Society's ChildS


Quenelle - Golden

DAPL protesters proclaim victory as pipeline forced to change route - statement


RT
Sun, 04 Dec 2016 23:57 UTC
Native American and visiting
© Lucas JacksonNative American and visiting "water protectors" celebrate that the Army Corps of Engineers has denied an easement for the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline inside of the Oceti Sakowin camp, North Dakota, U.S., December 4, 2016
The US Army Corps of Engineers will not grant permission for the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross Lake Oahe, the hotspot of massive protests of water protectors, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said in a statement, adding that alternative routes are now being studied.

"The Department of the Army will not approve an easement that would allow the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe in North Dakota," said a statement on the US Army website, citing the Assistant Secretary for Civil Works, Jo-Ellen Darcy.

Comment: It's not going to be that easy: Energy Transfer Partners and Sunoco Logistics Partners respond to statement from Department of the Army: "Committed to finish and not reroute Dakota Access Pipeline"

Read More...
Footprints

Parade of Indonesian Culture: Tens of thousands march in Jakarta to support first Christian governor


RT
Sun, 04 Dec 2016 22:33 UTC
rally indonesia
© Darren Whiteside / ReutersPeople attend a rally calling for national unity and tolerance in central Jakarta, Indonesia December 4, 2016.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, to show national unity and call for tolerance after a 200,000-strong Muslim rally demanded the arrest of the city's first Christian governor for alleged blasphemy.

Crowds holding up 'We are Indonesia' signs and waving red-and-white national flags flooded the streets of Jakarta on Sunday, filling a major traffic circle downtown, AP reported.

The rally reportedly was organized in response to two massive protests staged in the past month by hardline Muslim conservatives against Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, nicknamed 'Ahok' - the first ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta and the first Christian to hold the post in 50 years.
Read More...
Stock Down

How stable are western democracies? Not very, according to researchers

Amanda Taub
New York Times
Tue, 29 Nov 2016 22:06 UTC
democracy
Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.

His research suggests something quite different: that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline.

Mr. Mounk's interest in the topic began rather unusually. In 2014, he published a book, "Stranger in My Own Country." It started as a memoir of his experiences growing up as a Jew in Germany, but became a broader investigation of how contemporary European nations were struggling to construct new, multicultural national identities.

He concluded that the effort was not going very well. A populist backlash was rising. But was that just a new kind of politics, or a symptom of something deeper?

To answer that question, Mr. Mounk teamed up with Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. They have since gathered and crunched data on the strength of liberal democracies.

Their conclusion, to be published in the January issue of the Journal of Democracy, is that democracies are not as secure as people may think. Right now, Mr. Mounk said in an interview, "the warning signs are flashing red."

Comment: "Democracy" is not some magical system that spreads peace, love, and butterflies wherever nostrils catch a whiff of its perfumed scent. It is just as corruptible as any other system, barring knowledge of ponerology. The funny thing is that these researchers still think they live in viable democracies. They don't. Of course, things can get worse (much worse), but let's not kid ourselves. Modern democracies are already oligarchies.

Read More...
Dig

People Power! US Army Corps of Engineers halts construction on DAPL, will no longer pass through reservation lands

David Mack
Buzzfeed
Sun, 04 Dec 2016 22:22 UTC
#nodapl
© James Macpherson / AP Photo
The US Army Corps of Engineers on Sunday announced they will no longer allow the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under a lake near the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, marking a huge win for Native Americans and protesters who had long opposed the construction.

"Today, the US Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will not be granting the easement to cross Lake Oahe for the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline," Standing Rock Sioux Tribal chairman Dave Archambault II said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News. "Instead, the Corps will be undertaking an environmental impact statement to look at possible alternative routes.

"We wholeheartedly support the decision of the administration and commend with the utmost gratitude the courage it took on the part of President Obama, the Army Corps, the Department of Justice, and the Department of the Interior to take steps to correct the course of history and to do the right thing."

"It took tremendous courage to take a new approach to our nation-to-nation relationship, and we will be forever grateful," he said.

Assistant Army Secretary for Civil Works Jo-Ellen Darcy said she based her decision on a need to explore alternate pipeline routes.

"Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it's clear that there's more work to do," Darcy said in a statement. "The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing."

Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Comment: Can't help but wonder if the 2,000 veterans showing up had something to do with the timing of this decision.

Read More...
Propaganda

AP/NYT buries truth about Aleppo's civilians in last 2 paragraphs of report

AP
New York Times
Sat, 03 Dec 2016 21:54 UTC
Syrians who have been evacuated from eastern Aleppo, reach out for Russian food aid
© REUTERS/ Omar SanadikiSyrians who have been evacuated from eastern Aleppo, reach out for Russian food aid in government-controlled Jibreen area in Aleppo, Syria November 30, 2016.
Azza Haj Hussein held out for four years in war-ravaged eastern Aleppo, moving from one bombed-out home to another and surviving mostly on bread, crushed wheat and rice for four months under a suffocating government siege.

The 27-year-old mother of four recalls days when the family of six had to squeeze themselves into a tiny bathroom to seek shelter from airstrikes that shook the ground beneath them. On Tuesday, troops marched into their neighborhood, placing them on buses headed to government-controlled western Aleppo as rebel defenses crumbled.

She is now among some 3,000 families who have taken refuge in a market that has been turned into a shelter for the thousands who have fled east Aleppo over the past week. In some cases, more than a dozen people are staying in one room where water is scarce despite the municipalities' work to improve conditions.


Comment: Scroll down to see what should have been front-page/headline material, but instead got buried at the very end of the article.

Read More...
Eye 2

What Privacy? Uber can now track passengers' locations after they are dropped off even when the app is closed


Daily Mail
Sun, 04 Dec 2016 19:59 UTC
Uber can now track their passengers' locations after they are dropped off even when their app has been closed
© PA
Uber can now track their passengers' locations after they are dropped off and even when their app has been closed.

A new update to Uber's app allows the global taxi service to collect passenger data up to five minutes after a journey has finished.

Previously Uber had only been able to do this when their app was open.

Comment: It seems as though if you really must use Uber it might be a good idea to install the app when you need it and then as soon as you get out of the car delete the app, or turn off your phone.

Read More...
Green Light

ND police will move from contested bridge if protesters agree to concessions


Sputnik
Sun, 04 Dec 2016 19:37 UTC
nodapl camp
© REUTERS/ Lucas Jackson
North Dakota authorities now say they will move away from a key bridge near the Dakota Access protest encampment December 4 if protesters will agree to some basic parameters of their occupation of the land. North Dakota law enforcement also said they will not be "moving on that camp" in the near future.

The Army Corps of Engineers last week said protesters must leave the thousands-strong Oceti Sakowin campsite by December 5 or face trespassing charges, though it followed up the statement by stressing that it had no eviction plans.
Read More...
MIB

AT&T requires police to hide hemisphere phone spying

Adam Schwartz
Learn Liberty
Wed, 09 Nov 2016 19:10 UTC
Surveillance
AT&T built a powerful phone surveillance tool for police, called Hemisphere. Every day AT&T adds four billion call records to Hemisphere, making it one of the largest known reservoirs of communications metadata that the government uses to spy on us. Law enforcement officials kept Hemisphere "under the radar" for many years—hidden from courts, legislators, and the general public—until the New York Times exposed the program in 2013. EFF sued federal and state law enforcement officials to obtain records about Hemisphere, in part to better understand how and why police kept such a massive spying database secret for so long.
Read More...
Dollars

The extortion racket of government licensing requirements

Justin Gardner
The Free Thought Project
Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:34 UTC
government licenses
When we talk about declining jobs and economic burdens, the narrative conditions many to blame some "other" political or cultural group. But perhaps the least talked about threat to jobs comes from the government itself in the form of occupational licensing.

A new analysis from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) found that in Wisconsin alone, the rapid expansion of licensing requirements over the past 20 years caused 31,000 fewer jobs to be had, and cost consumers almost $2 billion.
The study, the first of its kind to examine the economic and social impact of the more than 240 different types of credentials issued by DSPS, shows a dramatic surge in the number of regulated occupations and license holders. Across the country, a bipartisan consensus - from the Obama White House to the Koch Brothers - has formed that occupational licensing is arguably one of the most substantial barriers to opportunity in America today. While some credentialing serves to protect public health and safety, much is rank protectionism - a device to "fence in" those who already have permission to work and "fence out" those who do not.
As this writer posited earlier this year, government licensing is just another extortion racket with no real purpose in making things safer or better.

These licenses involve paying government to take some sort of test and/or provide documentation of state-approved training, and then paying government every year—at steadily increasing rates—until you quit, retire or die.
Read More...
Fire

One-staircase 'labyrinth': Oakland fire survivors share accounts, claims of safety violations emerge while death count increases


Rt
Sun, 04 Dec 2016 13:16 UTC
Oakland fires
© Stephen Lam / Reuters 46Smoke rises from a smoldering building where a fire broke out during a party late Friday evening in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California, U.S. December 3, 2016.
Survivors of a deadly blaze have shared their accounts of getting out of an artist space dubbed the Oakland Ghost Ship that went up in flames on Friday night. Neighbors and attendees of previous parties at the venue claim it had no fire sprinklers.

The fire broke out in a two-story warehouse that housed an artists' studio on 31st Ave in Oakland during a party advertised as a 'Rave Cave,' which was part of musician Golden Donna's West Coast Tour.

One survivor, Adrian Lee, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was on the second floor with his friends when the fire broke out.

"We didn't see much smoke," he said. "It was just a plastic-ey, toxic, chemical-type smell."

People started panicking, he said, adding that "for the first half, people didn't know what was going on. It didn't seem like anything drastic had happened yet."

"The building itself was an art piece. The walls were completely covered with makeshift pieces of wood, so finding the staircase if you'd never been there before was difficult because they had built it into the wall in a certain way," said Laura Hobbs, 24, who attended the party. "I can't imagine how long it'd take 40 people to get out even in a calm situation," she added.

Comment: Update:
The death toll spiked from nine to 24 as the search continued overnight, Alameda County Sheriff's Sargent Ray Kelly said on Sunday, warning that more bodies are likely to be discovered.

Read More...