid when they had got several days’ or weeks’ worth of food and knew that an aid pipeline is functioning, he said.

He estimated that would require a daily minimum of 600 tonnes of food aid, or 30 trucks, for 10 days, starting immediately.

Aaron Maté (The GrayZone) : Global Power Plays and Israeli Electoral Shifts

Twin babies among 14 killed in Israeli airstrike on house in Rafah

Five-month-old twins who were conceived after three rounds of IVF have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on their family home in Rafah, southern Gaza. Naeim and Wissam Abu Anza were among 14 Palestinians – including six children – killed in the strike at the weekend, according to survivors and health officials. The babies’ father was among the dead. Another nine people are still missing under the rubble.

The twins, a boy and a girl, were born less than a week after the start of the Israel-Gaza war. Their parents had spent 10 years trying to conceive.

Rania Abu Anza had woken up at about 10pm on Saturday to breastfeed her son. She went back to sleep cradling the babies and with her husband beside them. An hour and a half later, the house collapsed in an explosion. ...

Dr Marwan al-Hams, the director of the hospital where the bodies from Saturday’s airstrike were taken, said six children and four women were among the 14 people killed. As well as her husband and children, Abu Anza lost a sister, a nephew, a pregnant cousin and other relatives.

Farouq Abu Anza, a family member, said about 35 people were staying at the house, some of whom had been displaced from other areas. He said they were all civilians, mostly children, and that there were no militants among them.

Australian PM First Western Leader Referred to ICC as 'Accessory to Genocide in Gaza'

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is one of several Western leaders who have provided political and material support of the Israeli government and military over the past five months as their bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 30,000 people, but on Monday he became the first to be referred to the International Criminal Court for being an "accessory to genocide."

More than 100 lawyers supported the referral under Article 15 of the Rome Statute, arguing that Albanese, a member of the Labor Party, as well as members of his Cabinet and of Parliament, have provided Israel with "rhetorical support in their public statements, their press conferences, their speeches" as well as material assistance, as attorney Sheryn Omeri told ABC's "News Breakfast."

Omeri said thee aid Australia has "most particularly" provided since Israel began attacking Gaza has been the export of F-35 fighter jet parts as well as military intelligence through the government's surveillance work at Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap in Australia's Northern Territory.

While Albanese has recently called on Israel to respect international law, said Omeri, "it's been months since the 7th of October, 2023, and between then and now there has been very little in the way of urging restraint on Israel and discouraging what the International Court of Justice found on the 26th of January was a plausible case of genocide."

The 92-page document compiled by the legal team lays out a number of specific ways Albanese and other Australian officials have acted as an accessory to genocide, including:

Freezing $6 million in funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East amid a humanitarian crisis based on unsubstantiated claims by Israel;

Providing military aid and approving defenee exports to Israel, which could be used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the course of the prima facie commission of genocide and crimes against humanity;

Ambiguously deploying an Australian military contingent to the region, where its location and exact role have not been disclosed; and

Permitting Australians, either explicitly or implicitly, to travel to Israel to join the IDF and take part in its attacks on Gaza.

"The Rome Statute provides four modes of individual criminal responsibility, two of which are accessorial," Omeri explained in a statement.

Along with Albanese, U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are among the Western leaders who have repeatedly defended Israel's actions in Gaza—despite the genocidal intent expressed in numerous public statements by Israeli leaders.

Biden was sued in federal court in January for alleged "complicity in the Israeli government's unfolding genocide." That case is still making its way through the U.S. appeals process.

UN Report CAN'T Prove 10/7 Mass Sex Assault Claims

UN finds ‘convincing information’ that Hamas raped and tortured Israeli hostages

The UN’s special envoy on sexual violence in conflict has reported “clear and convincing information” that some women and children hostages held by Hamas had been subjected to rape and sexualised torture and that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe such abuses were “ongoing”.

The special envoy, Pramila Patten, also reported on Monday that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe sexual assaults including rape and gang-rape in several places took place during the 7 October attacks by Hamas.

Patten led a nine-strong team of experts to Israel and the West Bank in the first half of February, but cautioned that there were limitations on what it could achieve in a limited time given a number of constraints.

Primary among those limitations was that the team did not manage to meet any survivors of sexual violence during the 7 October attacks, “despite concerted efforts encouraging them to come forward”.

Patten said some were still undergoing trauma therapy, some had been relocated inside Israel or moved abroad, and some first responder witnesses had been deployed in the army. She added: “The lack of trust by survivors of the 7 October attacks and families of hostages in national institutions and international organisations, such as the United Nations, as well as the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public, hindered access to survivors of the attacks, including potential survivors/victims of sexual violence.”

Netanyahu FURIOUS Gantz Is Meeting with Dems, UN Report Says Oct 7 Rapes LIKELY

How Gaza activists in Minnesota are pushing the US wave of ‘uncommitted’ votes

Minnesota organizers, inspired by the strong turnout for an uncommitted vote in Michigan, quickly put together a coalition to get out the word that Minnesota voters should follow Michigan’s example.

In Michigan, Democrats set a goal to get 10,000 uncommitted votes; more than 100,000 people instead voted uncommitted, a message to Joe Biden that Democratic voters demand his action on Palestine. The Israel-Gaza war serves as a key liability for the US president in his re-election bid, and his positions on the issue have turned some Democrats away from him during what is shaping up to be a close race with Donald Trump.

After Michigan’s success, organizers in other progressive states that have uncommitted options on their ballots have started working on local efforts to keep the pressure on Biden for a ceasefire. Minnesota, a Super Tuesday state, has a few factors that give it potential for a good turnout for the uncommitted vote: high voter turnout overall, a progressive history, a large Muslim community. Minnesota’s campaign could further buoy the movement and boost the protest vote in other states, organizers hope.

“We vote in Minnesota. Number one in the country for turnout,” said Jaylani Hussein, a co-chair of the Abandon Biden campaign in Minnesota. “And when it comes to minorities and immigrants, we also have historically high, record turnout.” ...

Over the past week, Minnesota activists have called and texted voters to push out the “uncommitted” message. They’ve gone to mosques around the state to share the idea, targeting Minnesota’s Muslim population. They’ve held rallies. They’ve reached out to college students, families, people who’ve attended protests in the past. ... Minnesota’s campaign doesn’t have a number goal like Michigan did. Instead, organizers want to keep Michigan’s first step going in Minnesota, then help people in other states stand up their own efforts. But, most importantly, they want Biden to act. And they believe the only way they can get him to listen now is through their votes.

Nobody With Real Power Cares If You Refuse To Vote For Biden

There’s been a lot of talk in pro-Palestine circles about withholding votes for Biden in protest of his genocide in Gaza, which is of course fine, but the discourse around doing so often misses an important point. A lot of US voters erroneously think they’d be punishing the Democrats for Gaza by costing them the election, mistakenly assuming Democrats care about winning. They don’t.

Losing an election costs Democratic party leaders nothing; all the career politicians and political operatives at the top keep their careers either way. From their point of view this is just a cushy job with sweet benefits, and they keep those win or lose. And obviously Biden himself doesn’t care; he’ll have a comfortable retirement regardless of the outcome in November, and on some level he’s surely aware that it’s nuts for a dementia patient to be in the White House anyway.

If the Democrats cared about getting your vote they’d be trying hard to earn it. They’re not trying because they don’t care.

The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don’t care who wins the election. They know they’ll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it’s Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else. Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.

And that’s the real issue. That’s the real point that keeps getting missed here. The problem is not that the wrong people keep getting elected, it’s that the elections don’t matter and voters don’t have a say. It’s that humanity is dominated by a murderous globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around Washington whose actual movements and behavior have effectively zero responsiveness to the will of the electorate.

You’re never going to be able to vote your way out of this mess, and you’re never going to be able to not-vote your way out of this mess, because the power of your vote has been undermined to a value of zero. That doesn’t mean there’s no way out of this mess, it just means there’s no way to get out of this mess using the fake plastic diversion toy they handed you to shut you up and trick you into thinking you have a say.

There are still plenty of other tools in the toolbox for forcing an evil power structure to stop doing evil things, but they require a whole lot of hands to bring about, and right now we don’t have them. Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.

Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they’re going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they’ve been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie. They’ve got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet. They’ve got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world. Only when enough eyes open to this reality can revolutionary change via direct action become possible.

Fanatics and fools. Crimea bridge obsession

UK urges Germany to give long-range missiles to Kyiv despite Luftwaffe leak

Britain has urged a reluctant Berlin to supply long-range Taurus missiles to Kyiv despite an embarrassing leak to Russian television of a top-secret call involving German air force officers who said UK troops were “on the ground” in Ukraine.

The Kremlin sought to exploit what it saw as a propaganda coup and pressure the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who in turn insisted on Monday he would not donate missiles that could strike at the strategic Kerch bridge linking Russia and occupied Crimea.

Released on Friday by the editor of the Kremlin-controlled news channel RT, Margarita Simonyan, the audio recording – confirmed as authentic by Germany – captures Luftwaffe officers discussing what they said was Britain’s military presence in Ukraine, helping the country select Russian targets.

Rather than publicly criticise Germany over the leak, Britain said it was for Berlin to investigate. Instead the UK toughened up its own lobbying on the Taurus missiles, which have a 300-mile range, twice that of Anglo-French Storm Shadow/Scalp weapons system already given to Kyiv.

“The UK was the first country to provide long-range precision strike missiles to Ukraine, and we would encourage our allies to do the same,” a Downing Street spokesperson said. “The presence of a small number of British troops in Ukraine” had been acknowledged by No 10 a week earlier, they added.

Scott Ritter: How close are we to global confrontation?

A plastic fork, a phone, a car part: why does the LAPD keep shooting people holding harmless objects?

The first report from the Los Angeles police department about the killing of Jason Maccani on 3 February immediately drew scrutiny: an officer had fatally shot a man who had been “armed with a stick” and threatening people in a building on Skid Row, the department said. LAPD’s update a day later raised new concerns: the 36-year-old Maccani hadn’t been holding any weapon, but rather a “white plastic fork”.

Body-camera footage released two weeks later raised even further questions about LAPD’s shifting narrative. The footage showed Maccani alone walking out of a unit into the building hallway, not threatening anyone, when seven officers approached with weapons drawn. The officer who fired the fatal shot opened fire within roughly 15 seconds of seeing him.

The killing of Maccani has sparked national consternation, but the circumstances are not unique. In recent years, LAPD has repeatedly shot individuals holding ordinary objects that police either mistook for weapons or claimed could be dangerous. That includes two shootings of people carrying cellphones; two cases where men had lighters; and shootings of people holding, alternatively, a bike part, a car part and a wooden board. ...

Many of these incidents share characteristics. The people shot were often in mental distress. Officers were told 911 call information suggested they were armed. But footage of these incidents consistently shows officers failing to investigate whether the information was accurate, escalating encounters with people experiencing mental health episodes, and rushing to use lethal force without clearly communicating with the individuals or in some cases other officers. ...

There have been reform efforts across the US meant to reduce lethal force over the last decade, but overall police in America continue to kill more people every year. In the last two years,police in Denver shot someone holding a marker; an officer in Columbus, Ohio, shot someone holding a vape pen; and in Harford county, Maryland, officers killed someone holding a cane.

Several experts said that is in part because of how police are trained. “The law enforcement identity creates a way of seeing things – where cellphones look like guns, cars look like weapons, poverty looks like criminality,” said James Nolan, a West Virginia University sociology professor and former police officer. “It’s a hypervigilance for danger and it puts both the police and community in danger.”

“Training is centered on all the possible threats – that anything can be used as a weapon, anything can kill you, and it can happen so quickly that officers who don’t assert control are vulnerable,” said Christopher Bou Saeed, an LA civil rights lawyer. More tragedies could be prevented if there were a focus on alternative responses to people in crisis, said Bou Saeed, and if there were meaningful consequences for excessive force.

Me hate shrinkflation! Me cookies are getting smaller.

— Cookie Monster (@MeCookieMonster) March 4, 2024

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Biden says in rare print interview he’ll beat Trump but polls say otherwise

In a rare print interview, Joe Biden addressed fears over his chances of victory in the coming US presidential election and said he was “the only one who has ever beat” his likely Republican challenger, Donald Trump, adding: “And I’ll beat him again.”

But the president was voicing a conviction at odds with most polling, in which clear majorities think that at 81 he is too old for a second term and narrow majorities put Trump ahead in a general election match-up.

Biden became a senator in 1973 and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008. He was vice-president to Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017 before securing the presidential nomination in 2020 with a campaign built on the threat he said Trump posed to American democracy itself. Such messaging has been central to Biden’s re-election bid but David Axelrod, formerly chief strategist to Obama and a prominent Biden critic, told Osnos: “I’m pretty certain in Scranton [Pennsylvania, Biden’s home town] they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night.”

“The Republican message is: the world’s out of control and Biden’s not in command. That’s the entire message – Trump, the strongman, is the solution. I think you have to be thinking about how you counter that, and how you deal with fears about Biden’s condition.”

Calls for Biden to step aside for a younger candidate have been rejected by the White House and most progressive pundits. In conversation with Osnos, Biden remained resolute.

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Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures

The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame, Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has claimed – prompting a backlash from climate experts. As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily responsible for the climate crisis.

The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking. “The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”

Woods said the world was “not on the path” to cut its planet-heating emissions to net zero by 2050, which scientists say is imperative to avoid catastrophic impacts of global heating. “When are people going to willing to pay for carbon reduction?” said Woods, who has been Exxon’s chief executive since 2017. “We have opportunities to make fuels with lower carbon in it, but people aren’t willing to spend the money to do that.”

Experts say Woods’s rhetoric is part of a larger attempt to skirt climate accountability. No new major oil and gas infrastructure can be built if the world is to avoid breaching agreed temperature limits but Exxon, along with other major oil companies currently basking in record profits, is pushing ahead with aggressive fossil-fuel expansion plans. ...

Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back as the 1970s, but forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about the climate crisis and stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. The revelations have inspired litigation against Exxon across the US. “What they’re really trying to do is to whitewash their own history, to make it invisible,” said Robert Brulle, an environment policy expert at Brown University who has researched climate disinformation spread by the fossil-fuel industry.

Satellite to ‘name and shame’ worst oil and gas methane polluters

A washing-machine-sized satellite is to “name and shame” the worst methane polluters in the oil and gas industry. MethaneSat is scheduled to launch from California onboard a SpaceX rocket on Monday at 2pm local time (22:00 GMT). It will provide the first near-comprehensive global view of leaks of the potent greenhouse gas from the oil and gas sector, and all of the data will be made public. It will provide high-resolution data over wider areas than existing satellites.

Methane, also called natural gas, is responsible for 30% of the global heating driving the climate crisis. Leaks from the fossil fuel industry are a major source of human-caused emissions and stemming these is the fastest single way to curb temperature rises.

MethaneSat was developed by the Environmental Defense Fund, a US NGO, in partnership with the New Zealand Space Agency and cost $88m to build and launch. Earlier EDF measurements from planes show methane emissions were 60% higher than calculated estimates published by US authorities and elsewhere.

More than 150 countries have signed a global methane pledge to cut their emissions of the gas by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Some oil and gas companies have made similar pledges, and new regulations to limit methane leaks are being worked on in the US, EU, Japan and South Korea.

The EDF’s senior vice-president, Mark Brownstein, said: “MethaneSat is a tool for accountability . I’m sure many people think this could be used to name and shame companies who are poor emissions performers, and that’s true. But [it] can [also] help document progress that leading companies are making in reducing their emissions.”

Texas town evacuated as firefighters battle state’s biggest ever wildfire

Firefighters in Texas are battling strong winds and warm temperatures as they work to stop the largest wildfire in state history. The large Smokehouse Creek fire was 15% contained and two other fires were 60% contained. Authorities have not said what ignited the fires, but strong winds, dry grass and unseasonably warm temperatures fed the blazes.

The winds spread flames and prompted the evacuation of one town over the weekend, while airplanes dropped fire retardant over the northern Texas panhandle.

The fires have caused unprecedented destruction – burning across more than 1,900 sq miles (4,921 sq km) in rural areas and farmland surrounding Amarillo, while the largest blaze spilled into neighboring Oklahoma. ...

So far five major fires have burned across the Panhandle destroying up to 500 homes and businesses, state officials said. A new conflagration dubbed the Roughneck fire began in Hutchinson county on Sunday. Cooler temperatures and calmer winds were set to arrive in the region on Monday and predicted to last through Tuesday, which could give authorities a chance to get a better grip on the emergency.

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Also of Interest

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

Top German military commanders plan direct attacks on Russia

Biden's Middle East Policy Trades Humanitarian Aid for Endless Warfare

Juan Cole: Is Tehran Winning the Middle East?

I met the Israeli settlers Biden placed sanctions on. They’re bad – but part of a rotten system

Craig Murray: US Case & Assange Rebuttal

Assange’s Draconian Prosecution

Secret cable: CIA orchestrated Haiti’s 2004 coup

Armenia Freezes Participation in Collective Security Treaty Organization, Further Poisoning Ties With Russia

Supreme Court Puts States Into Their Place

'Historic Victory': Swiss Approve Pension Boost, Reject Later Retirement

‘Elvis was as pilled up as me!’ Dan Penn on writing hits for Aretha, Otis, Dolly and more

Local Israelis DEBUNK NYT Sexual Assault Allegation

MSNBC Says Rural Voters Are Destroying Democracy!

The Intercept RIPS OFF The Grayzone’s Reporting On NYT H@mas Rąpe Hoax Story

NYT investigates staff as 'Hamas r@pe' scandal deepens

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A Little Night Music

Furry Lewis - Im Going To Brownsville

Furry Lewis - Big Chief Blues

Furry Lewis - When My Baby Left Me

Furry Lewis - See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

Furry Lewis - Sweet Papa Moan

Furry Lewis - When I lay my burden down

Furry Lewis - Jelly Roll

Furry Lewis - Kassie Jones parts 1 & 2

Furry Lewis - Take Your Time Rag

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