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This evening's music features St. Louis blues singer and guitarist Clifford Gibson. Enjoy!

"In our era, war, like the Pentagon budget and the growing powers of the national security state, has been inoculated against the virus of citizen involvement, and so against any significant form of criticism or resistance. It’s a process worth contemplating since it reminds us that we’re truly in a new American age, whether of the plutocrats, by the plutocrats, and for the plutocrats or of the generals, by the generals, and for the generals -- but most distinctly not of the people, by the people, and for the people."

-- Tom Engelhardt

News and Opinion

US Army Investigator Accuses National Security Adviser McMaster of War Crimes in Iraq

Former commander in charge of US Army Military Police in Iraq says President Trump’s new National Security Adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, ‘ordered’ criminal abuse of hundreds of Iraqi detainees in 2005

During his conversation with Scott Horton... [retired senior U.S. Military Police officer who served as 18th Airborne Corps Provost Marshal and Chief of Police of the Multinational Coalition Forces in Iraq in 2005, Col. Arnaldo] Claudio elaborated on his recent interview with Univision News, where he first publicly revealed his accusations against Gen. McMaster. Claudio explained how in his capacity as chief of all Military Police in Iraq he was ordered by Gen. J.R. Vines to investigate complaints regarding the treatment of detainees made against the U.S. Army command fighting in Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq in 2005, led by President Trump’s current National Security Adviser, then-U.S. Army Col., H.R. McMaster. ...

Col. Claudio was stationed in Iraq from March 16, 2005 through late January 2006. He was tasked to ensure that all detainee operations were being conducted in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and Standard Operating Procedures in compliance with U.S. laws and military regulations.

Claudio told Horton that the number of admissions and releases of detainees from the small detention facility in Tal Afar didn’t seem to add up. It appeared the admitted number of detainees exceeded the maximum capacity. Claudio and his investigative team traveled to Tal Afar to investigate further, where they discovered detainees were held in conditions that were both shocking and illegal. Detainees were being deprived of food and water for days while bound together with plastic handcuffs. Hundreds were also being held without shelter. All of this was in violation of military law, according to Col. Claudio. ...

Claudio’s interactions with McMaster were brief. “It was a very short conversation. He basically didn’t want me there. And he says, ‘Get on with your duty and get out of here.’” But Claudio responded, “Not so fast. I’m here, I have orders, and if you are in fact violating the standards of how to take care of detainees, you’re going back with me. Period.” In a detention camp designed to hold 250 detainees, Col. McMaster held over 900 people in brutal conditions, left outdoors without food, water, or shelter from the sun in their own feces and urine. ...

Col. Claudio was unable to find Col. McMaster after he and his team surveyed the facilities.

Noam Chomsky on Fascism: Could It Happen Here?

Why is everyone so blasé about unconstitutional foreign policy?

The White House is considering a major expansion of America’s involvement in Yemen’s civil war, according to the Washington Post. It’s a move that is not surprising given the speed with which the new administration has become embroiled in Yemen’s fight.

That does not make this development any less disappointing or unwise, enlarging as it does the U.S. role in a reckless war that has flown clear under most Americans’ radar, and which sees us supporting a Saudi coalition that’s been credibly accused of war crimes.

On top of all this, Congress has not declared war on Yemen as required by the Constitution, nor has it even bothered with an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). This is a presidential war in its truest sense, launched entirely at one man’s discretion and now, perhaps, expanded at the sole decision of another.

Yet if there is a roar of outrage over this unconstitutional foreign policy, it’s so quiet I can’t hear it.

Speaking of war crimes, Trump certainly seems to have an impressive aptitude for them, much like his predecessor who discovered that he was surprisingly good at killing people.

Donald Trump administration orders 70 airstrikes on Yemen in a month - twice as many as 2016 total

The US military under the command of Donald Trump has carried out 70 airstrikes on Yemen in the last month - more than twice the number for all of 2016.

Underscoring what appears to be a major build up of the US’s involvement in the fight against Al-Qaeda militants in the country, the Pentagon said this week it had carried out roughly 20 strikes in the past week. That brought the monthly total to 70. More than 30 Yemeni civilians were reportedly killed in a raid by US special forces earlier this year, the first operation with Mr Trump as commander-in-chief.

An excellent article worth reading in full:

Make the Anti-War Movement Great Again

Jim Mattis wants the White House to lift restrictions on “military support for Persian Gulf states engaged in a protracted civil war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.”

That wouldn’t be a fight against terrorists bent on attacking us––it would be geopolitical positioning in alliance with Saudi Arabia, a major sponsor of Islamic extremism.

Secretary Mattis is urging extra-constitutional war-making. And almost no one has noticed.

The way the Washington Post covered the story –– and the failure of many media outlets to cover it at all –– stem in large part from the anemia of America’s anti-war movement. That isn’t a criticism of the small group actively engaged in that cause: It is an observation that very few Americans are active, whether that means street protests or writing letters to Congress or working within the infrastructure of the political parties. ...

The last two presidents campaigned against dumb wars and won. The more interventionist candidate has lost every election since 2008. Yet the anti-war faction that mobilized against the Iraq War shrunk precipitously during the Obama years, and is less noisy as Trump takes office than anti-pipeline protesters. ... The absence of significant protests in the face of this inhumane militarism is a major reason why it is neither emphasized in the press nor kept in check by the most effective brake on killing among those who lack a moral compass: political consequences. Trump and most Republicans won’t worry about civilian deaths until they’re affected by them. Neither will most Democrats.

Nikki Haley appears to be trying to outdo Samantha Power as an Humanitarian Bombing advocate.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley Threatens Unilateral US Action in Syria

Holding up photos of dead children as justification for potential war, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said Wednesday that if the U.N. doesn't take action in Syria, "we may."

"When the U.N. consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action," Haley told the U.N. Security Council at an emergency meeting called in response to Tuesday's suspected chemical attack in Syria's northern province of Idlib.

CNN described her remarks as "the most direct threat of unilateral action by the U.S. delegation at the U.N. to solve the Syria crisis."

Tom Newton Dunn, political editor for the U.K.'s Sun newspaper, said on Twitter that Haley's comments on U.N. inaction were reminiscent of those "that George W Bush's administration used at [the] U.N. in late 2002," to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Nikki Haley is holding up pix of dead Syrian kids at UN. Wonder if next she'll hold up pix of Syrian & Iraqi kids killed by US airstrikes.

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 5, 2017

Western agencies scramble to obtain samples from Syria chemical attack

Western intelligence agencies are seeking biological samples from survivors of the chemical weapons attack in northern Syria to compare against specimens of sarin taken from the Syrian military’s stockpiles four years ago.

The testing will be used to established whether the nerve agent used in the attack – which the US, Britain and France say is very likely sarin – came from stores of the gas that the Assad regime was supposed to surrender in a UN-supervised process after more than 1,300 people were killed in an attack on a Damascus suburb in August 2013.

Intelligence officers are also seeking environmental samples from the town of Khan Sheikhun in Idlib province where, according to witnesses, a dawn airstrike on Tuesday released a noxious gas over the area, killing at least 70 people and wounding more than 100.

The samples are expected to be hand delivered in some cases and also collected from hospitals inside Turkey, where several dozen seriously ill people are being treated by medics.

An excellent article with far too much information to fairly excerpt, it is well worth the time to read in full.

Another Dangerous Rush to Judgment in Syria

With the latest hasty judgment about Tuesday’s poison-gas deaths in a rebel-held area of northern Syria, the mainstream U.S. news media once more reveals itself to be a threat to responsible journalism and to the future of humanity. Again, we see the troubling pattern of verdict first, investigation later, even when that behavior can lead to a dangerous war escalation and many more deaths. Before a careful evaluation of the evidence about Tuesday’s tragedy was possible, The New York Times and other major U.S. news outlets had pinned the blame for the scores of dead on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. That revived demands that the U.S. and other nations establish a “no-fly zone” over Syria, which would amount to launching another “regime change” war and would put America into a likely hot war with nuclear-armed Russia.

Even as basic facts were still being assembled about Tuesday’s incident, we, the public, were prepped to disbelieve the Syrian government’s response that the poison gas may have come from rebel stockpiles that could have been released either accidentally or intentionally causing the civilian deaths in a town in Idlib Province. One possible scenario was that Syrian warplanes bombed a rebel weapons depot where the poison gas was stored, causing the containers to rupture. Another possibility was a staged event by increasingly desperate Al Qaeda jihadists who are known for their disregard for innocent human life.

While it’s hard to know at this early stage what’s true and what’s not, these alternative explanations, I’m told, are being seriously examined by U.S. intelligence. One source cited the possibility that Turkey had supplied the rebels with the poison gas (the exact type still not determined) for potential use against Kurdish forces operating in northern Syria near the Turkish border or for a terror attack in a government-controlled city like the capital of Damascus. Reporting by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and statements by some Turkish police and opposition politicians linked Turkish intelligence and Al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists to the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack outside Damascus that killed hundreds, although the Times and other major U.S. news outlets continue to blame that incident on Assad’s regime.

UN: 40-50 years needed to clear weapons in Iraq and Syria

It will take 40 to 50 years to clear the mines, improvised explosive devices and other unexploded ordnance from Iraq and Syria, the United Nations said Tuesday.

"We are looking at decades of work for these countries to look like post-World War II Europe where we still find some unexploded ordnance here and there," Agnes Marcaillou, director of the United Nations Mine Action Service, told a news conference marking International Mine Awareness Day.

She said her office, which also deals with IEDs and unexploded ordnance, is looking at a "ballpark figure" of between $170 million to $180 million a year to clean up the areas retaken from the Islamic State extremist group in Iraq.

Marcaillou said that figure includes $50 million annually needed just to rid weaponry from Mosul.

North Korea launches ballistic missile day before US - China summit

White House: 'The clock has now run out' on North Korean nuclear program

A senior White House official issued a dire warning to reporters Tuesday on the state of North Korea's nuclear program, declaring "the clock has now run out and all options are on the table."

"The clock has now run out, and all options are on the table," the official said, pointing to the failure of successive administration's efforts to negotiate an end to North Korea's nuclear program.

The comments came as two senior White House officials briefed reporters ahead of President Donald Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week in Florida. The briefing took place on the condition of anonymity.

Xi Jinping holds all the cards ahead of Mar-a-Lago meeting with Trump

This week Xi Jinping will travel to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for a meeting that will set the tone for one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships. ...

Ahead of the meeting with Xi, Trump has set the stage for a major confrontation over trade and security issues. Trump used Twitter to predict discussions would be “very difficult” and on Sunday the Financial Times published an interview where Trump chastised China for failing to do enough to rein in North Korea’s nuclear program. ... Although the Trump administration has declared the efforts of earlier administrations a failure, and promised a new approach, the attempt to cajole China into putting more pressure on its impoverished and troublesome neighbour by more rigorous implementation of existing UN sanctions represents a continuation of the Obama administration’s policies.

Trump has made clear he wants concessions on reducing the US trade deficit with China and more cooperation on controlling North Korea, but Xi has made no demands – in part because he has already wrangled political concessions from the US. Soon after his election victory in November, Trump said he could use the status of Taiwan – a self-ruled democracy that China claims as part of its territory – as a bargaining chip. But in his first phone call with Xi, he agreed to uphold the “One China” policy – the diplomatic understanding by which Washington does not challenge China’s claim to the territory.

“Xi does not need to get very much, the mere fact of the meeting looks good and will play well domestically in China,” said Bonnie Glaser, the director of the China power project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in Washington. “It demonstrates he has a good relationship with the new president and can maintain a stable relationship with the US. Xi doesn’t have any big asks, whereas Trump does.”

Trump's authoritarian instincts ruin US credibility on human rights, activists say

Donald Trump’s embrace of authoritarian tactics – and leaders – has dealt a body blow to activists struggling against repressive regimes across the globe, campaigners have warned, as the US president prepares to welcome China’s strongman ruler, Xi Jinping, to his Florida estate. ...

Xi, with whom Trump will hold two days of potentially thorny talks focused on trade and North Korea, also faces a litany of accusations over his human rights record. In the nearly five years since he took office, activists say China has been plunged into the harshest period of political repression since the days after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

Campaigners and political opponents have urged Trump to speak out against Xi’s crackdown – which has targeted feminists, academics, publishers and top human rights lawyers – when the pair meet at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday. ... However, Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s East Asia director, said Trump’s open contempt for the judiciary and support for policies “in absolute and complete contradiction of human rights obligations under international law”, such as his travel ban, meant the days when Washington could effectively lecture countries like China on human rights were over.

Lawmakers Move To Stop Warrantless Cellphone Searches at the U.S. Border

Four members of Congress have introduced legislation that would require border agents to get a warrant to search through someone’s cellphone or laptop, bringing privacy rights at ports of entry closer to those that courts have recognized for the rest of the country.

The bill makes it illegal to access the contents of a device belonging to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident without probable cause and a warrant, and specifies that border agents can’t hold people for more than four hours to try to get them to unlock their phone or give up their data. It was simultaneously introduced on Tuesday in the Senate by Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rand Paul of Kentucky and in the House by Jared Polis of Colorado and Blake Farenthold of Texas. Wyden and Polis are Democrats while their co-sponsors are Republicans. ...

The bill states that accessing without a warrant electronic equipment, the contents of an online account, or information about someone’s online life is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Border agents are not allowed to deny someone entry for refusing to provide a password or unlock their information, a protection the bill clarifies. It does include an exception for emergency situations.

Noam Chomsky on How Businesses Sought to Destroy the Democratic Movements of the 1960s

An Enemy of the Wall Street Foreclosure Machine Is Running to Unseat a GOP Lawmaker in California

Foreclosure victims have been virtually invisible in Washington since the financial crisis. But they may finally get an ally.

Katie Porter, a University of California-Irvine professor and public interest lawyer who authored one of the first academic studies of foreclosure fraud, and who helped thousands of California homeowners as a monitor of the national foreclosure fraud settlement, announced yesterday that she will run for Congress in California’s 45^th Congressional district, against two-term Republican incumbent Mimi Walters. ...

Back in 2007, before the full impact of the foreclosure crisis was felt, Porter, then teaching law at the University of Iowa, wrote a prescient paper titled “Misbehavior and Mistake in Bankruptcy Mortgage Claims.” Porter examined public court records in 1,733 bankruptcy cases filed in 2006. She found near-universal disagreement between borrowers and mortgage servicing companies over amounts owed, with multiple instances of illegally imposed fees, including charging homeowners for ordinary office activities like delivering faxes. Impermissible fees were ratcheted up as a profit-making tool for the servicers. In one loan, the servicer claimed that the homeowner owed $1 million when they actually owed $60,000.

Porter also discovered that, in a majority of cases, servicers lacked one or more pieces of documentation required to establish the validity of the debt. That included the note, which was missing over 40 percent of the time. “The findings are a chilling reminder of the limits of formal law to protect consumers,” Porter wrote.

This was an early warning of the breakdown in foreclosure processes, with companies eventually papering over their lack of proof with fictitious mortgage assignments and records. Porter’s study caught the eye of the initial activists who uncovered and exposed Wall Street’s fraudulent foreclosure schemes; she was central to its unmasking.

Trump promises 'haircut' for banking rules

Casino Economics: From Our Hands to Their Pockets

The speculative financial industry has taken control over the economy. As opposed to capital being invested for productive uses it instead is used to create profit. Money making money on money while making nothing else. This is at best an inflationary activity creating debt and so driving up the cost of doing business for the economy as a whole. At its worst it is a bubble making activity looking for a place to burst. Our elites paid billions in lobbying over the decades since the New Deal to create this reversal in our economies. N.B. In the 1950’s nine out of every ten dollars of capital was invested in productive capacity. Today ninety five out of every hundred is not! The greatest and most debilitating trick that was pulled was convincing our populations that our governments have run out of money. Simultaneously engineering a situation where every government in the world is ‘drowning in debt’.

The reality of course is that you can be out of trees, out of bees, out of topsoil and drinkable water. ... By very stark contrast a country with its own currency can never be out of money. How our financial elites created this self-serving misconception was by financial engineering. In effect instituting a corporate coup d’etat over the creation of the money supply and the servicing of debt. Moving these from the public sector to the private sector. So whereas for the first century of my country’s existence our debt was owed to the Bank of Canada – aka ourselves – in the 1970’s the private banks convinced our politicians to instead owe it to them. The consequence of this is that the interest on the debt no longer returns to we the citizens of the country. Instead it goes to the foreign and domestic financial elites who have thereby taken the country from our hands to their pockets. ...

As a result our politicians have enabled the essentially fascist outcome of corporations being in control of both our government representatives as well as our monetary policies. As Mussolini pointed out fascism is defined by an economic system where the policies chosen by government are indistinguishable from those desired by corporations.

Iceland to enshrine equal pay for women and men in law

Iceland’s parliament has presented a bill that would require public and private businesses to prove they offer equal pay to employees, in what would be the first such requirement in the world. The bill entails that companies and institutions of a certain size, 25 or more employees, undertake a certification of their equal-pay programmes, Thorsteinn Viglundsson, minister of social affairs and equality, said.

Iceland ranks first on the World Economic Forum’s 2015 global gender gap index, followed by fellow Nordic nations Norway, Finland and Sweden.

But the new law aims to close the wage gap between men and women in the island nation of more than 323,000 people, Viglundsson said. It has the support of both Iceland’s centre-right coalition government as well as the opposition – and nearly 50% of the lawmakers in parliament are women.

The Civil Rights Act does protect LGBTQ employees, federal court rules in a landmark decision

For the first time in U.S. history, a federal court has ruled that LGBTQ employees are protected from workplace discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In 2013, professor Kimberly Hively filed a lawsuit against an Indiana community college alleging that the school had repeatedly refused to hire her for a full-time position because she was openly lesbian. A district court dismissed her claims, saying that sexual orientation wasn’t a protected class under the Civil Rights Act.

But the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision Tuesday, ruling that because the Civil Rights Act explicitly outlines that an employee’s “sex” can’t be used to discriminate against her, employers also can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation — even though, the court’s opinion acknowledges, “It is quite possible that these interpretations may also have surprised some who served in the [1964] Congress.”

Rikers guards are beating up inmates while New York figures out how to close the jail

Guards at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex routinely pummel inmates and lie about it afterwards, according to a new report from an independent court-appointed federal monitor. ... It’s the federal monitor’s third damning report since 2015, when New York City signed a consent decree with the Department of Justice to take steps to curb violence at Rikers, a 10,000-inmate penal colony on the East River. The latest report noted the slow pace of reforms, and said prisoners are still subjected to brutal force at an “alarming rate.”

The report seemingly bolsters the case that the troubled jail is beyond reform and needs to be shut down entirely. On March 31, the mayor said he supports a plan to close Rikers within 10 years by reducing the inmate population and building new facilities around the city. While the plan has the support of the City Council and many criminal justice reform advocates, it will cost billions of dollars and face stiff opposition from Correction Officers Benevolent Association, the powerful prison guard union.

Even in the best-case scenario, it will take years for the city to close Rikers. In the meantime, as the monitor’s report shows, the jail continues to be plagued by violence and impunity, with no immediate solution in sight.

Mark Blyth - Understanding the rise of populist politics in the West

Deportation Legal Defense Funds Move to Distinguish Between “Good” and “Bad” Immigrants

The “L.A. Justice Fund,” which provides lawyers to indigent deportation defendants, who are not guaranteed counsel under current law, was announced by Mayor Eric Garcetti in late December. In the months since, the Trump administration has overseen a deportation dragnet in Southern California, and religious leaders in Los Angeles have begun building safe houses to hide immigrant families. But the March 30 meeting was only the second time the committee has met, and the fund’s first disbursement has yet to be made.

After a bit of unremarkable discussion, the city council members arrived at the proposal’s most controversial point: whether immigrants with violent criminal histories should be allowed to access the fund. In a city whose elected leaders are nearly unanimous in their opposition to President Trump’s draconian immigration enforcement policies, the question of the moral status of undocumented immigrants with violent criminal pasts marks the point of fracture in the political consensus. ...

[Lindsay] Toczylowski [executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center] believes that by sorting undocumented immigrants into categories of deserving and undeserving of legal representation, politicians who are ostensibly pro-immigrant are adopting Trump’s “bad hombres” worldview. ... Trump has taken this binary view of immigrants to an extreme, but he didn’t invent it. Under the previous administration, the policy of distinguishing between “good” and “bad” immigrants was known informally as “felons, not families,” after a 2014 speech President Obama delivered to outline his immigration enforcement priorities. Under Obama’s policy, the government’s use of the criminal label to adjudicate deportation cases often verged on parody, applying in equal measure to serious violent felons and to undocumented immigrants with decades-old drug convictions that had long been resolved, or people whose most serious “crime” was driving over the speed limit.

The experience of the Obama years is a big part of what has motivated immigrant rights advocates in California to press for universal due process, to leave what they regard as a destructive false dichotomy behind. When the right to an attorney is predicated upon whether a defendant is regarded as socially worthy, they argue, the principle of equal representation under the law is compromised.

Climate change impacting ‘most’ species on Earth, even down to their genome

“It is reasonable to suggest that most species on Earth have been impacted by climate change in some way or another,” said Bret Scheffers with the University of Florida. “Some species are negatively impacted and some species positively impacted.” Scheffers is the lead author of a landmark Science study from last year that found that current warming (just one degree Celisus) has already left a discernible mark on 77 of 94 different ecological processes, including species’ genetics, seasonal responses, overall distribution, and even morphology – i.e. physical traits including body size and shape.

Woodland salamanders are shrinking in the Appalachian Mountains; the long-billed, Arctic-breeding red knot is producing smaller young with less impressive bills leading to survival difficulties. Marmot and martens in the Americas are getting bigger off of longer growing seasons produce more foodstuffs, while the alpine chipmunks of Yellowstone National Park have actually seen the shape of their skulls change due to climate pressure. ...

But the fact that so many species are undergoing genetic changes doesn’t mean they are successfully adapting to our warmer world. “In many instances genetic diversity is being lost due to climate change, not just in nature but also in resources that human’s depend on such as crops and timber,” Scheffers said. “It is important to not confuse species responses and adaptation as an indicator that everything will be okay.” Scheffers and his colleagues’ findings are furthered by a study in Nature Climate Change this February that found that 47 percent of land mammals and 23 percent of birds have already suffered negative impacts form climate change. In all, nearly 700 species in just these two groups are flagging under climate change, according to this research. ...

A third study – this one in PLOS Biology – found that more than 450 plants and animals have undergone local extinctions due to climate change. Local extinction, as its name implies, doesn’t mean the species are gone for good, but that they vanish from a portion of their range. For example, the barren ground shrew has seen its range constrict aggressively as its tundra home warms. “If global warming continues, species that cannot change or move quickly enough may go globally extinct,” the study’s author, John Wiens with the University of Arizona, said.

Such global extinctions have already happened. Last year, scientists discovered that the Bramble Cay melomys – an Australian rat-like rodent – went extinct recently (it was last seen in 2007) due to rising seas inundating its tiny coral island. It’s the first mammal confirmed to be pushed to extinction entirely due to climate change – or one could say our fossil fuel addiction.

Team Trump Ponders Climate ‘Engineering’

While President Trump floors the accelerator to speed up global warming through executive orders and appointments of notorious climate deniers to his administration, more and more scientists are pinning their hopes on “Plan B”: planetary-wide interventions to engineer ways to avoid global climate disruption. But critics warn that such a prescription, however alluring, may be as bad as the disease. Now, to compound the irony, members of Trump’s inner circle are touting climate engineering as a cheap way to insure the planet against harm without any need to change lifestyles or curb the oil and coal industries. ...

Evidence of climate disruption is all around us, including record-high temperatures, record-low sea ice, the die-off of major coral reefs, acidification of the oceans, drought-induced famines, and more extreme storm damage. ... Such considerations helped motivate more than 100 scientists and policy makers to meet in Washington, D.C., late last month to discuss some largely untested ways to prevent runaway warming by limiting the Earth’s absorption of solar radiation. These measures could include using aircraft to release tiny particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight, or using fleets of boats to spray the air with saline mist to promote the formation of reflective clouds.

Several prominent Trump supporters are big boosters of such climate engineering. For example, Newt Gingrich, the President’s close adviser and former House Speaker, gushed that it “holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year. Instead of penalizing ordinary Americans, we would have an option to address global warming by rewarding scientific innovation.” And Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told investors in 2015, when he was still CEO of Exxon Mobil, “Our plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions to address and react to whatever the climate system and its outcomes present to us.”

Responsible scientists, on the other hand, have little faith in untested proposals to re-engineer the earth’s climate system, even if they back further research into such stop-gap measures.

Perhaps the single biggest obstacle to climate engineering is not technical but political: who would govern its deployment? Could a mad billionaire take matters into his own hands? Could rogue nations weaponize the technology, trying to fine tune solar radiation to disrupt the climate of their enemies? Rutgers University climatologist Alan Robock has even warned about the increased risk of nuclear war: “Because if countries can’t agree on what the temperature should be, and somebody is mad at somebody else for controlling their climate, the situation could escalate into hostilities.”

Also of Interest

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

The Teflon Wars

Intercepted Podcast: Trump’s Secret Little Prince

'No Is Not Enough': Naomi Klein Writing Anti-Trump Blueprint for 'Shock Resistance'

Killing Our Way to Victory

After Deadly Navy SEAL Raid, Yemeni Villagers Suffer More U.S. Attacks

The Black Alliance for Peace: 50 Years Later, We Must Again Confront and Reject U.S. Warmongering

The state has let millennials down. That’s why we crowdfund basic needs

A Little Night Music

Clifford Gibson - Keep Your Windows Pinned

Clifford Gibson - Old Time Rider

Clifford Gibson - She's Got the Jordan River in Her Hips

Clifford Gibson - Blues Without A Dime

Clifford Gibson - Ice and Snow Blues

Jimmie Rodgers w/ Clifford Gibson - Let Me Be Your Side Track

Clifford Gibson - She Rolls It Slow

Clifford Gibson - Brooklyn Blues

Clifford Gibson - Hard-Headed Blues

Clifford Gibson - I Don't Want No Woman