Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Science post

 Alan MacLeod (MINT PRESS NEWS) has a really important science article:

 A sobering new report from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) lays bare the consequences that capitalist globalization has wrought on the planet. Since 1970, their research calculates, global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles plunged by 68 percent. Just two years ago in a previous report, that number was only 60 percent. Humans, it notes, are overusing Earth’s biocapacity by at least 56 percent.

The figures for the report were compiled by a worldwide team of 134 experts tracking 4,392 species of vertebrates, finding that species with larger bodies, often called “megafauna,” (e.g. Giant Panda, White Rhinoceros) were faring the worst. This was because they were less resilient to changes in the environment as they require larger and more complex habitats, reproducing more slowly and having fewer offspring.

Latin America and the Caribbean is the region of the world where the most precipitous drop in wildlife has occurred; a 94 percent reduction since 1970. President Bolsonaro of Brazil, where most of the Amazon rainforest is located, is a leader in this charge, vowing in 2017 that under his premiership, not one inch of the Amazon would be left for indigenous groups to live in. In Africa there was a recorded drop of 65 percent, the Asia Pacific region lost 45 percent of its wildlife. Europe and North America were the regions with the least catastrophic animal population reductions, at 24 and 33 percent respectively.

The reasons for the current mass extinction were also laid out. Changes in land and sea use, as humanity continually expands its domain, were the primary factor. But others, including species overexploitation by humans, the arrival of invasive species, pollution, and global warming were also key factors. Thus, humanity, and in particular the growth-obsessed capitalist system we live under, is overwhelmingly responsible for the crisis. The report, for WWF International Director General Marco Lamberini, “underlines how humanity’s increasing destruction of nature is having catastrophic impacts not only on wildlife populations but also on human health and all aspects of our lives.”


It's our home and we are destroying it.  There's no other way to put it.  We are destroying our own home.  And even if there end up being other 'neighborhoods' in space that are livable, that doesn't excuse what we're doing and I'd be afraid that if we found a new planet, we wouldn't have learned a damn thing from the destruction we've already created.


Harvard Smithsonian notes:


Recent science missions and results are bringing the search for life closer to home, and scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) may have figured out how to determine whether life is—or was—lurking deep beneath the surface of Mars, the Moon, and other rocky objects in the universe.                                                                             While the search for life typically focuses on water found on the and in the atmosphere of objects, Dr. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard and CfA astronomer, and Dr. Manasvi Lingam, assistant professor of astrobiology at FIT and CfA astronomer, suggest that the absence of doesn't preclude the potential for life elsewhere on a rocky object, like deep in the subsurface biosphere.

"We examined whether conditions amenable to life could exist deep underneath the surface of rocky objects like the Moon or Mars at some point in their histories and how scientists might go about searching for traces of past subsurface life on these objects," said Lingam, the lead author on the research. "We know that these searches will be technically challenging, but not impossible."

One challenge for researchers was determining the potential for the existence of water where there appears to be none. "Surface water requires an atmosphere to maintain a finite pressure, without which cannot exist. However, when one moves to deeper regions, the upper layers exert pressure and thus permit the existence of liquid water in principle," said Lingam. "For instance, Mars does not currently have any longstanding bodies of water on its surface, but it is known to have subsurface lakes."                 


It would be interesting to find life on Mars.  But that's not going to fix our problems here on Earth.  We have to get our act together.

"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

 Wednesday, September 23, 2020.  In the US the Ruth Bader Ginsburg press releases continue to pass for news (and for informed discussion), Iraq faces multiple crises, and much more.


The stupidity never ends.  Faux feminist Jill Filipovic wants you to know that if US President Donald Trump nominates Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court it will be an insult -- excuse me, an ultimate insult -- to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  

Ruth's dead, honey, she can't be insulted now.  She can't even sue for defamation -- nor can her family on her behalf -- that's what dead means, dear.

Maybe you should go back to posting your bikini pictures -- like you did back when everyone was protesting the Iraq War and your spoiled ass was off on an international vacation?  Most people finishing law school 'celebrate' by getting a job.  

Ruth's death has led to a lot of lunacy.

I guess we should be glad Jill cares about the feelings of dead women.  As she demonstrated as one woman after another came forward to speak of Joe Biden's uncomfortable touching and as she demonstrated when Tara Reade laid out her credible case that Joe assaulted her, Jill doesn't care about the feelings of women who are still alive.


Ruth is dead.  And from the grave we get a message via her granddaughter.  Clara Spera is in the media explaining what Ruth thought and wanted to BBC.  "My most fervent wish," she dictated to Clara who dutifully typed it up, "is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."


There is so much wrong with that statement.  Let's deal with most basic first.  So by her words, if Donald Trump is re-elected, a spot would remain vacant on the Court?  Donald Trump is the current president, he can't be a new president, even if he's re-elected.  Ruth's mind really was going at the end, wasn't it?


Clara also wants the world to know that Ruth is proud of her efforts to keep politics out of the Supreme Court.  Those efforts apparently are waived with a dying wish?  Actually, they were waived long before and that's what makes the centrist judge so very sad.  She has no ethics to point to.  She ignored Palestinians, she sided with killer cops over the families of their victims, she did so much that was so wrong.  But, hey, she gave us gals the right to vote!!! No, she was old, but not that old.  She gave women a place in the corporate world.  She didn't expand any rights beyond what corporate America was already doing in their businesses. 

But, Clara, your grandmother did talk about issues that were winding their way up the legal system, that she knew would arrive at the Supreme Court.  And that's called: a no-no.

She also felt the need to publicly weigh in on Donald Trump's presidential candidacy in 2015.  That's both a no-no and it is obvioulsy political.

Again, the brain was clearly going at the end.

She has no regrets, Clara wants you to know, regarding not stepping down when Barack Obama was president and could have appointed her successor.  


I believe she currently has no regrets about that because, again, she's dead.

We're not.

The American citizens are not dead.

And the wants and desires of RBG don't mean a thing and shouldn't.

Someone needs to tell Clara -- and any idiot clutching the pearls over Ruth's dying wishes -- that Ruth was a Supreme Court Justice, she was not the queen.  Meaning that seat was there before her and it will go on without her.  It was not her 'right' to serve, it was her privilege.  And dead or alive, she doesn't get to dictate who fills that seat.  She didn't own it.  She occupied it for a brief time and now it's going to be filled.


Should Donald Trump nominate someone to fill the spot?  According to RBG's earlier words, yes.  You don't need four-four decisions in the Court.  

He has the Constitutional right to nominate someone and I'm sure he will nominate someone (the press says by Friday he will nominate Barrett).  The Senate has to confirm the nominee.  Should they confirm her?  If they find her qualified, then, yes, they should.

That's how the system works.  You want to change it?  Let's have that conversation.  But stop the bulls**t about, "Bubbie wants . . .'  First off, every time you invoke that Yiddish word, it just reminds us that RGB was anti-Palestinian.  Not a good look.  Second, it's not about your dead grandmother.  It's about the nation.  Stop trying to personalize this with an idiot who was too stupid to step down and, according to her granddaughter, too stupid to realize at the end that she should have stepped down.

Stop making excuses for the powerful.  Poor women don't live as long as Ruth in the US -- a point we made in "Ruth Badger Ginsburg (Ava and C.I.)."  Her estimated wealth was over $25 million.  She was not One Of The People.  Stop pretending that she was.  She was denied certain opportunities as a young woman and her only cause was to make sure those opportunities she was denied would be open in the future.  Grasp that.  She was a reactionary.  She did not expand the rights of women beyond what she herself had experienced all those years ago.  


Sainted Ruth was a woman too stupid, when the latest round of cancer started in 2009, to resign.  Sainted Ruth's ego was too big then and too big at the end to admit she made a mistake.  In her final days, she offers a feeble plea for Donald not to appoint her successor.  She's a joke and she's a hypocrite.  It's the president job, as she herself noted when Barack was president, to nominate people to fill empty slots on the Court.  


She knew she made a mistake not retiring, that's why she made that idiotic (and unconstitutional) plea.


Everybody needs to grow the hell up and learn a hard lesson: We need a mandatory retirement for the Supreme Court.  Ruth demonstrates that they do not care enough about the American people to step down when they are clearly incapacitated.  We don't need to experience this again.  


Because of Ruth and her ego, we may get another Donald Trump appointee on the Court.  That's not something I'm happy about.  But it is what it is and the only thing we can do is learn from it.  The beatification of RBG has gone on long enough.  Serious critiques should have already been appearing.  Instead, we want to jolly her and make her one of the people.  If you're worth over $25 million, you're not one of the people.  She did a lousy job at the end creating all these new problems for the Court -- when some right winger on the Court is weighing on a Democratic Party presidential candidate, you better believe we on the left will be outraged.  And we shouldn't look the other way just because it's 'our' blessed Ruth.  

No where in the Constitution does it tell you that you get to have it your way.  That was a Burger King commercial, not a Constitutional amendment.  Even the Declaration of Independence only promises you "the pursuit of happiness."  

This isn't a good moment.  But denying reality is not going to make it a better one.  We need to learn from this and we need to demand that Justices stop dying of natural causes in office because they're egos are far too grand for them to contemplate doing the right thing and retiring.  


Had she stepped down in 2009, we would not be in the mess we are in.  This is on Ruth.


Margaret Kimberley Tweeted:

My thoughts on Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She should have stepped down, Obama and the democratic establishment didn’t care about losing senate and assumption of Hillary victory created a debacle. Have a listen.



And we'll note this Tweet from Ajamu Baraka:


People are being evicted, unemployment is ending and the Federal support in limbo and the issue is RBG and the court? This is why the democrats will lose.
6:16 PM · Sep 22, 2020


Turning to Iraq, Hardi Mohammed (RUDAW) reports:

Fourteen Kurdish political parties warned of continued efforts to revive Saddam Hussein era's Arabization policy in the disputed province of Kirkuk at a press conference on Sunday.

"Until now, we have not let one single span of territory be invaded in Kirkuk," Mohammed Osman, a top Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) official in Kirkuk, claimed to Rudaw on Sunday after a meeting between the parties. The official warned, however, that efforts to revive the notorious process are present in the province

The parties last met nine months ago, during which they set up a committee to report Arabization efforts, Osman said, adding that the president of Iraq was also party to the committee. He said the coronavirus pandemic forced them to suspend their work, but at Sunday's meeting, they decided to reactivate the committee.

A concerted effort under former President Saddam Hussein mostly between 1970 and 1978 brought Arabs from elsewhere in Iraq to the disputed areas of Kirkuk. After 2003, however, Iraq began a policy of de-Arabization to reverse the demographic changes.

Within the framework of Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution, these lands were returned to the previous Kurdish inhabitants. But since the 2017 retaking of Kirkuk by the Iraqi forces, there have been reports of Arab settlers reclaiming these lands. 


Brookings used to talk about this issue and how Kirkuk was a hot spot.  They gave up long ago.  But the issue was supposed to have been resolved during Nouri al-Maliki's first term as prime minister.  The Iraqi Constitution mandated that it be resolved by 2007.  Nouri blew it off as did others.  It's 13 years after the Constitutional mandate and it has still not been resolved.  Kirkuk is rich with oil and that is one of the reasons that both the KRG and the Baghdad-based government in Iraq want to take control of it.

Iraq is facing many critical issues.  For example, like the rest of the world, Iraq is dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic.  ARAB WEEKLY notes one action the Iraqi government is taking as a result of the pandemic, "Iraq is to bar entry to religious pilgrims to the country, its government health committee said in a statement on Monday, just weeks ahead of a Shia Muslim pilgrimage which is the largest annual religious gathering in the world. Arbaeen, due in early October, usually draws millions of people to the holy city of Karbala."  The numbers continue to mount in Iraq.  Hiwa Shilani (KURDISTAN 24) reports, "Iraqi health officials announced 4,724 new coronavirus infections on Tuesday as well as 57 fatalities over the previous 24 hours."


Those are only two issues.  There are many more that need addressing.  Kira Walker (WORLD POLITICAL REVIEW) notes:


The many ongoing challenges in Iraq -- from political upheaval and COVID-19 to plummeting oil prices and the resurgence of the Islamic State -- often overshadow the precarious state of the country’s water resources, even though water shortages are exacerbating many of those very issues. Studies have shown that equitable access to water is vital to supporting post-conflict recovery, sustainable development and lasting peace in Iraq, because water underpins public health, food production, agricultural livelihoods and power generation. But fresh water in Iraq is becoming scarcer, fueling more social tensions.

Iraq’s population of 40 million is expected to double by 2050, while the impacts of climate change—decreased and erratic precipitation, higher temperatures, prolonged and more severe droughts—will further aggravate its water woes. Iraqi and international experts are warning that instability will continue in Iraq so long as its long-neglected water crisis is not addressed.

When anti-government protests erupted last October, Iraqis’ demands for political and economic reforms and an end to corruption and foreign influence were accompanied by calls for better basic services, like water and electricity. During the protests, Humat Dijlah, a local NGO working to protect Iraq’s natural heritage, set up a tent in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square to link the right to fresh water with the broader struggle for human rights. Salman Khairalla, the organization’s executive director, says he and his colleagues wanted to encourage people to reflect on what Iraq’s future could look like with good water management, less pollution and more green space.

Yet the demonstrators’ efforts to create a better future for Iraqis were met with violent repression. More than 600 people were killed by security forces from October through January, according to Amnesty International. Others were arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared. “All human rights activists are at risk, including those fighting to protect environment and water,” Khairalla says in an interview.


Back to the US, Joseph Kishore is the SEP's candidate for US president.  He has an upcoming event this Sunday.





The 2020 election is unlike any in American history.

Donald Trump, surrounded by fascist aides, is threatening to appeal to the military and neo-Nazi groups to keep himself in office by use of force, raising the specter of dictatorship. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, whose unofficial campaign slogan is "nothing will fundamentally change," are more fearful of social opposition than anything else and are hostile to mobilizing masses of people to fight fascism. Instead, they are running a right-wing campaign aimed at portraying Trump as insufficiently bellicose toward Russia and China. Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America fecklessly tag behind Biden.

The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic has reached 200,000 in the US and nearly 1 million worldwide. The response of both parties in the US has been to force workers back to work and students back to school to fuel big business and boost Wall Street. Strikes and protests against unsafe conditions at workplaces and schools are growing, coalescing with opposition to the never ending spate of police murders that witnessed the largest nationwide demonstrations in decades.

The working class needs political leadership. Joseph Kishore and Norissa Santa Cruz launched their presidential campaign to fight to develop a revolutionary socialist leadership in the working class. For this reason, federal judges, Democratic and Republican alike, have denied them access to appear on the ballot. At Sunday's meeting, Kishore and Santa Cruz will address the current political crisis and lay out the programmatic response of the Socialist Equality Party.

Meet the Candidates
Joseph Kishore on Twitter
Norissa Santa Cruz on Twitter


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Tuesday, September 22, 2020

The ever embarrassing 1619 Project

 THE NEW YORK TIMES and its embarrassing 1619 Project just get more embarrassing.  Now they're changing their claims and doing so without noting that they're changing them.  Tom Mackaman and David North (WSWS) report:


It is not entirely clear when the Times deleted its “true founding” claim, but an examination of old cached versions of the 1619 Project text indicates that it probably took place on December 18, 2019.

These deletions are not mere wording changes. The “true founding” claim was the core element of the Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones from declaring that the historical identification of 1776 with the creation of a new nation is a myth, as is the claim that the Civil War was a progressive struggle aimed at the destruction of slavery. According to the New York Times and Hannah-Jones, the fight against slavery and all forms of oppression were struggles that black Americans always waged alone.

The Times’ “disappearing,” with a few secret keystrokes, of its central argument, without any explanation or announcement, is a stunning act of intellectual dishonesty and outright fraud. When it launched the 1619 Project in August 2019, the Times proclaimed that its aim was to radically change what and how students were taught about American history. With the aim of creating a new syllabus based on the 1619 Project, hundreds of thousands of copies of the original version of the narrative, as published in the New York Times Magazine, were printed and distributed to schools, museums and libraries all across the United States. A very large number of schools declared that they would align their curricula in accordance with the narrative supplied by the Times.

 

The deletion of the claim that 1619 was the “true founding” came to light this past Friday, September 18. Ms. Hannah-Jones was interviewed on CNN and asked to respond to Donald Trump’s denunciation, from the standpoint of a fascist, of the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones declared that the “true founding” contention was “of course” not true. She went further, making the astonishing, and demonstrably false, claim that the Times had never made such an argument.

The exchange went as follows:

CNN: Trump’s Executive order speaks to a misconception that I know that you have tried to address about what the 1619 Project is, that it is not an effort to rewrite history about when this nation was founded.

Hannah-Jones: Of course, we know that 1776 was the founding of this country. The Project does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country.

This is, of course, an outright lie. Hannah-Jones has repeatedly made the “true founding” claim in innumerable Tweets, interviews and lectures. These are attested to in news articles and video clips readily available on the Internet. Her own Twitter account included her image against a backdrop consisting of the year 1619, with the year 1776 crossed out next to it.

 

Hannah-Jones didn't deserve the Pulitzer (for opinion writing) to begin with but, now that the project is pulling at its own threads, the Pulitzer should be rescinded. 

 

"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

 Tuesday, September 22, 2020.  Another passing, professor Stephen F. Cohen, elections remain a mess in the US and in Iraq, and more.


Starting the US where Stephen F. Cohen passed away September 18th.  The professor was married to THE NATION's Katrina vanden Heuvel.  Katrina writes:


Through all our years together, Steve was my backbone, fortifying me for the battles Nation editors must wage (often with their own writers, sometimes including Steve!), and giving me the personal and political courage to do the right thing. But never more so than when we entered what might be called the “Russiagate era.”

While Steve liked to say it’s healthy to rethink, to have more questions than answers, there was a wise consistency to his political analysis. For example, as is clear from his many articles in The Nation in these last decades, he unwaveringly opposed American Cold War thinking both during the Cold War and since the end of the Soviet Union. He was consistent in his refusal to sermonize, lecture, or moralize about what Russia should do. He preferred to listen rather than preach, to analyze rather than demonize.

This stance was no recipe for popularity, which Steve professed to care little about. He was courageous and fearless in continuing to question the increasingly rigid orthodoxies about the Soviet Union and Russia. But in the last months, such criticism did take its toll on him. Along with others who sought to avert a new and more dangerous Cold War, Steve despaired that the public debate so desperately needed had become increasingly impossible in mainstream politics or media. Until his death he’d been working on a short article about what he saw as the “criminalization of détente.” The organization he established, the American Committee on East-West Accord, tried mightily to argue for a more sane US policy toward Russia.

He fared better than I often did confronting the controversies surrounding him since 2014, in reaction to his views on Ukraine, Putin, election interference, and more. Positions he took often elicited slurs and scurrilous attacks. How many times could he be labeled “Putin’s puppet”? “Putin’s No.1 American apologist”? Endlessly, it seemed. But Steve chose not to respond directly to the attacks, believing -- as he told me many times when I urged him to respond -- that they offered no truly substantive criticism of his arguments, but were merely ad hominem attacks. What he did write about -- he was increasingly concerned about the fate of a younger generation of scholars -- was the danger of smearing those who thought differently about US policy toward Russia, thereby silencing skeptics and contributing to the absence of a needed debate in our politics, media, and academy. 


Cohen called out the attempts to rebuild The Cold War and saw this taking place while Barack Obama was still president.  We spoke of this after Ed Snowden was in Russia trapped at the airport.  He was a strong voice and a great thinker.  At CONSORTIUM NEWS, Gilbert Doctorow notes:

A year ago, I reviewed his latest book, War With Russia? which drew upon the material of those programs and took this scholar turned journalist into a new and highly accessible genre of oral readings in print.  The narrative style may have been more relaxed, with simplified syntax, but the reasoning remained razor sharp. I urge those who are today paying tribute to Steve, to buy and read the book, which is his best legacy.

From start to finish, Stephen F. Cohen was among America’s best historians of his generation, putting aside the specific subject matter that he treated: Nikolai Bukharin, his dissertation topic and the material of his first and best known book; or, to put it more broadly, the history of Russia (U.S.S.R.) in the 20th century. 

He was one of the very rare cases of an historian deeply attentive to historiography, to causality and to logic.  I understood this when I read a book of his from the mid-1980s in which he explained why Russian (Soviet) history was no longer attracting young students of quality:  because there were no unanswered questions, because  we smugly assumed that we knew about that country all that there was to know. That was when our expert community told us with one voice that the U.S.S.R. was entrapped in totalitarianism without any prospect for the overthrow of its oppressive regime.

Caitlin Johnstone (ICH) observes, "In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen’s death is a blow to humanity’s desperate quest for clarity and understanding."  RT's CROSSTALK BULLHORNS addressed his legacy and the legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.




And CONFLICTS OF INTEREST explore Cohen's legacy and peace activist Kevin Zeese's legacy.


In the US, the presidential election is weeks away.  Will Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden make it to the finish line?  THE NEXT NEWS NETWORK has some video that makes you wonder.




Grasp that this is after weeks of resting and, yes, hiding.  In Iraq, parliamentary elections are being floated for June 6th.  Over the weekend, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi met with Speaker of Parliament Mohamed al-Halbousi to stress the need to work towards getting an election law passed. Is everyone on board for elections?  Apparently not.   Hayder Tweets:


Tomorrow’s agenda for #Iraq's council of representatives. They are still stalling the finalization of the electoral law. The more they stall the tougher it will be to hold early elections. And it is almost impossible to have fair early elections now.
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12:37 PM · Sep 21, 2020


The stalling in Parliament comes as a ceremonial figure jumps into the conversation.  Mina Aldroubi (THE NATIONAL) reports:

Iraq needs reforms, security and stability before it can hold a free and fair election, President Barham Salih cautioned on Sunday after the government said it plans an early national poll.

The administration of Mustafa Al Kadhimi said in July that early elections will be held next June, a year before the current parliamentary term ends. It has been a key demand of many of the anti-government protesters on the streets since last October.

"Reforms requires political will and the holding of early, free and fair elections that will give priority to public opinion and demands and are away from the power of arms, fraud and interference," he said during a conference on combating violence against women. 


Is Salih afraid he won't hold on to power?  The new elections would mean someone being named prime minister and someone being named president.  Is Salih afraid he doesn't have the support to continue as president?  


Amsiiraq Tweets:

Observers: The political and economic environment in Iraq has not changed in favor of holding free, fair and transparent elections that result in political forces other than those dominating power, which employ money, weapons and intimidation to survive.
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4:13 PM · Sep 21, 2020


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