CIA smears Sanders as ‘tool of Russia’

This 21 February 2020 video from the USA is called Mike Bloomberg Plotting to Steal Nomination from Bernie Sanders at Convention.

By Barry Grey in the USA:

Intelligence agencies intervene in US elections to link Sanders to Putin

22 February 2020

On the eve of Saturday’s Nevada Democratic caucuses, with polls predicting a major win for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the Washington Post reported Friday afternoon that “US officials” have told Sanders that the Russian government is working to aid his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

According to the Post, President Trump and members of Congress have also been informed of the alleged “Russian assistance” to Sanders.

The report has all the earmarks of a story planted by American intelligence agencies. It names no sources, does not identify the nature of the government officials who briefed Sanders, and provides no information about the content of the alleged support by Moscow for Sanders. No facts are presented to substantiate the vague claim of Russian government backing for the Sanders campaign.

In keeping with the standard practice of the so-called mainstream media, the Post uncritically presents this latest claim by US intelligence of “Russian meddling” in American politics as indisputable fact. …

These developments highlight the massive role that the unelected agencies of US subversion and provocation abroad play in US elections. Even if the claims of Russian intervention in US elections were true—and no evidence has ever been produced to substantiate them—such operations would pale in comparison to the role of the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies in manipulating elections and seeking covertly to affect their outcomes.

This is on top of the role of corporate donations and campaign bribes by billionaire oligarchs in installing their preferred candidates in power. …

The stepping up of the anti-Russia campaign and the attempt to turn it against Sanders coincides with a coordinated drive by the Democratic Party establishment and the corporate media to undermine the senator’s rise in the polls and prevent him from securing the Democratic presidential nomination at the party’s national convention in July.

This ruling class opposition to Sanders is not so much about Sanders himself … as about concerns over the growth of anti-capitalist and pro-socialist sentiment and the upsurge in the class struggle of which Sanders is the initial beneficiary. The financial oligarchy is incensed and frightened by Sanders’ calls for modest increases in its taxes, his talk of ending private health insurance and reining in the profits of the pharmaceutical giants, and his appeals to popular anger over the staggering levels of social inequality. …

This 21 February 2020 video from the USA says about itself:

Bernie Sanders dismantles Wall Street “crooks” at Santa Ana, California rally

Bernie Sanders slammed Wall Street billionaires and advocated for the middle class at a rally in Santa Ana, CA on Friday.

The Barry Grey article continues:

On Friday, the Financial Times published an interview with the recently retired CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, in which the billionaire life-long Democrat denounced Sanders, praised his billionaire rival Michael Bloomberg, and said that if Sanders got the Democratic nomination he would likely vote for Trump. In the interview, he praised the latter’s corporate tax cuts and lifting of regulations on business.

Goldman Sachs’ anti-Trump chairman says he may vote for Trump — for a nauseating reason: here.

Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” program, summed up the outlook of the financial oligarchy when he said that Wednesday’s Democratic candidates’ debate was “painful” because “your wealth was really under fire.” He joined Bloomberg in branding Sanders a “communist”, saying, “Is he really a socialist? Or is he a communist? What is socialist about what he wants? Isn’t he more of a communist?”

With the virtual collapse of the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden and Bloomberg’s poor performance at Wednesday’s debate, media pundits and Democratic officials are concluding that Sanders will come to the July party convention with a large lead in committed delegates, but will be short of the 1,991 needed to gain a majority and secure the nomination on the first ballot.

Backroom moves are being stepped up to channel delegates and donors currently backing so-called “moderates” such as Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg behind Bloomberg or the “progressive” Elizabeth Warren in order to block Sanders at the convention. The idea is to mobilize the nearly 800 elected officials, Democratic National Committee members and other party officials who constitute the “superdelegates”, who cannot vote on the first ballot, to vote on the second to install the commonly agreed upon alternative to Sanders.

This was prefigured at Wednesday’s debate when all of the candidates, with the exception of Sanders, said the candidate who gets the most votes in the primary contests should not necessarily be declared the party nominee at the convention. This anti-democratic position is being lauded in the media as the defense of established rules and procedures.

The day after Wednesday’s debate, Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader and longtime senator from Nevada, openly called for a brokered convention to deny Sanders the nomination. He said, “And you have most of the people who are not Bernie Sanders, are people who are moderates, and maybe they’ll work something out to get together and try to find that one person who can come up with the number of delegates. Maybe that’s one way to do it.” …

Politico reported that Bloomberg is privately lobbying party officials and donors allied with his “moderate” rivals to shift their allegiance to him and block Sanders at the convention. No doubt Bloomberg is using his unlimited cash hoard—his Federal Election Commission report filed this week said he has spent $464 million of his own money in the three months since he announced his bid for the White House—to induce party officials to come over to his side.

The CIA’s Complicity in Recent Global Atrocities Revealed: here.

This 22 February 2020 video from the USA is called Dick Van Dyke Endorses Bernie Sanders for President.

Bumblebees, more intelligent than thought

This 2016 video says about itself:

How to Train a Bumblebee: Scientists Study Insect Intelligence | National Geographic

Bumblebees can transmit learned skills to each other, a new study shows.

From Queen Mary University of London, England:

Bumblebees can experience an object using one sense and later recognize it using another

February 20, 2020

How are we able to find things in the dark? And how can we imagine how something feels just by looking at it?

It is because our brain is able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved by different senses. This multi-sensory integration allows us to form mental images of the world and underpins our conscious awareness.

It turns out that the ability to recognise objects across different senses is present in the tiny brains of an insect.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Macquarie University in Sydney have published new work in the journal Science showing that bumblebees can also find objects in the dark they’ve only seen before.

In the light, but barred from touching the objects, bumblebees were trained to find rewarding sugar water in one type of object (cubes or spheres) and bitter quinine solution in the other shape.

When tested in the dark, bees preferred the object that was previously rewarding, spending more time exploring them.

Bumblebees also solved the task the other way around. After bees learned to find a particular shape in the dark, they were tested in the light and again preferred the shape they had learned was rewarding by touch alone.

This ability is called cross-modal recognition and it allows us to perceive a complete picture of the world with rich representations.

Dr Cwyn Solvi is the lead author on the paper who was based at Queen Mary University of London and is now at Macquarie University in Sydney. She said: “The results of our study show that bumblebees don’t process their senses as separate channels — they come together as some sort of unified representation.”

Professor Lars Chittka, head of the lab at Queen Mary University of London in which the study was performed, said: “We’ve long known that bees can remember the shapes of flowers. But a smartphone can recognise your face, for example, and does so without any form of awareness. Our new work indicates that something is going on inside the mind of bees that is wholly different from a machine — that bees can conjure up mental images of shapes.”

Selene Gutierrez Al-Khudhairy, co-author on the paper, and now PhD student at the University of York, said: “This is an amazing feat when you consider the minuscule size of a bee’s brain. Future investigations of the neural circuitry underlying this ability in bees may one day help reveal how our own brains imagine the world as we do.”

Dr Solvi cautions: “This doesn’t mean bees experience the world the same way we do, but it does show there is more going on in their heads than we have ever given them credit for.”

Striking Canadian teachers interviewed

This 21 February 2020 video from Canada is called Construction worker supports striking Ontario teachers.

From the World Socialist Web Site in Canada:

Two hundred thousand Canadian teachers strike, as global worker counter-offensive continues

By a WSWS reporting team

22 February 2020

Two hundred thousand Ontario teachers and school support staff joined a one-day province-wide strike Friday.

The education workers are leading opposition to the sweeping austerity measures that are being implemented by Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government and its premier, the Trump admirer and multi-millionaire businessman Doug Ford.

As part of its drive to “make Ontario open for business”, the Ford government is cutting almost a billion dollars per year from education spending, dramatically increasing high school class-sizes, eliminating 10,000 teaching positions, and seeking to impose mandatory on-line courses.

Teachers and school support staff are also a primary target of the government’s mendaciously named “Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act.” Through this law, the government is imposing real wage and benefit cuts on more than a million public sector workers, by legally capping their wage and benefit increases to well below the inflation rate for each of the next three years. At the same time, it is funneling still more money to the rich through corporate and income tax cuts.

Since 2018, and as part of the resurgence of class struggle worldwide, a wave of teacher strikes has swept the globe. Teachers and college instructors have engaged in strike action in all six continents, from Chile and Argentine to the US, Britain, Holland, Iran and India. Teachers went on strike in Colombia’s major cities Thursday and Friday to demand improved wages, health care, and the government’s compliance with previous agreements.

If education workers find themselves in the forefront of the opposition to austerity, it is because capitalist governments view the dismantling of public education as a key element in their evisceration of all the social rights of the working class.

As one striking Toronto teacher told the World Socialist Web Site yesterday, “If you can privatize education, you can privatize anything.”

… In Santa Cruz, University of California graduate teaching assistants are currently mounting a wildcat strike in defiance of the no-strike clause in the contract negotiated by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

Yesterday’s walkout closed all of Ontario’s 5,000 publicly funded elementary and secondary schools, impacting two million students.

There is great militancy among the teachers and educational support workers and mass popular support for their stand in defence of public education.

This 21 February 2020 video from Ontario is called Parents show support for striking teachers.

More than 30,000 teachers and their supporters rallied yesterday outside Queen’s Park, the provincial legislature in downtown Toronto. An estimated 20,000 more held a mass picket along a kilometers-long stretch of highway in Toronto’s sprawling Peel County suburbs, and 10,000 rallied in Kitchener-Waterloo, a regional center in south-western Ontario.

Many teachers brought hand-made signs that expressed their anger with the government and pointed to the devastating impact of the cuts and their blatant class character. Diana, a French-language immersion school teacher, told the WSWS, “The slogan on the Ontario license plate says, ‘A place to grow’. But it’s only a place to grow for those with money. Ford is cutting public education because they want to control poor people by keeping our kids ignorant.”

Teachers who spoke with WSWS reporters at the Toronto rally expressed great interest in and solidarity with the struggles of teachers around the world to defend public education. Groups of teachers could be heard singing “We’re not gonna take it,” one of the main protest songs sung by West Virginia teachers during their 2018 wildcat strike. …

Ford and Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce have repeatedly threatened to criminalize all job action by the teachers and support staff and impose their cuts by government decree. For weeks, their standard refrain has been “there is still time for a negotiated agreement.” Yesterday, Ford stepped up the Conservatives‘ and corporate media’s smear campaign accusing teachers of taking children “hostage” for resisting the assault on public education and declared the strike “unacceptable”. …

Sonia, a high school teacher, told the WSWS, “All public sector workers need to unite. The only public employees Ford is backing is the police. There are sinister reasons for this. So far, these protests have been peaceful and lighthearted, but there is a potential that things could become more tense. We saw it with [federal Conservative leader] Andrew Scheer who said the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] should be sent against the [indigenous] Wet’suwet’en protesters blocking the rail lines. In the US, Trump says he has the police, the border patrol and law enforcement on his side. Ford wants to do the same.”

Rob, a high school teacher who spoked with a WSWS reporter at the Kitchener-Waterloo rally, discussed the government threat to legislate an end to the teachers’ struggle. “I haven’t talked with many teachers about what we would do or should do if Ford ordered us back to work. And I didn’t hear anything from the speeches today up on the stage about it. They told us that we do such a great job as educators. Sure, that’s true. They said how hard we work. True again. But I was expecting to hear something about what we do next. Other than a couple who mentioned not voting for Ford in two years, I didn’t hear anything. I want to know what we do next, not what might happen in a couple of years.”

Paul, a retired teacher with 30 years in the Toronto school district, said, “If you downgrade education, you downgrade democracy. They are dis-empowering the working class. Trump reminds me of fascists in Germany, diverting anger towards immigrants, and Ford is nothing but the Trump of the North. We have to stop them because every child deserves to have an education and a good future.”

Galapagos finches and marine bacteria, new research

This 2014 video is called The adaptive radiation of Darwin’s Finches.

From the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Germany:

Sweet beaks: What Galapagos finches and marine bacteria have in common

February 19, 2020

Summary: Ecological niches are a concept well known from higher animals. Apparently, bacteria act accordingly. Researchers have found that marine Polaribacter bacteria find their ecological niche by specializing on their favorite sugar.

The variety of finch species on the remote Galapagos Islands is the most prominent example for Charles Darwin‘s and Alfred R. Wallace‘s theory of evolution through natural selection. Galapagos finch species have developed distinct beak sizes and shapes and thereby have adapted to different food sources. This exemplifies how even closely related species can effectively make use of available resources, avoid competition and thus co-occur in the same habitat.

A bloom with great effect

This principle is not limited to macrofauna. It also applies in the realm of marine microbes, the scientists from Bremen now show. Satellite photos taken from coastal areas during warm seasons often show that the ocean is green rather than blue. This color originates from immense numbers of microscopic marine algae — so-called algal blooms. Such blooms are transient: At some point, all nutrients are depleted and predators like protists and viruses have taken their share. The ensuing mass mortality of the algae leads to the release of large quantities of organic matter into the seawater, including algal polysaccharides. These algal sugars are one of the main food sources for heterotrophic marine bacteria.

Tiny niches for tiny organisms

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, have investigated the bacterial response to spring algal blooms off the island of Heligoland in the German Bight (southern North Sea) for more than a decade. A close-knit microbial community is recurrently abundant during spring blooms in most years. One of the most prominent community members is Polaribacter, a genus of the Flavobacteriia class. From 2009 to 2012, the scientists investigated Polaribacter abundances during spring blooms and identified co-occurring closely related but distinct clades. “We found that these Polaribacter clades are pretty picky when it comes to sugar,” reports Burak Avci from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology. “Or, scientifically spoken: They have rather distinct niches with respect to algal polysaccharides.”

This is also reflected in the timing of the clade’s occurrence. Different clades tended to show up at different bloom stages. “One clade of presumed first responders is characterized by small genomes with a pronounced protein but limited sugar degradation capacity. In contrast, another clade of presumed late responders has larger genomes and the capacity to utilize more complex polysaccharides,” Avci continues. Another clade seems to be tied to presence of a specific algae (genus Chattonella). It is characterized by large genomes and has the most diverse sugar menu of all investigated Polaribacter clades.

Ecological significance

Like Galapagos finches, these results exemplify how also closely-related clades of marine bacteria (here Polaribacter) can forgo direct competition by partitioning available resources (here polysaccharides). “One of the fundamental questions in microbial ecology is which factors shape the composition of a given microbial community. Studies as this one advance our understanding of the principles that govern microbial community composition in such dynamic environments,” Avci concludes. This might be especially relevant for bacteria degrading algal blooms, which are an essential part of the global carbon cycle and might become more abundant following increased anthropogenic nutrient input into the oceans and global warming.

Shell, other corporate money to climate denialist

This April 2017 video from the USA says about itself:

Money Changed the Conversation on Climate Change

Jane Mayer talks about how money has influenced the political conversation on climate change.

Translated from Dutch NOS radio today:

The Dutch climate skeptic

‘Climate skeptic’ is a wrong expression. As skepticism, doubting and checking in principle everything, is a healthy attitude. While climate denialism is pseudoscience. Like neonazi Holocaust denialism, for which ‘Holocaust skepticism’ is a wrong expression.

Frits Böttcher, once co-founder of the Club of Rome, received more than one million guilders from Shell and other multinational corporations between 1989 and 1998. The goal was: to spread doubt about climate change and the role of humans in it. …

Investigative journalists from the Authentic Journalism Platform, De Volkskrant daily and Follow the Money report on this today.

Corporations such as Shell, Texaco [Chevron], KLM airline, Hoogovens [now: Tata Steel] and AkzoNobel … transferred money. With the money, Böttcher set up an international network of climate skeptics.

He also produced reports, books and opinion articles. In these he wrote, eg, that the greenhouse effect does not exist and that CO2 is not dangerous, but rather “good for plants”.

“Ammunitioned”

According to Follow the Money, Böttcher hoped to provide climate policy opponents with ammunition. His role in the environmental think tank Club of Rome suited him well. …

The Bovag [organisation of Dutch car dealers] also admits that it sponsored Böttcher.

SHELL FUNDED ANTI-CLIMATE LOBBYING LAST YEAR Royal Dutch Shell vowed last September to reach net-zero carbon pollution in its business by 2050. The vague goal seemed to become more realistic when the corporation announced earlier this month that its crude oil production had peaked in 2019 and would likely never increase again. Yet the oil giant has continued to fund a network of lobbying groups that fight policies to curb planet-heating emissions and rein in new drilling. [HuffPost]

Mariana Trench deep sea animals, video

This 18 February 2020 video says about itself:

The Mariana Trench is the deepest point on Earth, void of light with the pressure of 48 jumbo jets. Yet life finds a way to survive. Very weird life. Like crustaceans with aluminium shields or the blind, translucent snailfish, the deadliest predator in the trench and of course the sea pig, a type of sea cucumber that crawls with its tentacles. But the most surprising thing in the deep ocean is plastic… that’s right even the deepest part of the ocean can’t escape human pollution.

British Conservative Patel’s deportations, parody song

This 21 February satiric song from Britain is called Priti Patel – Goodbye Muddah, Goodbye Fadduh.

It is a parody of the song Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh (A Letter from Camp).

It says about itself:

Home secretary Priti Patel travels back in time and deports her parents to Kampala, Uganda.

LYRICS:

Goodbye muddah
Goodbye fadduh
Off you go to
Kampala, Uganda
Idi Amin
Is rampagin’
And he said he wants to clear out all the Asians

Though I’d really
Like to aid ya
I’m afraid you’re
Unskilled labour
You work hard for
Your retirement
But I’m afraid that you don’t meet our points requirement

Got eight million
Folks inactive
I can make ‘em
More proactive
Students, carers
Folks in prison
Who I threw in there for counter-terrorism

Civil servants
Said I’m crackers
So I kicked ‘em
In the knackers
Now off you go to
Potential slaughter
Truly yours, your dearest ever-lovin’ daughter

Home Office is ‘institutionally racist’! The way to end the ‘hostile environment’ is to bring down the Tories: here.

The move to appoint Andrew Sabisky as an adviser to the British government confirms the emergence of a fascist element in the Conservative Party. In blog posts and comments, Sabisky has said, “[V]ery real racial differences in intelligence are significantly—even mostly—genetic in origin” and that “it would be nice” if politicians paid attention “from the standpoint of immigration control …” He has argued, “One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception”. here.