Oh darling, I am so sorry for you. Get out. Now. While you can. Don’t snub the Helicopter.

Ok. A person is in the middle of a flood zone and the Television says, ‘Evacuation Orders Issued’. God will provide. Cop comes and knocks on the door. God will provide. Fire Department drops by in a boat. God will provide. Well the water gets higher and they have to crawl up on the roof, Coast Guard sends a Helicopter. God will provide.

They drowned of course and at the Pearly Gates Peter said, “Down”. “But wait,” they protested, “Our faith was so great that when the TV talked and the Police, Fire Department, and Coast Guard came I told them all God would provide!”

“You’re a moron and a blasphemer,” said Peter, “God provided you with those things.”

The moral of course is don’t believe in God, he’s entirely fictional.

But my point is that carrying an Assault Weapon into a Walmart a week after someone did the same thing and killed 22 people just to ‘test your Second Amendment Rights’ not only makes you the dimmest bulb in the string, it makes you an asshole.

Armed man who sowed panic at Walmart claimed he was testing his Second Amendment rights, police say
By Hannah Knowles, Washington Post
August 10, 2019

His wife told him it was a bad idea. His sister reminded him of what had happened in El Paso less than a week earlier, when a gunman killed 22 people after opening fire at a shopping center and Walmart.

But Dmitriy Andreychenko went ahead with his plan for a “social experiment,” according to police. The 20-year-old used a cellphone Thursday to film himself entering a Walmart in Springfield, Mo., wearing body armor and carrying a loaded military-style rifle. He said he wanted to test whether his Second Amendment rights would be honored in a public area.
…
Andreychenko claimed he did not anticipate customers’ reactions, a Friday statement from a Springfield police officer says.

“This is Missouri,” he told investigators, according to law enforcement. “I understand if we were somewhere else like New York or California, people would freak out.”

Prosecutors on Friday charged Andreychenko, of Springfield, with making a terrorist threat, saying he recklessly disregarded the risk of causing a building evacuation by knowingly sowing fear in the wake of the El Paso mass shooting at the same retail chain.

Missouri is an open-carry state. In 2014, state law allowed anyone with a concealed-carry weapon permit to carry a weapon in the open, statewide, overriding local regulations. In 2017, Missouri became a “shall issue” state for concealed weapons, allowing anyone 19 or older to carry a concealed weapon or one in the open without a permit.

“Missouri protects the right of people to open carry a firearm, but that does not allow an individual to act in a reckless and criminal manner endangering other citizens,” Greene County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Patterson said in a statement, likening Andreychenko’s actions to raising a false fire alarm in a theater.

Andreychenko’s second-degree felony charge carries up to four years’ imprisonment and a fine of as much as $10,000. He is being held on $10,000 bond with the stipulation that he may not possess a firearm, according to the prosecutor.
…
Andreychenko — who typically keeps a gun and vest in his car, according to his wife — arrived at Walmart just after 4 p.m. Thursday despite his family’s warnings that his plan would provoke fear after the El Paso massacre, court documents say. The man used his cellphone to record himself entering the Walmart’s front entrance and then headed toward the building’s southeast corner, according to police. On his right hip was another weapon besides his AR-style rifle: a semiautomatic handgun loaded with one round in its chamber. Police say he had more than 100 rounds of ammunition.

He said he was recording in case somebody stopped him. He just wanted to shop, he said — and test Walmart’s support for the right to bear arms.

Although he said he did not anticipate the fearful response, Andreychenko knew about the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and even said he brought the rifle and body armor to protect himself after the deadly attacks, police said.

Walmart employees quickly raised alarms.

Watching the armed man move down the aisles with a shopping cart, a store manager told an employee to pull the fire alarm to get people out of the store, believing that Andreychenko would open fire. Andreychenko said he, too, left the store at that point, police said. Surveillance footage captures shoppers fleeing.

Officers took the man into custody “without incident” after a store patron — identified by the Associated Press as an off-duty firefighter — held Andreychenko at gunpoint outside the building, according to authorities.

While Andreychenko did not fire at anyone, according to police, a Battlefield City officer and another driver “suffered severe injuries” in a crash as the officer rushed to the scene with emergency lights and sirens. Both people were taken to the emergency room.

The debate over where guns are allowed to be carried is long and complex. Missouri is one of about 30 states that allow people to carry an openly held or concealed firearm without a permit, the Associated Press reported. There have been numerous incidents where advocates of the Second Amendment have displayed weapons in the open. But such efforts have rarely triggered the level of panic seen in Springfield.

Walmart said in a statement that Andreychenko is no longer welcome in the chain’s stores and that it is working with authorities.

Banned from Walmart?! Great Moments in White Trash History.

My Type – Saint Motel

Frontier Psychiatrist – The Avalanches

No Face, No Name, No Number – Modern Talking

Jeffrey Epstein: Questions raised over disgraced financer’s death

Questions have been raised as to how US financier Jeffrey Epstein was able to apparently commit suicide in his prison cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

His body was discovered early on Saturday at a facility in New York.

Last month Epstein was found semi-conscious in his cell after an apparent suicide attempt.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for a full investigation, calling it “way too convenient”.

“What a lot of us want to know is, what did he know?” said Mr de Blasio, who is also running for the Democratic presidential nomination, told reporters in Iowa.

“How many other millionaires and billionaires were part of the illegal activities that he was engaged in?

Protests, clashes and lack of trust: the new normal for Hong Kong

Eighties movies tend to feel sillier with the passing of time. But that tell-tale aura of retrospective cheesiness is absent from John Milius’s 1984 blood and soil epic Red Dawn. 

Milius’s extended shoot-out, in which tall-haired teenagers from the heartland resist a Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan invasion, feels unsettlingly contemporary. It unfolds like a wham-bam fever dream stitched from random fragments of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration speech. Behold American Carnage: the Motion Picture. 

The Syrian PatientAssad Henchman Treated Abroad Despite Arrest Warrant

Jamil Hassan is one of the Assad regime’s most brutal henchmen. But despite an international warrant for his arrest, he was able to travel to Beirut for treatment of his ailing heart. Why wasn’t he taken into custody?

By Christoph Reuter and Fidelius Schmid

Once, it looked as though an attempt, at least, would be made to bring to justice one of Syria’s most important commanders, a man suspected of committing tens of thousands of murders against his own people. In June 2018, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice issued an arrest warrant for Jamil Hassan, the head of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence.

The word “intelligence” is perhaps misleading when it comes to what Hassan’s agency actually does. In its prisons, agents torture, rape, starve and murder prisoners. In November, France also issued an arrest warrant against Hassan.

A hermit nation ruled by an egomaniac: Is Turkmenistan on the brink of collapse?

By Julie Zaugg, CNN

Updated 0417 GMT (1217 HKT) August 11, 2019

CRIMINALIZING COMPASSION

The Unraveling of the Conspiracy Case Against No More Deaths Volunteer Scott Warren

Ryan Devereaux

THE FEDERAL COURTHOUSE in Tucson, Arizona, has always been a place where the borderlands and the American justice system collide. Described by its engineers as “a gateway to the desert and the mountains beyond,” it was completed in 2000, the year that the Pima County medical examiner’s office began tracking an explosion of deaths in that same desert.

Each afternoon, Monday through Thursday, dozens of chained migrants who survived the journey across the border but found themselves in Border Patrol custody are marched up from the building’s bowels for mass hearings. They come in groups of up to 70 at a time. You hear the chains before you see the people — men and women still wearing the clothes they crossed in. Appearing before a judge in clusters, they confess to entering without inspection, receive their sentences, and leave. Cases are adjudicated in minutes.

Fossil Fuels, even the cheapest like Coal and certainly including things like Tar Sands which are incredibly expensive, are simply no longer competitive with renewables. Driving in New Hampshire recently (live free or die) I saw hilltops full of brand new and extremely ugly GE Wind Turbine Generators which tells me at least one thing-

Granite State Electric got ripped off, in addition to being ugly they are among the most expensive to buy and operate.

But still, live free or die! This is a State that explicitly rejects Motorcycle Helmet Laws and Safety Belt Enforcement. At the corner store the cheesy portable lit sign with the replaceable letters now says- ‘Thank You Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio for Visiting NH’.

Only they didn’t use ‘Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio’.

Point being that it’s not exactly a beacon of blue but despite ‘political correctness’ they are notoriously cheap. Cheap wins.

One of the world’s largest banks thinks the writing is on the wall for the oil industry
Joe Romm, Think Progress
Aug 9, 2019

Plunging prices for batteries and renewables are driving an electric vehicle (EV) revolution so rapidly that the economics of oil “are now in relentless and irreversible decline.”

That’s the startling conclusion of a detailed new analysis for “professional investors” of the economics of EVs versus gasoline cars produced by BNP Paribas, the world’s eighth largest bank by total assets.
…
But the bank’s analysis, “Wells, Wires and Wheels,” is devastating for Big Oil. It concludes that “the oil industry has never before in its history faced the kind of threat that renewable electricity in tandem with EVs poses to its business model.”

Within a few years, electric vehicles (EVs) will be superior to gasoline powered cars in every respect. In part, that’s because electric motors are vastly more efficient than gasoline engines. And it’s also in part because solar and wind power and batteries have seen staggering price drops in the past decade — and are projected to see equally big drops in the coming years.

But one of the most startling findings is that because the cost of running EVs on solar or wind power is dropping so rapidly, the only way gasoline cars can compete with these renewable energy-powered EVs in the 2020s is if the price of oil were to drop to $11 to $12 per barrel. The current price of oil is over $50.

Even worse for oil, this economic analysis doesn’t even factor in many of the other benefits of running cars on renewable power rather than oil. These include the vast public health benefits of not breathing air pollution from burning oil, along with the benefits of not having huge oil spills and of not destroying a livable climate.

The report is written by Mark Lewis, global head of sustainability research at the bank. Lewis formerly worked as head of European utilities research at Barclays and as global head of energy research at Deutsche Bank.

Lewis notes that many independent analyses — including Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the risk management firm DNV GL — have concluded that in the 2022-2024 timeframe, the total lifecycle cost of owning an EV will be cheaper than that of owning a gasoline-fueled car.

The report also looks at the lifecycle costs of oil (drilling, production, and transportation) versus the life-cycle cost of renewable power plants (building and operating).

“We think the economics of renewables are impossible for oil to compete with when looked at over the cycle,” the study concludes.
…
Since BNP Paribas is a big bank and the report is for investors, though, a key point of the analysis is that oil companies are investing staggering amounts of money in finding and producing new wells — and most of them are going to lose a lot of that money.

“By the late 2020s” Lewis explains, a significant fraction of the oil produced today “might only be competitive at a price below [oil companies’] full cost of production.” Even worse, this fraction “will rise over the lifetime of these projects as the penetration rate of EVs increases.”

If you can’t produce oil profitably at under $10 or $20 a barrel, your oil company is in big trouble.

From a broader perspective, Lewis warns that all this money currently being spent on finding and producing new oil is a huge waste — “an opportunity cost to society as a whole.”

Exactly how big a cost? BNP Paribas calculates “the size of that opportunity cost is $24 trillion over the next 25 years on gasoline alone.” And that’s without counting the cost of saving a livable climate.

It’s time for investors and governments to walk away from Big Oil before the crash — and before it’s simply too late to save our children and future generations from catastrophe.

Feel Good – Gryffin & Illenium featuring Daya

Shelter – Porter Robinson & Madeon

Do It All The Time – I Don’t Know How But They Found Me

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. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) 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.

‘Son of Sam’ killer David Berkowitz caught near New York City; Leno and Rosemary LaBianca murdered by Charles Manson’s cult; FDR stricken with polio; The Smithsonian Institution established.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

Jerry Garcia

Continue reading

North Korea tests ‘short-range ballistic missiles’

North Korea has fired two missiles into the sea, its fifth such launch in recent weeks.

The missiles are thought to be short-range ballistic missiles, South Korea’s military says.

If confirmed, such a test would be a breach of 11 UN security Council resolutions.

The launches come after US President Donald Trump said he had received a “very beautiful letter” from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Mr Trump said Mr Kim was unhappy with the current US-South Korea joint military exercises.

‘P is for protest’: Hong Kong families take to the streets in pro-democracy rally

Event billed as rally to ‘guard our children’s future’ given permit by authorities, unlike others planned for weekend

You might have missed it.

Yesterday, on CNN and later on MSNBC, Chairman Jerome Nadler confirmed that the House Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the Mueller Report were a formal Impeachment Inquiry, something that had been asserted in previous Court filings but sort of publicly disbelieved as a mere ploy for a favorable ruling.

Not so said Nadler, this is the real deal.

The impeachment inquiry Trump feared is already here
By Amber Phillips, Washington Post
August 9, 2019

His statement makes clear what a lawsuit filed Wednesday by his committee states: that the “Judiciary Committee is now determining whether to recommend articles of impeachment against the President based on the obstructive conduct described by the Special Counsel.”

In fact, Democrats may have already begun an impeachment inquiry without most people noticing and without the fanfare (and potential political backlash) of a big announcement that it’s happening. In a court filing in late July to get the full, unredacted Mueller report, the Judiciary Committee argued that it needed the information because it “is conducting an investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment.” Since then, Democrats’ language has only become stronger in court filings, culminating with Nadler’s statement that impeachment proceedings have begun.

What that means: Democrats are taking the first step in this process. They have launched an impeachment inquiry to investigate what, if any, “high crimes and misdemeanors” Trump may have committed. If the investigation concludes that he has, the committee will draw up articles of impeachment and the Judiciary Committee and then the full House vote on it.

This is happening at the start of Congress’s August Recess (which is going to stretch until Sept. 9). So between now and then, any action will happen only in the courts. Once Congress is back, they can hold hearings highlighting the Mueller report, but their key witness and key documents could still be tied up in a legal battle.
…
Impeachment proceedings are the most intense, and dramatic, kind of congressional investigation.

Consider: Democrats are already investigating issues including whether Trump obstructed justice in the special counsel investigation, whether he had a role in illegal hush-money payments during the campaign, whether his business had money laundering ties to Russia, and much more. Trump has resisted handing over information in 20 investigations, leading to legal battles.

Most recently, House Democrats are suing Trump’s administration to try to get his tax returns and suing to get Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald McGahn, to testify about key moments in the Mueller report. (That’s the lawsuit they filed Wednesday where they said McGahn’s testimony is key for considering impeachment.) All that is in addition going to court to get the unredacted Mueller report.

Many of these investigations could get wrapped up into an impeachment investigation. And because that investigation carries the weighty “i” word, it guarantees news coverage and eyeballs on all future hearings Democrats have in this committee.

A catalyst for embracing the impeachment term seems to have been former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s III testimony in July to two House committees, where he laid out what his report found: that Trump’s campaign welcomed Russia’s help and Trump may have obstructed justice.

“We all looked up after Robert S. Mueller III’s testimony and realized that we are in an impeachment inquiry,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.

“In every meaningful way, our investigation is an impeachment inquiry,” Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, wrote in an op-ed in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, right as a majority of House Democrats said they supported taking the first step toward impeachment.

Arguing in under-the-radar court filings that the committee is beginning an impeachment inquiry is one thing. It could be a legal strategy that doesn’t carry much political weight. The “i” word strengthens Democrats’ case to get grand jury information underlying the Mueller report, or to force McGahn to testify, since Congress can argue it, too, is a judiciary body conducting a court proceeding, and it needs evidence to do that.

But having the chairman of the committee key to impeachment openly, and clearly, stating that an impeachment inquiry has started escalates things. The impeachment inquiry that Trump has feared is here.

I don’t understand this desire for concealment by Democrats. Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is a felon and a traitor. Is Impeachment now reserved only for consensual Blow Jobs? Even there the man is a self documented serial sexual abuser who associates with Porn Stars (not that there’s anything wrong with Sex Work) and Pedophiles.

Impeach.

Now.