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This evening's music features early Chicago blues singer and half brother of Big Bill Broonzy, Washboard Sam. Enjoy!

“Anyone with half a mind could see that," said Tiffany.
Miss Tick sighed. "Yes. But sometimes it's so hard to find half a mind when you need one.”

-- Terry Pratchett

News and Opinion

Trump's intel chief has had a visit from Captain Obvious:

Trump Intel Chief: North Korea Learned From Libya War to “Never” Give Up Nukes

The media is now filled with headlines about North Korea’s missile test on Friday, which demonstrated that its ICBMs may be able to reach the continental U.S. What isn’t mentioned in any of these stories is how we got to this point — in particular, what Dan Coats, President Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, explained last week at the Aspen Security Forum.

North Korea’s 33-year-old dictator Kim Jong-un is not crazy, said Coats. In fact, he has “some rationale backing his actions” regarding the country’s nuclear weapons. That rationale is the way the U.S. has demonstrated that North Korea must keep them to ensure “survival for his regime, survival for his country.”

Kim, according to Coats, “has watched, I think, what has happened around the world relative to nations that possess nuclear capabilities and the leverage they have and seen that having the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability.” In particular, “The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes … is, unfortunately: If you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them.”

This is, of course, blindingly obvious and has been since the U.S. helped oust longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011. But U.S. officials have rarely if ever acknowledged this reality.

Trump vows 'all necessary measures' to protect allies from North Korea, says Abe

Donald Trump has vowed to take “all necessary measures” to protect United States allies from North Korea’s evolving military threat, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has said following a phone conversation with the US president. The talks between Trump and Abe came after North Korea conducted its second intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test on Friday – a move analysts said put most of the US within range of Pyongyang’s missiles.

The US mounted a show of force aimed at Kim Jong-un’s regime on Sunday, flying two supersonic B-1B bombers over the Korean peninsula. The commander of the Pacific air forces, General Terrence J O’Shaughnessy, warned his units were ready to hit North Korea with “rapid, lethal, and overwhelming force”.

Trump, who has been trying to convince Beijing to ramp up the pressure on Kim, condemned China for doing “NOTHING” to rein in the North Korean dictator.

Russia’s foreign ministry said on Monday it was concerned about recent developments on the Korean peninsula and accused the US of trying “to shift responsibility for the situation to Russia and China.”

Is Trump Trying to Sabotage the Nuclear Deal to Lay Groundwork for War With Iran?

Putin: US must cut diplomatic staff in Russia by 755

President Vladimir Putin said the United States would have to cut its diplomatic staff in Russia by 755 people and that Russia could consider imposing additional measures against the US as a response to new sanctions approved by Congress.

Moscow ordered the US on Friday to cut hundreds of diplomatic staff and said it would seize two US diplomatic properties after the House of Representatives and the Senate approved new sanctions on Russia. The White House said on Friday that President Donald Trump would sign the sanctions bill.

A US State Department official said on Sunday Russia’s decision was “regrettable” and that it was now weighing its options. “This is a regrettable and uncalled for act,” the official said. “We are assessing the impact of such a limitation and how we will respond to it.”

Putin said in an interview with Vesti TV released on Sunday that the US would have to cut its diplomatic and technical staff by 755 people by 1 September. “Because more than 1,000 workers – diplomats and support staff – were working and are still working in Russia, 755 must stop their activity in the Russian Federation,” he said.

Bush's poodle catches a lucky break:

Tony Blair prosecution over Iraq war blocked by judges

Tony Blair should not face prosecution for his role in the 2003 Iraq war, the high court has ruled.

The lord chief justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and another senior judge, Mr Justice Ouseley, said on Monday that there was no crime of aggression in English law under which the former prime minister could be charged.

The decision blocks an attempt by a former Iraqi general, Abdulwaheed al-Rabbat, to bring a private war crimes prosecution against the former Labour leader.

The two judges recognised that a crime of aggression had recently been incorporated into international law, but said it did not apply retroactively.

The offence is not on UK statute books and it was for parliament to decide whether or not to do so, their judgment noted.

Attempt to prosecute Tony Blair over Iraq War blocked by UK High Court

Oh my, this is worth reading in full. Here is a teaser to get you started:

Hacked Emails Show UAE Building Close Relationship With D.C. Think Tanks That Push Its Agenda

The United Arab Emirates has one of the most repressive governments in the world. The Gulf dictatorship brutally cracks down on internal dissent and enables abusive conditions for its massive migrant labor force. It also plays a key role in the bloody war in Yemen, running a network of torture prisons in the “liberated” parts of the country.

That makes it all the more shocking that the UAE is so rarely criticized by leading U.S. think tanks, who not only ignore the Gulf dictatorship’s repression, but give a privileged platform to its ambassador, Yousef Al-Otaiba. Otaiba is a deeply influential voice in U.S. foreign policy circles, and is known in Washington for using his pocketbook to recruit allies.

Last month, hackers began releasing screenshots of emails from a Hotmail account that Otaiba used for official business. ... The latest batch of hacked emails passed to The Intercept and other outlets by “GlobalLeaks” provide insight into how Otaiba manages to find — or buy — so many friends in D.C. think tanks. The documents offer a glimpse into how a small, oil-rich monarchy can obtain such an outsized influence on U.S. foreign policy, showing the ambassador obtaining favors from Obama administration veterans — including Hillary Clinton’s presumptive Defense Secretary — and making large payments in return.

One of the documents obtained by The Intercept was an invoice from the Center for New American Security, an influential national security think tank founded in 2007 by alumni from the Clinton administration. The invoice, dated July 12, 2016, billed the UAE embassy $250,000 for a paper on the legal regime governing the export of military-grade drones. It was signed by Michele Flournoy, a senior Pentagon official under President Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton was widely expected to name Flournoy as her secretary of defense. Flournoy co-founded CNAS and, in addition to outside work as a management consultant, currently serves as the think tank’s CEO.

Libya: Pro-Haftar fighters storm constitution assembly

Fighters aligned with Khalifa Haftar, the military general based in the remote east of Libya, have stormed the headquarters of the constitution drafting assembly in the city of al-Bayda.

They held assembly members at gunpoint and demanded they back down from a recently approved draft constitution. It is unclear whether the fighters are still in the assembly.

The draft calls for a presidential and general election no more than 180 days from the passing of a constitution. It is understood that the draft bans Haftar from running as president.

An excellent article by Gareth Porter, here's a taste to get you started:

How Obama Fell into the Syrian Trap

Last week, a Trump administration official decided to inform the news media that the CIA program to arm and train anti-Assad Syrian forces had been terminated. ... One of the keys to understanding its origins is that the program was launched not because of a threat to U.S. security, but because of a perceived opportunity. That is always a danger sign, prompting powerful national-security bureaucrats to begin thinking about a “win” for the United States. (Think Vietnam and Iraq.) The opportunity in this case was the rise of opposition protests against the Assad regime in spring 2011 and the belief among national security officials that Assad could not survive. The national-security team saw a shortcut to the goal.

Former Obama administration official Derek Chollet recalled in his book The Long Game that Obama’s advisers were all talking about a “managed transition” and urging President Obama to publicly demand that Assad step down, according to Chollet. What that meant to Obama’s advisers was bringing pressure from outside, including providing arms to the opposition. That was wishful thinking not only in regard to the willingness of an Alawite-dominated regime to hand over power to its sectarian foes, but in regard to the assumed Iranian willingness to go along with toppling the regime. Not one of Obama’s advisers had sufficient understanding of regional dynamics to warn the President that Iran would not allow their Syrian ally to be overthrown by an opposition supported by Sunni states and the United States.

But the decisive factor in pushing the administration toward action was the pressure from U.S. Sunni allies in the region — Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — which began in autumn 2011 to press Obama to help build and equip an opposition army. Turkey was the leader in this regard, calling for Washington to agree to provide heavy weaponry — including anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles — to the rebel troops that didn’t even exist yet, and even offering to invade Syria to overthrow the regime if the U.S. would guarantee air cover.

In the ideology of the national security elite — especially its Democratic wing — regional alliances are essential building blocks of what is styled as the U.S.-sponsored global “rules-based order.” In practice, however, they have served as instruments for the advancement of the power and prestige of the national security bureaucracies themselves. The payoffs of U.S. alliances in the Middle East have centered on the military bases in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar that allow the Pentagon and the military brass to plan and execute military operations that guarantee extraordinary levels of military spending. But enormous Saudi arms purchases and the financing of any covert operations the CIA doesn’t wish to acknowledge to Congress have long been prime benefits for those powerful organizations and their senior officials.

Pentagon Denies Knowledge of Cameroon Base Abuses — Despite Being Aware of Reports of Torture

"To date, U.S. Africa Command has not received any reports of human rights abuses by Cameroonian forces at either of these locations.” This was the boilerplate reply to media outlets from Robyn Mack, a spokesperson for U.S. Africa Command, the umbrella organization for U.S. military activities on the continent. Mack was responding to revelations, detailed in a recently released Amnesty International report, of torture and killing by Cameroon’s elite Rapid Intervention Battalion — known by its French acronym, BIR — at two military bases in that country.

The Intercept and Forensic Architecture, a research firm based at Goldsmiths, a branch of the University of London, conducted an additional investigation based on Amnesty’s extensive research. The investigation demonstrated that as the U.S. military fortified one of the Cameroonian sites, known as Salak, and supported BIR troops based there, the outpost also served as a scene of illegal imprisonment, brutal torture, and even killings.

AFRICOM failed to provide comment on whether the command was aware of such allegations prior to publication. ... As far back as 2007, however, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor chronicled reports of torture at Salak by members of Cameroon’s BIR. And the Department of State’s 2016 Human Rights Report specifically cites previous investigations by Amnesty International into torture and deaths at Salak in 2014 and 2015. When this was brought to Mack’s attention by The Intercept, she claimed to be unsure if anyone at AFRICOM had been made aware of the report. “The State Department and the Department of Defense are two different things,” she said. ... According to Mack, U.S. Africa Command has now ordered an inquiry into Amnesty’s allegations.

Israel: Soldier who killed wounded Palestinian attacker loses appeal

‘Transferring’ Palestinian citizens of Israel to a Palestinian state goes from outrage to Netanyahu policy

The Israeli press reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now adopted an idea that had been beyond the pale: transfer– stripping Israeli Palestinians of citizenship without their OK and making them citizens of another country, all of course on a religious-ethnic basis.

A Palestinian lawmaker in Israel’s parliament accused Netanyahu of endorsing a “war crime.”

The news is that in talks with Trump administration officials, Netanyahu has reportedly endorsed the idea of swapping portions of Israeli land containing Palestinian communities for portions of occupied land in the West Bank containing Jewish settlers as a means to establish a Palestinian state.

'Human life is more expendable': why slavery has never made more money

Slave traders today make a return on their investment 25 to 30 times higher than their 18th- and 19th-century counterparts.

Siddharth Kara, a slavery economist and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Business School, has calculated that the average profit a victim generates for their exploiters is $3,978 (£3,030) a year. Sex trafficking is so disproportionately lucrative compared to other forms of slavery that the average profit for each victim is $36,000. In his book Modern Slavery, to be published in October, Kara estimates that sex trafficking accounts for 50% of the total illegal profits of modern slavery, despite sex trafficking victims accounting for only 5% of modern slaves. ...

Experts believe roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves by professional traders between the 15th and 19th centuries. Today, the UN’s International Labour Organisation believes at least 21 million people worldwide are in some form of modern slavery. “It turns out that slavery today is more profitable than I could have imagined,” Kara said. “Profits on a per slave basis can range from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars a year, with total annual slavery profits estimated to be as high as $150bn.”

While slavery two centuries ago involved lengthy, expensive journeys and high mortality rates, the modern slave trade is producing higher profits per victim thanks to quick and inexpensive modern transportation and lower risk. Huge global migration flows are producing a ready and easily exploitable supply of victims who can be fed into a large number of industries linked to the global economy such as fashion, beauty, seafood and commercial sex. “Human life has become more expendable than ever,” said Kara. “Slaves can be acquired, exploited and discarded in relatively short periods and still provide immense profits for their exploiters. The deficiency in the global response to slavery has allowed the practice to persist.

You know, perhaps we should give these guys a state (how about Alabama?) and build a really big wall around it...

'Young white guys are hopping mad': confidence grows at far-right gathering

“We are soldiers in this war,” Jared Taylor told an overwhelmingly male and entirely white audience of around 300 late on Saturday. “And we will win.”

The founder and editor of American Renaissance, once a print magazine and now “the internet’s premier race-realist site”, no longer thinks whites can have America to themselves. But he wants an all-white “ethnostate”, carved out of US territory.

This weekend, American Renaissance held its annual conference at a venue in Montgomery Bell state park, an hour west of Nashville, Tennessee. Attendees and speakers clearly felt a growing confidence. They have seen appreciable growth in membership of established and emerging far-right groups. They have also seen the election as president of Donald Trump. ...

When Taylor spoke, his audience was generationally diverse. Some, well into middle age or beyond, had heard it all before. But when he asked who was attending for the first time, the great majority raised their hands.

Retired Police Detective: Trump's Comments Endorsing Police Brutality are "Treasonous"

Amtrak's $630m Trump budget cut could derail service in 220 US cities

While he has touted a $1tn investment plan for America’s infrastructure – which so far shows few signs of materialising – the president’s proposed budget included $630m in cuts for Amtrak that would devastate long-distance services.

An advocacy group, the National Association of Railroad Passengers (Narp), warned the budget “wipes out funding for long-distance train service in over 220 cities and towns and in 23 states that will lose train service completely”. Almost all those states are in the middle of the country and voted for Trump. Most of the stations said to be at risk are in rural areas. ...

Meanwhile, underlining the contrast in prospects between rural and urban areas, plans are advancing for a privately funded $15bn bullet train between Dallas and Houston. California is constructing a high-speed link to whisk travellers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in three hours or less. And Elon Musk is fantasising about 29-minute trips from New York to Washington.

Sanders: 'We’re Figuring Out How We Can Mount a National Campaign' for Single Payer

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday that he will “absolutely” introduce legislation on single-payer healthcare now that the Senate GOP’s bill to repeal ObamaCare has failed.

"If people don't like the private insurance that they're getting, they should have a Medicare-type public option available in every state in this country," Sanders said

Asked if he would follow through on his pledge to submit single-payer legislation, Sanders said, “Of course we are, we’re tweaking the final points of the bill and we’re figuring out how we can mount a national campaign to bring people together”

Martin Shkreli: jury to consider fate of 'most hated man in America'

A jury will begin deliberations on Monday in the trial on securities fraud charges against the entrepreneur Martin Shkreli, who faces up to 20 years in prison.

The 34-year-old gained notoriety in 2015, when he purchased the commercial rights and then ruthlessly increased the cost of Daraprim, a life-saving Aids medication. Since then, he has maintained his reputation with a provocative presence on social media. This year he was suspended from Twitter, for harassing the journalist Lauren Duca.

As arguments wrapped up in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, Shkreli, known to many as “the most hated man in America”, was accused by government prosecutors of telling “lies upon lies” to investors and regarding himself as “above the law”. Shkreli’s lawyer told the jury his client was a genius and a target for “rich person ‘BS’”. ...

Shkreli is charged with defrauding investors at two hedge funds he started, MSMB Capital Management and MSMB Healthcare Management. When one of the funds collapsed, Shkreli raised more money and started Retrophin, a pharmaceutical company. He later started another drug company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and used a loophole in drug licensing laws to buy the rights to long established but niche medications and then hike the prices.

"Billion-Dollar Mistake": Democrats Neglect People of Color While Failing to Woo White Trump Voters

You Can Have Single-Payer When You Pry It From The Oligarchy’s Cold, Dead Hands

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said that public buy-ins to Medicare and Medicaid are on the table for Democratic lawmakers.

He is lying. This will not happen. If Democrats are able to stop babbling about Russia long enough to form a viable political party by 2018 and keep it up through 2020 and do exceptionally well in the House and the Senate in both of those elections, nothing even remotely resembling universal healthcare will come to pass. At best, Democrats will monopolize the issue, get everyone’s hopes up, string them along and come up with another obscenely expensive program that leaves ordinary Americans stuck in jobs they hate toiling away to pay for it and still struggling to make ends meet. ...

The billionaire class does not pour its financial might into perpetuating economic injustice because their mothers never taught them to share. It’s not because giving Americans the same social safety nets accorded to everyone else in every other major country will drive up taxes and deprive them of one more private jet. It’s because their ability to remain wealthy while keeping you poor allows them to be kings and queens. It’s not about the money, it’s about power. You will get economic justice when you take their power.

Planet has just 5% chance of reaching Paris climate goal, study says

There is only a 5% chance that the Earth will avoid warming by at least 2C come the end of the century, according to new research that paints a sobering picture of the international effort to stem dangerous climate change.

Global trends in the economy, emissions and population growth make it extremely unlikely that the planet will remain below the 2C threshold set out in the Paris climate agreement in 2015, the study states.

The Paris accord, signed by 195 countries, commits to holding the average global temperature to “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels and sets a more aspirational goal to limit warming to 1.5C. This latter target is barely plausible, the new research finds, with just a 1% chance that temperatures will rise by less than 1.5C.

“We’re closer to the margin than we think,” said Adrian Raftery, a University of Washington academic who led the research, published in Nature Climate Change. “If we want to avoid 2C, we have very little time left. The public should be very concerned.”

Governments settled on the 2C threshold partly through political expediency but also because scientists have warned of severe consequences from sea level rise, drought, heatwaves and social unrest should the temperature rise beyond this.

2017 is so far the second-hottest year on record thanks to global warming

With the first six months of 2017 in the books, average global surface temperatures so far this year are 0.94°C above the 1950–1980 average, according to NASA. That makes 2017 the second-hottest first six calendar months on record, behind only 2016.

That’s remarkable because 2017 hasn’t had the warming influence of an El Niño event. El Niños bring warm ocean water to the surface, temporarily causing average global surface temperatures to rise. 2016 – including the first six months of the year – was influenced by one of the strongest El Niño events on record.

For a long time one of the favorite climate denier myths involved claiming that we hadn’t seen any global surface warming since 1998. That myth has fallen by the wayside since 2014, 2015, and 2016 each broke the global surface temperature records previously set in 2010 and 2005 (which were also both hotter than 1998). Yet the myth persisted for years because 1998 was anomalously hot due to the monster El Niño event that year, which meant that global temperatures weren’t much hotter than 1998 until 2014 to today.

The World’s Shift to Electric Cars

Even as the Trump administration scrubs federal web sites of data about climate science and clean energy and appoints coal industry lobbyists to senior policy positions, other nations are responding vigorously to the reality of global warming. Great Britain and France have recently announced ambitious timetables for phasing out fossil-fueled cars by 2040. Even bolder are Norway, which expects all new cars sold by 2025 to be electric, up from 37 percent today, and India, which set 2030 as its target date for going all-electric.

Together with the rising domestic popularity of all-electric and hybrid electric vehicles, the potential political contagion from such foreign programs is spurring major U.S. fossil fuel producers into spending millions of dollars to kill clean transportation alternatives. A shadowy outfit called Fueling U.S. Forward, devoted to promoting greater use of oil and natural gas, recently produced a misleading attack video called “Dirty Secrets of Electric Cars.” The New York Times exposed the group as “a public relations group for fossil fuels funded by Koch Industries, the oil and petrochemicals conglomerate led by the ultraconservative billionaire brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch.”

The stakes, both financial and environmental, are high. The U.S. transportation sector currently consumes 14 million barrels of petroleum products every day. Transitioning away from all that gasoline and diesel to cleaner electric transportation will be critical to lowering carbon emissions before global warming wreaks havoc on human civilization and natural ecosystems. It will also help alleviate vehicle air pollution that kills an estimated 50,000 people each year in the United States alone. Unlike the power sector, where the renewable energy revolution is well underway across the nation, transportation remains largely stuck in the last century. In my car-friendly state of California, for example, thanks to a boom in solar and wind energy, electric power today accounts for only about 20 percent of statewide greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation, by contrast, contributes 36 percent, far more than any other sector. ...

Electric vehicles today number only about 2 million, or just 0.2 percent of all light passenger vehicles in use globally today, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The good news is that their numbers are growing about 60 percent per year. In the United States, customers bought 53,000 electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles in the first six months of 2017 — not counting Tesla sales — up from 33,000 in the same period a year ago. ... IEA cites estimates that the global stock of electric cars will range between 40 million and 70 million by 2025, if governments continue to support R&D, purchase incentives, and charging infrastructure. The transition to EVs may accelerate if, as some experts forecast, they become fully cost competitive with gasoline-powered cars within a decade.

Also of Interest

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

The Dawn of an Orwellian Future

‘Once We Move Into Space With Weaponry, Other Nations Will Follow’

Did Anyone In Washington Ask You If You Wanted A New Cold War?

Palantir: the ‘special ops’ tech giant that wields as much real-world power as Google

An Interview with WikiLeaks’ Assange

'Revolting': Trump Openly Calls for Police Brutality in Long Island Speech

Russia v. Health Care (and Everything Else)

Close All US Military Bases On Foreign Soil

Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason'

Can the Stock Market Continue Its Rise While the U.S. Dollar Slumps?

A Little Night Music

Washboard Sam - Flying Crow Blues

Washboard Sam - I'm a Prowlin' Groundhog

Washboard Sam - Don't Leave Me Here

Washboard Sam - Low Down Woman

Washboard Sam - Washboard Swing

Washboard Sam - Soap and Water Blues

Washboard Sam - She Fooled Me

Washboard Sam - Jumpin' Rooster