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US Promoted Civil War

• Kiev’s troops roll through E.Ukraine in ‘bid to disrupt voting’ – self-defense forces 

  A town in the Lugansk region has come under attack by Kiev’s APCs, while in the Donetsk region Ukrainian troops have seized four polling stations, self-defense forces claim. This comes as autonomy referendums kick off in the country’s southeast.

  “Around 15 APCs have come near Novoaydar,” Aleksey Chmilenko said. “Our self-defense guards are trying to stop the attack and prevent the vehicles moving farther in the direction of Lugansk.”

• 400 Blackwater Mercs Deployed In Ukraine Against Separatists, German Press Reports 

  In what is becoming a weekly ritual, the German press continues to demolish the US case of “idealistic humaniatrian” Ukraine intervention. Recall, that it was a week ago that German tabloid Bild am Sonntag, hardly the most reputable source but certainly one which reaches the broadest audience, reported that dozens of CIA and FBI agents were “advising the Ukraine government.” This conclusion is hardly a stretch and certainly based on facts considering the recent semi-secret jaunt by CIA head Brennan to Kiev. Fast forward one week when overnight the same Bild reported that about 400 elite mercenary commandos of the private US security firm, Academi, f/k/a Xe Services, f/k/a Blackwater “are involved in a punitive operation mounted by Ukraine’s new government” against east Ukraine separatists.

  

Wealth Plunder

• Pope Francis Calls For ‘Legitimate Redistribution’ Of Wealth To The Poor

  Pope Francis called Friday for governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the “economy of exclusion” that is taking hold today.

  On Friday, Francis called for the United Nations to promote a “worldwide ethical mobilization” of solidarity with the poor in a new spirit of generosity.

We Actually Know Nothing

• Understanding How Climatic Relationships Led To Major Ice Age Cycles  A new study has developed crucial new information about how the ice ages came about based on newly discovered relationships between deep-sea temperature and ice-volume changes. The international team of researchers, led by the University of Southampton, developed a new method for determining sea-level and deep-see temperature variability over the past 5.3 million years. The new method provides unprecedented insight into the climatic relationships that caused the development of major ice-age cycles during the past two million years. Dr Gavin Foster, from Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton, commented, “Our work focused on the discovery of new relationships within the natural Earth system. In that sense, the observed decoupling of temperature and ice-volume changes provides crucial new information for our understanding of how the ice ages developed.” Our record is also of interest to climate policy developments, because it opens the door to detailed comparisons between past atmospheric CO2 concentrations, global temperatures, and sea levels, which has enormous value to long-term future climate projections.”  This allowed the team to use the microfossil records as a sensitive recorder of global sea-level changes. This new data was then combined with existing deep-sea oxygen isotope records from the open ocean to demonstrate deep-sea temperature changes. There are uncertainties involved, so we included wide-ranging assessments of these, as well as pointers to the most promising avenues for improvement. This work lays the foundation for a concentrated effort toward refining and improving the new sea-level record.”

  Dr Mark Tamisiea, of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, noted the importance of the Strait of Gibraltar to the analysis.

  “Flow through the Strait will depend not only on the ocean’s volume, but also on how the land in the region moves up and down in response to the changing water levels. We use a global model of changes in the ocean and the ice sheets to estimate the deformation and gravity changes in the region, and how that will affect our estimate of global sea-level change,” he says.

• 2.7-Million-Year-Old Forested Landscape Discovered under Greenland Ice Sheet 

  “We found organic soil that has been frozen to the bottom of the ice sheet for 2.7 million years,” said Dr Paul Bierman, a geologist with the University of Vermont and the lead author of the paper appearing online in the journalScience.

  “The ancient soil under the Greenland Ice Sheet helps to unravel an important mystery surrounding climate change – how did big ice sheets melt and grow in response to changes in temperature?” said co-author Dr Dylan Rood from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

  The discovery indicates that even during the warmest periods since the ice sheet formed, the center of Greenland remained stable.“

  “Greenland really was green! However, it was millions of years ago. Greenland looked like the green Alaskan tundra, before it was covered by the second largest body of ice on Earth,” Dr Rood said.

  http://www.sci-news.com/geology/science-forested-landscape-greenland-ice-sheet-01861.html

• Retractions of dishonest scientific papers rose 1,900% in nine years
  In the first decade of the 21st century, retractions of papers published by medical journals went up 19 fold, although the number of manuscripts being published only increased 44 percent. The reasons behind this surge in evidence of scientific falsification were examined in a recent editorial in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics (the Red Journal), published in October 2013.

  “One of the greatest, and sadly all too common, challenges facing a contemporary medical journal editor is the adjudication of ethical integrity issues,” Editor-in-Chief Anthony L. Zietman wrote. “I had originally presumed that this would be just an occasional role, but it transpires that these problems are quite widespread, ranging from unconscious and unwitting naivete to the conscious and willful betrayal of scientific trust.”
  

But You Are A Criminal Anyway For Challenging Our Religion, You Heretic!

• US college professor demands imprisonment for climate-change deniers 

  Torcello, who has a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, explains that there are times when criminal negligence and “science misinformation” must be linked. The threat of climate change, he says, is one of those times.   

  Torcello says that people are already dying because of global warming. “Nonetheless, climate denial remains a serious deterrent against meaningful political action in the very countries most responsible for the crisis.”

  As such, Torcello wants governments to make “the funding of climate denial” a crime.

  “The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.”

Hitting Icebergs Religiously

• Mythical Climate Change Consensus Hits An Iceberg  

  Junk Science: Climate change “deniers,” as global warm-mongers call those who think empirical evidence is more reliable than computer models, may soon count among their number a 50,000-strong body of physicists.

  At the risk of being accused of embracing what alarmists call the flat-earth view of climate change, the American Physical Society has appointed a balanced, six-person committee to review its stance on so-called climate change that includes three distinguished skeptics: Judith Curry, John Christy and Richard Lindzen. Their credentials are impressive.

  A question the American Physical Society panel will address is one we ask repeatedly: Why wasn’t the current global temperature stasis, with no discernible change in the past 15 years, not predicted by any of the climate models used by the IPCC, part of the United Nations?

  The APS announcement lists among its questions to be answered: “How long must the stasis persist before there would be a firm declaration of a problem with the models?”

  In a nod to the likelihood that nature, not man, calls the shots, another APS audit question asks the panel: “What do you see as the likelihood of solar influences beyond TSI (total solar irradiance)? Is it coincidence that the stasis has occurred during the weakest solar cycle (i.e., sunspot activity) in about a century?”

• Mount Everest Is Shrinking Because Of Climate Change, Scientist Says  

  The world’s tallest mountain is losing its cool, and it might be our fault.

  On Thursday, Chinese scientist Kang Shichang told the country’s official Xinhua news agency that Mount Everest’s glaciers have melted by 10 percent over the past 40 years, and that the shrinkage is due to climate change. Shichang, a researcher at the Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said the statement was based on a long-term compilation of remote sensing and on-site monitoring data.

• Why It’s a Big Deal That Half of the Great Lakes Are Still Covered in Ice  

  Over the winter, as polar vortices plunged the U.S. Midwest into weeks of unceasing cold, the icy covers of the Great Lakes started to make headlines. With almost 96 percent of Lake Superior’s 32,000 miles encased in ice at the season’s peak, tens of thousands of tourists flocked to the ice caves along the Wisconsin shoreline, suddenly accessible after four years of relatively warmer wintery conditions.

  The thing is, all of that ice takes a long time to melt. As of April 10, 48 percent of the five lakes’ 90,000-plus square miles were still covered in ice, down from a high of 92.2 percent on March 6 (note that constituted the highest levels recorded since 1979, when ice covered 94.7 percent of the lakes). Last year, only 38.4 percent of the lakes froze over, while in 2012 just 12.9 percent did – part of a four-year stint of below-average iciness.

• Sublimation (phase transition) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Sublimation is the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase. Sublimation is an endothermic phase transition that occurs at temperatures and pressures below a substance’s triple point in its phase diagram.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(chemistry) 

Press The Press

• Court Declares That, Yes, Bloggers Are Media
  

  The full ruling does a nice job giving the history and purpose of the law above, as well as the importance of encouraging the media to report on difficult stories. And from there, it explains why VanVoorhis’ blog is clearly a part of the media and why blogs in general are so important:

  …it is hard to dispute that the advent of the internet as a medium and the emergence of the blog as a means of free dissemination of news and public comment have been transformative. By some accounts, there are in the range of 300 million blogs worldwide. The variety and quality of these are such that the word “blog” itself is an evolving term and concept. The impact of blogs has been so great that even terms traditionally well defined and understood in journalism are changing as journalists increasingly employ the tools and techniques of bloggers – and vice versa. In employing the word “blog,” we consider a site operated by a single individual or a small group that has primarily an informational purpose, most commonly in an area of special interest, knowledge or expertise of the blogger, and which usually provides for public impact or feedback. In that sense, it appears clear that many blogs and bloggers will fall within the broad reach of “media,” and, if accused of defamatory statements, will qualify as a “media defendant” for purposes of Florida’s defamation law as discussed above.

  There are many outstanding blogs on particular topics, managed by persons of exceptional expertise, to whom we look for the most immediate information on recent developments and on whom we rely for informed explanations of the meaning of these developments. Other blogs run the gamut of quality of expertise, explanation and even- handed treatment of their subjects. We are not prepared to say that all blogs and all bloggers would qualify for the protection of section 770.01, Florida Statutes, but we conclude that VanVoorhis’s blog, at issue here, is within the ambit of the statute’s protection as an alternative medium of news and public comment.

  While it seems crazy that this kind of issue is still being debated in 2014, it’s good to see a court make such a clear statement on the fact that blogs will often qualify as media properties.

• State Dept Launches ‘Free the Press’ Campaign While DOJ Asks Supreme Court to Force Reporter James Risen Into Jail The US State Department announced the launch of its third annual “Free the Press” campaign today, which will purportedly highlight “journalists or media outlets that are censored, attacked, threatened, or otherwise oppressed because of their reporting.” A noble mission for sure. But maybe they should kick off the campaign by criticizing their own Justice Department, which on the very same day, has asked the Supreme Court to help them force Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen into jail.

• How to record police encounters without losing your video

  Police State USA

  

  Technology is a double-edged sword.  It has enabled the government to become more intrusive than ever with its online spying capabilities.  However, cheap and discreet recording devices make it much more feasible to hold cops on the street accountable.

  Police State USA encourages holding government officials accountable but advises everyone to research the laws in their own states regarding secretly recording audio conversations (Read more: The Reporter’s Recording Guide).  Encounters with police officers in public generally do not fall under such restrictions, particularly after the recent court decision in Illinois.

  Here, we intend to look at the technologies that facilitate that recording.

• Illinois Supreme Court Unanimously Overturns the Country’s Strictest Recording Ban  Illinois Supreme Court unanimously overturned that state’s draconian eavesdropping law, which makes it a felony to record public officials without their permission, even when they are performing their public duties. Two years ago the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled that the law was unconstitutional as applied to police officers recorded in public. Today’s decision extends that analysis to other public officials as well as private citizens when they do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

  The justices note that the eavesdropping ban “criminalizes a wide range of innocent conduct,” including “the recording of conversations that cannot be deemed private: a loud argument on the street, a political debate on a college quad, yelling fans at an athletic event, or any conversation loud enough that the speakers should expect to be heard by others. None of these examples implicate privacy interests, yet the statute makes it a felony to audio record each one. Judged in terms of the legislative purpose of protecting conversational privacy, the statute’s scope is simply too broad.”

• Big brother is watching you, your Forest Service bug out road has a camera Not long after I got an e-mail from the Western States lands Coalition Western Slope No Fee Coalitionwith the news story dated Mar 12th 2010 that the first camera had just found, also in February. Check out the location! East Coast. Remember that I’m in Oregon on a Forest Service road having this discussion with my buddy and he was saying ALL roads had cameras. It raises some disturbing questions. Is homeland security grants paying for all this monitoring? How many new hires do they have? How do they upload this info? Is it computer monitored or did they go to India for labor? What the heck is the story here?

  Full link followed by full text of the Post Coureir news story:
  Francis Marion has hidden cameras – Charleston SC – The Post and Courier – postandcourier.com

• Federal court rules that stiff driving posture is suspicious behavior

  

  NEW MEXICO — A federal appeals court has ruled that driving with one’s hands at the “ten-and-two position” is reason enough to pull someone over for further investigation. No traffic laws have to actually be broken.  Additionally, the court ruled that facial acne is reason enough to suspect a driver is a drug smuggler.

• Illinois Supreme Court: Cop Cannot Pull Over A Man Looking For A Woman
  Top court in Illinois rules that police must have a valid reason for stopping a motorist before asking for identification. A police officer who pulls over a car he believes is driven by a wanted woman must end the traffic stop once he realizes the driver is actually a man. The Illinois Supreme Court came to this conclusion last week in deciding 5 to 2 that Derrick A. Cummings had his constitutional rights violated when he was stopped and arrested on January 27, 2011.
• Texas officer who fatally shot 93-year-old woman is fired Pearlie Golden, longtime resident in town of about 4,600 people, was shot multiple times at her home Tuesday 10 May 2014 The police officer who fatally shot a 93-year-old woman at her home in Texas has been fired after a city council vote Saturday. Officer Stephen Stem was dismissed from the Hearne Police Department on Saturday after the city council voted 6-0 to take disciplinary action against him, said Jessica Vega, Hearne Police Department communications supervisor.

Warning America About To Die

• Supreme Court Justice Scalia Talks Eminent Domain, Internment Camps 

  On the other hand, Scalia said he could see another period of internment camps happening in America during a time of war. 

  He was responding to a question about the famous case involving Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American who was arrested in 1941 for violating a federal order authorizing the military to incarcerate people.

  Scalia said the court’s 1944 decision in favor of the government was “wrong” but was repudiated in a later case.

  “But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” he said. 

  He used a Latin expression to explain why:
  “Inter arma enim silent leges …In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

• “That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot,” Scalia said. “That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again — in time of war. It’s no justification but it is the reality.”

• Feds can hide rationale for killing U.S. citizen, judge rules A Bay Area federal judge says the Obama administration can keep secret a memo spelling out the legal rationale for a 2011 drone attack in Yemen that killed a U.S. citizen and alleged terrorist mastermind.

And Then America Died and No One Noticed

• Supreme Court Declines to Hear NDAA Indefinite Detention Appeal
  

  Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges joined plaintiffs and supporters outside the Second Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013 in speaking out against the Obama administration’s continued efforts to legalize the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens by the military. (Christopher Twarowski/Long Island Press)

  A group of journalists and activists who filed a lawsuit two years ago challenging a controversial provision in a national defense spending bill that they claimed allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens were dealt a crushing blow Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal.

  In declining to hear the case, the highest court in the land effectively killed the lawsuit—Hedges V. Obama—which was brought by famed former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, plus four others. Collectively, the plaintiffs were dubbed “The Magnificent Seven” by supporters.

  The decision upholds the U.S. Second District Court of Appeals July 2013 decision to vacate a permanent injunction on its implementation, which was previously issued by a President Obama-appointed U.S. District Court Judge in September 2012. In her decision, Judge Katherine Forest, ruled Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act unconstitutional. The Obama Administration appealed Forest’s ruling the very next day.
  

• Supreme Court green lights detention of Americans
  Lets stand arrests of ‘anyone viewed as a troublemaker’

  A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” according to critics.

  The high court this week refused to review an appeals court decision that said the president and U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals.

• Chris Hedges: We’re Losing the Last Shreds of Legal Rights to Protect Ourselves from Oligarchy 

  The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power — one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed — a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating — is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.

• Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Case Against NDAA Unlawful Detention  

  Within days of Congress reauthorizing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in January 2012, Brian Trautman summarized it perfectly:

  This pernicious law poses one of the greatest threats to civil liberties in our nation’s history. Under Section 1021 of the NDAA, foreign nationals who are alleged to have committed or merely “suspected” of sympathizing with or providing any level of support to groups the U.S. designates as terrorist organization or an affiliate or associated force may be imprisoned without charge or trial “until the end of hostilities.”

  The law affirms the executive branch’s authority granted under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and broadens the definition and scope of “covered persons.”

  But because the “war on terror” is a war on a tactic, not on a state, it has no parameters or timetable. Consequently, this law can be used by authorities to detain (forever) anyone the government considers a threat to national security and stability — potentially even demonstrators and protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.

• The Post-Constitutional Era 

  

  Activist Lauren DiGioia is arrested Jan. 3, 2012, during a demonstration in New York City’s Grand Central Station held to call attention to the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Barack Obama on the previous New Year’s Eve. (AP/Mary Altaffer)

  The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal.

The Supreme Court Abandoning its Judicial Branch Post Leaves Us Where?

• Kansas v. Colorado, 206 U.S. 46 (1907)  

  As Congress cannot make compacts between the states, as it cannot, in respect to certain matters, by legislation compel their separate action, disputes between them must be settled either by force or else by appeal to tribunals empowered to determine the right and wrong thereof. Force, under our system of government, is eliminated. The clear language of the Constitution vests in this court the power to settle those disputes. We have exercised that power in a variety of instances, determining in the several instances the justice of the dispute. Nor is our jurisdiction ousted, even if, because Kansas and Colorado are states sovereign and independent in local matters, the relations between them depend in any respect upon principles of international law. International law is no alien in this tribunal.

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