Way Worse

Climate Change is Worse Than We've Been Told. Jay Greathouse. Oct. 13, 2019.

IPCC recommendations understate our current situation and underestimate our near-future risks by relying on the outdated 1979 “Charney Sensitivity” of the IPCC computer model ensemble. This sensitivity value of the surface temperature of the planet to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, always challenged by other models, merely seems the one most acceptable to the conservative IPCC consensus policy process.

In this case we are talking about the sensitivity value of the surface temperature of the planet to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. A low value suggests that we can keep on with business as usual burning fossil fuels for awhile longer. A high value suggests that we need to stop now and indicates how much trouble we’re in already.

The differences between the sensitivity values given by the models, it seems, concerns how well the various models account for the numerous and complex feedbacks. All the models seem to miss some of the feedbacks, as to be expected since no model can totally represent the total reality. The valid proof of any computer model can only be confirmation from the observation of reality.

To understand the implications of the IPCC preferring a certain model, we can compare three of the more famous models. The observable reality against which modeled values can be checked is the change in average surface temperature of the planet between the last glacial maximum and the preindustrial benchmark.

This temperature change between the last glacial maximum and the preindustrial benchmark is assumed to be about 5°C, during which time the CO2 levels went from around 180 ppm to 280 ppm. These are the more conservative numbers produced from fossilized vegetation and early ice core samples. These numbers were later confirmed in other ways and I’ll get to that.

Then, we can compare the three models in a chart showing how they stack up to reality. The first model is named after Jule G. Charney. The second model is named after the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office. The third model is named after James Hansen, who had previously worked with Charney on the first model.

Jule G. Charney was Chairman of the Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate that produced the “Caron Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment”. It’s pretty easy to do a simple search and still find a copy of the “charney_report1979.pdf” online.

The New York Times published a good article about this called “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change”.  It’s worth taking the time to read it. This article was later expanded into a book.

The Charney Sensitivity only included some of the relatively fast feedbacks in terms of water-vapor concentration, some albedo change from reduced sea ice coverage, together with estimates of changes in cloud effects. This was the best computers could do in 1979 and they knew then that they had not included all of the feedbacks.

The Charney Sensitivity indicates about 3°C warming for a doubling of CO2. As you can see from the chart, it shows we can expect about 1.5°C warming from our current level of CO2. At 440 ppm CO2 we should expect about 2°C warming from CO2 alone. We haven’t experienced all that heat yet because Earth’s thermal inertia delays Earth’s thermal equilibrium with the GHG (greenhouse gas) already in the atmosphere.

The thermal inertia of the global system is confirmed by the time-lag between cause and effect, between the human use of fossil fuels and the full manifestation of global heating and climate change. The Earth has yet to reach thermal equilibrium with the total amount of both CO2 and non-CO2 GHG already in the atmosphere.

It’s as if the Earth is a huge pot of water on a small stove and we have the heat turned very low. It will just take some time for the heat to equally warm up the Earth. And, of course, the heat is still turned on, so we know it will eventually get much hotter because we are still pumping more GHG into the atmosphere.

It’s just that there was never a time in Earth’s natural history that so much GHG has been added to the atmosphere is such a short time period. What we’ve done in a little over a couple of hundred of years it took Earth thousands of years to accomplish previous to the past extinction events.

Starting in 2000 with more powerful computers, the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office appeared to lead the field with their evolving HadGen3 programs. They were able to include the so-called carbon cycle feedbacks from things like vegetation changes.

The Hadley Sensitivity indicated about 4.5°C warming for a doubling of CO2. With this sensitivity we can expect about 2.25°C of warming from our current level of CO2. At 440 ppm CO2 we should expect about 3°C warming from CO2 alone. That would be hot enough to to end people, that is human extinction.

In 2005, Ferdinand Engelbeen published results of a regression analysis of the correlated values of CO2 concentration and temperature based on the gas analysis of bubbles trapped deep in the Antarctic ice cap at Vostok. This work confirmed the earlier number of about 5°C temperature rise when the CO2 levels went from around 180 ppm to 280 ppm. I told you this was coming.

In 2008 James Hansen and associates attempted to close the gap between computer modeling and the empirical measurement from Vostok. Now this model also included the slow feedbacks from things like ice sheet loss.

The Hansen Sensitivity indicated about 6°C warming for a doubling of CO2. With this sensitivity we can expect, eventually, about 3°C of warming from our current level of CO2. With this added accuracy we see that people are already functionally extinct. At 440 ppm CO2 we should expect almost 4°C warming from CO2 alone.

Then scientists working in the field came up with more confirmation of the earlier numbers derived from real world evidence. Towards the end of 2009, Mark Pagani and associates published a paper on “High Earth-system climate sensitivity determined from Piocene carbon dioxide concentration”. Their analysis was based on proxy derivation of temperature and CO2 concentration using ocean-floor sediment cores reaching back some 60 to 100 million years.

In 2011, Jeffrey Kiehl surveyed current peer-reviewed academic papers reporting on the reconstruction of values of atmospheric CO2 concentration reaching back to the Eocene period. The authors also derived values for earth system climate sensitivity across this period. Kiehl’s work confirmed Pagani’s, Engelbeen’s and the previous paleo-vegetation estimates.

We now have excellent numbers for a total Earth System Sensitivity derived from actual measurements, not just computer models. 

The Earth System Sensitivity indicates almost 8°C warming for a doubling of CO2. With this sensitivity we can expect about 4°C of warming from our current level of CO2. At 440 ppm CO2 we should expect about 5°C warming from CO2 alone. That is warm enough to end all life on Earth.

Today we have more than just CO2 in the atmosphere. We also have a lot of methane in the atmosphere, which is a lot more warming than CO2. The question of how much more warming depends upon what time period you look at because methane breaks down to CO2 over time.


The carbon majors like using the number for methane’s warming ability of 34 times that of CO2 over a hundred years time. Over a shorter period of time, say 20 years, methane’s warming ability is about 86 times that of CO2. Methane is also measured in ppb, 1/1000 the ppm concentration that’s used for measuring CO2, so there is a bit of math involved to determine its CO2 equivalence.

As the planet heats up another powerful GHG, water vapor, levels also go up because of increased evaporation. The evidence of this increased level of evaporation shows up in extreme weather events including more flooding from heavier rainfall and greater droughts.

Methane in the atmosphere also increases the level of ozone in the atmosphere, another powerful GHG. Then we have nitrous oxide levels to account for, which is another powerful GHG. Altogether, to say that we now have about about 700 parts per million CO2e in the atmosphere is a totally reasonable estimate.

At 700 parts per million CO2e in the atmosphere we already have more than a 10°C temperature rise in the pipeline. Even if we just stop all trains, planes and automobiles plus stop all fossil fuel electricity generation and petrol-chemical production, we’d still have to stop all the leaks from our natural gas wells and pipelines.

Don’t forget the methane bubbling up from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf and the East Siberian Sea and the GHG from the thawing permafrost tundra. Now those GHG emissions are on their own being run by natural reactions to an already too warm planet. If we can’t do something about that, then we are in run-a-way global heating.

We don’t have any carbon budget left. 

[Only] with immediate carbon drawdown and sequestration to 280 ppm to refreeze the Arctic, we can save life on Earth.

Safran Foer: We Are The Weather

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Alex Preston, The Guardian. Oct. 6, 2019.

Warning: Jonathan Safran Foer’s compelling new book is likely to alter your relationship to food for ever…

What would you do to save the world? Not the strapline for a Netflix series, but rather the question that sits behind Jonathan Safran Foer’s second work of nonfiction, We Are the Weather. The answer to the question appears to be “not very much”, given that despite the looming threat of global heating, despite the fact the next generation (and those that follow) will live more precarious lives, with food, water and clean air in ever-shorter supply, despite the fact that the future of our planet appears to be one of flooded cities, scorched forests and sulphurous skies, we continue to behave as if the climate crisis is someone else’s problem. In 2018, despite knowing more about climate change than we have ever known, we produced more greenhouse gases than we have ever produced, at three times the rate of global population growth.

Climate change, therefore, exists as a rhetorical challenge as much as a scientific one. The most pressing question is how to persuade people to act, and to act now, both on an individual basis and, particularly, collectively. Extinction Rebellion provides a blueprint for action, but what about the majority who aren’t about to chain themselves to the headquarters of Shell? One landmark in the rhetorical battle was Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, although it may surprise you to learn that Gore’s film, for all its rigour, didn’t mention the single largest contributor to global heating: livestock.

Now Safran Foer, best known for his astonishing magical-realist debut novel Everything Is Illuminated, but also the author of a bestselling 2009 book about factory farming, Eating Animals, has set about remedying that omission. In We Are the Weather, he demonstrates that, rather than being an insurmountable nexus of insoluble problems, there’s one small change that all of us can make that would have a sustained and far-reaching impact on the climate crisis: eating fewer animal products. “We cannot keep the kind of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is as straightforward and as fraught as that.”

First, a warning: this is a life-changing book and will alter your relationship to food for ever. I can’t imagine anyone reading Safran Foer’s lucid, heartfelt, deeply compassionate prose and then reaching blithely for a cheeseburger. There’s some dispute as to precisely what proportion of global heating is directly related to the rearing of animals for food, but even the lowest estimates put it on a par with the entire global transportation industry. A well-evidenced 2009 report by the Worldwatch Institute claimed that livestock-related emissions accounted for 51% of all greenhouse gases, “more than all cars, planes, buildings, industry and power plants combined”. Whichever the case, Safran Foer’s thesis is clear and compelling: by making “a collective act to eat differently” (he suggests “no animal products before dinner”) we can turn the tide of the climate crisis.

The book is made up of five sections, each divided into a series of sharp, hard-hitting chapters. Part two, How to Prevent the Greatest Dying, is a bombardment of facts that seeks to overwhelm the reader with evidence. “Humans use 59% of all the land capable of growing crops to grow food for livestock”; “60% of all mammals on Earth are animals raised for food”; “There are approximately 30 farmed animals for every human on the planet”; “In 2018, more than 99% of the animals eaten in America were raised on factory farms”; “Animal agriculture is responsible for 91% of Amazon deforestation”; “If cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.”

These facts, though, are part of the problem, rather than the solution. The point is, we know this stuff, we just don’t believe it. And so the rest of the book is dedicated to persuading us that it is our duty to act, just as, Safran Foer suggests, it was the duty of Jewish leaders in the US to act when Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, came to them in June 1943 with news of the murder and persecution of Jews in Europe. The Jewish leaders, and particularly the supreme court justice Felix Frankfurter, didn’t act. “I am unable to believe what you told me,” Frankfurter told Karski. History now judges Frankfurter as it will judge us.

The final chapter is structured as a letter from Safran Foer to his children. The author’s grandmother, who herself fled Poland just before it was too late to do so, has just died. Most of her family were killed in the Holocaust and Safran Foer powerfully interweaves her story of action with his own history of inaction in the face of global warming. Reversing climate change, he says, “requires an entirely different kind of heroism”. This heroism is “perhaps every bit as difficult” as the sacrifice his grandmother made “because the need for sacrifice is unobvious”. That sacrifice begins, as the book’s subtitle suggests, at breakfast.

Things Are Bleak! Kate Aronoff, The Nation. Oct. 29, 2019.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s quest for planetary salvation.

Foer does not propose that an accumulation of individual lifestyle choices will in and of itself solve the problem, which requires (by his admission) large-scale government action. He doesn’t pretend he has One Quick Trick to Save the Planet. But he contends that change cannot come without an accumulation of individual lifestyle choices: Be the emission reductions you want to see in the world. “Humankind takes leaps,” he writes, “when individuals take steps,” noting also that “of course it’s true that one person deciding to eat a plant-based diet will not change the world, but of course it’s true that the sum of millions of such decisions will.” Like so many well-intentioned liberals, Foer individuates a collective problem. Planetary salvation is possible only if we each, on our own, begin to become better people—and better eaters.

...

What’s so unsettling and even tragic about Foer’s book is that his moralizing is illustrative of a broader self-flagellating despair among many liberals who are troubled by the ominous climate forecasts but who have absorbed right-wing nostrums that it’s a problem of our shared making.

When it comes to Foer’s specific remedies for climate change, it is worth noting that there are compelling ethical and scientific cases to be made for constraining meat, dairy, and egg consumption—many of which Foer presents in Eating Animals.

...

For many reasons, we should all eat fewer animal products. Yet Foer never makes it entirely clear how giving up yogurt and BLTs will lead to any significant change in the atmospheric temperature in the short time frame that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given us to mitigate climate catastrophe. The high-​consumption lifestyles of those lucky enough to have them are conditioned by much larger forces, from the agribusiness companies that lobby to maintain a broken food system to the fossil fuel executives who have funded disinformation campaigns to spread doubt about the reality of climate change. Driving to work in a gas-guzzling vehicle isn’t a choice so much as a necessity for people living in places where austerity has deprived them of functional public transit and for whom 30-plus years of wage stagnation has put Priuses and Teslas out of reach. A less meat-intensive diet may well be easier and cheaper than we make it out to be, but without systemic changes to erode the power of industrial agricultural—to better value the work of farmers and make healthy food accessible to all—it won’t be worth much to the planet.

...

And therein lies the problem. For Foer, climate change is first and foremost an issue of personal morality, not corporate power. 

...

“We” are not all the deniers that Foer makes us out to be. As even Bittman, who has long promoted the benefits of a mainly vegan diet, has noted, decades of writing and advocacy urging people to make more climate-friendly consumer choices hasn’t led to a meaningful decrease in emissions. That’s not likely to change based on a Jonathan Safran Foer book. Our best hope in the face of enormous odds is collective action of a different sort than he prescribes, pioneered by those listed above. As with the New Deal and even the mobilization for World War II, any adequate solution to the climate crisis will emerge from a head-on confrontation with those blocking progress and the kind of ambitious public policy that will allow countries and people to transform their consumption in the ways Foer advocates. In fighting the New Deal order, early neoliberals understood that changing public consciousness wasn’t a matter of having enough conversations about Hayek around the dinner table. It was about taking power.

If the world does manage to steer away from catastrophe, the credit will be owed to a critical mass of social movements, unions, and the elected officials accountable to them, working to take power back. No angst-filled breakfast or lunch can do the same.

see also:

Is Eating Meat Worse Than Burning Oil? Charles Kennedy, oilprice.com. Oct. 22, 2019.

Bad news for meat worshipers. Eating healthy isn't just good for your body--it’s good for the environment, too, according to a series of new studies, suggesting that only vegetarians can save the planet.  

The fight against climate change is already polarizing enough without adding the meat-plant divide.  

But new studies insist that what we eat has quite a lot to do with climate change. It’s not just about food security or species extinction, either.  

Today’s food supply chain creates around 13.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents and 26 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  

A further 2.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (5 percent) are caused by nonfood agriculture and other drivers of deforestation.  

A study from 2017 found that if citizens in 28 high-income nations like the United States, Germany, and Japan actually followed the dietary recommendations of their respective governments, greenhouse gases related to the production of the food they eat would fall by 13 percent to 25 percent. But giving up meat is hard to do. ....

related video exposes here:

Mercy For Animals

also worth reading:

Comfortably Unaware: Global Depletion and Food Responsibility... What You Choose to Eat Is Killing Our Planet, by Richard Oppenlander.

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. by Peter Singer.

In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave, by Peter Singer.

Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights, by Tom Regan.

Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, & Money, by Erik Marcus.

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, by Matthew Scully.

An Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying The Planet and Each Other, by Jim Mason.

The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals, by James McWilliams.

Climate Links - Oct. 2019 #2

‘We really need to wake up quickly’: Al Gore warns of a looming food crisis caused by climate change. Amanda Little, WashPo. Oct. 22, 2019.

Some 40 panelists, most of them farmers and scientists, took the stage to discuss topics from healthy soil to carbon sequestration, but the main event was Gore's slide show, delivered with his characteristic mix of bravado and humility, detailing the impacts of climate change on food systems worldwide. 

"This is in Georgia; a heat wave cooked these apples before they could be harvested," he said, issuing forth rapid-fire examples alongside bone-chilling images and video. "This is the Australia wine region that's going to be untenable. . . . Rice yields in 80 percent of Japan have declined due to the rising temperatures. . . . In nearby Murfreesboro, Tenn., we'll see a quarter decline in soybean yields within the next 30 years." 

Gore spent the better part of 90 minutes detailing the pressures of drought, heat, flooding, superstorms, "rain bombs," invasive insects, fungi and bacterial blight on food producers. "We may be approaching a threshold beyond which the agriculture that we've always known cannot support human civilization as we know it," he declared in a low growl. "That's something we need to avoid." 

Alice Waters, who Gore said catalyzed his interest in food and who had volunteered to cook the vegetarian lunches served to attendees (using local, seasonal and organic ingredients, natch), said the presentation was bittersweet: "I am deeply depressed. But on the other hand, the solution seems so, so unbelievably transformational. . . . We can restore the health of the planet while also restoring the health of people and communities." 

Naomi Starkman, editor-in-chief of ­Civil Eats, which covers news on sustainable agriculture, was similarly fraught: "Gore spoke with such devastating and fierce clarity, connecting the dots between the ways agriculture is implicated in and impacted by the climate crisis. But it also felt like a hopeful moment wherein agriculture, and farmers in particular, are taking a front-and-central place in solving one of the most urgent issues of our time." 

Mark Bittman, the former New York Times food columnist, was more circumspect: "There are ways in which the conversation here isn't quite realistic. Regenerative agriculture is not about increased yield, it's about producing more of the right food in the right ways. ... But kudos to Al Gore for taking it on. There's no more important conversation to have."

Extinction Rebellion and the Birth of a New Climate Politics. David Wallace-Wells, NYMag. Oct. 15, 2019.

Not that long ago, you could count on the world’s Establishment institutions to give you a comforting if mistaken assessment of the risk of climate change. You could choose to see those demanding radical action to take hold of global warming as, by definition, extremists. And you could be reassured by the fact that none of the planet’s most powerful “responsible” parties were really freaking out much about the state of the crisis. 

Somewhat all of a sudden, that is no longer the case. Very much no longer the case. 

... 

One striking feature of these movements is that, unlike even recent bursts of environmental activism, their rhetoric is, with few exceptions, not out of line with the chorus of scientific consensus, which grows increasingly panicked by the day. A report published by the IMF this month summarizes that new consensus this way:  “There is growing agreement between economists and scientists that the tail risks are material and the risk of catastrophic and irreversible disaster is rising, implying potentially infinite costs of unmitigated climate change, including, in the extreme, human extinction.” This is the IMF, for Christ’s sake. 

When alarmist rhetoric and Establishment wisdom have collapsed into each other, what role is there for protest? It may be less about shifting the Overton window and more about simply insisting that those in power operate as though they believe what they say, rather than retreat into an already-familiar climate hypocrisy (declaring a climate emergency and then immediately approving a new oil pipeline, as Justin Trudeau, for instance, has done).

We Broke the World. Roy Scranton. The Baffler. Sept 2019.

Facing the fact of extinction. 

... 

It should be pointed out that neither the IPBES nor mainstream science supports the conclusion that we face near-term human extinction as a result of ecological collapse or global warming. The business-as-usual scenarios established by the IPBES and IPCC predict a hellish and chaotic future that will with high probability destabilize modern human civilization and likely lead to immense human suffering and death. Significant uncertainty surrounds even these scenarios, however, since contemporary scientists don’t have a good idea of what happens on short time scales with shocks to the global ecosystem as powerful as those we have triggered. Observed changes regularly exceed those predicted by current models: for instance, a recent study reported Arctic permafrost melting “exceeding modeled future thaw depths for 2090 under IPCC RCP 4.5,” that is, seventy years earlier than expected. 

The paleoclimate record can show us what happens in general when the global climate and environment undergoes abrupt transformation, which is often mass extinction, but the record lacks the precision to tell us exactly how abrupt. As geologist Marcia Bjornerud writes in her book Timefulness, discussing the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period when the earth was up to 8 degrees Celsius warmer than today and which provides the nearest geological analogue to the climate we might eventually expect from global warming: “The sedimentary record of the PETM, with a resolution no better than a few millennia, does not allow us to distinguish between an essentially instantaneous release of carbon from a belching ocean and a longer-term (1,000-year) combustion of coal or peat.” Looking at observed changes in the earth’s geological record gives us only a fuzzy picture of how and how fast the earth’s biosphere and climate undergo rapid transformation. Climatic and geological changes like those which caused the End-Permian extinction, to take another example, including the release of enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, could have taken thousands of years, or they could have happened much more quickly, perhaps over centuries or even decades. The End-Permian saw up to 96 percent of marine life and up to 70 percent of terrestrial life on earth wiped out. It is thus conceivable that devastating the biosphere as we have and dumping as much carbon into the atmosphere as we have could initiate strong enough positive feedbacks to rapidly heat the earth beyond the point where it could sustain human life within a century or two, but the science is not yet telling us that we’re all going to die from climate change in the near term. 

U.S. Military Could Collapse Within 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Report Commissioned By Pentagon Says. Nafeez Ahmed, vice.com. Oct. 24, 2019.

The report says a combination of global starvation, war, disease, drought, and a fragile power grid could have cascading, devastating effects. 

According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes. 

The senior US government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA. The study called on the Pentagon to urgently prepare for the possibility that domestic power, water, and food systems might collapse due to the impacts of climate change as we near mid-century.

...  

The report paints a frightening portrait of a country falling apart over the next 20 years due to the impacts of climate change on “natural systems such as oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, reefs, and forests.” 

Current infrastructure in the US, the report says, is woefully underprepared: “Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions.” 

Some 80 percent of US agricultural exports and 78 percent of imports are water-borne. This means that episodes of flooding due to climate change could leave lasting damage to shipping infrastructure, posing “a major threat to US lives and communities, the US economy and global food security,” the report notes. 

At particular risk is the US national power grid, which could shut down due to “the stressors of a changing climate,” especially changing rainfall levels.

... 

The US Army report shows that California’s power outage could be a taste of things to come, laying out a truly dystopian scenario of what would happen if the national power grid was brought down by climate change. One particularly harrowing paragraph lists off the consequences bluntly:

“If the power grid infrastructure were to collapse, the United States would experience significant:

• Loss of perishable foods and medications
• Loss of water and wastewater distribution systems
• Loss of heating/air conditioning and electrical lighting systems
• Loss of computer, telephone, and communications systems (including airline flights, satellite networks and GPS services)
• Loss of public transportation systems
• Loss of fuel distribution systems and fuel pipelines
• Loss of all electrical systems that do not have back-up power”

full report here:
Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army. United States Army War College.

Mercy for Animals

13 Undercover Investigations Scarier Than a Horror Film. Mercy for Animals.

October is the month to enjoy horror movies, go through haunted corn mazes, and get chills reading about ghost encounters. While these make for some fun times, you can always remind yourself that they are not real. For farmed animals, however, blood, guts, and fear are the horrific reality every single day. Mercy For Animals’ brave undercover investigators and whistleblowers have conducted more than 60 investigations and exposés inside factory farms and slaughterhouses to expose the public to the truth.

Here are 13 MFA investigations and exposés that are scarier than any horror film you could watch.


1. Lilydale

Footage obtained by MFA found workers at several Lilydale chicken suppliers ripping off the heads and legs of live chickens; violently jamming birds into overcrowded transport crates; running over live birds with forklifts; and hitting, kicking, and throwing chickens.


2. McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets

The 2015 investigation at a McDonald’s chicken supplier exposed horrific cruelty to animals, including birds beaten, crowded in filthy sheds, stabbed to death with nails attached to makeshift clubs, and left to suffer and slowly die without proper veterinary care.


3. Andrus Farms

At Andrus Farms, a supplier to one of the largest cheese producers in the world, the investigator documented workers viciously beating, stabbing, and dragging sick and injured cows.


4. Leprino Foods Supplier

This investigation at Winchester Dairy, a supplier to major pizza cheese producer Leprino Foods, caught workers viciously kicking and punching cows, stabbing cows with screwdrivers, and violently whipping them with metal chains and wires.


5. Walmart Supplier

A 2013 undercover investigation exposed routine and sadistic animal abuse at a Tyson factory farm that supplied pork to Walmart. An investigator documented workers kicking, punching, and throwing pigs. Workers also gouged the eyes of mother pigs.


6. Catfish Corner

A startling glimpse into a fish slaughter facility in Mesquite, Texas, found fish suffocated, skinned, and dismembered while conscious and able to feel pain.


7. E6 Cattle Co.

This heartbreaking undercover investigation found workers bludgeoning calves’ heads with pickaxes and hammers (often five or six times before rendering the animals unconscious), beaten calves—still alive and conscious—thrown onto piles of dead animals, and workers kicking downed calves in the head and standing on their necks and ribs.


8. Butterball

In 2014 an MFA undercover investigator captured video footage of baby turkeys routinely mutilated without painkillers; ground up alive in macerating machines; and carelessly thrown, dropped, and mishandled.


9. Tyson Foods

Workers for Tyson Foods, a major chicken supplier to McDonald’s, KFC, Chick-fil-A, and more, were documented punching, throwing, and beating birds. The undercover investigation also found birds having their heads ripped off while still alive.


10. Mexico’s Government-Owned Slaughterhouses

An MFA investigation at government-owned slaughterhouses in Mexico documented egregious animal abuse, including terrified animals hooked in the mouth, stabbed in the neck, and bludgeoned to death with metal pipes—all while they were still conscious and able to feel pain.


11. Lilydale Turkey Supplier

The disturbing hidden-camera video revealed birds painfully shackled upside down, shocked with electricity, cut open while still conscious, and scalded to death in hot water tanks at a turkey slaughterhouse owned by Lilydale—one of the largest poultry producers in Canada.


12. Bettencourt Dairies

MFA’s investigation into Bettencourt Dairies, a major cheese supplier in Idaho, led to criminal animal cruelty charges for three workers, including the manager of the dairy. Hidden cameras captured workers—including management—viciously beating and shocking cows and violently twisting their tails to deliberately inflict pain; workers and management repeatedly shocking a downed cow and then dragging her by the neck using a chain attached to a tractor; extremely unsafe and unsanitary conditions, including feces-covered floors that caused cows to regularly slip, fall, and injure themselves; and sick or injured cows suffering from open wounds, broken bones, and infected udders left to suffer without veterinary care.


13. Maple Lodge Farms

Shocking hidden-camera footage recorded by an MFA whistleblower at a hatchery owned by Maple Lodge Farms exposed baby chicks ground up alive, roughly dropped onto machines, viciously killed by having their necks smashed against metal edges of factory equipment, and dumped into baskets and left to suffer for hours before death.

So while we may be enjoying tricks and scares, for animals at factory farms, the horror and the gore are real.

To help stop this nightmare from continuing, support our work and become an Investigator Ally today.

And remember: Leaving animals off your plate is the best thing you can do to end the atrocities animals face. Try a compassionate vegan lifestyle.

Not sure whether to laugh or cry, but best essay I've read in awhile

Zombie Nation? The Democratic Party Is Dead, And Everyone Knows It But Them. Helen Buyniski, HelenOfDestroy.com. Oct. 22, 2019.

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, thought to have finally retired from politics after an embarrassing electoral loss to a politically-inexperienced reality show personality, is threatening to enter the 2020 race, serving up reheated Cold War fearmongering and an ironclad sense of royal privilege to a Trump-weary populace. A morally and fiscally bankrupt Democratic Party is poised to enable this sick drama with the help of a spineless and compliant media.



How could this possibly happen? Surely Democrats learned their lesson after their decision to take Clinton’s money in order to stay financially solvent in 2016 required them to rig the primaries in her favor, a crime that likely tanked her candidacy when it was revealed by WikiLeaks? Surely the mainstream media realizes that, three years on, the preposterous Russiagate conspiracy theory they cooked up to defend her has ripped the last shreds of journalistic integrity out of the mainstream media establishment?

Just kidding — the Democratic Party and its media handmaidens bargained away their morals long ago. They’re aiding and abetting a Clinton comeback, wheeling her out to give her opinion on everything from the latest steps toward peace in Syria (bad, needs more war) to the 2020 candidates. Last week, she took aim at Tulsi Gabbard, the best hope the party has of getting voters excited enough to show up in 2020, claiming (without a shred of evidence) that the National Guard major and former DNC chair is being groomed by Russia to act as a third-party spoiler, handing the election to Trump. Had such a claim come from anyone else, the DNC would have slapped it down. But they know on which side their bread is buttered. They’d rather lose than defy their queen.


Let’s do the time warp again

This month’s primary debates proved that, if nothing else, the party has refused to move on from 2016. Candidates clamored to distinguish themselves as the biggest Trump-hater and impeachment zealot, with not one appearing to comprehend that next in line behind their favorite punching bag is Mike Pence. The vice president is a man so possessed by religious sexual phobia that he refuses to be alone in a room with a woman. A Christian Zionist, he is even more willing than Trump to send US soldiers to fight Israel’s battles — the better to hasten the Rapture. Only Andrew Yang — a party outsider — dared speak the truth: “When we are talking about Donald Trump, we’re losing.”

Indeed, everything about the 2020 election is signaling a repeat of the last one. The DNC is broke again, ripe for a Clinton rescue that will once again require the rigging of the primary in return for her kindness. Naysayers who once laughed at the idea of yet another Clinton candidacy are reconsidering their scorn, and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon insists she is, in fact, running — merely waiting for the right moment to officially declare her candidacy. Certainly the media blitz of the past few weeks — ostensibly to promote a book co-written with her do-nothing daughter, but in reality a string of opportunities for her to denounce the “illegitimate” president and remind America that the position is rightfully hers — looks like a campaign publicity tour.

For all that Clinton says she empathizes with current Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden, currently being accused of corruption, she has, in these interviews, always brought the conversation back around to 2016, insisting that “the most outrageously false things” were said about her as well (and lamenting that “enough people believed them” to rob her of the presidency). Biden, like Clinton, is still being pushed as the 2020 favorite, despite coming with decades of baggage including flagrant corruption (threatening to withhold $1 billion in IMF loans from Ukraine until it fired the prosecutor probing an energy company that gave his son a no-show job is only the tip of the iceberg).

Even the New York Times has pointed out the similarities between their two candidacies — both physically deteriorating before voters’ eyes, uninterested in changing the status quo, and embraced by the wealthy donors that keep the party afloat. Biden’s Ukraine problem is as massive and impossible to avoid as Clinton’s email problem. Biden, like Clinton, is positioning himself as not the best candidate, but the only one who can beat Trump — embracing his identity as, he hopes, the lesser of two evils. Both have a long history in politics, dozens of skeletons in the closet (literally, in Clinton’s case), and a string of failed presidential attempts. Both cringingly pander to working-class and minority voters despite a history of racism (“superpredators,” the 1994 crime bill, close friendship with segregationists) and classism (NAFTA).


If at first you don’t succeed…

Ever the strategist, Clinton is likely biding her time until the facts come out about Biden’s involvement in Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma during impeachment hearings and sink his candidacy.She’ll then swoop in, volunteering to take his place as the crusty old standard-bearer of the Democratic pack. Biden’s suicidal stubbornness all but ensures he’ll go down in flames (despite his son Hunter’s admitted drug problems and the obvious nepotism and corruption behind his receiving a $60,000/month directorship just months after being kicked out of the Navy Reserves for cocaine use, Biden insists Hunter will join him on the campaign trail).

Clinton feels the presidency is hers by divine right — that it’s “her turn” to take the reins, like she was promised after Obama snatched it out from under her in 2008. Having paid her dues as First Lady, the long-suffering wife and enabler of serial rapist Bill Clinton occupied a Senate seat just long enough to present herself to the public as a stateswoman in her own right, then made a run at the glass ceiling of the presidency — only to be rejected in favor of a spray-tanned novice without her baggage. Patiently serving as Secretary of State, she oversaw the destruction of Libya, once the jewel of the Middle East under Gaddafi with the highest standard of living on the African continent, turning it into the failed state with open-air slave markets it is today. Thwarted in her efforts to do the same in Syria, she left the White House in 2012.




Clinton transformed the State Department into an extension of the Pentagon via her misleadingly-named “smart power” philosophy. The agency once tasked with solving America’s foreign policy problems diplomatically now merely provides diplomatic cover for regime-change operations like the one she helped engineer in Ukraine in 2014 (while she left the State Department in 2013, the processes she set in motion would culminate in the Maidan revolution that saw actual Nazis take over in Kiev) and the one currently trying to pry Hong Kong from China’s grasp.

She also monetized the position, selling access to the presidency through the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons vastly enriched themselves at the expense of the rest of the world, having never met a dictator they didn’t like. But while they elevated corruption to an art form, their actions were wholly in keeping with the modus operandi of the Democratic Party. Swaddle oneself in the appearance of helping the less fortunate (Clinton has appeared with countless ‘save the children’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ type groups like Somaly Mam’s AFESIP, which notoriously invented Cambodian child brothel horror stories out of whole cloth) while exploiting them to within an inch of their lives (Haitians still protest outside Clinton events over the Foundation’s decision to give over 90 percent of the $13.3 billion given in response to the 2010 earthquake to foreign contractors and Foundation donors while Haitians starved and died).


The rot goes to the core

Clinton wouldn’t be able to get away with this sort of thing if her party wasn’t fully on board with such moral depravity. The current impeachment circus is merely the latest proof that they do not believe anything they say in public. For the entire party and its stenographers in the media to turn on a dime from accusing Trump of colluding with Russia to accusing him of engaging in quid-pro-quo with Ukraine (an enemy of Russia, if one is paying attention) suggests they don’t believe either scandal is necessarily based on facts, but that, to quote congressman and impeachment fanboy Al Green, “if we don’t impeach the president, he will get reelected.”

After losing its collective mind with the 2016 defeat, the Democratic Party, led by Clinton and outgoing President Obama along with CIA director John Brennan and FBI chief James Comey, cobbled together Russiagate as their revenge. Relying on a network of spooks and paid operatives, they conjured up a half-baked menace from the depths of Americans’ collective Cold War memories, light on facts but heavy on the implications, with just enough salacious material to ensure it would go viral. The intention was to cripple Trump’s presidency — if they couldn’t remove him from office, they could at least ensure he played by their rules rather than follow through on wild promises to end the wars in Syria and Afghanistan and normalize relations with Moscow. The status quo held until the release of special counsel Mueller’s Russiagate report meant the media could no longer claim with a straight face that Trump was scheduled to be executed for treason any second now. But top Democrats were unfazed when it was exposed as a hoax — they’d invented it in the first place.




If not a sense of moral outrage that the president is colluding with a foreign power, what has driven the party leadership and its enablers in the media to pursue Trump to the ends of the earth? Democrats’ choice of impeachment issues is proof they lack any sort of moral center — as fake as Russiagate and Ukrainegate are, there are dozens of issues that could potentially be used to skewer Trump. The sky-high civilian casualty rates and record number of bombs dropped on his watch don’t faze Democrats — after all, Bush and Obama started those wars, and neither were impeached for the atrocities committed under their watch.

If anything, Democrats are clamoring for more war, shrieking after Trump announced the latest attempt at a troop pullout from Syria that such an action was unthinkable. Weeping and gnashing their teeth over the impending “genocide” of the Kurds, they spun on a dime when Trump announced a five-day ceasefire with Turkey last week, claiming such a deal — which gave Kurdish militias ample time to vanish from the Turkish border area without being attacked — somehow “discredited” American foreign policy. The Democrat-controlled House even voted to condemn the troop pullout — perhaps forgetting they’d never authorized the deployment of troops to Syria in the first place, an easy mistake to make as the US military has been industriously building up a base infrastructure in flagrant violation of Syria’s sovereignty.

The Trump administration’s blatant nepotism — Jared Kushner, a pampered princeling who has never held a real job in his life, was tasked with making peace between Israel and Palestine, despite blatant partiality toward the Netanyahu government (Bibi slept at the Kushners’ home in New Jersey) — didn’t bat a single Democratic eyelash. After all, Hunter Biden got his own lucrative sinecure in Ukraine with as few credentials. The massive deregulation that has seen the deficit skyrocket as corporations and the wealthy pay even less taxes than they did before bothers no one — Democratic donors benefited as much as Republicans, even though billionaires now pay a lower tax rate than the working class. Trump spitting in the face of international law by “declaring” first Jerusalem and then the Golan Heights the property of Israel went down smoothly as can be — no surprise when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself has said that she would back Israel “even if the Capitol crumbles to the ground.” Democrats’ problem has always been finding an “impeachable offense” Trump was committing that they were not also guilty of.



The devil’s rejects

Perhaps Democrats’ awareness that they’re morally as well as fiscally bankrupt is what drives them to make the same mistakes they did four years ago. Just as they did with Bernie Sanders, the party is doing its utmost to sideline Tulsi Gabbard at every opportunity, barring her from September’s debate despite her polling higher than several candidates who were included and refusing to speak up for her in the face of Clinton’s baseless smear. Their hypocrisy is transparent, preaching identity politics until a Hindu woman emerges championing antiwar policies. Gabbard is the only one bringing fresh ideas to the table, ideas that have excited many voters sick of the shame they feel knowing their country is the number one killer since World War II. Spike her, and they’re almost guaranteed to lose.

As if to prove that point, Clinton pounced on the Hawaii congresswoman last week with her “Russian asset” smear — not referring to Gabbard by name, but making it clear she was talking about no one else. Her spokesman Nick Merrill, asked if Clinton was really saying Gabbard — who served in the Iraq war — was an agent, confirmed the smear: “If the nesting doll fits…” In a sane society, Clinton’s disapproval would be a badge of honor (and to her credit, Gabbard appears to be wearing it as such) — but in the mainstream media hothouse, it’s another strike against her — along with the guilt-by-association smears that come with a 4chan fan club and even her looks.

Sanders might be able to muster a win against Trump, but at 78, his health is failing, and his base is wary after he betrayed them in 2016. Despite stolen primaries in New York and California, he sat mutely, throwing his own supporters under the bus during the convention. After a solid year of slamming Clinton for giving secret speeches to Goldman Sachs, voting to bail out the banks in 2008, and backing every war in the past three decades, Sanders turned on his supporters and implored them to vote for her. He remained silent while his supporters demanded a legal reckoning. Some have forgiven him and returned to cheer him on in 2020, but many have not.

Nevertheless, he is head and shoulders above most Democrats, who are completely for sale to the highest bidder, whether it’s Israel, the arms industry or Big Pharma. They violate the Constitution on a daily basis, whether it’s by voting to make participation in boycotts of Israel illegal (a blatant violation of the First Amendment, as a Texas court recently found; passing a law permitting indefinite detention without trial for American citizens (as Obama did in 2011, backed by a supine Congress, in violation of the Sixth Amendment); or outlawing religious vaccine exemptions (a violation of both the First Amendment and the Geneva Convention).

In perhaps the most shocking betrayal of the party’s liberal and progressive wing, Democrats have embraced the CIA, the FBI, and the entire intelligence apparatus that has infiltrated and destroyed leftist movements since the 1960s. Once the home of the counterculture, the Party now clings to authority, enthusiastically licking the boots they believe will curb-stomp Trump. Bereft of historical perspective — even the torture revelations of the early 2000s have vanished amid the onslaught of Orange Man Bad — Democrats ironically calling themselves the Resistance wear slogans like “It’s Mueller time!” and “Comey is my homey,” broadcasting their allegiance to men who’ve covered up monumental crimes and even committed a few themselves. It’s no surprise to see the mainstream media taking the side of the intelligence agencies — assets like Anderson Cooper, Ken Dilanian, and Wolf Blitzer have been keeping newsrooms safe for democracy for decades. But never before have ordinary voters leapt to embrace their oppressors quite so openly. The phenomenon can’t even be described as selling out — because selling out implies getting something in return for one’s soul.


A hive of lesser evils

Even if Clinton does not run, her influence permeates the party. “I’ve talked to most of them,” she revealed on ABC’s The View earlier this month, slyly hinting that previous contests’ frontrunners a year before the election had failed to secure the nomination. Instead of Sanders and Gabbard, the Democratic National Committee is propping up Biden and grooming as his second Elizabeth Warren, the neoliberal wolf in sheep’s clothing trying to steal Sanders’ thunder by insisting she’s all he represents plus a pair of X chromosomes. Decked out in borrowed rhetoric and forged identity politics credentials, she earnestly presents herself as a leftist, hoping no one remembers she was registered as a Republican until her 40s.




Lest anyone be fooled by Warren’s “radical” act, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently gushed “I know she’s pragmatic, just wait.” Such an endorsement should be a death knell for her progressive support, especially after the revelation that she has been in constant contact with Clinton. Warren emphasizes in communications with donors that she doesn’t actually intend to upend the status quo, and has flip-flopped repeatedly on accepting big-dollar donors and PACs, only rejecting them once she’d stockpiled a healthy war chest from those very donors.

Many of Clinton’s 2016 campaign operatives have chosen California Senator Kamala Harris as their standard-bearer, and Harris exhibits many Clintonesque characteristics.Her enthusiasm for locking up black men for minor drug offenses (she bragged about increasing drug dealers’ conviction rate from 56% to 74% in just three years) — and black women for their truant children (she supported a law that imprisoned mothers if their kids skipped school, then lied about it on the campaign trail) — is worthy of the woman who called black kids “superpredators.” Harris has praised Clinton for “putting our country first” and “serving with distinction” while calling for Trump to be banned from Twitter for his “irresponsible” language.

The other candidates are largely distractions aimed at getting the selection process at the 2020 convention to a second ballot. With voters clamoring for reform after the 2016 disaster, the party obliged by doing away with superdelegates on the first round, but for any round beyond that, they’re fair game — and the DNC refuses to leave the selection up to chance, or anything so small-d democratic as a vote. With a handful of votes thrown to Pete Buttigieg — the anti-Gabbard, a gay pro-war vet — and Beto O’Rourke — the face of privilege whose Spandering caused the cringe heard ‘round the world in the first primary debate — the convention will progress to a second round, and the superdelegates will slither out of their holes to crown their king — or queen.


Status quo defenders

As much as those Democratic establishment stalwarts with presidential ambitions — Clinton and the two dozen-odd candidates determined to dislodge Trump in 2020 — want to get rid of the Bad Orange Man, the benchwarmers in Congress have learned to love him. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer can merely rail against Trump instead of actually governing, floating whatever irresponsible fantasy bills they want with the knowledge that they’ll die in the Republican-controlled Senate or — at worst — be vetoed by Trump. House Democrats got the chance to virtue-signal about ending the war in Yemen, helping voters forget Obama had gotten the US involved in the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century, knowing Trump would kill the bill to serve their shared Saudi paymasters. And pearl-clutching about kids in cages on the border (cages built, again, by Obama) while calling for open borders attracts the votes of recent immigrants while ensuring they’ll never have to cash the checks they’re writing.

Michael Moore, once a progressive darling, recently appeared on ‘comedian’ Bill Maher’s program to lambaste his fellow ex-progressive about abandoning his own liberal credentials. Maher complained that the “Squad” — progressive congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — were unpopular, that Medicare for All was less desirable than Obamacare, and that a leftward shift would sink the party. Moore whimpered that if the election was held today, Trump would win, just as he had predicted in 2016. But where was Moore in 2016? Pleading on Democracy Now for Sanders supporters to go to the polls for Clinton, even though “she is to the right of Obama.”

The exchange between the two millionaire entertainers was a disturbing window on the utter alienation of the Democratic Party, insulated by layers of money, from its constituents — and increasingly ex-constituents, as nearly 40 percent of Americans disavow both parties. Maher represents the McCarthyite neoliberal centrism that has taken the mainstream media by storm, in which any flicker of anti-war or pro-working class sentiment is viewed as Russian. And Moore represents the thought-leaders who, despite knowing better, have led the party into its current moral sinkhole, insisting it’s the only pragmatic route.

Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 18, 2019

Moore knows Clinton is — as Gabbard declared — the Queen of Warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long. He just doesn’t care as long as he gets paid. Moore, like Clinton, took money from casting couch predator Harvey Weinstein despite his predation being an ‘open secret’ in the industry. As late as 2015, he called the molesting mogul “one of the best people to work with in this town” in a tweet he quickly deleted after it was dug up in October 2017 following Moore’s belated decision to speak out against Weinstein’s crimes. Even after the New York Times story in which several actresses first went public with their accusations was published, it took Moore weeks to climb aboard the dump-Weinstein bandwagon, likely out of concern it would hurt his film — Fahrenheit 11/9 — about the Trump presidency. The bottom line — not morality, or even being factually correct — is his chief concern.

In that respect, Moore is the Democratic Party writ large. Caught in a vicious cycle of selling out to wealthy donors to keep the lights on, it has sealed itself off to the working class, the minorities whose voice it still claims a monopoly on, and the young people just now awakening to the fact that they’ve been cheated out of a future. There has been barely any pushback against the DNC’s relentless trudge to the right from the mainstream media and the party establishment. Van Jones appeared on CNN calling out Clinton’s red-baiting of Gabbard, pointing out the smear contained “no facts” and that Gabbard had been the party chairman before she was demonized for backing Sanders in 2016, but the rest of the #Resistance remained silent as Clinton insisted that opposition to war was anti-American. Even the few candidates who defended Gabbard from her slurs did not mention Clinton in their rebuttals. No one dares to oppose the party’s owners.

Until someone does, the Democratic Party is dead. And it’s all but turned Trump into the lesser evil.

Any pretence of a sane or just democracy left?

Our increasingly Orwellian world keeps devolving closer to Collins' depiction in the Hunger Games.


Craig Murray on Julian Assange. via Edward Curtin. Oct. 23, 2019.

I rarely post other people’s articles here, but this one should be read by every person with an ounce of conscience left.  There is no doubt that the U.S. and U.K. governments, monsters of cruelty and injustice, are torturing and trying to kill Julian Assange for exposing their evil actions all around the world. Please read this and join in defense of a most courageous and suffering man of truth.


Assange in Court. Craig Murray. Oct. 22, 2019.

I was deeply shaken while witnessing yesterday’s events in Westminster Magistrates Court. Every decision was railroaded through over the scarcely heard arguments and objections of Assange’s legal team, by a magistrate who barely pretended to be listening.

Before I get on to the blatant lack of fair process, the first thing I must note was Julian’s condition. I was badly shocked by just how much weight my friend has lost, by the speed his hair has receded and by the appearance of premature and vastly accelerated ageing. He has a pronounced limp I have never seen before. Since his arrest he has lost over 15 kg in weight.

But his physical appearance was not as shocking as his mental deterioration. When asked to give his name and date of birth, he struggled visibly over several seconds to recall both. I will come to the important content of his statement at the end of proceedings in due course, but his difficulty in making it was very evident; it was a real struggle for him to articulate the words and focus his train of thought.

Until yesterday I had always been quietly sceptical of those who claimed that Julian’s treatment amounted to torture – even of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture – and sceptical of those who suggested he may be subject to debilitating drug treatments. But having attended the trials in Uzbekistan of several victims of extreme torture, and having worked with survivors from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, I can tell you that yesterday changed my mind entirely and Julian exhibited exactly the symptoms of a torture victim brought blinking into the light, particularly in terms of disorientation, confusion, and the real struggle to assert free will through the fog of learned helplessness.

I had been even more sceptical of those who claimed, as a senior member of his legal team did to me on Sunday night, that they were worried that Julian might not live to the end of the extradition process. I now find myself not only believing it, but haunted by the thought. Everybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable. Yet the agents of the state, particularly the callous magistrate Vanessa Baraitser, were not just prepared but eager to be a part of this bloodsport. She actually told him that if he were incapable of following proceedings, then his lawyers could explain what had happened to him later. The question of why a man who, by the very charges against him, was acknowledged to be highly intelligent and competent, had been reduced by the state to somebody incapable of following court proceedings, gave her not a millisecond of concern.

The charge against Julian is very specific; conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War logs, the Afghanistan war logs and the State Department cables. The charges are nothing to do with Sweden, nothing to do with sex, and nothing to do with the 2016 US election; a simple clarification the mainstream media appears incapable of understanding.

The purpose of yesterday’s hearing was case management; to determine the timetable for the extradition proceedings. The key points at issue were that Julian’s defence was requesting more time to prepare their evidence; and arguing that political offences were specifically excluded from the extradition treaty. There should, they argued, therefore be a preliminary hearing to determine whether the extradition treaty applied at all.

The reasons given by Assange’s defence team for more time to prepare were both compelling and startling. They had very limited access to their client in jail and had not been permitted to hand him any documents about the case until one week ago. He had also only just been given limited computer access, and all his relevant records and materials had been seized from the Ecuadorean Embassy by the US Government; he had no access to his own materials for the purpose of preparing his defence.

Furthermore, the defence argued, they were in touch with the Spanish courts about a very important and relevant legal case in Madrid which would provide vital evidence. It showed that the CIA had been directly ordering spying on Julian in the Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide security there. Crucially this included spying on privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers discussing his defence against these extradition proceedings, which had been in train in the USA since 2010. In any normal process, that fact would in itself be sufficient to have the extradition proceedings dismissed. Incidentally I learnt on Sunday that the Spanish material produced in court, which had been commissioned by the CIA, specifically includes high resolution video coverage of Julian and I discussing various matters.

The evidence to the Spanish court also included a CIA plot to kidnap Assange, which went to the US authorities’ attitude to lawfulness in his case and the treatment he might expect in the United States. Julian’s team explained that the Spanish legal process was happening now and the evidence from it would be extremely important, but it might not be finished and thus the evidence not fully validated and available in time for the current proposed timetable for the Assange extradition hearings.

For the prosecution, James Lewis QC stated that the government strongly opposed any delay being given for the defence to prepare, and strongly opposed any separate consideration of the question of whether the charge was a political offence excluded by the extradition treaty. Baraitser took her cue from Lewis and stated categorically that the date for the extradition hearing, 25 February, could not be changed. She was open to changes in dates for submission of evidence and responses before this, and called a ten minute recess for the prosecution and defence to agree these steps.

What happened next was very instructive. There were five representatives of the US government present (initially three, and two more arrived in the course of the hearing), seated at desks behind the lawyers in court. The prosecution lawyers immediately went into huddle with the US representatives, then went outside the courtroom with them, to decide how to respond on the dates.

After the recess the defence team stated they could not, in their professional opinion, adequately prepare if the hearing date were kept to February, but within Baraitser’s instruction to do so they nevertheless outlined a proposed timetable on delivery of evidence. In responding to this, Lewis’ junior counsel scurried to the back of the court to consult the Americans again while Lewis actually told the judge he was “taking instructions from those behind”. It is important to note that as he said this, it was not the UK Attorney-General’s office who were being consulted but the US Embassy. Lewis received his American instructions and agreed that the defence might have two months to prepare their evidence (they had said they needed an absolute minimum of three) but the February hearing date may not be moved. Baraitser gave a ruling agreeing everything Lewis had said.

At this stage it was unclear why we were sitting through this farce. The US government was dictating its instructions to Lewis, who was relaying those instructions to Baraitser, who was ruling them as her legal decision. The charade might as well have been cut and the US government simply sat on the bench to control the whole process. Nobody could sit there and believe they were in any part of a genuine legal process or that Baraitser was giving a moment’s consideration to the arguments of the defence. Her facial expressions on the few occasions she looked at the defence ranged from contempt through boredom to sarcasm. When she looked at Lewis she was attentive, open and warm.

The extradition is plainly being rushed through in accordance with a Washington dictated timetable. Apart from a desire to pre-empt the Spanish court providing evidence on CIA activity in sabotaging the defence, what makes the February date so important to the USA? I would welcome any thoughts.

Baraitser dismissed the defence’s request for a separate prior hearing to consider whether the extradition treaty applied at all, without bothering to give any reason why (possibly she had not properly memorised what Lewis had been instructing her to agree with). Yet this is Article 4 of the UK/US Extradition Treaty 2007 in full:

On the face of it, what Assange is accused of is the very definition of a political offence – if this is not, then what is? It is not covered by any of the exceptions from that listed. There is every reason to consider whether this charge is excluded by the extradition treaty, and to do so before the long and very costly process of considering all the evidence should the treaty apply. But Baraitser simply dismissed the argument out of hand.

Just in case anybody was left in any doubt as to what was happening here, Lewis then stood up and suggested that the defence should not be allowed to waste the court’s time with a lot of arguments. All arguments for the substantive hearing should be given in writing in advance and a “guillotine should be applied” (his exact words) to arguments and witnesses in court, perhaps of five hours for the defence. The defence had suggested they would need more than the scheduled five days to present their case. Lewis countered that the entire hearing should be over in two days. Baraitser said this was not procedurally the correct moment to agree this but she will consider it once she had received the evidence bundles.

(SPOILER: Baraitser is going to do as Lewis instructs and cut the substantive hearing short).

Baraitser then capped it all by saying the February hearing will be held, not at the comparatively open and accessible Westminster Magistrates Court where we were, but at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, the grim high security facility used for preliminary legal processing of terrorists, attached to the maximum security prison where Assange is being held. There are only six seats for the public in even the largest court at Belmarsh, and the object is plainly to evade public scrutiny and make sure that Baraitser is not exposed in public again to a genuine account of her proceedings, like this one you are reading. I will probably be unable to get in to the substantive hearing at Belmarsh.

Plainly the authorities were disconcerted by the hundreds of good people who had turned up to support Julian. They hope that far fewer will get to the much less accessible Belmarsh. I am fairly certain (and recall I had a long career as a diplomat) that the two extra American government officials who arrived halfway through proceedings were armed security personnel, brought in because of alarm at the number of protestors around a hearing in which were present senior US officials. The move to Belmarsh may be an American initiative.

Assange’s defence team objected strenuously to the move to Belmarsh, in particular on the grounds that there are no conference rooms available there to consult their client and they have very inadequate access to him in the jail. Baraitser dismissed their objection offhand and with a very definite smirk.

Finally, Baraitser turned to Julian and ordered him to stand, and asked him if he had understood the proceedings. He replied in the negative, said that he could not think, and gave every appearance of disorientation. Then he seemed to find an inner strength, drew himself up a little, and said:

I do not understand how this process is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t even access my writings. It is very difficult, where I am, to do anything. These people have unlimited resources.

The effort then seemed to become too much, his voice dropped and he became increasingly confused and incoherent. He spoke of whistleblowers and publishers being labeled enemies of the people, then spoke about his children’s DNA being stolen and of being spied on in his meetings with his psychologist. I am not suggesting at all that Julian was wrong about these points, but he could not properly frame nor articulate them. He was plainly not himself, very ill and it was just horribly painful to watch. Baraitser showed neither sympathy nor the least concern. She tartly observed that if he could not understand what had happened, his lawyers could explain it to him, and she swept out of court.

The whole experience was profoundly upsetting. It was very plain that there was no genuine process of legal consideration happening here. What we had was a naked demonstration of the power of the state, and a naked dictation of proceedings by the Americans. Julian was in a box behind bulletproof glass, and I and the thirty odd other members of the public who had squeezed in were in a different box behind more bulletproof glass. I do not know if he could see me or his other friends in the court, or if he was capable of recognising anybody. He gave no indication that he did.

In Belmarsh he is kept in complete isolation for 23 hours a day. He is permitted 45 minutes exercise. If he has to be moved, they clear the corridors before he walks down them and they lock all cell doors to ensure he has no contact with any other prisoner outside the short and strictly supervised exercise period. There is no possible justification for this inhuman regime, used on major terrorists, being imposed on a publisher who is a remand prisoner.

I have been both cataloguing and protesting for years the increasingly authoritarian powers of the UK state, but that the most gross abuse could be so open and undisguised is still a shock. The campaign of demonisation and dehumanisation against Julian, based on government and media lie after government and media lie, has led to a situation where he can be slowly killed in public sight, and arraigned on a charge of publishing the truth about government wrongdoing, while receiving no assistance from “liberal” society.

Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?



"He doesn’t fight the law, he fights the lawless posing as the law". Ilargi, automatic earth.


Useful quick review of history behind Assanges totally unlawful persecution

E-Day

The End of Trudeaumania. Luke Savage, Jacobin. Oct. 21, 2019.

Justin Trudeau may be decisively rejected in today’s Canadian election. The race has been shaken up by a surge in support for Jagmeet Singh and his social-democratic NDP, whose left-wing program is what many Canadians thought they were getting when they voted for Trudeau four years ago.

In 2015, the Liberals gained millions of votes on the basis of Trudeau’s personal popularity and a platform many mistakenly believed was a blueprint for transformative change. Predictably enough, Trudeau soon frustrated these hopes with a run of broken promises and a refusal to implement many parts of the ultimately modest agenda he had once campaigned on.

...

As the Liberals governed from the technocratic center, the Trudeau brand carried on as usual, creating an ever-widening disjuncture between the government’s meticulously crafted political artifice and reality. When it emerged several weeks ago that the same prime minister who had built a cloying international image as the standard-bearer for inclusive liberalism had done blackface more times than he could count, the symbolism could hardly be missed.

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In essence, the NDP’s pitch is a more tangible and cogent version of what many voters — particularly the young — mistakenly believed they were going to get with Trudeau in 2015. 

What Canada Can Teach Us About Liberals Everywhere. Luke Savage, Current Affairs. Oct. 16, 2019.

What all this means is that Canadian federal governments have comparatively few obstacles to passing transformative legislation, if indeed it’s their intention. Except in extreme cases, a prime minister with a majority in the House probably won’t face a backbench rebellion and isn’t going to run afoul of big donor money in the event they push legislation private interests dislike. Public opinion, of course, might be an obstacle: Governments aren’t generally prone to pursuing policies that are wildly unpopular. But majority public opinion in Canada appears predisposed to supporting big new social programs and higher taxes on the rich (recent polling, for example, has found that more than two-thirds of Canadians support a wealth tax and a big majority support the creation of a national universal prescription drug program).

For even more evidence of this, we need to look no further than Justin Trudeau’s own campaign messaging in 2015—which gestured, rhetorically at least, towards an activist and equality-minded style of governance. In office, however, Trudeau has largely governed from the neoliberal center: paying lip service to the problems and injustices facing Canadian society while doing little if anything to meaningfully alleviate them and, in some cases, actively moving things in the opposite direction. Unlike its predecessor, his administration has been willing to acknowledge the threat of climate change, but nonetheless remains fiercely committed to the construction of new oil pipelines. For the first time in Canadian history, it has tabled a poverty reduction strategy, a document which in practice amounts to nothing more than a series of new metrics for measuring poverty and includes no resources for actually reducing it. In a cynical sleight of hand, its signature tax hike on the rich was neatly paired with a tax cut for the slightly less rich. Having promised to reform Canada’s archaic electoral system, it reversed course midstream and denounced the very efforts it had sworn to take up as risky and dangerous.

Despite four years of a Liberal government in office preaching the rhetoric of progressive reform, little about Canadian society has fundamentally changed and there’s every reason to believe things will stay that way if the government is re-elected with another majority. And yet, members of the Canadian left can probably expect all the familiar sermons to be repeated when they inevitably protest. Despite the relative lack of obstacles they face compared to America’s Democrats, Canada’s liberals have long been masterfully dextrous when it comes to lecturing progressively-minded voters about the need for “pragmatism” and the necessity of never breaking too much with the status quo, even as they rhetorically acknowledge its injustices.

The Election and the Climate Crisis: A Tyee Reader. The Tyee. Oct. 16, 2019.