Open Thread 07-12-15

Good morning 99percenters!
Morning news dump and music by Poco.

International Scientists Issue Call for Climate Action Now: 'Commit to Our Common Future'
'Window for economically feasible solutions' is closing, statement says

Time is running out to deal with the "defining challenge of the 21st century," a group of leading scientists said Friday at the close of a climate conference, and added that this must be the year of bold action like taxing carbon to rein in greenhouse gases.

The call was issued in the outcome statement from the Our Common Future under Climate Change, a four-day meeting that gathered nearly 2,000 international academics five months ahead of the United Nations climate talks in Paris, COP21.

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," it states. "Its effects have the potential to impact every region of the Earth, every ecosystem, and many aspects of the human endeavour. Its solutions require a bold commitment to our common future.

"The window for economically feasible solutions with a reasonable prospect of holding warming to 2°C or less is rapidly closing," the statement reads, referring to the widely accepted warming threshold for the planet—an increase that many say will still bring disaster.

It’s Not Just the NSA—the IRS Is Reading Your Emails Too

The privacy of Americans’ email has an expiration date.

Because of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)—passed in 1986, long before electronic communications became prevalent in the United States—email content is easily accessible to many civil and law enforcement agencies as soon as it is at least 180 days old.

Fortunately, politicians on both sides of the aisle are now backing the movement to change the outdated law.

The Email Privacy Act, which is up for a vote in the House of Representatives, would remove the expiration date on privacy.

Mexican drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman escapes from prison again
Head of Sinaloa cartel escapes from maximum-security jail after security cameras lost sight of him when he went to showers

Top Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, head of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, has escaped from a maximum-security prison for the second time, Mexican officials said as they launched a manhunt.

Guzman was last seen about 9pm Saturday in the shower area of the Altiplano prison, 56 miles outside Mexico City, according to a statement from the National Security Commission. He went to the shower area but security cameras lost sight of him. Upon checking his cell, authorities found it was empty.

A search operation began immediately in the surrounding area and highways. Flights were also suspended at Toluca airport, near the prison.

Guzman was captured in February 2014 after more than a decade on the run. He was listed as 56 years old at the time, though there are varying dates for his birth. He faces multiple federal drug trafficking indictments in the US and was on the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s most-wanted list.

‘Right Sector on combat alert’: Ukraine Neo-Nazis refuse to lay down arms after shootout

Ukrainian Right Sector militants, blocked in on the outskirts of Mukachevo after deadly clashes with police, are refusing to lay down their arms without their leader’s orders. Civilians in the area have been evacuated, as negotiations so far have failed.

SWAT police and special units of the National Guard, as well as Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) agents have secured the area and blockaded members of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Right Sector group on the outskirts of Mukachevo, which lies a stone’s throw away from Hungarian and Slovakian border.

“To prevent possible bloodshed, the Security Service and Interior Ministry demand that the illegal armed group lays down [its] arms and surrenders,” the SBU said in a statement, adding that fighters refuse to surrender unless ordered directly by Right Sector (‘Pravy Sektor’) leader Dmitry Yarosh.

Authorities said they will do everything necessary to disarm and detain the“organized criminal group”, that killed one, and injured four civilians. Six police officers were also injured in the standoff on Saturday afternoon.

How Fascist Capitalism Functions: The Case of Greece

There is democratic capitalism, and there is fascist capitalism. What we have today is fascist capitalism; and the following will explain how it works, using as an example the case of Greece.

Mark Whitehouse at Bloomberg headlined on 27 June 2015, “If Greece Defaults, Europe’s Taxpayers Lose,” and presented his ‘news’ report, which simply assumed that, perhaps someday, Greece will be able to get out of debt without defaulting on it. Other than his unfounded assumption there (which assumption is even in his headline), his report was accurate. Here is what he reported that’s accurate:

He presented two graphs, the first of which shows Greece’s governmental debt to private investors (bondholders) as of, first, December 2009; and, then, five years later, December 2014. This graph shows that, in almost all countries, private investors either eliminated or steeply reduced their holdings of Greek government bonds during that 5-year period. (Overall, it was reduced by 83%; but, in countries such as France, Portugal, Ireland, Austria, and Belgium, it was reduced closer to 100% — all of it.) In other words: by the time of December 2009, word was out, amongst the aristocracy, that only suckers would want to buy it from them, so they needed suckers and took advantage of the system that the aristocracy had set up for governments to buy aristocrats’ bad bets — for governments to be suckers when private individuals won’t. Not all of it was sold directly to governments; much of it went instead indirectly, to agencies that the aristocracy has set up as basically transfer-agencies for passing junk to governments; in other words, as middlemen, to transfer unpayable debt-obligations to various governments’ taxpayers. Whitehouse presented no indication as to whom those investors sold that debt to, but almost all of it was sold, either directly or indirectly, to Western governments, via those middlemen-agencies, so that, when Greece will default (which it inevitably will), the taxpayers of those Western governments will suffer the losses. The aristocracy will already have wrung what they could out of it.

Who were these governments and middlemen-agencies? As of January 2015, they were: 62% Euro-member governments (including the European Financial Stability Facility); 10% International Monetyary Fund (IMF), and 8% European Central Bank; then, 17% still remained with private investors; and 3% was owned by “other.”

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Chicken or the egg?

I had a wild dream a couple of mornings ago. I was deep into REM sleep and suddenly dreamed that someone took a full swing with a baseball bat hitting me directly in my right calf. I woke up with the most excruciating cramp in that calf that I've ever experienced, and believe me I've had bad ones before. It took several minutes to relieve the cramp and it hurt like hell for the rest of the day. Granted I am prone to cramping when dehydrated and I had sweated a lot the day before and didn't drink as much water as I should have so that was probably a factor.

What puzzled me about it is, did I have the cramp first and that triggered the dream of being smacked with a baseball bat or did I have the dream first and this led me to flex my calf muscle that then caused the cramp. Or was Freddy Kruger somehow involved? Was there any deep psychological implications? Usually I'm pretty good at interpreting my dreams, I can usually associate actions in my subconscious state with things that have or are occurring in my life at the time, would this dream have any significance or was it simply stimulated by muscle response.

All I know for sure is that damn thing hurt.

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mimi's picture

You need to not only drink water, but add to the water salt and juice of lemons and sugar and keep it near you. You need potassium, sugar, lemon juice and sodium chlorite in your water. Taste awful, but it's also used for people who travel to the tropics and get diarrhea in addition to just sweating a lot. Homemade Electrolyte Replacement Fluids

I always drink the original Seltzer water and was not feeling well although I drank a lot of it. (It's hot and humid here and doesn't cool down at night and I sweat like crazy). So, I was wondering why my water drinking isn't helping til I read the fine print of that water and it didn't contain sodium chlorite. I started to eat salty nuts and put more salt than usual on my food and it made a difference.

Other than that the news out of Germany and France isn't to my liking. Germany and France are in disputes over how to handle Greece and it endangers Europe. Wonderful. Something we have tried to fight and the whole German-France cooperation and the future of Europe is at risk. Everything that Germany and France tried in the past to overcome is falling apart, it seems. Schaeuble is out of order, imo. Just talked to my sister and I realized that they think over there that Schaeuble is "very intelligent and that he is right to keep Tspipras in check". So, now I have nobody anymore in my German family, who is still left, I would be able to agree with politically. Makes it hard to go back.

Grexit is off the table. Tsipras has capitulated (says Krugman), but that capitulation isn't enough for the Germans or the EU apparently, they want total humiliation of Greece.

Well, all of it is just good for throwing up. Haven't read US press yet about it. Just some German live-tickers.

Ok, let's dance and your dream was stimulated by your muscle's response to dehydration, I say. Wow. This chief has spoken. Man, I am so disappointed about what is going on in the world. Can't talk straight.

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the constant Greece soap opera is starting to make my brain cramp. I'm beginning to think that the financial overlords are keeping this thing in the media's eye for nefarious reasons. The whole thing smacks of the run up to the 2008 melt down when we were bombarded with the constant meme of financial armaggedon if the banks weren't bailed out.

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gulfgal98's picture

If I were to guess as to which came first, the dream or the cramp, my guess is that they happened almost simultaneously. As soon as you leg began to cramp, you had the instant dream of being hit by a baseball bat. I am prone to leg cramps and have been all my life. I take a high quality multi vitamin every day and starting taking magnesium which seems to help with the leg cramps. Drinking water never seemed to make much of a difference for me though. I drink about a half gallon of water every day and still get them. One thing about magnesium. You have to be careful not to take too much or it will upset your intestinal tract.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

yeah, I think you're probably right about the dream. I've worked outside in the hot sun and hot weather my whole life and only really got cramps when I was dehydrated and adding water and electrolytes always helped, but the older I get the more frequent the cramps are occurring, I guess that's a part of getting old, no? Anywho, when I get dehydrated sometimes all it takes is to flex a muscle the wrong way and it will cause a cramp, that's what prompted the chicken or the egg question, like maybe I had the dream first and it made me flex my calf causing the cramp. But then I have to ask myself, "Why the heck would I have a dream about someone hitting me in he calf with a bat"? Pretty weird, huh.

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hecate's picture

the other afternoon where I was doing PI work for a guy I've done PI work for, off and on, in the "real" world, for the last 30 years. In the dream, I was nervous that I wasn't doing it right. Which tracked with the real-world experience. Then, as I "woke up," I had unreel before me a huge and inexhaustible life, image after image after image after image after image, in "dreams," where I had been doing PI work for this guy, in that city, and forever, and suddenly, all these "dreams," were coming back to me; and I realized that, in "dreams," I had been living a whole nother life, around this guy, in that city, with all sorts of other people and experiences, including heart-caught long-time lovers, and for decades on, a life as full and as vivid as the one I had lived in "real" life. And I laid there and I wondered: what is "dream"? And what is "life"? And how is one, really, to know the difference?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt08hVJ2H28]

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wake up with fleas. Maybe Nuland will pass out cookies, that should halt the hostilities.

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mimi's picture

Fox News Calls Pope Francis ‘Marxist,’ ‘Most Dangerous Person on the Planet’ Over Climate Encyclical

So, now with the intertubes, twitter, facebook, blogs and all the good stuff, we know how bad and evil people can be. All that transparency doesn't seem to help us.

What to do now?

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link

The war in Yemen has one local winner, Al Qaeda. The Saudis seem oddly unconcerned.

Since early April, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has controlled Yemen's fifth largest city, Mukkalla, and much of the surrounding governorate of Hadramawt. The Hadramawt is Yemen's largest governorate and home of about one-third of Yemen's oil production before the war. Mukkalla is the country's second largest port on the Indian Ocean after Aden. Hundreds of AQAP supporters have gone to Mukkalla after jail breaks in other parts of Yemen since the start of the war.
...
Since the start of the Yemen war, the Royal Saudi Air Force and its coalition partners have not targeted AQAP's Hadramawt emirate. It has not been subjected at all to the bombing other Yemeni cities are enduring. As a consequence, Yemeni internally displaced persons have sought shelter and protection in Mukkalla. The port has also remained open for some traffic unlike ports controlled by the Zaydi Shia Houthi rebels.

Riyadh's apparent willingness to tolerate an Al Qaeda stronghold on its southern border has raised conspiracy theories in Yemen that the Saudis implicitly at least welcome AQAP as an ally against the Zaydis. There are also longstanding suspicions that the Kingdom would like to annex Hadramawt to give it access to the Indian Ocean and a route for an oil pipeline to Mukkalla that would allow oil to reach the sea without transiting the Straits of Hormuz.

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paragraph in your snip is the money quote, IMHO.

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Big Al's picture

in Yemen to conclude whether it's really Al Qaeda that is "winning". When Al Qaeda wins, the U.S. wins, Al Qaeda
is a U.S. construct and proxy military tool after all.
Yemen's location is a key geopolitical area which is why the U.S. has been fucking with it for so long. One of the world's
oil chokepoints. It plays into the global power struggle with China and Russia.

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mimi's picture

... I wonder if I would post that on gos what a reaction this article from Mother Jones would get (The photos are amazing):
Last of the Munichans

I am not quite sure if the article grasps the emotional underpinning of this strange development in its full extent. Significant as it relates just to Germany (more prevalent in former East German regions) and eastern European countries. Of course my feelings about it are purely personal and just based on guts feelings.

To me this triggers my own question of why "tatoos" have gotten a renaissance all over the Western world.

Somehow I sense the need of people for a tribal affiliation, a desire to fight for their "territory", getting "their country back", and the "back to nature and to a warrior culture" best symbolized through Native American tribes and culture, may be getting an identity through their artwork of tatoos on their bodies, escaping marginalization in a Western modern culture, where the individual doesn't count ?

I know you know much more about it, so teach me a lesson.

When did this all start? In the late seventies? After reunification in the late eighties? Any ideas and thoughts about it?

I know this behavior is an insult to Native Americans, as their culture is abused or misused for something that imo has very little to do with Native American culture at all. But it's probably impossible to make that comprehensible to a Native American.

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mimi's picture

I always underestimate their "weirdo stupidity". I had in the last three to four years several encounters that were so blatantly racist I start to ask myself if I still am able to live in "German reality". At the same time I know people see in me something "typical German".

Oh, darnit. I just ignore it now. Doesn't matter anyhow what I think.

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Greece might have to change strategies.

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