Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.
Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Breakfast News
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Obama Sends Troops Back to Iraq as ISIS Insurgency Worsens
The Obama adminstration has ordered the urgent deployment of several hundred armed troops in and around Iraq, after the rampant insurgency in the country forced the first talks between the US and Iran over a common security interest in more than a decade.
Barack Obama discussed the crisis with national security team on Monday night after earlier notifying Congress that up to 275 troops could be sent to Iraq to provide support and security for personnel and the US embassy in Baghdad.
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Bush, NeoCon and Pro-War Liberal Blunders That Produced the New Mess in Iraq
And so the inevitable is unfolding: a possible collapse of the U.S.-imposed Iraqi state, the apparent triumph of the most brutal extremists in the world, and more to come in Syria, Afghanistan, and possibly Jordan, Mali, Libya, and who knows where else. The first step to recovery — if recovery is even feasible — is an honest reckoning of why this is happening.
The discourse in Washington, as always, will be superficial, partisan, and knowledge-free. The blaming of Obama for leaving Iraq in 2011 will be the Fox News mantra of coming days and weeks (and, judging from the Benghazi flap, for years). Even theNew York Times on Wednesday morning — reporting that the forces of the extremists, the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, or ISIS, had overrun Mosul and were headed toward Baghdad — mentioned that this was another blow to the White House’s faltering foreign policy. But while Obama has his share of missteps, the responsibility for this catastrophe rests with the neocons of the George W. Bush years and the liberal hawks who can’t help but propose war when they see a wrong that needs righting.
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A US Citizen Tortured Abroad by the FBI? — 5 Cases of Extreme US Govt. Inhumanity in the Obama Era
President Obama’s 2009 promise to ban abusive interrogations has fallen far short, with torture by proxy forces a frequent tool wielded in the never-ending “war on terror.” The Obama administration has also continued efforts to make sure nobody is held accountable for torture.
The latest reminder of the administration’s policies on interrogation abuse came last week, when a federal court accepted the Obama Justice Department’s arguments that a case against the Federal Bureau of Investigation should be dismissed. The U.S. District Court first heard the case of Amir Meshal, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen who says he was abused by FBI agents working in African countries, in 2009.
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Pentagon Preparing for Mass Civil Unrest
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model “of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions.” The project will determine the “critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagions by studying their “digital traces” in the cases of “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey.”
Twitter posts and conversations will be examined “to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised.”
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A Superbug Resistant to ‘Last-Resort’ Antibiotics Has Made Its Way into the Food Supply
A dangerous “superbug” has made its way into the North American food supply for the first time, Canadian researchers announced Wednesday. Routine testing of raw squid, imported from South Korea, revealed a strain of bacteria resistant to carbapenems, a class of antibiotics used to treat life-threatening infections.
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Must Read Blog Posts
How Inequality Shapes the American Family
by Lynn Stuart Parramore
Pluto’s big comeback: Why it could be reclassified as a planet
by Ken Croswell
Hellraisers Journal: Military Forbids Distribution of Aid to Wives and Children of Deported Miners
by JayRaye
Gender Prison: Anti-transgender violence
by rserven
Why the Japanese live so long
by Geoffrey Cain
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The Daily Wiki
El Niño (/ɛlˈniːnjoʊ/, /-ˈnɪn-/, Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈniɲo]) is a band of warm ocean water temperatures that periodically develops off the Pacific coast of South America.
There is a phase of ‘El Niño- Southern Oscillation’ (ENSO), which refers to variations in the temperature of the surface of the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean and in air surface pressure in the tropical western Pacific. The two variations are coupled: the warm oceanic phase, El Niño, accompanies high air surface pressure in the western Pacific, while the cold phase, La Niña, accompanies low air surface pressure in the western Pacific.[2][3] Mechanisms that cause the oscillation remain under study.
Developing countries dependent upon agriculture and fishing, particularly those bordering the Pacific Ocean, are the most affected. El niño is Spanish for “the boy”, and the capitalized term El Niño refers to the Christ child, Jesus, because periodic warming in the Pacific near South America is usually noticed around Christmas.[4]
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Breakfast Tunes
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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee
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