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Another day, another John Vachon Pittsburgh photo. 

June 1941. "Jones and Laughlin steelworks. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

From Alexandra Palace over the City, right, and Docklands, left:

And they still have the terrace fenced off.

all this nonsense is Martin Heidegger, a confirmed Nazi. I have banged on about this often enough already, but it's a point that needs to be made as often as possible. When you're keen, as so many of our modern critical thinkers are, to analyse the shortcomings of modern western society, it's perhaps wise not to base your analysis on the works of a thinker who saw enemies in world Jewry and British democracy, and the answer in National Socialism. 

om www.shorpy.com” class=”asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451ebab69e2026be40eb2aa200d img-responsive” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/mt_imported_image_1758339089.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”image from www.shorpy.com” />
[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

ortive measures to any student, faculty, or staff member who requests assistance,” the statement added, saying the school is “committed to building a culture of respect and dignity where all members of our community can feel safe, supported, and can thrive.”

Here's that Campus Reform article.

As the class was online, you can watch the video yourselves in either of the above links. It's not very clear, to be honest. But do make sure you have a counsellor or your nearest therapist on hand to guide you through the inevitable trauma.

le=”width: 550px” title=”Lockdown669″ />
Zewdi, Yabsra and Ehiopia, Lockdown Day 57 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

Father Kevin, Lockdown Day 70 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

Alice, Lockdown Day 76 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

Nora, Lockdown Day 87 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

Kitty, Lockdown Day 92 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

Skye, Lockdown Day 110 © Julia Fullerton-Batten

Each image on the website has a "story" link, top left, where you can read about the individuals pictured.

One of the Critics Choice 2020 Top Ten at Lens Culture.

John Vachon, June 1941:

"Carloads of fruit and vegetables at terminal. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."

"Railroad. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."
[Photos: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

st to showcase her purely musical talent in film. Her playing was so beautiful, so visceral, that even in her known recordings her playing has been compared favorably to her hero Louis Armstrong.

Yet she remains forgotten, for every door she opened for female musicians, she lived to see them slam back. Yet she continued to play, and she deserves to be remembered for what she was: a groundbreaking trumpet player, who wrote an important chapter in the history of women's jazz.

fewer fires in previous years, and dry tinder accumulated, awaiting a spark.

For the previous year’s flu season, Sweden saw remarkably low death rates, relative to its own recent history and to that of its neighbors. […]

Going into the corona pandemic of 2020, Sweden already had an abundance of vulnerable elderly who would not have survived a harsher flu season – and whose Danish, Norwegian and Finnish counterparts did not survive the previous years’ flu seasons in those countries. 

In our paper, we present and link to numerous other analyses of the “dry tinder” effect in Sweden. It is real, and it is very large. We provide some simple calculations to suggest that it might account for half of Sweden’s outsized COVID death toll. […]

Delivering the verdict on Sweden’s response to the corona pandemic must take this into account: going into 2020, Sweden was already in a more vulnerable position than its neighbors. 

Even if one disregards new research suggesting that lockdowns don’t work…, it is improbable that Sweden’s light lockdown is one of the main possible reasons for Sweden’s high COVID death rate. But we go on to list 15 other factors. The single-minded story that Sweden’s high death rate, relative to the other Nordics, stems from its relatively liberal corona policy lacks nuance. There are many other differences between Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, including differences specific to the present. Compared to its neighbors, Sweden would have had a much worse death toll regardless of the policy measures it took in March 2020. 

ecently about Chinese boats fishing illegally in North Korean waters, and the resulting skirmishes with North Koreans. According to this Slate article by Ian Urbina – How China’s Massive Fishing Fleet Is Transforming the World’s Oceans – the problem of aggressive Chinese fishing goes much further than North Korea:

With anywhere from 200,000 to 800,000 boats, some as far afield as Argentina, China is unmatched in the size and reach of its fishing armada. Fueled primarily by government subsidies, its growth and activities have largely gone unchecked, in part because China itself has historically had few rules governing fishing operations. The dominance and global ubiquity of this fleet raise broader questions about how China has put so many boats on the water, and what it means for the world’s oceans.

China’s fishing fleet is more than just a commercial concern; it acts as a projection of geopolitical power on the world’s oceans. As the U.S. Navy has pulled back from the waters of West Africa and the Middle East, China has bolstered its fishing and naval presence. And in places such as the South China Sea and the Arctic’s Northern Sea Route, China has laid claim to prized shipping lanes as well as subsea oil and gas deposits.

“The scale and aggressiveness of its fleet puts China in control,” says Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adding that few foreign countries have been willing to push back when China’s fishing boats make incursions into their national waters.

Not that the fishing itself is unimportant. The fleet is also a way to obtain food security for China’s 1.4 billion people. Many of the marine stocks closest to China’s shores have dwindled from overfishing and industrialization, so ships are forced to venture farther to fill their nets. The Chinese government says it has roughly 2,600 distant-water fishing vessels, which, according to a recent report by the Stimson Center, a security research group, makes it three times larger than the fleets of the next top four countries—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Spain—combined. […]

One of the reasons China’s fleet is so bloated is that some of its fishing ships serve purposes other than merely fishing. Part of a so-called civilian militia, Poling says, these fishing vessels are dispatched to conflict zones at sea to surveil the waters and occasionally to intimidate and ram fishing or law enforcement boats from other countries. Separate from its fishing subsidies, China has a program that incentivizes boats to operate in disputed waters in the South China Sea as a way to assert China’s claims. They get many of the same benefits as the distant-water fleet, plus cash payments because operating in that region is otherwise unprofitable.

It's all very depressing.