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"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds."

-- John Perry Barlow

News and Opinion

With the latest WikiLeaks revelations about the CIA – is privacy really dead?

In the week that WikiLeaks revealed the CIA and MI5 have an armoury of surveillance tools that can spy on people through their smart TVs, cars and cellphones, FBI director James Comey has said that Americans should not have expectations of “absolute privacy”. ...

Both the Snowden revelations and the CIA leak highlight the variety of creative techniques intelligence agencies can use to spy on individuals, at a time when many of us are voluntarily giving up our personal data to private companies and installing so-called “smart” devices with microphones (smart TVs, Amazon Echo) in our homes. ...

The law hasn’t kept pace with digital technologies. For example, there is a legal theory called the “third-party doctrine” that holds that people who give up their information to third parties like banks, phone companies, social networks and ISPs have “no reasonable expectation of privacy”. This has allowed the US government to obtain information without legal warrants. ...

American citizens should not be lulled into a false sense of security that the CIA only targets foreign nationals. The “Vault 7” documents show a broad exchange of tools and information between the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other US federal agencies, as well as intelligence services of close allies Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

“We can’t spy on our own citizens but we can spy on anyone else’s,” explained Neil Richards, a law professor from Washington University. “If agencies are friends with each other, they have everybody else do their work for them and they just share the data.”

CIA-Funded Washington Post Doesn’t Think You Should Pay Attention To The CIA Leaks

Ahh, here it is at last. The Washington Post, whose owner has received hundreds of millions of dollars directly from the CIA, and which never follows standard journalism practice by disclosing this potential conflict of interest when reporting on the US intelligence community, has released an unintentionally hilarious analysis of WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 drop that we should all be pointing and laughing at right now. I’ve been scanning WaPo’s headlines like a kid checking the mailbox for a letter from Santa waiting to see what the CIA’s unofficial trade rag has to say about the leaks, and baby it did not disappoint. ...

That’s right, in part one of its four-part list explaining why Americans should ignore the CIA leaks, the CIA-funded Washington Post tells readers that the leak may have come from a country that the leak shows us the CIA has been deliberately collecting the hacking fingerprints of. The CIA’s UMBRAGE group, according to the press release of a drop that the intelligence community admits is wholly authentic, “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation,” which could be used to “misdirect attribution by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints' of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.”

“A key point here is that this document trove shifts the narrative away from the hacking of the DNC and Russia’s relationship with Trump,” the article continues, “and toward a focus on the malfeasance allegedly committed by the CIA.”

Yeah, no shit. As The Intercept’s Kim Zetter rightly notes, there is no proof in the documents WikiLeaks has released (currently less than one percent of its Vault 7 series) that the CIA used the Russian hacking signatures it warehouses to frame Russia for leaking emails of Democratic insiders to WikiLeaks, but it also doesn’t prove that they didn’t. We now know for a fact that the conglomerate of serial liars and manipulators known as the CIA actively collects programs that can be used to falsify Russian hacking fingerprints wherever it wants, and we’re still meant to focus on Russia as the source of the leaks? Yeah, no thanks. Vault 7 killed the establishment narrative on Russia, and these deep state propaganda outlets are still tying strings to its corpse to trot it around like a marionette so we’ll think it’s still alive. Nobody knows who leaked the DNC documents, and there’s no longer any valid reason to believe that it was Russia. So yes, naturally people are paying more attention to the CIA’s malfeasance than they are to Russia.

Some interesting but inconclusive evidence:

Deep hack

So did the CIA hack the DNC server?

You may have read something along those lines on websites like Breitbart. The basis for these reports is a tool call Umbrage which is described in the documents. According to WikiLeaks press release, the tool can be used to leave a digital fingerprint during an attack which will point to another perpetrator, with WikiLeaks specifically mentioning Russia in relation to this.

Umbrage is a sort of code repository for CIA agents who don’t want to write their own code. It contains malware cobbled together from various sources and the CIA can use it to make attribution more difficult when it attacks a target.

The problem with the WikiLeaks/Breitbart viewpoint that suggests the CIA impersonated the Russian government, is that the specific malware used by the DNC hackers is nowhere to be found on the list used by the CIA which was released Tuesday.

'Double standards': CIA leaks don't stir MSM, Russia stays in spotlight

Fresh Doubts about Russian ‘Hacking’

The widely cited Russian fingerprints on the “hacking” attacks – such as malware associated with the suspected Russian cyber-attackers APT 28 (also known as “Fancy Bear”); some Cyrillic letters: and the phrase “Felix Edmundovich,” a reference to Dzerzhinsky, the founder of a Bolsheviks’ secret police – look less like proof of Russian guilt than they did earlier. ...

A former U.S. intelligence officer, cited by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, acknowledged that the CIA’s “Umbrage” library of foreign hacking tools could “be used to mask a U.S. operation and make it appear that it was carried out by another country…. That could be accomplished by inserting malware components from, say, a known Chinese, Russian or Iranian hacking operation into a U.S. one.”

While that possibility in no way clears Moscow in the case of the Democratic “hack,” it does inject new uncertainty into the “high confidence” that President Obama’s intelligence community expressed in its assessment of Russian culpability. If the CIA had this capability to plant false leads in the data, so too would other actors, both government and private, to cover their own tracks.

Another problem with the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment is that the forensics were left to private contractors working for the Democrats, not conducted independently by U.S. government experts. That gap in the evidentiary trail widens when one notes that CrowdStrike, the Democratic Party’s consultant, offered contradictory commentary about the skills of the hackers.

CrowdStrike praised the hackers’ tradecraft as “superb, operational security second to none” and added: “we identified advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities including deliberate targeting and ‘access management’ tradecraft — both groups were constantly going back into the environment to change out their implants, modify persistent methods, move to new Command & Control channels and perform other tasks to try to stay ahead of being detected.”

In other words, CrowdStrike cited the sophistication of the tradecraft as proof of a state-sponsored cyber-attack, yet it was the sloppiness of the tradecraft that supposedly revealed the Russian links, i.e. the old malware connections, the Cyrillic letters and the Dzerzhinsky reference.

If you're writing about the CIA/@Wikileaks story, here's the big deal: first public evidence USG secretly paying to keep US software unsafe. pic.twitter.com/kYi0NC2mOp

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 7, 2017

The FBI launches a criminal investigation to find source of the CIA leak

The FBI and CIA have launched a criminal investigation after confidential documents were published by WikiLeaks on Tuesday. Federal authorities plan to interview hundreds of agents as part of their search to find the person responsible for providing a huge cache of top secret documents to the whistleblowing site, with initial investigations focusing on the possibility that an insider was responsible for the leaks.

The U.S. intelligence community is scrambling to find the source of the massive leak of classified CIA documents, which lay out, in detail, the tools the agency uses to conduct covert monitoring of electronic devices — everything from iPhones to smart televisions.

According to sources speaking to the New York Times, investigators say the data published by Julian Assange’s organization may have been stolen from a server outside the CIA, managed by a contractor — but it is not ruling out the possibility of a CIA employee being responsible.

Reuters reports the investigators believe a CIA contractor may be responsible for the leak, and that they have been aware of the breach since last year. According to CNN’s sources, the investigation is also seeking to establish what other material WikiLeaks may have in its possession.

To security establishment, WikiLeaks' CIA dump is part of US-Russia battle

In the Washington security establishment ... the leaks are being viewed more as the latest battle in a struggle between US and Russian intelligence services being played out in the US political arena – a fight in which WikiLeaks is widely seen as sitting firmly in Moscow’s corner.

The latest leaks land amid an ongoing and very public feud between the US president and the country’s intelligence agencies over Kremlin efforts to influence the election in Donald Trump’s favour. In recent months, the president has repeatedly denigrated US intelligence agencies – going as far as comparing them to the Nazi regime – while openly cheering on WikiLeaks activities. He has also alleged, so far without any evidence, that the Obama administration spied on him and his election campaign.

The apparent CIA hacking tools published by WikiLeaks feed directly into that struggle. Some Trump supporters have claimed that the apparent Russian hacking attacks could be a “false-flag” operation, hinting it was carried out by the new president’s domestic foes, and the “Vault 7” documents published on Tuesday give them potential ammunition. ...

James Lewis, senior vice-president at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on cyber security, speculated that the motive behind the leak could be to underpin the false flag narrative of the Trump camp.

Trump Picks Hawkish Critic of Russia as NATO Ambassador, Veering From One Extreme to the Other

President Trump has reportedly tapped as his ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) a hawkish critic of Russia who wants the U.S. to arm Ukraine. It’s the latest sign that the administration is reacting to criticism that it is too soft on Russia by pivoting to the other extreme.

Richard Grennell is a former Bush-era U.S. spokesperson at the United Nations who also served as a foreign policy spokesperson for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. He frequently appears on Fox News and other conservative outlets saying President Obama appeased Russia. ...

Writing in The New York Times’s Room for Debate section in 2014, Grenell said that Obama’s belief that the U.S. could “support Ukraine but not antagonize Russia” represented “a naïve and dangerous world view.” In a Fox News op-ed, he proposed military escalation: “Offer advice and training to Ukraine, and sell it the lethal weapons required to contend with Russian armored personnel carriers, tanks and missiles,” he wrote, adding that the U.S. should also restart missile defense shield programs in Poland and the Czech Republic. ...

Grenell is not the only Russia hawk to step into Trump’s orbit recently. His new national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, holds more moderate views on Islam than his bigoted predecessor Michael Flynn — but also has a more adversarial view of Russia. ... Trump’s UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has also taken a tough line with Russia during her first month on the job.

Republicans and Democrats team up to piss away your tax dollars like the proverbial drunken sailor on the military. See how your congressworm voted here.

House OKs $578B military spending bill

The House voted decisively Wednesday to approve a $578 billion spending bill that keeps the U.S. armed forces operating through September and sets the stage for substantial increases to the Pentagon’s budget advocated by President Donald Trump.

The fiscal year 2017 defense legislation passed the GOP-led chamber by a wide margin, 371-48, clearing the way for the Senate to act. The Trump administration is preparing a $30 billion supplement to the bill, which serves as a down payment on the president’s promise to repair what he and other Republicans have described as a military “depleted” by the Obama administration’s refusal to spend enough money.

The United States spends more on defense than the next seven nations combined. Yet GOP defense hawks are pressing Trump to spend tens of billions more on defense than he’s envisioned for the next budget year.

Syria: US marines deploy troops and artillery battery near Islamic state group capital of Raqqa

Marines have arrived in Syria

Marines from an amphibious task force have left their ships in the Middle East and deployed to Syria, establishing an outpost from which they can fire artillery guns in support of the fight to oust the Islamic State from the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, defense officials said.

The deployment marks a new escalation in the U.S. war in Syria, and puts more conventional U.S. troops in the battle. Several hundred Special Operations troops have advised local forces there for months, but the Pentagon has mostly shied away from using conventional forces in Syria. The new mission comes as the Trump administration weighs a plan to help Syrian rebels take back Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State. The plan also includes more Special Operations troops and attack helicopters. ...

The new Marine mission was disclosed after members of the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment appeared in the Syrian city of Manbij over the weekend in Strykers — heavily armed, eight-wheel armored vehicles. Defense officials said they are there to discourage Syrian or Turkish troops from making any moves that could shift the focus away from an assault on Islamic State militants.

The fine work that Barry and Hill did to improve the lives of women and children is just breathtaking in its scope.

Syria’s war has created a “terrifying mental health crisis” for a generation of children

Six years of constant brutality and bloodshed in Syria has created a “terrifying mental health crisis” for a generation of traumatized children, leaving some suicidal and others unable to speak.

Those are just some of the stark findings in Save the Children’s new report Invisible Wounds. The aid agency said it is the largest mental health survey inside Syria since the war began in 2011, and warned that millions of Syrian children could be living in a state of “toxic stress.” Nearly 3 million Syrian children under the age of 6 have lived their whole lives in a warzone, according to the report’s findings, while more than 2 million children have been forced to flee the country as refugees.

“After six years of war, we are at a tipping point, after which the impact on children’s formative years and childhood development may be so great that the damage could be permanent and irreversible,” Marcia Brophy, a senior mental health adviser for Save the Children, wrote in the report. ...

“The risk of a broken generation, lost to trauma and extreme stress, has never been greater. ”

Trump administration looks to resume Saudi arms sale criticized as endangering civilians in Yemen

The State Department has approved a resumption of weapons sales that critics have linked to Saudi Arabia’s bombing of civilians in Yemen, a potential sign of reinvigorated U.S. support for the kingdom’s involvement in its neighbor’s ongoing civil war. ...

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s approval this week of the measure, which officials say needs White House backing to go into effect, provides an early indication of the new administration’s more Saudi-friendly approach to the conflict in Yemen and a sign of its more hawkish stance on Iran.

It also signals a break with an approach the previous administration hoped would limit civilian deaths in a conflict that has pushed Yemen to the brink of widespread famine but that Persian Gulf ally Saudi Arabia has cast as a battle against the spread of Iranian influence across the Middle East.

US rejects calls for diplomacy talks with 'irrational' North Korea

China had asked the US to halt joint military activities with South Korea in exchange for the suspension of North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said China's proposal was not a "viable deal."

"This is apples and oranges," he said. "What we're doing in terms of our defense cooperation with South Korea is in no way comparable to the blatant disregard that North Korea has shown with respect to international law."

In the United Nations, US Ambassador Nikki Haley said North Korea's actions called for a different response.

"We are not dealing with a rational person," Haley told reporters after the UN Security Council discussed North Korea's Monday launch of four ballistic missiles. ...

She said the new US administration was reevaluating how it would handle North Korea and that "all options were on the table."

Poland threatens to derail EU summit over Donald Tusk re-election

Poland has threatened to derail a summit of EU leaders in Brussels over the probable re-election of Donald Tusk as European council president.

The presidency was the first item on the agenda as leaders gathered in Brussels, but Poland has threatened to veto the summit’s conclusions if leaders re-elect Tusk, a former Polish prime minister who has been in a long-running battle with the current government in Warsaw.

The country’s foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, speaking on the eve of the summit said: “We will inform our partners that the entire summit is at risk if they force the vote today. We’ll do everything we can to ensure that the vote won’t take place today.”

Tusk has widespread support among the member states, and is expected to be reappointed despite Warsaw’s bellicose talk. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has said that granting Tusk a second term would be a “sign of stability”.

Republicans Plan a Coup Today in the House, Gutting Established Class Action Law

Without holding as much as one public hearing, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are hoping to show their fealty to their corporate masters and make it next to impossible for citizens to bring class action lawsuits against corporate wrongdoers. A vote will be held today on H.R. 985, a bill with the Orwellian reverse-speak title of “Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017.”

While the media is absorbed in the wild accusations-du-jour Tweeted out by the President of the United States, corporations are salaciously using the media distractions to repeal a century of hard-fought gains in labor and civil rights protections.

The bill was introduced by Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the largest donors to the Goodlatte political campaign in 2016 were multinational corporations and their trade associations.

The legislation is so bad that the American Bar Association, which represents both plaintiff and defense counsel, sent a strident letter to House members on Monday. Thomas M. Susman, the Director of Governmental Affairs for the ABA, said it would create a “nearly insurmountable burden for people who have suffered a personal injury or economic loss at the hands of large institutions with vast resources, effectively barring them from bringing class actions.”

Keiser Report: Neoliberalism is Junk

Replacement healthcare bill clears first big hurdle in House of Representatives

Republicans cleared the first hurdle early on Thursday in their plan for a massive overhaul of the US healthcare system backed by Donald Trump, despite Democratic concerns that the cost of the bill and its impact on the budget remain unknown.

The House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee approved the bill to replace Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act along party lines on Thursday morning after debating the draft legislation for nearly 18 hours.

The chamber’s Energy and Commerce committee continued its own marathon session, two days after the proposal was unveiled by Republican leaders.

“This is an historic step, an important step in the repeal of Obamacare,” said Republican Representative Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, after the committee voted 23-16 on the measure.

The opioid crisis would probably get worse under Trumpcare

Republicans have finally unveiled their plan to replace Obamacare, but the proposal is already under attack — from other Republicans. Among them are GOP governors who warn that the proposal could have disastrous consequences for states struggling to combat the surge in opioid overdoses.

Republicans have long expressed their desire to cut funding for Medicaid, limit enrollment, and do away with rules that require coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatment. And the plan would do just that, gradually rolling back the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which provides health insurance to roughly 11 million low-income people in 31 states, including Ohio and Kentucky, two places among the hardest hit by the opioid epidemic.

“Phasing out Medicaid coverage without a viable alternative is counterproductive and unnecessarily puts at risk our ability to treat the drug-addicted, mentally ill, and working poor who now have access to a stable source of care,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Tuesday.

Trump’s anti-Muslim policies may portend oil industry brain drain

Chemical, electrical and production engineers are among those who gather every Friday for a service at the Muslim Association of West Texas, a small mosque in Midland, Texas. According to Farook Rafeek, who regularly attends these services, more than half of the congregation works in the oil industry. And Trump’s new immigration ban may keep the mosque from growing: despite an oil industry desperate for specialists like the ones who moved across the world from majority-Muslim nations to work in Texas, fewer are on the way.

“The Trump administration is already having an impact on hiring decisions,” said George Stein, managing director at Commodity Talent, a recruiting agency for oil companies. “Two of our international clients are considering basing foreign hires outside of the United States because of difficulties arising from the ban.” ...

If Trump’s immigration ban clears court hurdles and is fully implemented, experts say it would have a dramatic impact across the industry. “It would be damaging industry-wide,” said oil and gas consultant Mark LaCour. LaCour explained the industry already faces talent shortages and has for years: frontiers in the industry such as “downstreaming” (using petroleum to manufacture everything from plastics to paint brushes) require experts. “Especially around new technologies. Cognitive science or big data, for example. A portion of those scientists are Muslim,” said LaCour.

Oil companies already compete with tech firms in Silicon Valley for cognitive science and big data specialists. With the ban in place the two industries will be competing for even fewer immigrants candidates. “Oil is already competing with tech,” said Webber. “Things just got a little bit harder.”

Facing Likely Deportation, Immigrant Activist Ravi Ragbir Speaks Out Before ICE Check-in

The first “Dreamer” arrested by ICE under Trump is stuck in legal limbo

A Wednesday hearing for Daniel Ramirez Medina, the first Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient to be detained by Trump administration immigration officials, yielded few answers for the 750,000 DACA recipients in the United States wondering what their future holds.

Scolding Department of Justice attorneys for filing a brief so late on Tuesday night that he couldn’t review it that day, Judge James Donohue declined to release Ramirez or to rule on one of the Seattle case’s main issues, which is under whose jurisdiction the case should fall. The Department of Justice would like to try the case in immigration court; Ramirez’s lawyers say district court is the best place to deal with the case’s constitutional consequences.

Like all DACA recipients, also known as DREAMers, Ramirez arrived in the United States as an undocumented child and now has temporary permission to legally live and work in the country. But in February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents encountered Ramirez during an unrelated search for Ramirez’s father, described by ICE as “a prior-deported felon” who has since been reportedly charged. During the search, one agent allegedly stopped Ramirez and asked, “Are you here legally?” Though Ramirez said he was, the agents took him into custody anyway.

Ramirez’s DACA protection was later revoked and he’s now technically in the country illegally.

Is Trump Adviser Carl Icahn an Illicit Lobbyist or a Corrupt Official?

Watchdog group Public Citizen asked Congress on Wednesday to investigate whether billionaire investor and unofficial Trump administration adviser Carl Icahn has engaged in illegal, unregistered lobbying in conjunction with his public bid to change an ethanol rule that would save one of his affiliated businesses $200 million annually.

Icahn raised eyebrows last week for getting the Renewable Fuels Association to reverse its position on a key proposal that would benefit him personally. The association, which lobbies for ethanol producers, agreed to a proposal to shift the responsibility for ensuring that gasoline contains a minimum volume of renewable fuels — from oil refiners to gasoline wholesalers. Icahn is the majority shareholder in CVR Energy, a refiner that cannot blend ethanol on its own, and which therefore must buy over $200 million in “renewable fuel credits” each year to follow the law. By shifting the responsibility to wholesalers, CVR would no longer have to make that purchase. ...

Since the Trump administration insists that Icahn is a private citizen who receives no compensation as a government official, he would fall into the category of needing to register any lobbying work, according to a complaint sent to the clerk of the House and secretary of the Senate. Public Citizen argues that Icahn’s formal proposal to change the renewable fuel standard regulation, along with his reported assistance in vetting candidates for the Environmental Protection Agency, comprises lobbying activity.

Los Angeles set to tax itself to raise billions for homelessness relief

Homelessness advocates in America’s second largest city were savoring a seeming double victory after Los Angeles voters appeared to choose to tax themselves to raise more than $3.5bn for homeless services over the next decade, and comprehensively knocked down a second measure that would have slammed the brakes on many housing developments.

Tuesday’s election was the second in a row in which voters aligned with LA’s political leadership in calling for a massive funding effort to move tens of thousands of homeless people into permanent housing and provide the “wraparound” services they need to overcome addiction, mental health and other challenges.

The sales tax increase required a two-thirds majority, and its apparent close passage – like the passage of a $1.2bn bond measure last November – was a measure of the depth of both LA’s homelessness crisis, which has worsened sharply over the past eight years, and of a countywide housing shortage pushing prices out of reach for many working families.

The revenue from the quarter-cent sales tax increase would “enable the most comprehensive plan to combat homelessness in the history of Los Angeles County”, the head of the county Homeless Initiative, Phil Ansell, said shortly before the election.

If the sales tax increase is confirmed, the county of Los Angeles would have the means to deliver on its own promise to house 45,000 homeless people and help another 30,000 people avoid losing their homes over the next five years.

Thomas Frank takes down the opportunist corporate dems now doing the pseudo sackcloth and ashes schtick and screaming "resistance" rather than repentance. Worth a full read:

Don't let establishment opportunists ruin the resistance movement

The fury that is currently welling up against our demagogue president is a gorgeous thing. The women’s march on Washington bowled me over by its sheer numbers. The town hall meetings calling Republican representatives to account are delicious payback for decades of phony populism. The combination of the two is one of the healthiest political developments I have seen in many years.

But opportunism never sleeps, and with the rage and the resistance of recent weeks some far less noble characters have seen a chance to develop a new con. They’re up on the resistance bandwagon right now, rending their garments, shaking their fists, and praying that no one holds them responsible for the dead end into which they’ve steered us over the years. Inveighing loudly against Trump has become, for the people I am describing, a means of rescuing an ideology that has proven a disaster.

Comparing this moment with the Tea Party tells us a lot about this misdirection. ... There is a possibility that the resistance to Trump will turn out the same way – that it will become a vehicle for our Enron Democrats to avoid accountability. “I don’t think people want a new direction,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in December. Now is not the moment for infighting, others have insisted, but for unity and togetherness. Unity behind the existing leadership, that is. Changing the personnel in the C-Suites will only weaken us, they will say; hell, we can’t even afford to see our leaders criticized. ...

The last lesson to take from modern conservatism is the most important: the Tea Party succeeded by pretending to be a hard-times protest movement. It deliberately echoed the language of the old left. It raged against bank bailouts and crony capitalists. It dreamed about vast, crippling strikes. It pretended to stand up for workers. Paul Ryan denounced big business. Glenn Beck modeled himself after Thirties enfant terrible Orson Welles. Trump himself constantly mourns deindustrialization and idle factories.

Another way of saying this is that the Tea Party movement was an imitation of the old, workerist left. If you want an explanation for how the manufacturing states of the Midwest went Republican last November, look no further. The insight here is that liberals don’t need to mimic the Tea Party in order to head off this powerful impulse; they merely need to be what they used to be – what they are supposed to be.

I doubt that many of our leading Democrats will be able even to do that, however. For decades now, Democrats and Blair-style “Third Way” leaders have praised one another for leaving all that workerist stuff behind, for embracing globalization and the knowledge economy and the enlightened professional class and affluent Republican voters in the suburbs. This has been going on for so long that the problem today is not only that they don’t want to recapture that part of their identity but that they don’t even know it exists.

Climate Change Denial, Democratic-style

I turned on the cable news at 3:00 p.m. last Friday. With a massive permafrost melt threatening the release of catastrophic levels of carbon and methane, with sections of the Antarctic ice sheet calving at an alarming rate, with a pandemic of sand mining threatening sea life and waterways throughout the planet, with shocking concentrations of pollutants threatening the delicate web of sea life even in the remotest depths of the world’s oceans, the lead story on both MSNBC and CNN was this: “Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be returning to The Apprentice.”

It’s no different on the nightly network newscasts, where the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) arbiters of public groupthink—along with their print confreres at The New York Times and Washington Post—have been frantically stoking a Hearst-like yellow journalism plague of lurid tales about the Russian Menace, Jeff Sessions’s two meetings with the Russian ambassador, Trump’s fresh round of Twitter storms about phone tapping, real or imagined, and so on, unto terminal stupor, as the world burns. ...

Faux progressives love to work up a good rhetorical lather about Trump’s mental condition, but the sedulous burial of any mention of the environmental/climate crises besieging the planet, much less their imminence and gravity—surely the most important story in the history of humanity—in favor of the standard diversionary drivel bespeaks a sociopathy among the liberal political/media elites every bit as frightening as any impairment imputed to Trump. These elite fauxgressive opinion leaders (and their millions of followers) relish their occasional robust lap or two of sweaty sanctimony about Republican climate deniers but seem curiously oblivious to the “soft” but no less deadly denialism in force among corporate liberal Democrats: sporadic campaign speechifying and the occasional meaningless, non-binding international declaration salve the conscience of those with no more real seriousness or sense of urgency about this world-historical crisis than Steve Bannon or Rush Limbaugh, whose dismissal of the issue is at least blatant and honest; the denialism of the liberal class is submerged beneath a surface of unctuous pieties and empty token gestures that pass for “concern,” even “action,” among the sharpies of the Democratic Party elites and their brain-fogged captives in the citizenry. ...

In 2015, the hottest year on record up to that time, mass media coverage of climate change declined from previous years, with each major news network devoting less than an hour to this subject for the entire year—ABC a miniscule 13 minutes. Hence the mass stupefaction of the American public on policy in general and climate change in particular. ... It’s true that of the two major establishment parties in the United States, only the Democrats have proposed any counter-measures at all. But they are so feeble, so obviously tailored to the needs of their corporate patrons rather than the needs of the planet, that they amount to another form of climate denial. And for all the rhetorical embroidery, these radically insufficient Democratic words and deeds are, in their way, as resolutely indifferent to the findings of the latest climate science as the cruder know-nothingism of the Republicans.

Dying robots and failing hope: Fukushima clean-up falters six years after tsunami

Barely a fifth of the way into their mission, the engineers monitoring the Scorpion’s progress conceded defeat. With a remote-controlled snip of its cable, the latest robot sent into the bowels of one of Fukushima Daiichi’s damaged reactors was cut loose, its progress stalled by lumps of fuel that overheated when the nuclear plant suffered a triple meltdown six years ago this week.

As the 60cm-long Toshiba robot, equipped with a pair of cameras and sensors to gauge radiation levels was left to its fate last month, the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), attempted to play down the failure of yet another reconnaissance mission to determine the exact location and condition of the melted fuel. ...

Despite the setbacks, Tepco insists it will begin extracting the melted fuel in 2021 – a decade after the disaster – after consulting government officials this summer.

But Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Germany who is based in Japan, describes the challenge confronting the utility as “unprecedented and almost beyond comprehension”, adding that the decommissioning schedule was “never realistic or credible”. ...

“The current schedule for the removal of hundreds of tons of molten nuclear fuel, the location and condition of which they still have no real understanding, was based on the timetable of prime minister [Shinzo] Abe in Tokyo and the nuclear industry – not the reality on the ground and based on sound engineering and science.”

African Penguins under threat

Trump’s EPA chief isn't sure humans are causing global warming

President Donald Trump’s new EPA chief Scott Pruitt told CNBC Thursday that he does not believe carbon dioxide or human activity are the primary contributors to global climate change and called the Paris climate agreement a “bad deal.”

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” Pruitt said. “We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

Pruitt’s comments on climate change put him directly at odds with the other scientific agencies of the federal government including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Also of Interest

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

Steve Bannon’s Apocalyptic ‘Unravelling’

Women and Children in Yemeni Village Recall Horror of Trump’s “Highly Successful” SEAL Raid

CIA’s New “Digital Innovation” Division Can’t Seem to Keep Its Own Secrets

Vladimir Putin Isn’t a Supervillain

Women’s Strike Organizers Arrested in New York on a Day of Protests Worldwide

To fund border wall, Trump administration weighs cuts to Coast Guard, airport security

NATO, U.S. slap Kosovo's move to create national army

Texas Lawmakers Push for Fetal Burial Bill on International Women’s Day

Michael Hudson: Retirement? What Social Obligation?

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A Little Night Music

Sax Man Brown & The Broomdusters - Round House Boogie

J.T. "Nature Boy" Brown - You Stayed Away Too Long

J T Brown - Sax-Ony Boogie

J.T. Brown - Give Her Plenty Of Money To Spend

J.T. Brown - Short Dresses

J.T. "Nature Boy" Brown - Windy City Boogie

Nature Boy Brown - House Party Groove

Nature Boy Brown - Blue Blue Boogie

Sax Man Brown with The Broom Dusters - Sax Symphonic Boogie