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Climate change is laying waste to water supplies, warns Farm Bureau

by Leona19Cnqta Posted on January 13, 2015

Climate change is laying waste to water supplies, warns Farm Bureau

By on 13 Jan 2015commentsShare

The American Farm Bureau represents conventional agriculture, and a conservative base. But, unlike some members of Congress, it accepts the reality that climate change is real, and having an impact on its members. The Washington Examiner reports that the group is already planning for climate change.

Here’s what has caught the Farm Bureau’s attention: Snowpack is the biggest reservoir in the west. It efficiently stores water, in the form of snow, in the winter, then releases it slowly throughout the spring and summer. If all that snow turns to rain (or even a major percentage of it), there’s no way we’ll have enough reservoir space to store water for the dry seasons when farmers need it.

From the Examiner:

The influential American Farm Bureau, citing climate change, said a shift to collecting rain must happen now because it could take up to 30 years to build a new infrastructure.

At a meeting in San Diego, California Farm Bureau Federation President Paul Wenger said that up to now about 70 percent of water storage has been in mountain reservoirs filled with melting snowpack.

“As climate change comes, we have to adapt, and that means we’d better have lower-level capturing systems to be able to capture that water, because it’s going to come as rainfall, not snowpack,” he warned, at a workshop at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s 96th Annual Convention and IDEAs Trade Show.

This doesn’t mean that the Farm Bureau is going to be campaigning for a carbon tax. It doesn’t want government to use cap-and-trade, or taxes, or the Clean Air Act to prevent climate change. As a rule, it basically opposes any kind of regulation. It would like the government to help farmers adapt by building dams, however.

The Farm Bureau is not exactly a climate hero, but at least it’s not pretending it can’t see lightning and hear thunder. Let’s hope those thundershowers come with a little rain.

Source:
Drought-plagued West warned to collect rain as snowpack disappears

, Washington Examiner.

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Climate change is laying waste to water supplies, warns Farm Bureau

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The Group Behind America’s Biggest Anti-Abortion March Now Says Birth Control Causes Abortions

by CarmineGraebner Posted on January 13, 2015

Mother Jones

Each year on January 22—the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade—the March for Life draws thousands of protesters to Washington, DC, for what organizers bill as “world’s largest anti-abortion event.” But this year, there’s an added wrinkle: Organizers of the march have spent the past six months arguing that birth control pills are a form of abortion.

March for Life Education and Defense Fund, the nonprofit that organizes the annual protest, identified oral birth control as a form of abortion in a lawsuit filed in July. With the suit, which is ongoing, March for Life is fighting for an exemption from the Affordable Care Act mandate that all private employers provide contraception coverage.

March for Life argues that covering drugs or medical devices that cause abortions would violate its founding principles. And it places hormonal birth control, which includes things like oral contraception and vaginal rings, squarely within that category. In its lawsuit, the group refers to these as “abortifacients,” a characterization with which most physicians strongly disagree.

Polls consistently find that a majority of Americans who oppose abortion have no moral objections to birth control. Most of those planning to attend the march probably have no idea that March for Life views birth control as immoral: March for Life doesn’t advertise its opinions on birth control in its promotional material for the protest, and the group’s website simply bills the march as a mass demonstration against “legalized abortion on demand.”

The group’s lawsuit seems to have been inspired by the Supreme Court’s June 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. In that case, Hobby Lobby’s owners sued to avoid covering intrauterine devices and emergency contraception pills. A 5-4 conservative majority on the high court ruled in favor of the craft chain’s owners, saying that certain privately owned businesses don’t have to cover emergency contraceptives if the owners object on religious grounds.

The next month, the Supreme Court went even further: It allowed organizations with objections to paying for any kind of contraception—not just the types of emergency contraception that the court dealt with in Hobby Lobby—to bring lawsuits against the contraception mandate. March for Life Education and Defense Fund filed its lawsuit five days after that expanded ruling.

Writing for the majority in Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito agreed with the argument, made by Hobby Lobby’s owners, that some types of emergency contraception may cause abortions. March for Life makes a similar contention about hormonal birth control. Doctors and medical researchers, however, almost uniformly disagree with these assertions.

Birth control primarily works by preventing ovulation, making it impossible for a woman to conceive. But the pill also causes thinning of the uterine lining. This makes it more difficult for a fertilized egg to implant in the womb. Mainstream medical organizations argue that pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg is implanted in the womb. But in the view of some abortion foes, including March for Life, preventing implantation is tantamount to an abortion. March for Life’s attorneys go so far as to call the lawsuit a legal challenge to the “abortion-pill mandate.” (In fact, the abortion pill, a drug that can be used to terminate a pregnancy in its early stages, is not included under Obamacare’s contraception mandate.)

Jeanne Monahan-Mancini, the president of March for Life Education and Defense Fund, declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuit or its implications for the message of the group’s annual march. “The March for Life Education and Defense Fund believes that life begins at conception/fertilization,” she wrote in an email. “The organization is opposed to any drug or device that has a mechanism of action that can be life-destructive.”

Joerg Dreweke, a policy researcher with the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank, says the March for Life lawsuit is part of a pattern of anti-abortion groups conflating contraception with abortion in a quiet effort to roll back both.

“Birth control is very much in the movement’s cross-hairs, and antiabortion advocates are working to stigmatize contraception by blurring the lines between contraception and abortion,” he wrote in a recent analysis. “Yet, the movement is doing this in a strategic and deceptive way…Antiabortion groups ignore and often contradict their positions when it might hurt them politically.”

As evidence of this, Dreweke pointed to the fact that the March for Life, in promoting its upcoming events, wasn’t also touting the radical claims in its lawsuit: “If you take their lawsuit at face value, it turns the March for Life into the March to Ban Birth Control.”

Link:  

The Group Behind America’s Biggest Anti-Abortion March Now Says Birth Control Causes Abortions

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Governor-Elect Laments the Californication of Texas

by IPALarazkd Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Local fracking bans. Laws outlawing plastic bags. Strict tree-cutting ordinances. Another day in California? Nope. Welcome to life in urban Texas, where Democratic-controlled city councils are enacting powerful consumer and environmental protections—much to the chagrin of the state’s leading conservatives. “Texas is being California-ized, and you might not even be noticing it,” Gov.-elect Greg Abbott complained last week at a meeting of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. “We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”

This, he added, is a nasty “form of collectivism” that could “turn the Texas miracle into the California nightmare.”

Though California has long been a conservative bête noire, Abbott’s comments highlight a rising fear among Texas Republicans. More than half of all Texans now live in 10 large urban counties that are growing much faster than the state as a whole. Their voters tend to be more liberal than other Texans, a trend that’s accelerating as minorities, young people, and out-of-staters settle there, lured by cosmopolitan neighborhoods and good jobs. According to a 2012 analysis by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, 70 percent of Democratic gains in Texas since 2000 have come from the four counties that encompass Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. All of them voted for Barack Obama in 2012.

In a state known for caring more about hot-button social issues than consumer or environmental protections, it should come as no surprise that urbanites would turn to their city councils to tackle quality-of-life issues the state prefers to ignore. The fracking ban enacted this November in Denton, a college town near Dallas in the gas-rich Barnett Shale formation, is a case in point: It might have never passed had residents felt the state was doing enough to protect them. “It says the industry can’t come in and do whatever they want to do to people,” Cathy McMullen, the head of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group, told the Washington Post. “They can’t drill a well 300 feet from a park anymore. They can’t flare 200 feet from a child’s bedroom anymore.”

Last week, the governor-elect went on to suggest that the Legislature should crush such liberal local regulations. “My vision,” Abbot said, “is one where individual liberties are not bound by city limit signs.”

But critics quickly accused him of hypocrisy. “It’s disappointing to hear the governor-elect wants to overrule the will of city voters on a range of issues,” Bennett Sandlin, the executive director of the Texas Municipal League, which represents city governments, said in a press release. “It amounts to the same kind of governmental overreach at the state level that he opposes when it comes from Washington.”

That the new governor has so quickly backed himself into a rhetorical corner may reflect his party’s increasingly cramped political circumstances. Demographic trends strongly suggest that Texas will turn blue. The state GOP, sandwiched in between the big federal government and a lot of pesky little local ones, almost seems to be defending the political equivalent of the Alamo.

Almost, but not quite: The Alamo is in San Antonio, now a stronghold of Democrats.

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Governor-Elect Laments the Californication of Texas

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Jeb Bush Has an Obamacare Problem

by William V. Wainscott Posted on December 26, 2014

Mother Jones

From Politico:

Jeb Bush is stepping down from the board of a health care company that has reportedly profited from Obamacare, a move that comes as the Republican explores a run for the presidency.

According to various media reports, Tenet backed President Barack Obama’s health reform act and has seen its revenues rise from it. Bush’s involvement with Tenet could give ammunition to conservatives in the GOP who view him as too moderate — particularly those who despise the Affordable Care Act.

I can’t help but get a chuckle out of this. In normal times, Bush would have left Tenet because it’s a big, soulless corporation that’s paid fines for Medicare fraud and been criticized for dodgy tax practices at the same time it was beefing up executive pay. A man of the people who aspires to the Oval Office can’t afford to be associated with this kind of dirty money.

But no. At least if Politico is to be believed, this isn’t really an issue in the GOP primary. What is an issue is that Tenet might have profited from Obamacare, which in turn means that Jeb may have profited from Obamacare. Even if it’s a double bank shot, that’s dirty money in tea party land.

Of course, Jeb also has some of the more conventional plutocratic image problems:

Soon after his tenure as governor ended, Bush became an adviser to Lehman Brothers and, later, Barclays….In May 2013, Bush set up Britton Hill Holdings and dove into the private equity business….Bush’s first fund invested in Inflection Energy….His next one, BH Logistics, raised $26 million this spring from investors including China’s HNA Group….Bush’s newest fund, U.K.-based BH Global ­Aviation, is his largest and most complicated. It deepens his financial ties to China and Hainan….“In many deals, the U.K. ­effectively serves the same function as the Cayman Islands or Bermuda,” Needham says. “It’s like a tax haven, except it’s the U.K.”

Plus there’s the fact that Jeb stayed on as an advisor to Barclay’s for years after it was fined for illegally trading with various blacklisted countries, notably including Cuba and Iran. If being on the board of a company that profited from Obamacare is a problem, surely this is at least equally bad. The attack ads write themselves, don’t they?

Anyway, apparently Jeb is now in cleanup mode:

“These are all growth investments that the governor has worked on,” said Bush’s spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell….Campbell said the 61-year-old former governor is “reviewing all his engagements and his business commitments” now that he’s begun to focus on a potential race. “That’s a natural next step,” she said.

Indeed it is. On the other hand, Mitt Romney severed most of his ties with Bain Capital a full decade before he ran for president, and just look at how much good that did him. Jeb probably isn’t out of the woods yet.

Link to original: 

Jeb Bush Has an Obamacare Problem

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Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?

by KentMolloy Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

One year after Mother Jones reported on multi-million-dollar investments made on behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that appeared to contradict the foundation’s mission, the philanthropy’s trust will not say if one of its most controversial holdings is still on its books.

In its 2012 tax filing, the Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the foundation’s endowment, reported a $2.2 million investment in the GEO Group, a Florida-based prison company. In its most recent tax forms, the Gates Foundation Trust listed an investment in the GEO Group worth more than $2 million.

In recent years, the GEO Group has faced accusations of detainee abuse and substandard care in multiple states. In 2012, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Detention Oversight reported that GEO Group’s Adelanto facility near Los Angeles had committed “several egregious errors” in administering medical care to detainees. (GEO Group has repeatedly dismissed allegations of mistreatment.) More recently, a group of former immigrant detainees in Colorado sued the company for making them work around the prison for minimal pay, sometimes under the threat of solitary confinement. (The GEO Group said detainees were working under a “volunteer work program” and that its $1-per-day wages met federal standards.) The Gates Foundation Trust did not respond to requests for comment directed through a foundation spokesperson.

According to the Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates—the only members of the trust’s board—have defined areas that the trust will not invest in, “such as companies whose profit model is centrally tied to corporate activity that Bill and Melinda Gates find egregious.” Tobacco companies fall into that category.

The trust’s last reported investment in the GEO Group took the form of a $2,148,790 bank loan. (The Gates Foundation Trust did not issue the loan itself. The term “bank loan” refers to a type of corporate debt that companies with low credit ratings occasionally sell through a conventional bank to get extra cash.) The asset was reported in a tax form filed with the Internal Revenue Service this October, but is accurate only through October 2013.

Bank loans can yield higher returns for investors than stocks or bonds, but their ownership is harder to trace independently.

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In April, after demanding Gates divest from the GEO Group, supporters of a coalition of immigrant, Native American, and Latino rights groups rallied outside the foundation’s Seattle headquarters. The foundation eventually accepted more than 10,000 petitions from the activists and promised to submit their grievances to the trust.

“Bill Gates needs to be transparent about whether they’re still investing in GEO Group,” says Mariana Ruiz Firmat, managing director for Presente, which organized that protest. “It’s really problematic for the foundation, which claims to invest in communities of color. By investing in GEO Group now or in the past, that goes against communities of color.”

Christopher Petrella, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who published a study this year demonstrating that private prisons are disproportionately filled with people of color, sees a similar contradiction between the trust’s investment in GEO Group and its declared mission of “improving the quality of life for individuals around the world.”

“In my estimation, such a contradiction is difficult to justify,” he said in an email.

In an interview with the Seattle Stranger at the time of the April protest, foundation spokesman Jonah Goldman said the staff were sympathetic to the outcry since “everybody at the foundation is deeply committed to social justice and human rights.” Yet, in an instance of what reporter Ansel Herz called “philanthro-splaining,” Goldman rationalized the foundation’s private-prison investments. “The foundation invests in life-saving technologies, in US schools, in making sure people living with AIDS in Africa are less likely to die,” Goldman said. “The trust invests in a lot of things to make sure we have the most money we can have to do that job.”

Last June, after our story ran, the trust pulled its investments in G4S, a United Kingdom-based private security group which operates a number of youth detention centers in the United States, and which had come under fire for maintaining Israeli detention facilities. At the time, a spokesman for the Gates family gave a vague explanation for why the trust had ended its investment: “Like other large foundations, the foundation trust evaluates its holdings regularly, both for performance and fit. As a result of this, the foundation trust no longer holds an investment in G4S.”

The foundation’s investments in the prison industry have been waning. In 2003, three years after the Gates Foundation was formed, tax returns show its trust held more than $23 million in bonds from Corrections Corporation of America and a $7 million bond from Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, GEO’s predecessor. By 2012, the trust had reduced its investment in the GEO Group by 70 percent and no longer retained any investments in CCA.

According to its tax forms, the Gates Foundation’s total assets were worth more than $40 billion in 2013, up from $36 billion at the beginning of the fiscal year. Most of this increase came from investment income.

The Gates Foundation first caught flack over its financial holdings in 2007, when the Los Angeles Times published a major investigation showing that the trust’s investments were actually undermining public health gains it was promoting. A Nigerian boy featured in the story had received Gates-funded polio and measles vaccinations yet suffered from a cough made worse by pollution from an oil refinery owned by the Italian company Eni. The Gates Foundation was one of the company’s investors.

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Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?

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Watch the Bullies Who Protest Outside of Abortion Clinics Get Exactly What They Deserve

by GarnetPalafox Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

A video of a pregnant woman delivering a scathing rebuke to a group of anti-abortion protestors outside a London abortion clinic is going viral on social media.

A group of protestors from the British pro-life organization Abort67 gathered in front of the clinic to film women as they entered. In the video, the protestors can be seen denying that they’re filming the women, despite the fact that, curiously enough, they were outfitted with cameras on their chests while standing in front of a bloody fetus banner. With their weak denials quickly dissolving, one of the protestors then owns up but explains that the group regularly records their demonstrations to prevent “false accusations we’re harassing people.” That’s when the woman courageously goes off on the protestors:

“It’s wrong what you’re doing. You don’t know why people are doing what they’re doing, but you want to be out here judging and filming…You’re standing out here making people feel guilty. I think this is wrong on so many levels. Many people have been abused, you don’t know what their reasons are for.”

The woman, who has been identified as an employee of a charity group that assists children in need, then suggests the protestors quit trying to guilt other women and instead help out real vulnerable kids.

Bravo.

Source:  

Watch the Bullies Who Protest Outside of Abortion Clinics Get Exactly What They Deserve

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Everyone Loves Charts! Except For Those Who Don’t.

by DonnyLangston Posted on November 28, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This post is going to end up being insufferably nerdly, so bear with me. It comes via Justin Wolfers, who tells us about a new study showing that if you present information, it’s more persuasive if it includes a chart. Since my Wikipedia entry says I’m known for “offering original statistical and graphical analysis,” this is thrilling news—especially since I’ve never really believed that my charts have influenced anyone who didn’t already believe what I was saying in the first place.

So let’s go to the source. First off, I love the title of the paper:

Blinded with science: Trivial graphs and formulas increase ad persuasiveness and belief in product efficacy

Trivial graphs! Roger that. And sure enough, the researchers’ first experiment suggests that if you tell people a drug reduces illness by 40 percent, they’re more likely to believe it if you include a bar chart that shows one bar 40 percent lower than the other. Unfortunately, this conclusion comes via a tiny, non-random sample, and the responses are weirdly contradictory. On a scale of 1-9, the chart group rates the drug only slightly more effective than the non-chart group. But on a question that directly asks if the drug works, the chart group is far more positive. What’s up with that?

But this isn’t yet the truly nerdly part. I’m just picking the usual statistical nits. Next up, the researchers tried to find out if the chart group is more persuaded simply because the chart helps them remember the information better. Long story short, that’s not the case. Everyone remembers the information about equally well. But wait: this group is even worse: it’s a tiny, non-random sample of university freshman lab rats, who are very much not typical of the population, especially when it comes to assessing quantitative information. What’s more, assuming I’m interpreting the typo-laden concluding sentence correctly, the chart group displays 79 percent retention vs. 70 percent for the non-chart group. That sure sounds like a possibly significant difference. It’s only the tiny sample size that makes it worthless. But frankly, the tiny sample size probably makes this whole study worthless.

But this still isn’t the truly nerdly part. Here it is, and I’m going to excerpt directly from the study:

Say what? This molecule allegedly has 29 (!) helium atoms? Come on, man. I took one look at that and just laughed. Then I looked at the fake chemical formula, and they got it wrong. It’s got 29 hydrogen atoms. Or does it? Who knows. Now, it’s true that the group for this study was recruited at a shopping mall, and I’ll grant that your average mall rat isn’t too likely to notice this. Still. WTF? That’s at least two typos; a ridiculously small and non-random sample; and contradictory results depending on how the participants were queried.

I’m going to keep using charts because they convey a lot of information efficiently to people who like charts. Plus, I like charts. But are these charts actually persuading anyone of anything? I’m unpersuaded.

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Everyone Loves Charts! Except For Those Who Don’t.

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Watch a New York Woman Get Catcalled 108 Times in Less Than One Day

by BookerAtchison Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

In hopes to demonstrate the absolute awfulness that is catcalling, one woman recently took to the streets of Manhattan with a hidden camera to show just how humiliating, and downright horrifying, it can be to be just that–a woman.

“Hey beautiful.”

“Smile.”

“God bless you mami.”

“Someone’s acknowledging you for being beautiful. You should say thank you more.“

These are just some of the 108 disgusting remarks that were directed towards Shoshana Roberts of the group Hollaback!, a nonprofit working towards shedding light on street harassment, as she silently walked about in no less than a T-shirt and jeans.

One man even attempts to grab her attention by walking alongside her for four straight minutes.

The powerful recording calls out catcalling for exactly what it is: pervasive, overwhelmingly tolerated, and constant. Someone please show this to Doree Lewak.

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Watch a New York Woman Get Catcalled 108 Times in Less Than One Day

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The Anthropocene is here, whether geologists make it official or not

by Brittan6935 Posted on October 18, 2014

Age of Us

The Anthropocene is here, whether geologists make it official or not

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18 Oct 2014 7:00 AM

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Humans rule the world, for worse or for worse. This week, a 30-strong team of geologists, ecologists, and climate scientists from around the globe are meeting in Berlin to discuss whether we’ve entered into a new geologic “epoch of humans.” Their question, in Greek-inspired sciencese (scienglish? scienceGreek?): Is it time to declare the Holocene officially over and the Anthropocene underway?

Our question, in plain English: Does it even matter what these highbrows decide? The sixth mass extinction, a remarkable build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide, rapid sea-level rise, and the halving of the world’s wildlife populations — all human-caused — prove that the Anthropocene is upon us.

Popular discourse and scientists of every stripe aren’t waiting around for a royal decree from the egghead society to declare the Age of People a real phenomenon. CBS News reports that more than 500 scientific studies published this year alone have referred to the current time period as the Anthropocene. Grist has published dozens of stories about the Anthropocene concept, dating back to this 2008 think piece.

The big bureaucratic body that makes decisions about geologic time periods — the International Commission on Stratigraphy — responded to the overwhelming adoption of a term they’ve not formally approved by setting up this Anthropocene Working Group and giving it until 2016 to hash out a proposal.

So who’s in this little club? Twenty-nine men and one woman, which prompted this from the Twittersphere:

What these mostly white men are debating is whether humanity is leaving an impact on the earth that will affect the geologic record as much as other events that have marked new chapters in the planet’s history. If the ICS ultimately approves such an amendment to the geologic time scale, then somewhere a golden spike will be driven into a particular exposed rock layer to mark the epochal transformation.

Making it all official would be cool, but we don’t need their gilded nail to identify where humans took over the globe. That point in time will be distinguished by a layer of substances practically nonexistent in the pre-industrial geologic record: plastic particles, plutonium and other radioactive isotopes, as well as polyaromatic hydrocarbons and lead released by fossil fuel burning.

It would be a downer note to leave the story on that note. Instead, a poignant response to ecological-economic thinker Kate Raworth’s “Manthropocene” tweet:

Source:
Anthropocene: is this the new epoch of humans?

, The Guardian.

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The Anthropocene is here, whether geologists make it official or not

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The Arab World’s Version of the Ice Bucket Challenge: Burning ISIS Flags

by RandyKirwin Posted on September 3, 2014

Mother Jones

On Saturday, three Lebanese young men in Beirut protested the Islamic State by burning the extremist group’s flag, a black banner emblazoned with the Muslim tenet “there is no god but God and Muhammed is his prophet.” The teens then posted a video of the flag-burning online, exhorting others to do the same to demonstrate their opposition to the movement led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In recent weeks, the Islamic State has allegedly beheaded a Lebanese army sergeant and kidnapped about 20 Lebanese soldiers. The flag-burning campaign, modeled on the viral “Ice Bucket Challenge,” quickly took off on social media under the hashtag #BurnISISFlagChallenge. “I nominate the whole world to #Burn_ISIS_Flag_Challenge. You have 24 hours. GO!!” wrote one Lebanese YouTube user.

Though the campaign hasn’t spread throughout the world yet, it has received considerable attention in Lebanon, where many citizens have rallied behind the cause. But some Lebanese officials are not happy about the protest. Lebanese Minister of Justice Ashraf Rifi has called for the “sternest punishment” for the flag burners for their “insult” to the Islamic religion and its symbols. He contends the flag is a religious relic, not a symbol of the Islamic State. And he claimed the flag-burning could “stir up sectarian conflicts” and, consequently, was illegal under Lebanese law, according to newspaper Asharq al-Aswat.

Nabil Naqoula, a member of Lebanon’s Change and Reform parliamentary bloc, took issue with Rifi and maintained that the protesters who started the movement did not intend “to insult the Islamic religion.” Ibrahim Kanaan, a member of the same group, offered legal support to the three young men who launched the flag-burning frenzy if they are charged with a crime.

The Islamic State’s flag has flown everywhere from a Chicago motorists’ window last Wednesday as he made bomb threats against the police, to the streets of Tabqa in northeast Syria where the extremist group seized a military airbase. The black banner has become synonymous with the group’s radical violence and mercilessness.

Here are a few examples of Lebanese activists taking the flag-burning challenge:

Link: 

The Arab World’s Version of the Ice Bucket Challenge: Burning ISIS Flags

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