More damage Trump is determined to do, this time to a wilderness area in northern Minnesota:

Today this region, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, looks almost exactly as it appeared 10,000 years ago when Paleo-Indians lived there. Sigurd Olson, the naturalist and writer who guided there for three decades, called it “the most beautiful lake country on the continent.” Few who see it would disagree. Today it is the most visited wilderness area in the United States.

But now this special place is at great risk.

Late last year the Interior Department concluded that the two expired leases held by a Chilean-owned company, Twin Metals Minnesota, should be reinstated for copper and nickel mining near the border of the Boundary Waters. This reversed a decision made at the end of the Obama administration, which rejected the leases after the Forest Service concluded that a mine there “posed an inherent potential risk” that threatened “serious and irreplaceable harm” to the wilderness.

To the Obama administration that was a bad thing, but the Trump people love to destroy wilderness. The Trump administration says those leases must be renewed.

These actions are another chapter in President Trump’s continuing assault on the nation’s most precious natural and cultural lands. They are of a piece with the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah by 85 percent to carve out areas believed to contain oil and gas reserves and large uranium deposits. By giving the extractive industries virtually everything they want in Utah, Alaska, Minnesota and elsewhere, this administration has sent an unambiguous message: There is no place on our public lands — or waters — that is inviolable if there are resources to be exploited.

Condos in the Grand Canyon, casinos in Yosemite, steel mills in Yellowstone.

This is not the first threat to the Boundary Waters. In the early 1960s, there were battles over logging, timber roads and the use of motorboats and snowmobiles. Though the area was included in the 1964 Wilderness Act, some logging and motor use were allowed to continue. Finally in 1978 Congress passed the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act, which expanded its size, restricted motorboat use, ended logging and banned mining in the wilderness and some adjacent lands.

But there are ore deposits there, and Twin Metals Minnesota wants’em.

The danger is that mining these sulfide ores can result in contaminated water seeping and flowing into lakes, rivers, streams and wetlands and groundwater. Because of the interconnected waterways in the wilderness area, much of the area’s watershed could become polluted. Once that happens, there is no fixing it.

TMM says don’t worry! We’ll be super super careful! It will be fine!

Twin Metals argues that the risk for pollution from the sites will be minimal. But the idea that pollution can be prevented by mitigation measures has proved wrong time and again at other mines. Studies undertaken for opponents of mining have concluded that the highly toxic waste from a single mine in the wilderness area’s watershed could continuously pollute the Boundary Waters for hundreds of years.

Huh. Speaking of absurd moral panics over “black identity politics,” here’s an item from Foreign Policy, also last October, that I saw not via the ravings of Sam Harris but via Trump’s “they’re not people, they’re animals.”

As white supremacists prepared to descend on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, the FBI warned about a new movement that was violent, growing, and racially motivated. Only it wasn’t white supremacists; it was “black identity extremists.”

Amid a rancorous debate over whether the Trump administration has downplayed the threat posed by white supremacist groups, the FBI’s counterterrorism division has declared that black identity extremists pose a growing threat of premeditated violence against law enforcement.

Oh no, it’s the black identity extremists coming to get you.

“The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence,” reads the report, marked for official use only and obtained by Foreign Policy.

Are these “extremist” perceptions of police brutality against African Americans actually wrong? Factually wrong? Has that problem been entirely fixed already?

“The FBI assesses it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement,” the report states.

Some 748 people have been shot and killed by police so far in 2017, including at least 168 African-Americans.

The report, dated Aug. 3 — just nine days before the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly — appears to be the first known reference to “black identity extremists” as a movement. But former government officials and legal experts said no such movement exists, and some expressed concern that the term is part of a politically motivated effort to find an equivalent threat to white supremacists.

Can we call the FBI White Identity Extremists now? Would that be fair?

A former senior counterterrorism and intelligence official from the Department of Homeland Security who reviewed the document at FP’s request expressed shock at the language.

Just in case we were inclined to think of the FBI as the anti-Trump, this is a useful corrective.

Some experts and former government officials said the FBI seemed to be trying to paint disparate groups and individuals as sharing a radical, defined ideology. And in the phrase “black identity extremist” they hear echoes of the FBI’s decades-long targeting of black activists as potential radicals, a legacy that only recently began to change.

…

The FBI is linking the people discussed in the report based only on them being black, rather than on any sort of larger ideological connection, the official said. “The race card is being played here deliberately.”

Michael German, a former FBI agent and now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, said manufacturing this type of threat was not new. He has criticized earlier FBI reports on “black separatists,” arguing that they conflated radical groups operating in the 1970s with attacks in 2010 and later, even though there was no obvious connection.

The use of terms like “black identity extremists” is part of a long-standing FBI attempt to define a movement where none exists. “Basically, it’s black people who scare them,” German said.

Ta-Nahisi Coates! Black Identity Politics! Auggghhhh!

In 2009, Daryl Johnson, then a Department of Homeland Security intelligence analyst, warned of the rise of right-wing extremism, setting off a firestorm among congressional critics. Johnson, who left the department in 2010, said he could think of no reason why the FBI would create a new category for so-called black identity extremists. “I’m at a loss,” he replied, when asked about the term.

“I have no idea of why they would come up with a new term.”

There have been concerns about rising violence among black separatist groups in recent years, he said, but it does not approach the threat of right-wing extremism. “When talking about white supremacists versus black supremacists, there are way more white supremacists,” Johnson said.

For historians and academics who have looked at the history of FBI surveillance of black Americans, the report also smacks of the sort of blatant racism the bureau has worked hard to leave behind. From the time J. Edgar Hoover took over the anti-radical division in the FBI at the height of the first “red scare” in 1919, the bureau began systematically surveilling black activists.

It goes all the way back. You could argue it’s a product of the white guilty conscience translated to paranoia about a Likely Uprising.

Lately, that seemed to be changing. As FBI director, James Comey famously kept a copy of the Martin Luther King Jr. wiretap order on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s past abuses and made new agents learn the history of the FBI’s pursuit of the civil rights leader.

The FBI also appeared to be focusing more attention on the threat of white supremacists. In May, the FBI warned that white supremacist violence was growing, according to a report obtained and published by FP. That same report noted that white supremacists were responsible for more attacks in the United States than any other extremist group, including Islamic extremists.

Little did we know they were trying to “balance” it with talk of Black Identity Extremists.

Trump watches his morning Fox, flips out, composes wrathful tweet.

President Trump marked the first anniversary of the special counsel’s Russia investigation Thursday by repeating accusations that the FBI had a confidential informant inside his 2016 campaign and by calling the probe “disgusting, illegal and unwarranted.”

Trump tweeted: “Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI ‘SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.’ Andrew McCarthy says, ‘There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.’ If so, this is bigger than Watergate!”

I’m not sure Watergate is the analogy he’s looking for.

Giuliani told The Washington Post and other news organizations Wednesday that the special counsel’s team informed the president’s attorneys recently that prosecutors do not believe they can charge a sitting president with a crime under Justice Department guidelines, signaling they would leave it to Congress to address any possible findings of wrongdoing by Trump.

Giuliani is working for Trump. He’s not an impartial legal expert, he’s a Trump stooge. What he says about the investigation can’t be taken as expert information.

The top-secret intelligence source has been the subject of a showdown between key Trump allies in Congress and the Justice Department.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has sought classified documents from the Justice Department, saying he needs to review the records as part of his congressional oversight duties.

But, as The Post reported earlier this month, senior FBI and national intelligence officials notified Nunes that doing so could endanger a top-secret intelligence source and risk lives.

But of course Nunes couldn’t care less about that. His one purpose is to Protect the Boss.

The new Jesus and Mo:

J and M on Patreon

Life in the US of A:

[Jessica] Mock was about to check out Sunday at the Publix near Lake Jackson when she realized she’d forgotten to pick up Tupperware. She left her cart in the lane to get some and found another woman trying to check out ahead of her when she returned.

The two argued, and the victim moved to a different lane. They both checked out about the same time and left the store only seconds apart. Before leaving, the victim used an expletive and said, “I’ll meet you outside.” Mock replied, “I’ll see you outside.”

The victim unloaded her groceries and returned her cart, running into Mock again along the way. Mock pulled a small handgun from her waistband.

One minute it’s a quarrel over queue-jumping at the supermarket, the next it’s somebody pulling a gun.

“(Mock) pointed the gun at (the victim),” the report says. “(The victim) stated she blacked out near this time. She stated she was in fear for her life when this occurred.”

The encounter didn’t end there. After the victim drove away from the parking lot with her two children, Mock followed them. The victim called law enforcement, who stopped Mock as she followed behind the victim on Fred George Road.

Mock denied being armed inside Publix, brandishing a gun or intentionally following the victim. However, deputies searched her car and found a holstered, silver revolver in the center console. They also found the victim’s vehicle tag written on a note. Mock was taken to the Leon County Detention Center and released Monday on $1,000 bail.

People are too unstable and anger-prone to be allowed to carry guns.

Vanity Fair asks: is China straight-up bribing Trump?

So it was a bit odd to see Trump pull a complete 180, suddenly insisting that the company and its 75,000 Chinese jobs must be saved, though to be fair, tweeting “Look, China just pumped $500 million into a Trump Organization project so I had to do them a solid” might not have gone over so well.

Oh, that’s right—according to multiple news outlets, the president’s total about-face on China came just 72 hours after the developer of a theme park outside Jakarta, known as MNC Lido City, with whom the Trump Organization has an agreement to license its name, signed a deal to receive $500 million in Chinese government loans, in addition to another $500 million from government banks. According to Agence France-Presse, the Trump Organization will rake in almost $3.7 million in licensing and consulting payments from Lido, along with another project in Bali. The company will also earn management fees, and be “eligible for additional unspecified incentives.”

That’s all $$$ in Don’s pocket. Little Don and Eric are running the org but Don still gulps down the profits.

The White House, naturally, isn’t commenting on any of this. “You’re asking about a private organization’s dealings that may have to do with a foreign government. It’s not something I can speak to,” Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said Monday when he was asked about the Lido City deal.

That’s rich, isn’t it – getting all huffy about asking questions about “a private organization’s dealings” when the organization belongs to the fucking president. The press people damn well ought to be able to speak to it, and they ought to be compelled to tell the truth about it, too. All the truth.

North Korea appears to have sprung the trap on Trump.

North Korea is casting doubt on next month’s summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump over joint Air Force drills taking place in South Korea, which it says are ruining the diplomatic mood.

…

North Korea suggested that the drills were putting the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, scheduled for June 12, in jeopardy.

“The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities,” said KCNA, the North’s Korean Central News Agency.

Aw. Donnie was all excited about his Nobel Peace Prize.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the United States has not received a notice of any change or cancellation. She said the government is continuing to plan for the summit and is confident that Kim understands the need for exercises.

Really? Do Trump’s people really think Kim is just fine with military exercises that are mostly a threat aimed at him?

A Pentagon spokesman, Army Col. Rob Manning, said Tuesday that the exercises are part of the U.S.-South Korean alliance’s “routine, annual training program to maintain a foundation of military readiness.”

…to attack North Korea should the need arise. They’re not aimed at repelling chicken thieves.

Manning said the purpose of the exercises is to enhance the alliance’s ability to defend South Korea.

From North Korea.

North Korea, as it has in the past, disagreed.

“This exercise targeting us, which is being carried out across South Korea, is a flagrant challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration and an intentional military provocation running counter to the positive political development on the Korean Peninsula,” KCNA said.

…

By mentioning the Panmunjom Declaration, North Korea was referring to the agreement signed last month by Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in following their historic summit.

They agreed to work to turn the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War in 1953 into a peace treaty that would officially bring the war to a close, and also to pursue the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula.

Which would be great, but let’s not pretend Kim has suddenly turned into a cuddly bunny.

At the same time as threatening to scupper the summit with Trump, North Korea canceled talks with South Korean officials that had been scheduled for Wednesday, less than 24 hours after agreeing to them.

He’s messing with us.

Back in May 2015 I wrote this post about the Cannes film festival’s banning women from film screenings if they were not wearing high heels.

Annals of Gender Policing. Anna Merlan at Jezebel reports:

The Cannes Film Festival is reportedly not allowing women into screenings if they’re wearing flat shoes.

Into screenings. It would be bad enough if it were the Top Gala Codfish Ball, but it’s screenings. People go to screenings as part of their work, as well as for entertainment and enlightenment. The Cannes Film Festival is a professional event as well as social and festive and so on.

And then there’s the issue of what high heels are, which is a form of temporary and comparatively mild foot-binding. The bones aren’t actually broken as they are in footbinding (although high heels can easily cause broken bones in the feet and anywhere else, because they’re highly unstable – that’s the whole point of them), but they are pinched and bent.

A few days ago I saw a pair of woman-man couples cross the street on their way to a wedding in a local park. The street there is pocked and lumpy, as city streets so often are. Both women looked all but disabled by the task – their posture was hunched and distorted as they picked each step carefully in their towering heels. The men of course were just walking in a normal confident manner. It creeps me out that this is just normal. I think most people consider foot-binding (if they’re aware of it) grotesque and deeply misogynist, yet high heels are a close relative of foot-binding but they’re seen as normal…and in Cannes, actively mandated.

Flatgate erupted on Twitter this week after several women were apparently turned away from a red carpet screening of Cate Blanchett’s new movie Carol because they were in the demon flats. According to Screen Daily, the screening was on a Sunday night and the women weren’t exactly wearing Keds:

Multiple guests, some older with medical conditions, were denied access to the anticipated world-premiere screening for wearing rhinestone flats.

The festival declined to comment on the matter, but did confirm that it is obligatory for all women to wear high-heels to red-carpet screenings.

Obligatory. That’s fucked up.

Today the BBC reports:

The issue of high heels at Cannes has been a spiky one in recent years.

Now it seems Kristen Stewart, a member of this year’s jury at the film festival, has flouted the ban on flat shoes – by instead going barefoot on the red carpet.

The Twilight actress wore black Louboutin heels as she arrived at the BlacKkKlansman premiere.

But before entering the screening of the Spike Lee film, she slipped off her shoes to walk up the stairs.

She was apparently not sanctioned for taking off her heels.

Last year, Stewart – who’s been known to wear trainers with dresses on the red carpet – spoke about the event’s fashion rules.

“There’s definitely a distinct dress code, right?” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “People get very upset if you don’t wear heels or whatever.

“I feel like you can’t ask people that any more – it’s a given. If you’re not asking guys to wear heels and a dress, you cannot ask me either.”

Forcing women to wear heels is forcing them to be slowed down, off balance, easy to push over, weakened, hobbled. It’s forcing them to be at a huge physical disadvantage compared to men. Given what we’ve been learning about the ways of the film industry, maybe that’s not such a good idea, huh?

Meanwhile at the UN:

The United States blocked a United Nations Security Council statement drafted Monday that called for an independent investigation into Monday’s killing of at least 58 Palestinians along the Israeli-Gaza border. The deaths, alongside some 2,700 people who were injured, made Monday the deadliest day in Gaza since 2014. The protests erupted on the same day as the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem—a move that outraged Palestinians and many in the Muslim world. The statement, vetoed by the U.S., said in an initial draft: “The Security Council expresses its outrage and sorrow at the killing of Palestinian civilians exercising their right to peaceful protest. The Security Council calls for an independent and transparent investigation into these actions to ensure accountability.” After the scores of deaths on Monday, White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah blamed Hamas, refused to criticize Israel, and said: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Not by shooting unarmed protesters it doesn’t.

MSF issued a statement on the bloodbath in Gaza yesterday:

MAY 14, 2018—As teams from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treat people wounded today in Gaza, Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, MSF representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, provided the following statement:

What happened today is unacceptable and inhuman. The death toll provided this evening by Gaza health authorities—55 dead and 2,271 wounded—including 1,359 wounded with live ammunition, is staggering. It is unbearable to witness such a massive number of unarmed people being shot in such a short time.

Our medical teams are working around the clock, as they have done since April 1, providing surgical and postoperative care to men, women, and children, and they will continue to do so tonight, tomorrow, and as long as they are needed. In one of the hospitals where we are working, the chaotic situation is comparable to what we observed after the bombings of the 2014 war, with a colossal influx of injured people in a few hours, completely overwhelming the medical staff. Our teams carried out more than 30 surgical interventions today, sometimes on two or three patients in the same operating theater, and even in the corridors.

This bloodbath is the continuation of the Israeli army’s policy during the last seven weeks: shooting with live ammunition at demonstrators, on the assumption that anyone approaching the separation fence is a legitimate target. Most of the wounded will be condemned to suffer lifelong injuries.

As new demonstrations are announced for tomorrow, the Israeli army must stop its disproportionate use of violence against Palestinian protesters.

Not just trolling:

In December 2016 Diep Saeeda, an outspoken human rights activist from the Pakistani city of Lahore, received a short message on Facebook from someone she didn’t know but with whom she had a number of friends in common: “Hy dear.”

She didn’t think much of it and never got round to replying.

But the messages weren’t coming from a fan of Mrs Saeeda’s activism – instead they were the start of a sustained campaign of digital attacks attempting to install malware on her computer and mobile phone to spy on her and steal her data.

She got many more messages from that account, which pretended to be that of a young woman who worked for the UN doing human rights activity.

However, the attackers targeting Mrs Saeeda made crucial mistakes that allowed researchers from human rights group Amnesty International to trace a number of individuals linked either to the operation or to the malware used.

They include a British-Pakistani cyber security expert running a company he claims to be based in Wales, and another who used to work for the Pakistani army’s public relations wing.

Saeeda is quite sure intelligence agencies are behind it.

Amnesty International has spoken to three other Pakistan human rights activists who have been targeted in the same way.

They discovered that the main piece of malware being used had also been used in previously documented attacks on Indian military and diplomatic officials.

Amnesty International say they have no evidence of Pakistani state involvement and are unable to say who is ultimately responsible for conducting the attacks.

Sherif Elsayed-Ali, director of global issues at Amnesty, told the BBC they were calling on the Pakistani authorities to investigate the attacks “as a matter of urgency… and to ensure that human rights defenders are adequately protected both online and offline”.

Which seems rather like urging the fox to investigate attacks on the hen house.

In January 2017, a group of bloggers went missing for a number of weeks before being released. Two subsequently told the BBC that they had been detained by the security services and tortured.

Theocrats don’t like human rights activists.

Who cares about Ebola, anyway? Not Trump.

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Tuesday that a new Ebola outbreak has emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — and thanks to the Trump administration, we are woefully under-equipped to deal with it.

Just as news broke about the resurgence of the deadly disease, the Trump administration made a series of moves that could severely hamper America’s capacity to respond to disease outbreaks.

Hours before the announcement from WHO, Trump called on Congress to rescind $252 million that had been set aside specifically for the purpose of dealing with Ebola outbreaks. The money was left over from the funds that Congress appropriated to fight the 2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, which was the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded.

The money, which Trump referred to as “irresponsible federal spending,” was actually set aside intentionally in anticipation of the next outbreak. Having funds available immediately allows the U.S. to quickly deploy health officials to the site of the outbreak so it can be stopped before it spreads further and becomes a deadly — and extremely costly — international crisis.

Yes, it’s “irresponsible” the way having sprinklers in buildings is irresponsible, the way getting vaccinated is irresponsible, the way looking behind you before you back out of a driveway is irresponsible. Responsible people don’t take precautions of any kind, because Jesus saves those who don’t save themselves.