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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West Antarctic glaciers in ‘irreversible’ thaw, raising seas: study
Vast glaciers in West Antarctica seem to be locked in an irreversible thaw linked to global warming that may push up sea levels for centuries, scientists said on Monday.
Six glaciers, eaten away from below by a warming of sea waters around the frozen continent, were flowing fast into the Amundsen Sea, according to the report based partly on satellite radar measurements from 1992 to 2011.
Evidence shows “a large sector of the West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into a state of irreversible retreat”, said lead author Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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Pilots Come Clean: Drone Warfare Is Riddled with Tragic, Bloody Errors
Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.
Imagine if those drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen (as well as the United States) had a human face all the time, so that we could understand what it was like to live constantly, in and out of those distant battle zones, with the specter of death. In addition to images of the “al-Qaeda” operatives who the White House wants us to believe are the sole targets of its drone campaigns, we would regularly see photos of innocent victims of drone attacks gathered by human rights groups from their relatives and neighbors. And what about the third group — the military personnel whose lives revolve around killing fields so far away — whose stories, in these years of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns, we’ve just about never heard?
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Seeing America’s Longest War Through Afghan Eyes
The old man sat legs folded on the asphalt, facing a bullet-ridden building. Spread out before him were Colgate toothbrushes and colored plastic combs and glossy cigarette packs promising “American flavor.” The building was like a crumbling cave, with its collapsed roof, buckling support beams, and a yawning hole for a front door. He pointed to the structure. “There,” he said, “was once something glorious.”
He had lived in this sweltering city of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, selling trinkets and toiletries for as long as he could remember-“before the Americans, before the Taliban, before the Russians,” he explained. In the 1970s, the building had served as the Helmand Cinema House, the only movie theater in all of southern Afghanistan. On a Friday afternoon, you could catch double features imported from around the world. One of the most popular was Laila Majnu, a Bollywood take on a classic Arab story of unrealized love. Qays, a farmer, falls hard for a girl named Laila, but her father forbids the marriage and she is given to another man. Despondent, Qays roams the desert for years, earning the sobriquet majnun, madman. Eventually, his body is found next to the grave of his beloved, his final ode to her written in the sand nearby.
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9 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wind Energy
“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the authors declared.
Burning fossil fuels has led to water scarcity in arid regions, torrential downpours in wet regions, extreme heat waves, and larger and longer-burning wildfires.
Unless we are prepared to condemn our descendants to a world that could be 10 degrees warmer on average by 2100, we need to dramatically wean ourselves off fossil fuels.
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U.S. confirms second case of MERS
U.S. health officials confirmed the country’s second case of MERS, a deadly virus first discovered in the Middle East, and said the patient was in good condition in an Orlando, Florida hospital.
The patient, 44, is a healthcare worker who lives and works in Saudi Arabia and traveled to the United States to visit relatives. He was admitted to the Dr. P. Phillips Hospital in Orlando on May 9.
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Must Read Blog Posts
You Need to Watch John Oliver’s Hilariously Raunchy Take on Political Ads
by Andrew Kirell
Her Name Was Rachel Hoffman
by Diane Fornbacher
Every Week, 2 Anonymous Students Sneak Into A Classroom And Proceed To Blow Everyone’s Mind.
from ViralNova
Privacy Tools: Encrypt What You Can
by Julia Angwin
Hellraisers Journal: “She touched and called to her three children, and they were all dead.”
By JayRaye
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The Daily Wiki
A TARDIS is a product of the advanced technology of the Time Lords, an extraterrestrial civilisation to which the programme’s central character, the Doctor, belongs. A properly maintained and piloted TARDIS can transport its occupants to any point in time and any place in the universe. The interior of a TARDIS is much larger than its exterior, which can blend in with its surroundings using the ship’s “chameleon circuit”. TARDISes also possess a degree of sentience (which has been expressed in a variety of ways ranging from implied machine personality and free will through to the use of a conversant avatar) and provide their users with additional tools and abilities including a telepathically based universal translation system.
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. ~Mark Twain
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Breakfast Tunes
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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee
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