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This evening's music features country blues singer and guitarist Sleepy John Estes. Enjoy!

"If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."

-- EO Wilson

News and Opinion

One in three Americans say violence against government justified

One in three Americans believe violence against the government is sometimes justified, according to a new Washington Post poll.

The survey, with the University of Maryland, was released on New Year’s Day – five days short of a year since rioters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat by Joe Biden. According to the authors of The Steal, a new book on Republican attempts to fulfill Trump’s aim through legal action in key states, the rioters of 6 January 2021 “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.

But it was still by far the most serious attack on the seat of federal government since the British burned Washington in 1814 and the Post poll comes amid a sea of warnings of growing domestic strife, even of a second civil war.

The Post reported: “The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34%, which is considerably higher than in past polls by the Post or other major news organisations dating back more than two decades. “… The view is partisan: The new survey finds 40% of Republicans, 41% of independents and 23% of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified.” ...

The Post reported: “A majority continue to say that violence against the government is never justified – but the 62% who hold that view is a new low point, and a stark difference from the 1990s, when as many as 90% said violence was never justified.”

Twit dumped from Twitter. Free speech? Feh!

Twitter permanently suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account

The personal Twitter account of the Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been permanently suspended, for violating policies on Covid misinformation.

The action against Greene on Sunday came under the “strike” system Twitter launched last March, which uses artificial intelligence to identify posts about the coronavirus misleading enough to cause harm. Two or three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock, four strikes prompt a weeklong suspension and five or more can get an account permanently removed.

Twitter had previously suspended Greene’s account for periods ranging from 12 hours to a week. She was issued a “fourth strike” this summer, for saying vaccines were failing. ...

The congresswoman’s official account remains active. ...

In a statement on the Telegram app on Sunday, she called Twitter “an enemy to America” and said it could not “handle the truth”. She also accused Twitter of seeking “a communist revolution” and said: “Social media platforms can’t stop the truth from being spread far and wide. Big tech can’t stop the truth. Communist Democrats can’t stop the truth. I stand with the truth and the people. We will overcome.”

Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world.

We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.

The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.

It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.

When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.

I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.

Glenn Greenwald, worth a full read:

NBC News Uses Ex-FBI Official Frank Figliuzzi to Urge Assange's Extradition, Hiding His Key Role

Two of the television outlets on which American liberals rely most for their news — NBC News and CNN — have spent the last six years hiring a virtual army of former CIA operatives, FBI officials, NSA spies, Pentagon chiefs, and DOJ prosecutors to work in their newsrooms. The multiple ways in which journalism is fundamentally corrupted by this spectacle are all vividly illustrated by a new article from NBC News that urges the prosecution and extradition of Julian Assange, claiming that the WikiLeaks founder, once on U.S. soil, will finally provide the long-elusive proof that Donald Trump criminally conspired with Russia.

The NBC article is written by former FBI Assistant Director and current NBC News employee Frank Figliuzzi, who played a central role during the Obama years in the FBI's attempt to investigate and criminalize Assange: a rather relevant fact concealed by NBC when publishing this. But this is how U.S. security state agents now directly control corporate news outlets. ...

MSNBC has been repeatedly promoting it. That is remarkable on its own: a so-called "news outlet” is cheering — indeed, salivating over — the Biden administration's attempt to criminalize Assange under “espionage” laws for the sin of reporting genuine documents showing all sorts of improper conduct by the agencies whose former operatives now staff that network. Given that press freedom groups in the West have uniformly condemned the prosecution of Assange as a grave threat to a free press, it is stunning to watch a corporation that claims to be in the news business cheering rather than denouncing it.

But for the U.S. media, that is just ordinary corruption and subservience to the CIA: it is hardly rare to find "journalists” giddy over the prospect of Assange's ongoing imprisonment. What makes this new article particularly notable is that the FBI — when Figliuzzi was a senior official there — was directly involved in the attempt to investigate, frame and prosecute Assange. Yet the article, while identifying its analyst as “the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, where he served 25 years as a special agent and directed all espionage investigations across the government,” makes no mention of his direct personal interest in the Assange prosecution.

Last year was tough; what will 2022 bring?

Fools driving Fnords:

Russia ‘very likely’ to invade Ukraine without ‘enormous sanctions’ – Schiff

Russia is “very likely” to invade Ukraine and might only be deterred by “enormous sanctions”, the chair of the US House intelligence committee said on Sunday. Adam Schiff also said an invasion could backfire on Moscow, by drawing more countries into the Nato military alliance. “I also think that a powerful deterrent is the understanding that if they do invade, it is going to bring Nato closer to Russia, not push it farther away,” he said.

After the California Democrat spoke, the White House said Joe Biden had spoken to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a statement: “President Biden made clear that the United States and its allies and partners will respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine.”

On Twitter, Zelenskiy said: “The first international talk of the year with [Biden] proves the special nature of our relations.” He also said the joint actions of Ukraine, the US “and partners in keeping peace in Europe, preventing further escalation, reforms, deoligarchisation were discussed. We appreciate the unwavering support of Ukraine.”

Putin said new sanctions could cause complete severance of Russian-US ties - Kremlin aide

Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a call with his US counterpart Joe Biden that relations between the two countries could be severed completely in the event the threatened "unprecedented sanctions" become a reality, Kremlin Aide Yury Ushakov told reporters on Friday.

Putin was responding to Biden’s warning that Western countries will introduce massive economic and military sanctions if further escalation on the Ukrainian border takes place, Ushakov said.

Hungary election: outsider from the right backed by left to beat Viktor Orbán

When Hungarian opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay was in Brussels at the end of last year, he visited the street where an MEP from prime minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling party, Fidesz, had fled down a drainpipe to evade a police raid on a “gay orgy” that broke lockdown rules. The MEP, who later resigned, had been an architect of a clause in Hungary’s constitution defining marriage as a heterosexual institution. The drainpipe visit was easy political capital for Márki-Zay, seeking to draw attention to the hypocrisy of the governing party, while stressing his commitment to LGBT rights and conservative credentials.

It’s the kind of move that has discombobulated Fidesz, who weren’t expecting to face this kind of challenge in Hungary’s parliamentary elections in spring 2022.

Márki-Zay, a conservative churchgoing father of seven, is the candidate for prime minister of six opposition parties, spanning social democrats to the former far right, who united to take on Orbán. “After 16 years it’s the first time the opposition has a real chance to win,” Róbert László, an election specialist at the Political Capital institute in Budapest, said.

Hungarians go to the polls in April or May in a contest that could bring down Orbán, whose 11-year experiment with “illiberal democracy” has resulted in Hungary becoming the first EU member state to be classed as only “partly free” by the NGO Freedom House.

“Nobody expected the left and centre parties who dominated the opposition could be led by an outsider coming from the right,” László said. “One of his super-powers is that he can’t be blamed as the puppet of the past leftist parties, or the ex-prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány,” a wealthy former leader who remains deeply divisive.

With One Exception, Biden Has Barely Altered Foreign Policies Inherited From Trump

The Biden administration’s foreign policy in its first year was mostly defined by an unwillingness to make major policy changes and to take significant political risks to follow through on the president’s campaign pledges. The important exception, of course, was Biden’s prudent decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, which stands out even more as one of the few occasions when the president has bucked the prevailing consensus view in Washington. On almost every other issue, however, the Biden administration has been overly cautious and content to accept the status quo, even when it was a Trump-era policy that the president and his officials had condemned as an obvious failure.

From tariffs to “maximum pressure” sanctions to arms sales to reckless clients, the watchword for the last year has been continuity.

There has been a sharp increase in emphasizing support for human rights in administration rhetoric since Trump left office, but one looks in vain for examples of how Biden has made human rights central to his foreign policy. This has been most noticeable in the resumption of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while their war on Yemen continues unabated. Despite credible charges that the Saudi and Emirati governments have used U.S.-made weapons to commit war crimes against civilians, the Biden administration has approved new weapons and maintenance contracts for the Saudi military and allowed the $23 billion arms sale to the UAE to go forward. Now that the UAE is losing interest in sale because it comes with too many security restrictions, the decision to allow the sale to proceed looks even worse.

No one expected that Biden was going to preside over a radical overhaul of U.S. foreign policy, but even when measured against a much more modest standard, his foreign policy has fallen short of what his supporters reasonably expected to see. ...

The Trump administration’s use of economic warfare to inflict punishment on entire countries was one policy that was crying out for immediate changes, but this is also one that Biden has done the least to alter. Broad sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, Syria, and North Korea all remain in place, and there has been no urgency to lift any of them despite their harmful effects on the population in the middle of a pandemic. The Biden administration’s lengthy review of sanctions policy was remarkable for how little the administration had to show for nine months of effort. ... The administration’s refusal to offer even token sanctions relief for humanitarian purposes has been one of the main sticking points in the talks to salvage the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Because Iran has continued reducing its compliance with the nuclear deal to protest the “maximum pressure” sanctions and sabotage attacks on its program, the Biden administration will not budge on sanctions relief until Iran returns to full compliance. This has created an unfortunate test of wills where neither government wants to take the first step to break the impasse, and the result is that the JCPOA is slowly being extinguished while a mutually beneficial solution stares everyone in the face. ...

The administration also needs to take a much harder look at the policies that it inherited from Trump. If they understand that “maximum pressure” sanctions have been a cruel failure across the board, they should lift or suspend those sanctions to the greatest extent possible.

Biden’s Agenda Is Dying Because the Interests of the Rich and Poor Are Irreconcilable

There’s a lot you can say about the apparent death of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, largely at the hands of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin. One thing that should be abundantly clear is that it starkly disproves both Biden’s and the corporate Democratic Party’s entire political worldview.

Biden’s campaign was predicated on the dubious idea that you could forge a political coalition, or at least a temporary alliance, between the superrich and the vast majority of working people. The first time he publicly hinted he would run for president — tellingly, at a Las Vegas hedge fund conference run by one-time Donald Trump comms director Anthony Scaramucci — he outlined this basic vision, pleading with the collection of Wall Street mavens in front of him to see it was in their interest to pay just a tiny little more in taxes to be invested in the country and its economy, for the sake of everyone’s future prosperity. This is how Business Insider recounted his speech:

“Raise your hand if you think twelve years of education is enough in this economy,” he said to the crowd.

Nervous silence.

So we need $9 billion, Biden said. To Wall Street, that’s nothing. Wall Street knows that for America, it’s nothing. But that $9 billion would pay for free community college for people who want it, Biden said. That, in turn, would add two-tenths of a percent to gross domestic product.

“Wake up,” he demanded.

That same year, Biden convened a panel called “Win-Win: How the Long View Works for Business and the Middle Class,” where, alongside a collection of corporate executives and finance bigwigs, he urged big business to reinvest profits in job-creating activities instead of shareholder payouts, explaining that “you can’t have a healthy country without a strong middle class.” A couple years later, he infamously told a crowd of ultrawealthy donors, as he begged for their money, that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he was president — that he would simply tinker around the margins, just enough to keep a lid on the populist anger that was erupting around the country.

Even if we allow that Biden earnestly believed what he was saying, we already had enough real-world evidence to know how silly this idea was. For one, this had already been tried a decade ago, when Barack Obama fueled his vaguely populist campaign with record amounts of Wall Street cash, then designed an economic recovery overwhelmingly weighted toward financial interests over ordinary people. There was also the 2014 peer-reviewed study that concluded, after comparing the policy preferences of average Americans, wealthy ones, and powerful special interest groups to nearly two-thousand policies enacted in the twenty years after 1981, that the United States was an oligarchy where laws pass largely on the back of how much elite and wealthy backing they get.

But if you weren’t convinced by all this, then congratulations, because the Biden presidency just gave you a front-row seat to watch this process play out yet again. What did we just witness over the course of this year? The parts of Biden’s agenda that were backed by corporate America — namely, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package and the half-a-trillion-dollar infrastructure bill — sailed to his desk with relative ease. The parts they opposed, namely the now-shelved Build Back Better bill, with its modest tax hikes and new government powers that would cut into corporate profits, failed. Meanwhile, at the same time as Biden’s social spending was slashed over inflation concerns, the military-industrial complex just got a gargantuan new spending bill care of huge congressional majorities.

Ban on Most Surprise Medical Bills Takes Effect

While welcoming a federal ban on most surprise medical bills that went into effect on Saturday, Medicare for All advocates made clear that the new law, which crucially excludes ground ambulances, is only necessary because the United States lacks the superior alternative taken for granted in every other wealthy nation: a single-payer healthcare system.

Thanks to the No Surprises Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation passed during the Trump administration and "fine-tuned" by the Biden administration, millions of people in the U.S. will be protected from unexpected and costly bills that private-equity-owned providers foist upon patients who inadvertently receive out-of-network care during medical emergencies, the New York Times reported.

"Even with insurance, emergency medical care can still be expensive, and patients with high deductible plans could still face large medical bills," the Times noted. "But the law will eliminate the risk that an out-of-network doctor or hospital will send an extra bill. Currently, those bills add up to billions in costs for consumers each year."

Journalist James Conner, founder and editor of the Flathead Memo, tweeted earlier this week that "this law would not be needed if we ha[d] an everyone covered for everything, zero copay, federal single-payer healthcare system paid for by fair taxes."

The Times reported that "behind the scenes, medical providers are still fighting with regulators over how they will be paid when they provide out-of-network care. But those disputes will not interfere with the law's key consumer protections."

60% Of Inflation Caused By CORPORATE GREED

In 'Victory for Democracy' and 'Blow to Trumpism,' FDIC Chair Resigns

What has been described as both "open lawlessness" and a "partisan brawl" came to an end Friday when Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Jelena McWilliams—an appointee of former President Donald Trump—revealed she is resigning, which will give Democrats control of the agency.

In a letter to President Joe Biden published on the FDIC's website, McWilliams said she intends to step down effective February 4, 2022. Politico pointed out that her resignation "means that FDIC board member Martin Gruenberg will become acting chair, his third stint atop at the 88-year-old agency, which insures trillions of dollars in deposits at the nation's banks."

Noting McWilliams' recent conflict with the three Democrats on the five-member board—which already had one vacancy—the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research said that her departure is "good news for financial stability, and the rule of law," as well as "a victory for democracy and a blow to Trumpism."

The Open Markets Institute also welcomed her resignation, highlighting that it comes after she tried and failed "to subvert a democratic vote of the FDIC board to review bank merger policy."

RECORD Number Of States To Raise Minimum Wage

Starbucks Workers in Chicago and Colorado File Union Petitions With NLRB

Capping off what organizers and other labor rights advocates have dubbed "the year of the worker," employees at two more Starbucks stores are seeking to unionize.

Workers at a pair of Starbucks locations in Broomfield, Colorado and Chicago, Illinois filed union petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a Twitter account associated with organizing efforts at the coffee giant announced Thursday.

The filings follow the first-ever successful union vote for at least one Starbucks in Buffalo, New York earlier this month and ongoing efforts at locations across the country.

Trump-Appointed Judge Sides With Cops Who Brutalized DAPL Protesters

Five years after police brutalized activists opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump has dismissed a lawsuit accusing North Dakota law enforcement officers of excessive use of force—a decision that critics have characterized as a tacit endorsement of the violent repression of climate justice advocates.

Several peaceful protesters who gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to struggle against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure were assaulted by law enforcement officers on November 20, 2016. Police sprayed demonstrators with water cannons amid sub-freezing temperatures that night, and according to the plaintiffs' lawyers, they also used tear gas and fired rubber bullets and exploding munitions "indiscriminately into the crowd."

Attorneys for law enforcement officers named as defendants, including Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier and Mandan Police Chief Jason Ziegler, "say officers were outnumbered and were concerned for their lives and safety," The Bismark Tribune reported Thursday. "They sought to have the protesters' legal claims dismissed."

"U.S. District Judge Daniel Traynor issued the order granting their request Wednesday," the newspaper noted, "writing that 'the Court finds the undisputed and irrefutable evidence in this case could only lead a reasonable juror to conclude the officers' conduct in this case was objectively reasonable.'"

Traynor argued that police violence was justified given the "unprecedented" nature of the situation. He cited the fact that "officers issued two code red requests and a Signal 100, requesting the assistance of every available officer in the state," which "has never been done in North Dakota history."

Morton County Assistant State's Attorney Gabrielle Goter applauded the ruling, saying in a statement that "law enforcement reasonably believed the protestors were trespassing and therefore, law enforcement was permitted to use less lethal force to protect themselves and others, from violent protestors that law enforcement perceived as" threats who intended to "physically injure" them.

Rachel Lederman, an attorney for the plaintiffs, meanwhile, warned that Traynor's ruling "effectively legitimizes launching an hours-long barrage of freezing water, explosives, and highly dangerous munitions into a crowd of demonstrators."

According to the Tribune:

The lead plaintiff in the case is Vanessa Dundon, a member of the Navajo Nation whose eye was injured the night of the incident.

The plaintiffs alleged in court documents filed earlier this year that officers "used a wildly disproportionate amount of force when they deployed water cannons, impact and explosive munitions at the plaintiffs, who were unarmed, peaceful, and not committing any crime or actively resisting law enforcement in any way."

Traynor in January threw out another lawsuit filed by a pipeline protester claiming that law enforcement used excessive force at a 2017 protest site. The order came weeks after a similar ruling in a case brought by another demonstrator.

A lawsuit filed by protester Sophia Wilansky, of New York, is continuing in federal court. Wilanksy claims police targeted her with a concussion grenade during the Nov. 20, 2016 confrontation. She suffered a left arm injury in an explosion and had multiple surgeries to save the limb.

Janine Hoft, another attorney for the plaintiffs, said Traynor's decision this week "is an example of how judges use 'qualified immunity' to let law enforcement off the hook for even the most extreme brutality."

After he infamously led the Morton County Sherriff's office in terrorizing opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), Kirchmeier went on to advise other law enforcement agencies on how to put down anti-fossil fuel demonstrations elsewhere, Common Dreams reported in 2017.

Since DAPL, which transports crude oil from North Dakota's Bakken shale basin to a terminal in Illinois, became operational—and immediately started leaking—in 2017, opponents of the project have been subjected to surveillance and counterterrorism measures carried out by local police forces and private military contractors hired by the company behind the pipeline, corporate-led lawsuits, and arrests that could result in lengthy prison sentences.

Environmental justice and Indigenous rights advocates welcomed a federal judge's ruling in March 2020 that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Environmental Policy Act in 2016 by approving federal permits for DAPL, which allowed construction to happen before expert analysis put forward by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe was considered.

Campaigners celebrated a few months later when a U.S. district court ordered DAPL to be shut down and emptied of oil while federal regulators conducted a comprehensive environmental review.

However, despite his campaign pledges to respect tribal sovereignty and transition the U.S. to clean energy, President Joe Biden in April 2021 refused to shut down DAPL, instead allowing the project to continue operating without a federal permit.

Krystal Ball: The Left MUST Primary Biden

Trump acolytes vie for key election oversight posts in US midterms

When Americans go to the polls in the 2022 midterms, the most important elections won’t be for office in Washington. The most high-stakes races will be statewide contests, in some cases for long overlooked offices, that have profound consequences for the future of free and fair elections in America.

The races for governor and secretary of state, the chief election official in many places, will determine which officials have control over setting election rules and the post-election certification process.

Allies of Donald Trump and others who have spread baseless conspiracy theories about the election have launched campaigns for several of those offices, both at the statewide and local level, in an effort to take control of election machinery. Trump is expected to run for president in 2024, and if his allies are successful, there are fears they could use their positions to block Trump’s opponent from taking office should Trump lose.

Democrats are seeking to hold on to governor’s offices in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three crucial swing states. The Democratic incumbents in all three states have blocked efforts by GOP-led legislatures to enact voting restrictions so far. There will also be hotly contested elections in Arizona and Georgia, where Republican candidates who have spread lies about the results of the 2020 election are running for governor.

Republicans who have embraced lies about the election are also running for secretary of state offices in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. Overlooked for years, there is now a broader awareness of the enormous power these secretaries of state wield over how elections are run and ballots are counted. That power was on unprecedented display in 2020, when secretaries of state made decisions about things like how to establish ballot drop boxes and whether to automatically send out mail-in ballot applications to voters. Secretaries of state wield enormous unilateral power and, if they were elected, election deniers could do extensive damage in future elections.

FIRST Socialist Elected In Florida In 100 Years Launches Creative New Working Class Project

Colorado wildfire: three feared dead and hundreds of homes destroyed as Biden declares disaster

Three people are missing and feared dead after a wind-stoked wildfire roared through two towns in Boulder county, Colorado, prompting thousands of evacuations and destroying nearly 1,000 homes, authorities said on Saturday. ... Wind gusts of more than 100mph (160km/h) pushed flames eastward into the towns of Superior and Louisville, prompting the evacuation of both communities. In about two hours, the fire had scorched 6,000 acres (2,400 hectares), officials said.

Becky Bolinger, assistant state climatologist at the climate center at Colorado State University, tweeted: “The ingredients for a devastating wildfire have been coming together since last spring. A very wet spring 2021 helped grow the grasses. A very dry summer and fall dried the grasses out and prepared the kindling.

“I have thought it won’t be long before we start experiencing fires like California where flames chase people out of their neighborhoods,” Bolinger said in an interview with the Denver Post. “I didn’t expect that would happen in December.”

Temperatures have been too high. June to December 2021, was the warmest period on record, Jennifer Balch, a fire scientist and director of the Earth Lab at Colorado University, Boulder, told the newspaper. “Climate change is definitely a part of this story in that fire seasons are longer,” she said.

In addition, the larger Denver metro area has grown in size with suburbs spreading and new residential neighborhoods being built in the Front Range that were just wild grassland a generation ago, leading to massive disruption for those towns when fires strike.

Climate Change-Fueled Blaze Destroys 1,000 Homes in Colorado in Rare Winter Wildfire

Navy objects to recommendation it drain fuel tanks near Pearl Harbor

The Navy on Wednesday filed objections to the conclusion by a Hawaii state official that it should be required to remove fuel from tanks it owns near Pearl Harbor.

State Department of Health Deputy Director Marian Tsuji now has 30 days to consider the Navy’s complaints before making a final decision on the matter.

At issue is whether the Navy should be required, as ordered by Gov. David Ige earlier this month, to drain fuel from the tanks.

The Navy argued it shouldn’t. That prompted two days of hearings presided over by David D. Day, a deputy attorney general. After those hearings, Day on Monday recommended that the governor’s order be followed.

The governor issued his order after the Navy disclosed that fuel from a World War II-era fuel storage facility at Red Hill had contaminated one of its drinking water wells and sickened hundreds in military housing. Honolulu officials are concerned leaks from the facility may permanently damage an aquifer that sits underneath the tanks, jeopardizing Oahu’s broader water supply.

Companies race to stem flood of microplastic fibres into the oceans

From filters to bags to balls, the number of products aimed at stopping the torrent of microplastic fibres being flushed out of washing machines and into rivers and oceans is increasing rapidly. Grundig recently became the first appliance manufacturer to integrate a microfibre filter into a washing machine, while a British company has developed a system that does away with disposable fibre-trapping filters. ...

Microplastic pollution has pervaded the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water, as well as breathing them in. Microplastics have been shown to harm wildlife but the impact on people is not known, though microplastics do damage human cells in the laboratory. ...

New data from 36 sites collected during The Ocean Race Europe found that 86% of the microplastics in the seawater samples were fibres. “Our data clearly show that microplastics are pervasive in the ocean and that, surprisingly, the major component is microfibres,” said Aaron Beck, at the Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany.

Grundig, which launched its fibre-catching washing machine in November, said the system caught up to 90% of synthetic fibres released during wash cycles. The filter cartridges are made from recycled plastic and last for up to six months, after which they can be returned free of charge. A system that can be retrofitted to existing washing machines and does not need replacement cartridges has been created by the British company Matter, and was recently awarded £150,000 from the British Design Fund. The device, called Gulp, is connected between the outflow pipe and the drain and traps the fibres in a container that is emptied every 20 washes.

Also of Interest

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

Yes, 10 Good Things About 2021

US, South Korea ‘Effectively’ Agree on Draft Declaration to End Korean War

Putin Warns Biden Major Sanctions Over Ukraine Would Sever US-Russia Ties

Deciphering the Biden-Putin Telephone Chat of Yesterday, 30 December 2021

Talks Between Putin And Biden Continue

What the US Misunderstands About Russia

How Mossad Helps Arab Despots

Jamal Khashoggi killers living in luxury villas in Riyadh, say witnesses

Turkish inflation soars to 36%, highest in Erdogan era

‘Degrowth’ Isn’t Just About the Economy. It’s About Culture.

2021: a year of climate crisis in review

Starbucks Workers EXPOSE Anti-Union 'Psychological Warfare'

A Little Night Music

Sleepy John Estes - Milk Cow Blues

Sleepy John Estes - Diving Duck Blues

Sleepy John Estes - The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair

Sleepy John Estes - Mailman Blues

Sleepy John Estes - Drop Down Mama

Sleepy John Estes - Jailhouse Blues

Sleepy John Estes - Every Time My Heart Beats

Sleepy John Estes - Everybody Oughta Make a Change

Sleepy John Estes - Needmore Has Harmed Many A Man