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This evening's music features blues and rock musician Ike Turner. Enjoy!

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”

-- Nelson Mandela

News and Opinion

Citing U.S. Prison Conditions, British Appeals Court Refuses to Extradite Accused Hacker Lauri Love to the U.S.

A British appeals court on Monday rejected demands from the U.S. Government for the extradition of an accused British hacker, Lauri Love, citing the inability of U.S. prisons to humanely and adequately treat his medical and mental health ailments. Extradition to the U.S., the court ruled, would be “oppressive by reason of his physical and mental condition.”

Rejecting the prosecutor’s pleas that “the British courts should trust the United States to provide what it said it would provide” in order to secure Love’s health and safety, the court instead invoked extensive medical and psychological testimony that conditions inside American prisons are woefully inadequate to treat Love’s ailments. As a result, extradition and incarceration inside the U.S. prison system would exacerbate those health issues and produce a high risk of suicide.

Love, 33, is accused by the U.S. Government of participating in the 2012 and 2013 hacking of the computer systems of various U.S. military agencies and private companies. The U.S. Justice Department, citing a confidential FBI source who claimed to have accessed chat rooms in which Love plotted with others on how to use the stolen data, indicted Love in three different states (New Jersey, New York and Virginia) on felony hacking and theft charges. Love was arrested in 2013 by British authorities and released on bail. Ever since, the U.S. Government has sought his extradition from the U.K. for him to stand trial, and ultimately be imprisoned, in the U.S. ...

The court concluded that suicide prevention programs in U.S. prisons are so crude and harsh that they actually increase the likelihood of a prisoner’s suicide.

UK - British judge upholds Assange warrant

Remarkably one-sided reporting in this piece.

UN outrage at Syrian suffering: ‘We can no longer stay silent’

The scale of suffering across Syria has reached unprecedented levels, with access to aid blocked in three major population centres, growing displacement and more than 13 million people in need across the country, the UN has said.

The organisation called on Tuesday for a one-month ceasefire to ease what it described as an “extreme situation” that “we haven’t seen before” at any point during the war, which is soon to enter its eighth year. The conflict has been marked by a mass exodus of Syrian citizens, sieges, starvation and a death toll that surpassed 500,000 people in 2016.

The UN’s assistant secretary general and humanitarian coordinator in Syria, Panos Moumtzis, said the organisation had been almost powerless to respond to a “dramatic deterioration in the humanitarian situation” over the past two months in particular, when access to people in opposition areas had been blocked by Syrian government officials. ...

The city of Afrin in northern Idlib was attacked last month by the Turkish military and an Arab proxy force, adding a new layer of complexity to a war in which alliances have shifted and internal dynamics have splintered attempts to provide a united opposition front against the Assad regime. All the while, international powers have increasingly tried to shape the outcome of the war in their own interests, while mounting humanitarian needs across the province have routinely gone unmet.

No 'Olive Branch?' Erdogan accuses Washington of plotting against Turkey in Syria

142 civilians killed in Turkish military offensive in Syria's Afrin

As many as 500 people have been killed and wounded during the two-week-long Turkish military campaign against the Kurdish-held Afrin region in northern Syria, state news agency SANA reported on Monday.

The casualties have been taken to the Afrin hospital, said SANA, adding that 142 civilians were killed and 345 others wounded by the Turkish military offensive on Afrin in the northern countryside of Aleppo near the Turkish border.

On Monday, the Turkish shelling targeted a center of the Red Crescent in Afrin, leaving big damages in the facility, according to SANA.

The Turkish military campaign started on Jan. 20, targeting historic sites, mosques, residential areas and the infrastructure in the Afrin enclave, SANA added.

Turkey detains nearly 600 for opposing Syrian offensive

Turkey has so far detained 573 people for social media posts and protests criticizing its military offensive in Syria, the government said on Monday.

The crackdown, which has extended to the national medical association, has deepened concerns about free speech under President Tayyip Erdogan, who has criticized opponents of the military intervention as “traitors”. ...

“Since the start of Operation Olive Branch, 449 people have been detained for spreading terrorist propaganda on social media and 124 people detained for taking part in protest action,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement. ...

Last week, a prosecutor ordered the detention of 11 senior members of the Turkish Medical Association, including its chairman, after the organization criticized the incursion, saying: “No to war, peace immediately”.

Lithuania: Russia deploying more missiles into Kaliningrad

Lithuania's president said Monday Russia has deployed additional nuclear-capable missiles in its Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad on a permanent basis, calling it a threat to Europe.

President Dalia Grybauskaite told reporters after visiting NATO troops in the central Lithuanian town of Rukla that "Iskander missiles are being stationed in Kaliningrad for permanent presence as we speak." She called it a threat not only to Lithuania but to "half of all European countries." ...

The head of the Russian parliament's defense committee, Vladimir Shamanov, confirmed the missiles' deployment in remarks carried by Russian news agencies. He added that the move was a response to a NATO buildup near Russia's borders, with the number of U.S. weapons in Poland a particular irritation to Moscow.

Isikoff Stunned That His Carter Page Article Was Used To Justify Spy Warrant

Investigative journalist Michael Isikoff said Friday that he was surprised to find out that an article he wrote about Carter Page prior to the election was used to obtain a spy warrant against the former Trump campaign adviser. ...

One “essential” part of the application was the uncorroborated Steele dossier, according to the memo. And an article that Isikoff wrote for Yahoo! News on Sept. 23, 2016 that was based directly on the dossier was “cited extensively” in the application. Isikoff was shocked, he said, because his very article was based on information that came from Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier. He said it was “a bit beyond me” that the FBI would use his article in the FISA application.

“Obviously the information that I got from Christopher Steele was information the FBI already had,” he said, noting that Steele began sharing information from his dossier in July 2016. Isikoff acknowledged the potential problem with the DOJ and FBI citing his article to support the FISA against Page. “It’s self-referential,” he said of the article and its reliance on the dossier. “My story is about the FBI’s own investigation,” he continued.

The Republican spy memo makes a similar argument. “This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from the information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo! News,” it reads. It also asserts that the Page FISA application “incorrectly assesses” that Steele was not a source for Isikoff.

Republicans got what they wanted with #ReleaseTheMemo

#ReleaseTheMemo is working.

A new poll by Reuters/Ipsos published Monday shows that three out of four Republicans believe the FBI and Department of Justice are trying to delegitimize President Trump — a clear reversal for the traditional party of law and order. Democrats say that’s exactly what Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were aiming for when they hyped and then published their memo alleging profound anti-Trump bias among federal investigators.

Just last month 91 percent of Republicans said they had confidence in the country’s law enforcement agencies, according to Reuters. ...

Trump tweeted Saturday that the memo “totally vindicates” him, calling special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia and his efforts to obstruct justice a “witch hunt.” But the Reuters/Ipsos poll published Monday also found that 52 percent of Americans believe the special counsel will find evidence that the Trump campaign worked with Russia to influence the election.

The Nunes Memo Matters—But Not For the Reason You Think

... When you wave away all the partisan smoke, what’s left is that the Nunes memo confirms that American intelligence services were involved in a presidential campaign and remained so in the aftermath. That’s the real takeaway from the political hysteria of the past week. The FBI conducted an investigation, the first ever of a major-party candidate in the midst of a presidential contest, that exonerated Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing over her private email server, a government-endorsed “okay” for her expected victory. No real probe was ever conducted into the vast sums of money moving between foreign states and the Clinton Foundation, dead-ending those concerns to partisan media.

A month before the election, the Obama administration accused the Russian government of stealing emails from the Democratic National Committee. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said the leaked emails (which reflected poorly on Clinton) “are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” The FBI swung again and said well maybe there was something to see in Clinton’s emails, buried on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. The CIA and NSA, meanwhile, leaked like cheap diapers throughout the campaign. Trump owes money to Russia. Trump’s computers communicate with Russia. The Russians have sexy kompromat on Trump. That the newly elected president is literally a tool of Russian intelligence became a common stipulation in the national conversation (John McCain on the Nunes memo release: “We are doing Putin’s job for him.”)

Leave aside the question of what in all of the above is actually true. Maybe Clinton’s private email server exposed no secrets. Maybe Trump’s real estate ventures have dirty Russian money in them. It is doubtful any of us will ever know. What is important is each of those actions by the intelligence community affected the course of the election. They may not have always shifted votes in the intended way, and there theoretically may have been no intention per se, but the bare-naked fact is that unlike any previous presidential election, the intelligence community played an ongoing public role in deciding who ended up in the White House, and they’re now continuing that role to determine how long the elected president remains there.

Even Trump’s lawyers think he’ll lie to Mueller

Donald Trump’s lawyers have told him not to agree to an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, fearful he would lie to investigators and place himself in legal jeopardy, the New York Times reported Monday.

The president told reporters last month he was looking forward to speaking with Mueller to prove “there has been no collusion whatsoever” between his campaign and Russia.

But four people briefed on the matter told the Times that Trump’s attorneys – John Dowd and his deputy, Jay Sekulow – and other key advisers had told him to refuse an interview. They’re concerned that Trump, an habitual liar prone to making contradictory statements, will face charges if he lies to the probe.

Bannon to “defy order” to testify before Congress

Steve Bannon will refuse to appear before Congress Tuesday, according to sources speaking to the Guardian and Reuters.

The former White House chief strategist will reportedly defy a subpoena ordering him to appear before the House Intelligence Committee because the scope of the questions has not been agreed between the Committee and the White House.

If he does fail to appear, Bannon could be held in contempt of Congress — though the last time Congress arrested and detained a witness was 1935.

Dow Jones Record Plunge! Here’s Why

Trillions wiped off global markets after Wall Street bloodbath

Financial titans celebrated with world leaders in Davos last month as global markets soared. Ten days later and trillions of dollars have been wiped from the stock market in the worst crash on Wall Street since 2008.

Following Monday’s U.S. bloodbath, all major markets in Europe fell by more than 3 percent in early trading Tuesday. In Asia, Japan, Hong Kong and Korea all suffered similarly heavy losses. ...

$4 trillion wiped off global equity markets in the last week pic.twitter.com/NoYS6STQgx

— Jamie McGeever (@ReutersJamie) February 6, 2018

Economists are scrambling to explain the sudden dip, which follows an unprecedented period of sustained gain that saw the Dow rise 25 percent in 2017.

Some have pointed to the change in leadership at the Federal Reserve, while others suggest an overdue correction to the market.

Humans need to become smarter thinkers to beat climate denial

Climate myths are often contradictory – it’s not warming, though it’s warming because of the sun, and really it’s all just an ocean cycle – but they all seem to share one thing in common: logical fallacies and reasoning errors.

John Cook, Peter Ellerton, and David Kinkead have just published a paper in Environmental Research Letters in which they examined 42 common climate myths and found that every single one demonstrates fallacious reasoning. For example, the authors made a video breaking down the logical flaws in the myth ‘climate changed naturally in the past so current climate change is natural.’

Cook has previously published research on using ‘misconception-based learning’ to dislodge climate myths from peoples’ brains and replace them with facts, and beating denial by inoculating people against misinformers’ tricks. The idea is that when people are faced with a myth and a competing fact, the fact will more easily win out if the fallacy underpinning the myth is revealed. In fact, these concepts of misconception-based learning and inoculation against myths were the basis of the free online Denial101x course developed by Cook and colleagues.

Also of Interest

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

Lie After Lie: What Colin Powell Knew About Iraq 15 Years Ago, and What He Told the U.N.

Understanding Russia, Un-Demonizing Putin

'Still fighting': Africatown, site of last US slave shipment, sues over pollution

They owned an island, now they are urban poor: the tragedy of Altamira

Cosmik debris: Frank Zappa's son reveals details of hologram tour

A Little Night Music

Ike Turner - Matchbox (Version A)

Ike Turner - Down & Out

Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm - She Made My Blood Run Cold

Ike Turner and His Orchestra - The Big Question

Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm - Box Top

Ike Turner & The Kings of Rhythm - I'm Lonesome Baby

Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm - That's All I Need

Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm - You've Got To Lose

Ike Turner and The Kings Of Rhythm - Heartbroken & Worried

Ike Turner And His Kings Of Rhythm - Do You Mean It

Billy Gayles w/ Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm - Do Right Baby

Ike Turner - Tequila!