Veteran socialist and popular filmmaker Ken Loach was expelled from the Labour Party as part of the ongoing purge of leftists and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn within the party
Ken Loach. (Photo: via Facebook)
Leftist and progressive sections across the UK expressed shock and outrage at the expulsion of veteran socialist and filmmaker Ken Loach from the Labour Party. On Saturday, August 14, Loach tweeted about his expulsion from the party. Left-wing sections denounced the Labour leadership’s decision to expel socialists like Loach. Thousands, including MP Jeremy Corbyn, extended support and solidarity to Loach.
In the US it sometimes seems the fossil fuel corporations and far right nationalists OWN the state. It’s no secret that climate-lethal US methane emissions have been hidden for generations, only now its admitted in the official media. Finally under Obama a regulation law came in, but it was just VOLUNTARY monitoring.
And Trump reverted to pampering the Oil and Gas Cowboys by blocking even that and ignoring all types of methane leaks, including from over a million abandoned fracking wells, the Bakken Frack Rush, the maze of new pipelines, the Great Plastics Bubble and the giant LNG export plants, etcetera!
Methane emissions from oil and gas are ‘even worse than previously thought’ admits CBS News at last
Posted on AUG 18, 2021 / 8:30 AM / MONEYWATCH b y BY IRINA IVANOVA
“Recent research indicates that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for far more methane than previously believed”. CBS NEWS MoneyWatch
Not surprising. When Harvard studies exposed the great methane crime and huge clouds of methane were observed 10 years ago from satellites over the Fracking Fields it was claimed without evidence to be natural and ignored.
“Now experts say slashing methane emissions is essential to staving off the worst effects of global warming, with the United Nations calling it “the strongest lever we have to slow climate change.”
*****
Report: Oil companies are burning off natural gas — and leaving regulators in the dark Billions of cubic feet of natural gas are burned off in U.S. oil and gas fields every year, wasting the fossil fuel and emitting greenhouse gases without actually generating energy. In Texas alone, state regulators have permitted companies to burn more than a million cubic feet of gas every day since 2019. Combined, that would be enough natural gas to supply 15 million homes’ annual gas needs.
*****
Fossil fuel companies choose to burn natural gas instead of capturing and selling it for a variety of safety and economic reasons. Most commonly, oil fields have a gas glut and insufficient pipeline capacity to move it to refineries and markets. The solution to the logjam is to burn excess natural gas — which is primarily composed of methane, a potent planet-warming pollutant — with the permission of state regulators.
The Texas Railroad Commission, or RRC, is the state agency tasked with regulating the oil and gas industry and overseeing companies’ flaring practices. When fossil fuel companies want to flare, they’re required to request a permit from the agency. But a new analysis by Earthworks, an environmental nonprofit, has found compelling evidence that they often don’t bother to. In fact, more than two-thirds of the 227 flares observed during three months in 2020 were not permitted by the state, according to the group, potentially leaving the RRC in the dark.
Yet a new analysis of satellite data shows that fossil fuel companies — which contribute up to half of human-caused methane emissions around the globe — are falling far short of their pledges to eliminate the environmentally destructive hydrocarbon”.
Venting methane to increase quick fracking profits is considered patriotic in West Texas
“I’m fine,” the pale, red-haired Jessica Chastain says as she takes off her full black jumpsuit and face mask. The scene is from Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which despite the seeming banality of the dialogue, says a lot about a new flavor of feminism that has evolved in the white and Western world since 9/11 and the War on Terror.
In the film, Chastain plays a CIA “targeter” named Maya who is physically delicate but tough as nails in every other way, which in this particular conversation also means that she is up for torture. In fact, that is what she and her male CIA colleague have been doing inside a makeshift bunker that also serves as a torture chamber. “Let’s go back in there,” she tells the men after they have rested a minute from the hard toils of inflicting extreme pain on other human beings.
Here, then, is gender equality at its most perverse, a white woman trying her best to show a white man that she has as much of an appetite for cruelty as he does. And the laconic white men appear to approve. “She’s a killer,” her boss says in her wake as she disappears down a hallway. If this had been an entirely fictional film, all of it could have been discarded as the morbid fantasy of some Hollywood director.
As it happens, Maya is based on a very real CIA sleuth, whose identity the agency has never released but to whose gritty greatness many have made pointed allusions. Maya (along with others, also mostly women, CIA sources have said) was responsible for the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
The film Zero Dark Thirty may be a souped-up, cinematically slick, and action-packed retelling of what the real Maya managed to do, but it is based on fact. For her now-feted heroism, the real Maya won the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, an honor about which she was happy to boast to all her CIA colleagues through a mass email.
I watched Zero Dark Thirty in a nearly full movie theater in Indiana. Jessica Chastain’s Maya may have been “fine” in makeshift torture bunkers, but I definitely was not. Beyond the movie theater, the shopping mall was all aglow with holiday decorations and around me, my fellow moviegoers seemed snug in the cozy darkness of the theater and smug in this elevation of white women as the ultimate weapon in crushing Brown terrorists.
Only a little more than a kilometer and seven days separate these photos. The first two were taken in evictions that, despite the mobilization of PAH Vallekas (pah-vallekas.org), could not be stopped. The first, left Manuela, her partner and her kids on the street…
Four children. Recipients of the “Minimum Vital Income”, who had occupied an apartment owned by Bankia – Caixabank that had been empty for seven years.
A week later, it was Cruz, along with her four grandchildren, who were evicted.
They lived by renting an apartment from the Global Tarasca vulture fund. They did not have their rental contract renewed.
In the first three months of this year, 847 eviction orders have been issued in the Community of Madrid, which is equivalent to almost 30 evictions a day.
This figure leaves out all the silent evictions, in which the inhabitants abandon their homes before being evicted.
This shows that the so-called “Social Shield” of the Government is only propaganda
We are dealing with a virus that around 99.7% of people will easily survive according to the medical establishment’s own studies and stats as well as numerous independent studies, yet, for some reason we are being bombarded with fear mongering from the media and from governments.
A total of 349,763 websites were banned in Turkey between 2016 and 2020, according to the 2020 annual report of the Freedom of Expression Association’s (İFÖD) EngelliWeb initiative.
According to a report by the Stockholm Center for Freedom, citing İFÖD’s findings, the number of websites that have been banned since 2006 has reached 467,011, with 58,809 website bans in 2020, a slight decrease over 2019.
In addition to websites, access bans were issued for 150,000 URLs (or Internet addresses), 7,500 Twitter accounts, 50,000 tweets, 12,000 YouTube videos and 8,000 Facebook and 6,800 Instagram posts since 2006.
The report is titled “Fahrenheit 5651,” in reference to Fahrenheit 451, the famous dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, and Law no. 5651 — aka the Internet Act — which authorizes various legal and administrative bodies to ban access to websites and request content removal under a variety of circumstances.
The Turkish government increased its pressure on social media platforms after the Gezi protests of May 2013, which began over government plans to build over Gezi Park, one of the few green spaces left in İstanbul. Twitter emerged as alternative media and a networking tool among protestors, while the mainstream media hesitated to broadcast the popular protests at the time.
Since then, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has listed social media as one of the main threats to national security, and the Turkish government has expanded its Internet restrictions to curb the availability of critical news and opinion and penalized users who committed so-called anti-state crimes in the online public sphere.
According to the report a total of 5,645 Internet addresses containing news stories were banned, and content was removed from 4,620 of them in 2020.
Citing data released by the Interior Ministry, the report said a total of 75,292 social media accounts were investigated in 2020 and that legal action was taken against 32,000 of them, marking a significant increase over 2019.
Number of social media accounts that were investigated (on the left) and number of accounts that were the subject of legal action
In July 2020 the Turkish parliament passed legislation at Erdoğan’s request, imposing far-reaching restrictions on social media platforms with over 1 million daily visitors in Turkey.
The law, which concerns YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, went into effect at the beginning of October and sets forth progressive sanctions forcing social media platforms with more than 1 million connections a day to appoint a representative in Turkey with whom the Turkish authorities can resolve problems arising from cases of insult, intimidation and violation of privacy.
The bill was criticized by human rights defenders and critics including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the UN, who expressed their concerns over the government’s move.
Only 500 years later. Words of the Zapatista Peoples.
August 13, 2021.
Sisters, brothers, hermanoas:
Compañeros, compañeras, compañeroas:
The Zapatista communities speak through our voices.
First, we would like to express our thanks.
Thank you for having invited us.
Thank you for having welcomed us.
Thank you for having housed us.
Thank you for having fed us.
Thank you for having taken care of us.
But above all, we’d like to express our gratitude for the fact that despite differences and obstacles you have all agreed to what we’re doing today. Perhaps it seems small to you, but for us Zapatista communities it is huge.
Zapatistas in Madrid: “500 years later, the communities come to listen to you”
“Tell us your story, your rage, your rebellion. We come to listen and learn from your story. In each resistance there is a cry for life. 500 years later, the communities come to listen to you,” was the message from Squadron 421, in the name of the Zapatista support bases of Chiapas, Mexico, in a large rally in the Plaza de Colón, from the capital of the Spanish State, within the framework of the 500 years of the conquest of Tenochtitlán, Aztec territory.
After a march from Puerta del Sol to Plaza Colón, the Zapatistas gave thanks that they have been received, housed, fed, cared for, and especially they added: “that despite their differences were able to agree,” to carry out the march and rally.
“We are Zapatistas, from a geography called Mexico. The government doesn’t recognize de that geography, to the state we are extemporaneous,” the EZLN’s support bases recalled, alluding to the way in which the Mexican government tends to catalog people who are not registered right after being born, but rather due to economic, social, geographic and bureaucratic issues do it after some time.
“But we have not come here to complain,” the Zapatistas clarified, and indicated that Squadron 401 precedes a larger group of Zapatistas (the Zapatista Airborne Company) that will separate into smaller groups and tour the European continent, also baptized by them as Slumil K´Ajxemk´Op. Members of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), the Indigenous Government Council (CIG) and representatives of the Peoples Front in Defense of Land and Water of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala will arrive, along with indigenous peoples.
“We don’t bring any recipe, visions or strategies, we come to listen to you. As Zapatistas we have a cause, a motive, a goal: Life,” the indigenous people who rose up in arms in 1994 expressed.
The message to the struggles that the Zapatistas described as diverse was not to stop, but to be more profound and radical, faced with something that prevents us from living; in other words, capitalism, they said.
——-Ω——-
Originally Published in Spanish by Pozol Colectivo
Ken Loach. (Photo: via Facebook)
The Free 
 EngelliWeb initiative.){kind=link}