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Desert Pit Stop, 2018 © George Byrne
Hotel Pool #1, 2015 © George Byrne
99c Culver City, 2016 © George Byrne
Ace Hotel, Sth Broadway, 2015 © George Byrne
Gas Station, Route 66, 2018 © George Byrne
Bank of America #2, 2018 © George Byrne
Motel Grand #2, 2014 © George Byrne
Pink Awning with Orange, 2018 © George Byrne
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Johan Norberg – we panicked our way into this situation. Now, how do we get out?
Measures that seemed unthinkable a few months ago have been implemented in haste and without debate. In the UK, as in many other countries, the rationale changed. First, lockdown was designed to ‘buy time’ so the health service could prepare. Next, it was needed to ‘flatten the curve’. But when the curve peaked a few weeks later, the restrictions didn’t merely stay in place, they were reinforced.
Is the science on face masks weak? No matter, let’s make them mandatory anyway. Is there any evidence that closing borders has any meaningful effect on slowing the spread of the virus? […]
But hang on, you might say, we’re living in unprecedented times — as politicians love to tell us — and they call for unprecedented action. But this pandemic is small by historical standards. Even now, the global number of deaths from Covid-19 is still lower than from the Hong Kong flu of 1968. But there was no lockdown, no mass school closures, nor did we throw ancient civil and economic liberties overboard. What’s new, this time, is our reaction, not the virus. Sooner or later we will face a worse pandemic or another devastating crisis. What would we be willing to sacrifice then?
The problem is that we have a weak government that was caught on the back foot. Johnson's initial instinct was to avoid lockdown, but then along came Neil Ferguson's doomsday prophecies – plus, every other major European country bar Sweden was enforcing draconian lockdown measures. What else was he going to do? It was that initial panic, sadly, that caused the biggest disaster – the transfer of the sick and elderly to care homes out of hospitals, to clear the beds that in the end weren't needed anyway. So now we have some of the worst Covid-19 figures anywhere – if we can trust the figures, which I sincerely doubt. And the government, aware of its poor record, can only flip-flop and go with a renewed lockdown every time the figures seem to worsen. The precautionary, safety-first outlook has become the government's overarching outlook, whatever social freedom needs sacrificing to get there.
change puppet.”
But in a statement by Facebook on networks that the platform had removed in August, it was confirmed that PeaceData was among 13 accounts excised over links to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA).
It added that their “activity focused primarily on the US, UK, Algeria and Egypt.”
Facebook confirmed that it had decided to act after receiving a tip-off from the FBI about Peace Data’s “off-platform activity.”
They added their “internal investigation revealed the full scope of this network on Facebook.”
In a statement on September 1, Twitter also confirmed: “We suspended five Twitter accounts for platform manipulation that we can reliably attribute to Russian state actors. As standard, they will be included in updates to our database of information operations in the coming weeks to empower academic research.
“The accounts purported to be associated with a website called PeaceData, which publishes a range of content about global political issues. At least some of the content published on the website was created by real people who appear to have contributed to PeaceData as freelancers.” […]
In recent articles for The Canary, Mr Topple has attempted to attack Sir Keir Starmer over the new Labour leader’s clampdown on antisemitism and left-wingers associated with Jeremy Corbyn.
He has also previously appeared on Russia Today UK and Al Jazeera and been heard on Sputnik International Radio and Talk Radio Europe.
Someone else who swims around in these murky waters is Pink Floyd man Roger Waters (previously, and again). Here he is on Al-Jazeera last week, in a MEMRI TV clip:
"The conspiracy… The plan to spread the antisemitic story about people like me and about the Labour Party, in England, abroad – it probably centered and came out of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in Tel Aviv. This was completely orchestrated and very well done, and [it] succeeded totally in destroying Jeremy Corbyn's chances of becoming the next Prime Minister of the UK….
"Thank you for giving me this platform to say what I think, because I love to have a platform where I can say what I think, right or wrong, openly and honestly. And still, thank goodness, Al-Jazeera is one of the places I can do it. I can do it on Al-Jazeera, I can do it on RT [Russia Today]. I can't do it anywhere in the United States, because…"
No surprise that he enjoys speaking on Russia Today. He starts the interview by expressing his support for the Russian annexation of the Crimea from the "illegal government of the Ukraine". Clearly a Putin fan.
-shaming.html”>back in July, counted some 150 anxious messages he received in a three week period early this summer from academics who dissent, even slightly, from the tenets of the woke left. They're worried about speaking out, and what might happen to their careers if they do. With good reason:
The charges levied against many of these professors are rooted in a fanatical worldview, one devoted to spraying for any utterances possibly interpretable as “supremacist,” although the accusers sincerely think they have access to higher wisdom. A white professor read a passage from an interview with a well-known Black public intellectual who mentions the rap group NWA, and because few of the students knew of the group’s work at this late date, the professor parenthetically noted what the initials stand for. None of the Black students batted an eye, according to my correspondent, but a few white students demanded a humiliating public apology.
This episode represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice. From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity—but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors.
Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived. One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.
And so it goes. Independent minds – in academia, of all places – are not welcome.
Especially sad is the extent to which this new Maoism can dilute the richness of a curriculum and discourage people from becoming professors at all. One professor has stopped teaching James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” after Black students claimed that it forced them to “re-live intergenerational trauma.” I have heard from not one but two philosophy doctorates who left academia. One explained that he was driven out by the “accelerating creep of what felt to me a pretty stifling orthodoxy. The hiring market was dominated by a concern for diversity statements, the ability to teach fairly ideologically-slanted courses on philosophy and critical race theory or philosophy and gender, etc.; and more generally it felt progressively less like a profession where I could opt out of those trends while still being a competitive job applicant.”
ley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/mt_imported_image_1758339128.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Beyond-whiteness5″ />
Northern joys. Bemidji, Minn. 2014. On Lake Bemidji. © Monika Lawrence
Solar powered retro. Bemidji, Minn. 2011. Old ice house using a solar panel for electricity is seen at Lake Bemidji. © Monika Lawrence
Firefighters’ ice break rescue training setup. Bemidji, Minn. 2015. Each year First Responders practice their ice rescue skills on Lake Bemidji. © Monika Lawrence
Shoreline conversation. Bemidji, Minn. 2016. During a snow storm at the lake. © Monika Lawrence
Spring must be close. Bemidji, Minn. 2019. The return of ducks in late winter. © Monika Lawrence
Rough April. Bemidji, Minn. 2019. The long fight between winter and spring. © Monika Lawrence
One of the Lens Culture Critics Choice Award Winners for 2020.
Related – Ice Fishing Huts on Lake Winnipeg.
g taken as the killer’s concubine (the fate of Andromache in myth and scores of nameless women in reality). These women are being punished for the crime of having married the wrong person.
Well – state-sanctioned rape is what it is.
It's not just Xinjiang and Tibet: it looks like Inner Mongolia is next in line for the cultural genocide treatment, in Xi's vision of a monocultural Han Chinese nation:
China is facing growing protests in its Mongolian region after it was accused of attempting “cultural genocide” by ordering schools to dump the native language and teach in Chinese.
Videos surfaced on Sunday of demonstrations involving hundreds of people, including school pupils, in Inner Mongolia, with protesters shouting in their own language: “Our mother tongue is Mongolian. Until death, we are Mongolian.”
The protests come after reports that hundreds of teachers in the cities of Tongliao and Ulaanhad were called into “urgent, secret meetings” to take orders from Beijing to switch curriculums to Mandarin under a state-supported “bilingual education programme”.
According to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Centre (SMHRIC), a New York-based group, the new policy was issued verbally rather than in writing. It requires Chinese to be taught from the first year of primary school, and demands Chinese replaces Mongolian as the language of instruction for politics and history. Other subjects will be converted as the policy progresses, it says.
Until now, students took lessons in their native language, then began to study Chinese from eight years old. […]
The shift in the education policy appears to be the latest attempt by Beijing to rein in the country’s largest ethnic minorities, which have their own languages and distinct cultural traditions.
With unrest among Tibetans and the Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang, there are rising calls from Beijing that the country’s ethnic populations should learn Chinese to build a common national identity.
f nation’s population, most occupying low paid and often physically arduous jobs.
It goes back further than that, of course – right back to the centuries-old Arab slave trade. And in places like Sudan, a racist Arab supremacy over black Africans continues to this day.
otest". It was worse than that, though. A lot worse. Look who's speaking here – with Corbyn behind:
From the JC:
The antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke was loudly cheered as he addressed more than 10,000 people at an anti-lockdown demonstration in central London on Saturday, at which far-right placards and flags were openly displayed.
The former sports presenter – who has previously spoken of "global conspiracy Rothschild-Zionism" - was joined on stage by Jeremy Corbyn's brother Piers and other leading coronavirus-deniers at the “Unite For Freedom” protest in Trafalgar Square.
One protester was photographed at Saturday's gathering holding a flag displaying the symbol of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.
Several other attendees held placards promoting the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory which revolves around the idea of an all-powerful, world-ruling cabal controlling the world.
One of the rally's organisers, who introduced themselves from the stage as a leading figure in the Save Our Rights UK organisation, was applauded for a speech in which she claimed George Soros was responsible for the funding of abortion as well as the Black Lives Matters movement.
Other pictures from the demonstration showed Trafalgar Square almost full of protesters , none of whom were wearing protective masks, holding signs that branded the pandemic as a “hoax”. […]
Mr Icke has in the past accused Jews of helping to plan the coronavirus outbreak and of secretly being behind antisemitic attacks on their own communities. He has also suggested that Adolf Hitler was Jewish and an agent of Zionism – both in books sold on Amazon and most recently in a video uploaded to YouTube in March of this year.
In April he suggested Israel was using the pandemic to "test its technology". Following the controversial broadcast by London Live, YouTube and Facebook removed the video from their platform.
A similar demo took place in Berlin, Germany, at which far-right extremists attempted to storm the Reichstag parliament building and other protestors again held QAnon banners.
So no, not so much an "anti-lockdown protest", more a far-right conspiracists' jamboree.
They do both have an unfortunate tendency to share a platform with noted antisemites, these Corbyn brothers.
