Toronto councillors call for end to 'extreme show of force' in encampment clearings


BY DENISE PAGLINAWAN, THE CANADIAN PRESS
POSTED JUL 23, 2021 

Five Toronto councillors urged the city’s mayor on Friday to end what they called an “extreme show of force” during the clearing of homeless encampments.

In a letter to John Tory, the councillors said there’s no need for batons, pepper spray or guns in the operations, adding that the mayor’s approach to encampments does not resolve the challenges posed by them.

“We demand an end to the violence and extreme show of force,” said the letter signed by councillors Shelley Carroll, Mike Layton, Josh Matlow, Gordon Perks and Kristyn Wong-Tam.

“You are only moving people experiencing homelessness from parks to laneways, under bridges or into another park.”

The letter came after violence erupted on Wednesday when authorities moved in to clear a homeless encampment at a Toronto park.

The operation at Lamport Stadium Park saw police push out a crowd made up of encampment residents and many supporters after they refused to leave the area.

A different encampment was cleared the day before at Alexandra Park in downtown Toronto.

Tory said in a statement Friday that some councillors “continue to ignore” the work city staff have done to reach out to people in encampments and encourage them to take up safe indoor shelter with proper support.

“After thousands and thousands of visits offering housing before and after trespass notices are issued, there does come a time when an encampment cannot continue to occupy a public park, to threaten the safety and health of people experiencing homelessness, and impact the families and communities who rely on these parks,” he said.

“I support the right to protest but I do not support protesters trying to stop City staff from offering safe indoor housing to residents in encampments, forcing confrontations with police and City staff, and trying to stop the City from having discussions with encampment residents and from making sure our parks are safe and healthy places for everyone.”

The city has cited the risk of fires and the need to make parks accessible to everyone as factors behind the clearings.

Police have said they were at Lamport Stadium to support city staff in the clearing operations and carried out “enforcement” as a last resort, using “minimal force.”

The councillors who wrote to Tory added that any obstruction of media access to encampment clearing operations is “undemocratic and unconstitutional.”

A Canadian Press photographer covering the Alexandra Park clearing was arrested Tuesday by Toronto City Corporate Security and removed from the area

The councillors added that any obstruction of media access to encampment clearing operations is “undemocratic and unconstitutional.”

Early in the pandemic, hundreds fled Toronto’s homeless shelters for fear of contracting COVID-19, setting up tents in parks throughout the city. Recent data obtained by The Canadian Press also shows a significant rise in violent incidents in Toronto’s shelter system over the last five years.

The city maintains the shelter system is safe, and city council recently passed a motion to end encampments.

People condemn Toronto Police actions as more encampment protest footage emerges


More and more photo and video documentation of the most recent tent encampment eviction in Toronto — at Lamport Stadium Park in Liberty Village on Wednesday — continues to emerge on social media as the public, shocked, criticizes the actions of police facing protesters on the scene.

As was the case in the wake of the city's move to clear a similar tent community in Trinity Bellwoods Park last month, residents are shocked by the sheer number of police and private security guards employed to enforce trespass notices against those experiencing homelessness who have been living in the public green space.

Also, the tactics of authorities on the scene, who violently clashed with protesters who had set up physical barricades in an attempt to stop the clearings.

Officers were seen pushing, hitting, dragging, pepper spraying, and arresting advocates as authorities took apart the makeshift structures that some 11 people were residing in.

Police were dispatched by the city to help get the homeless out of the park and offer them "safe, indoor accommodation and supports" that included meals, a housing worker and mental health assistance — and also to see to the large number of protesters who oppose the city's dismantling of encampments that have cropped up during the pandemic.

Mayor John Tory and the TPS have defended action on multiple occasions, saying the heavy-handed police presence was simply a response to protesters that "outnumbered encampment residents, creating an increasingly unstable and unsafe environment for them and for city staff" who were tasked with offering housing to those residents living in the park.

"Compare the experience [at Alexandra Park on Tuesday] where streets-to-homes workers were relatively unobstructed offering indoor housing without interference of protesters to today, where you had many, many more protesters, which necessitates the presence of more police officers in order to make sure that [everyone] can be kept safe," Tory said in a presser Wednesday.

"We're trying our very best to do this in a way that is compassionate, but also firm — firm in the sense that we must find safer, more healthy, legal indoor accommodations for people who have many needs for support in their lives, provide those supports and do it in a way that preserves everyone's safety."

Following the Bellwoods encampment clearing in June, Tory chalked the violence up to "hundreds of people who showed up and involved themselves who were not the people experiencing homelessness that we were trying to help," referring to them as people "trying to make a statement" rather than actually help those experiencing homelessness.

"The City's objective today was to peacefully encourage encampment occupants to accept safe, indoor accommodation, as it does daily with people experiencing homelessness across the city. Camping in parks is unhealthy, unsafe and illegal," reads a release issued Wednesday following the Lamport drama.

"Protesters indicated they would not leave the fenced area, preventing City staff from doing their jobs in assisting encampment occupants and making the park safe and accessible for all.," it continues.

"As protesters remained in the area and refused to leave, the City requested TPS assistance in clearing the fenced area of the park. When the area was cleared by police of protesters, the City re-engaged with any encampment occupants who remained, and began the removal of structures and debris."

A total of 26 people were arrested at Lamport on Wednesday, and face criminal and provincial charges including assault with a weapon, assaulting a peace officer and obstructing police.

Protesters were also pepper sprayed in a tense demonstration outside TPS 14 Division on Dovercourt following the day's earlier events.

The city has said it intends to move forward with the dismantling of the remainder of the encampments it identified as priority locations to ensure that they can be used for things like summer camp programming.

Lead photo by @BikeLaneDiary

Protesters blare Imperial March from Star Wars as Toronto cops clear yet another encampment

If you can't beat them, make them look like total tools.

Advocates for people experiencing homelessness got creative this morning when protesting Toronto's destruction of yet another tent encampment — this one at Lamport Stadium Park — by using loudspeakers to blare a song that has become synonymous with evil authoritarian regimes.

"The Imperial March," composed by John Williams for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, is a recurrent musical theme within the wildly-popular film franchise.

It is also known colloquially among fans and non-fans alike as "Darth Vader's theme song" or "the death march." Online content creators have been known to set the track against actual news footage as a form of political criticism.

There was no need to edit the video that came out of Liberty Village this morning, however, as hundreds of Toronto police officers, bylaw-enforcement officers and private security guards marched to enforce trespass notices against some 17 homeless people.

Rather, people protesting the Lamport Stadium encampment eviction played the song live on speakers loud enough for everyone within earshot to enjoy.

The message to police and city officials was clear, and advocates gathered to support encampment residents got a kick out of it.

Sadly, nothing else happening at the scene today is even moderately funny. To ask those present and many others watching through digital means, the situation is downright f*cked.

City crews have once again entirely fenced off a public park and are arresting anyone who dares to go inside: Volunteers, activists, journalists and anyone else who might get in their way or document what they're doing.

Nine people were arrested in total during the dismantling of a different encampment, the one at Alexandra Park, on Tuesday, less than 24 hours before cops arrived on bike, foot and horseback to Lamport Stadium.

Advocates report that the entirety of Lamport Stadium Park had been surrounded by cops, cruisers and court wagons before 6 a.m. on Wednesday.

For context, the sizeable park is bordered by King Street West to the north and East Liberty Street to the south, Fraser Avenue to the west and Jefferson Avenue to the east. And it's not only the park being blocked off, but areas surrounding the park as well.

Onlookers are once again taking up issue with the city's heavy-handed approach to enforcing trespass notices to people living in parks, and wondering how much an operation like this must be costing taxpayers.

"Imagine waking up and thinking there was actual sound, moral grounds in forcing unhoused folks into even less safe/autonomous housing just so rich residents can avert their eyes from the horrors of wealth disparity and corporate and government created housing crisis," tweeted one local.

"This is Toronto."

The (second) clearing of the encampment at Lamport Stadium Park is ongoing, and the City of Toronto has stated that all individuals living there are being offered safe, indoor space, with access to meals, showers and laundry, harm reduction, physical and mental health supports, and a housing worker.

"Occupants will be given time to pack two bags of belongings to take with them. All other belongings will be collected and stored for up to 30 days for future pickup," reads a release from the city issued Wednesday morning. "There are more than 30 structures on-site, including tents and makeshift structures."

One of the city's prime stated reasons for dismantling this and other encampments is a high risk of fires, of which there have been 130 already this year within Toronto tent cities. Seven people have died as a result of encampment fires in Toronto since 2010.

The city also spoke to one of the reasons behind their intense security response in this morning's press release:

"City staff attempting to assist those experiencing homelessness are increasingly facing intimidation, threats and criminal harassment by advocates or protestors at encampments," reads the release. "This behaviour is unacceptable, and the City is committed to ensuring that employees are protected from harassment in the workplace."

Ex-Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime on allegations: "I am ashamed"

"I am extremely sorry that I failed you."

News by Wesley Yin-Poole, Editor

Updated on 24 July 2021

Ex-Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime has issued a statement on recent allegations about the company, saying: "I am ashamed."

This week, the State of California sued Activision Blizzard over what it alleges to be a "frat boy" culture that created "a breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women"

.

Ex-Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime.

The lawsuit alleges a culture of "constant sexual harassment", mainly at Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft, Diablo and Overwatch.

Activision Blizzard has strongly denied the accusations, calling many of the claims distorted or false.

Morhaime co-founded Blizzard in 1991, when the studio was known as Silicon & Synapse, eventually becoming president in 1998, then president and CEO in 2007.

During Morhaime's time at the company Blizzard released gargantuan hits such as World of Warcraft, Overwatch and Hearthstone, and contributed billions of dollars to Activision Blizzard's bottom line. Morhaime left Blizzard in 2018 - a move that was widely seen as a significant blow for the company - and was replaced by current president J. Allen Brack.

Morhaime's statement is published in full, below:

"I have read the full complaint against Activision Blizzard and many of the other stories. It is all very disturbing and difficult to read. I am ashamed. It feels like everything I thought I stood for has been washed away. What's worse but even more important, real people have been harmed, and some women had terrible experiences.

"I was at Blizzard for 28 years. During that time, I tried very hard to create an environment that was safe and welcoming for people of all genders and backgrounds. I knew that it was not perfect, but clearly we were far from that goal. The fact that so many women were mistreated and were not supported means we let them down. In addition, we did not succeed in making it feel safe for people to tell their truth. It is no consolation that other companies have faced similar challenges. I wanted us to be different, better.

"Harassment and discrimination exist. They are prevalent in our industry. It is the responsibility of leadership to keep all employees feeling safe, supported, and treated equitably, regardless of gender and background. It is the responsibility of leadership to stamp out toxicity and harassment in any form, across all levels of the company. To the Blizzard women who experienced any of these things, I am extremely sorry that I failed you.

"I realise that these are just words, but I wanted to acknowledge the women who had awful experiences. I hear you, I believe you, and I am so sorry to have let you down. I want to hear your stories, if you are willing to share them. As a leader in our industry, I can and will use my influence to help drive positive change and to combat misogyny, discrimination, and harassment wherever I can. I believe we can do better, and I believe the gaming industry can be a place where women and minorities are welcomed, included, supported, recognised, rewarded, and ultimately unimpeded from the opportunity to make the types of contributions that all of us join this industry to make. I want the mark I leave on this industry to be something that we can all be proud of."

Morhaime left Blizzard to form a new game company called Dreamhaven. Dreamhaven is made up of two separate studio teams - Moonshot and Secret Door - each led by former Blizzard talent.

On its website, Dreamhaven says it wants to "provide a safe place where developers, creators, and players can connect in meaningful ways".

THEY HAVE BETTER HAIR THAN LITTLE KIM

Why North Korea is so afraid of K-pop

Jessie Yeung and Yoonjung Seo
CNNDigital
 Saturday, July 24, 2021 



Members of South Korean K-pop band BTS pose for photographers ahead of a press conference to introduce their new single "Butter" in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, May 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

North Korea is doubling down on its culture war, warning citizens to stay away from all things South Korean -- including its fashion, music, hairstyles and even slang.

In the past decade, South Korea has emerged as a formidable cultural force, with products from makeup to K-pop and K-drama finding enthusiastic fans around the world.

But one place trying to stop South Korean influence from permeating its borders is its neighbour to the north.

For decades, North Korea has been almost completely closed off from the rest of the world, with tight control over what information gets in or out. Foreign materials including movies and books are banned, with only a few state-sanctioned exceptions; those caught with foreign contraband often face severe punishment, defectors say.

Restrictions have softened somewhat in recent decades, however, as North Korea's relationship with China expanded.

Tentative steps to open up have allowed some South Korean elements, including parts of its pop culture, to seep into the hermit nation -- especially in recent years, when relations thawed between the two countries.

But the situation in North Korea is now fast deteriorating -- and strict rules have snapped back into place, in a crackdown reminiscent of its earlier, more isolated history.

Earlier this month, South Korean lawmaker Ha Tae-keung said after attending a briefing by the country's spy agency that North Korea's regime was implementing strict rules on how young people dress and speak.

For instance, South Korean women often use the term "oppa" for their romantic partners -- it's now forbidden in the North. Instead, North Korean women must refer to their lovers as "male comrades," said Ha.

Propaganda videos in the country also denounce behaviors that show "foreign influence," such as public displays of affection.

Those who violate the rules are the "sworn enemy of the revolution," Ha said, citing South Korea's National Intelligence Service.

Last Sunday, the regime blasted foreign ways of life in an article in state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun, urging young people to be "faithful to the calling of their country."

"Struggle in the field of ideology and culture is a war without gunfire," said the article, citing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Without specifically naming South Korea, it added that losing the culture war would "bring many times more serious consequences than on the battlefield."

Clothing, hairstyles and language were "a reflection of the state of thought and spirit," it added. "Even if young people sing and dance, they should sing and dance to the melodies and rhythms that fit the needs of the times and the national sentiment of our people, and flourish our style of culture."

These restrictions may seem outlandish -- but things like slang, innocuous on the surface, represent a much more complicated struggle over power and control, experts say. And North Korea's tolerance for foreign influence is in constant flux, shifting alongside its economic wellbeing and international diplomacy.

WHY HAIR AND MUSIC MATTER IN NORTH KOREA

North Korea's relationship with South Korea has remained fraught since the Korean War ended with an armistice in 1953. No peace treaty was ever signed, meaning the war never formally ended.

North Korea had once been among the most industrially developed parts of East Asia, said Andrei Lankov, director of the Korea Risk Group and professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. But after decades of isolation, its people now live in grinding poverty.

The North Korean economy spiraled downward in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ended the flow of aid into the country, leaving China as the country's biggest trading partner.

By contrast, South Korea is Asia's fourth-largest economy, with a GDP per capita on par with European nations like France and Italy. Its soft power has boomed as cultural exports like music, food and beauty products gained popularity around the world.


That's why North Korea is so wary of allowing any foreign influence such as South Korean slang, said Lankov -- because it means "acknowledging that the alternative model of society worked, and the North Korea model did not."

North Koreans who adopt South Korean mannerisms -- fashion, hairstyles, vocabulary -- thus indicate two things, Lankov added: access to banned materials, and "an indication of admiration and sympathy" toward South Korea."

The potency of this soft power relies upon the vast inequity between the countries.

People are dying of hunger in North Korea, where supply shortages mean the prices of some staple food items are skyrocketing. Kim has acknowledged the "tense food situation," though he blamed it on a series of typhoons and floods.

It's not necessarily that North Korean leaders fear a mass uprising from a disgruntled public, said Lankov -- the regime is "brutal" enough to punish "everybody who will dare to open his or her mouth."

But rising knowledge about the outside world, and about just how much worse things are in North Korea, could erode the regime's legitimacy and its entire ideological framework -- similar to how the clamor for Western goods in 1980s Soviet Russia contributed to public disillusionment and its eventual fall.

"It absolutely does pose a threat if young North Koreans are watching South Korean dramas and seeing what life is like for Koreans outside their country, because they're seeing images of Seoul, of how well they're living, how freely they're living," said Jean Lee, senior fellow at the U.S.-based Wilson Center and the former Pyongyang bureau chief for the Associated Press.

And young people are the biggest target of the crackdown because they're "the most vulnerable to new influences," Lankov said. "Older people don't want change ... But all the new ideas are spreading among the younger generation."

POLITICS AND POP CULTURE

Talks between the North and South have started and stalled numerous times over the years -- and North Korea's attitude toward foreign pop culture appears to have relaxed and hardened accordingly.

After Kim assumed power in 2011, he initially favored a more liberal approach, said Lankov -- even allowing some Western music, and forming an all-girl North Korean band.

Lee, who was based in the capital Pyongyang during those early years, said foreign influences became apparent as the rules relaxed.

North Koreans would casually drop South Korean slang as a "sly way to hint that they were watching South Korean dramas," she said. Tourist attractions began to adopt English signage. Elite North Koreans were allowed to travel more, primarily to China.

But Kim soon adopted a more conservative approach, and began cracking down on USBs and other technology that could be used to smuggle in information, said Lankov.

Tensions escalated in 2016 and 2017 with a series of North Korean missile launches.

But relations began thawing after South Korean President Moon Jae-in took office -- by the end of 2018, Moon and Kim had vowed to formally end the Korean War and work toward complete denuclearization.

That same month, Kim and his wife attended a rare concert of South Korean singers and performers in Pyongyang -- the first time in more than a decade that South Korean musicians had traveled to North Korea.

The same switch happens in the South too, Lee said, where North Korean products and culture become "trendy" during times of diplomacy, and taboo when tensions rise. "It's the political climate that affects pop culture," she added.

But talks faltered in 2019 after a summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump fell apart, and communication ultimately broke down. By early 2020, the country completely shut its borders due to COVID-19, cutting off nearly all trade with China, its main economic lifeline.

The state of North Korea's economy often dictates its restrictions -- and with the country in increasingly dire straits, the regime isn't taking any risks.

In December, North Korea passed a new law to prevent the spread of content not approved by government censors; this February, Kim suggested greater controls on societal content could be coming; the following month, a North Korean propaganda website accused K-pop record labels of "slave-like exploitation."

It's impossible to say for sure what triggered Kim's latest crackdown on foreign influence in the past two to three years, said Lee -- but she added it could be linked to the border closures and extreme economic hardship.

"Goods and people are not going across the border, so they can't get the things that they want or crave, she said. "So what we know from this edict that was passed down is that they're telling their people, stop craving that stuff. And (they're) phrasing it in a way that's about North Korean identity -- let's get back to our tradition, our language, who we are, and not be so covetous of foreign things."

But, she added, things can change quickly depending on the state of inter-Korea diplomacy.

"The party is constantly changing the rules about what's acceptable when it comes to foreign content, and the people have to pay attention," she said.

The message now is: "There may have been a period where it was okay to covet these things, to crave these foreign goods. But it's no longer okay."

See Don Lemon's reaction when ex-Trump doctor gets upset with reporters

Jul 24, 2021

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) took issue with reporters asking GOP lawmakers if they were vaccinated, and said reporters should be asking the Democrats if they are vaccinated. A CNN survey found that 100% of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol hill have been vaccinated. Meanwhile, cases of Covid-19 are skyrocketing among the unvaccinated as the Biden administration continues to combat vaccine misinformation and disinformation. #DonLemon #DonLemonTonight #CNN

PS HE IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR, HE IS A NAVY CHIOPRACTOR; A BONE STRETCHER!!!!

SPACE TAKES A BEATING
JEFF BEZOS: HOW THE CLUMSY APPROACH OF A BILLIONAIRE COULD’VE GONE DIFFERENTLY
A miniscule tweak could have changed everything.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images/ Inverse Photo Illustration

ADAM MANN
7.23.2021 

A TSUNAMI OF DUNKS arrived in the wake of Jeff Bezos’ 11-minute rocket ride in a questionably shaped New Shepard launch vehicle earlier this week.

It seemed that large percentages of highly-online people were of the opinion that the world’s wealthiest man had just squandered enormous amounts of cash on a pointless joyride and that the reportedly $10 billion he’s invested so far in Blue Origin, his aerospace company, could have been better spent elsewhere.


@mattxiv


@cloud149


@OxfamAmerica

Even reporter Soledad O’Brien got in on the pessimistic hot takes:



@soledadobrien

The question is, did Bezos and Blue Origin miss an opportunity to better shape the narrative around their media event? And, if so, what could they have done?

Revelations that Bezos might only pay a true tax rate of 0.98 percent — far less than the average American — and his moves to squash unionizing efforts at his company Amazon, certainly didn’t help the matter. The cowboy-hat-wearing CEO’s own comments thanking “every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all of this," were similarly tone-deaf, drawing condemnation from U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others.

But in some ways, those issues are orthogonal to the matter of what kind of value a suborbital flight like Bezos’ can bring to the world.

To put it another way, there is one tweak that Bezos could have made to improve the public’s perception of space travel and science, which undoubtedly took a severe beating because of his clumsy approach.

It’s something that Elon Musk — who is, no doubt just as big a huckster as Bezos — does with ease, and claims an army of space-loving fans because of it: Musk merely often explains there’s a larger purpose at play than just a rich boomer going to space.

The technology developed for the dick-shaped rocket can be used for good here, and the scientific discovery and research that tech may enable is potentially good for all humanity.

“People didn’t understand why it was important that commercial companies replicate something government did decades ago,” Laura Forczyk, owner of the space consulting firm Astralytical, tells Inverse.

“I like to talk about how money spent in space isn’t really spent in space; it’s spent on Earth. All the technologies created in spaceflight are useful to society.”

Forczyk saw the jaunt in terms of its potential for scientific discovery. New Shepard has already carried experiments for universities, NASA, and private companies on previous uncrewed flights and intends to continue to do so. Along with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which has also started taking experimental payloads into suborbital space, a larger market could develop for research opportunities in this region, Forczyk says.


Yet Blue Origin’s ham-handed attempts at self-promotion haven’t always been the finest. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment from Inverse, sent what appeared to be an extremely petty tweet aimed at their competitor, Virgin Galactic, shortly before the latter’s launch a week earlier:


@blueorigin

“They were perhaps trying to point out, from a marketing standpoint, that their product and service had superior features,” Chris Lewicki, an engineer and space entrepreneur, tells Inverse. “In retrospect that was clearly a bad idea.”

Lewicki thinks that the misstep was relatively minor and likely to be soon forgotten. “But it creates a bit of a predisposition for people to be less receptive to the message that follows,” he said.

Perhaps Blue Origin won’t ultimately pay much of a price for such lapses in judgment. Research has shown that even negative word-of-mouth can increase public awareness of a brand and help sell goods, Jessie Liu, a marketing professor at Johns Hopkins University, tells Inverse.

“Compared to [Elon Musk’s] SpaceX, Blue Origin was born with far less hype and publicity in the game of space travel,” she writes via email. “So even criticism about Jeff Bezos that gets people to talk about Blue Origin and create awareness is not necessarily a bad thing for the company.”

There might be an opportunity for the aerospace company to identify and covert the most engaged consumers through negative word-of-mouth, Liu added, since such comments tend to stem from people’s emotional investment, and passion can lead to activity.

Though he understood where some of it was coming from, the negative commentary frustrates Lewicki: “There seems to be a lot of attention on two or three individuals, and a wish that they shouldn’t be that wealthy or that they should be using their wealth in some different way.”

Both he and Forczyk point out that the fact that Bezos and other billionaires aren’t paying as much as they might to the U.S. government in taxes is more a matter for legislators to try to solve, and that Bezos is taking active steps to donate parts of his vast wealth to causes he deems valuable.

“For me, it’s an opportunity for self-reflection,” says Lewicki. “If I’m complaining that Bezos isn’t using his resources to charitably solve problems, then how do I rank up with using my time?”

For us standing at this moment in history, it can be hard to know what future results will come from something like this first passenger launch of New Shepard. Comparing Blue Origin to Amazon, Lewicki says that Bezos seems particularly adept at creating never-before-seen kinds of infrastructure to, say, routinely deliver packages quicker than anyone thought possible.

In the end, the haters are going to say whatever they want about Bezos and his pursuits. It’s possible (probable, even) that even if Bezos was clear about the loftier ambitions of Blue Origin — “millions of people living and working space” is the tag line — the launch would still be received poorly.

But the billionaire’s passion for space travel is deep-seated, and Lewicki says Bezos has personally told him he’s never planning to give up on that dream.

“Right now, the message he’s talking about is building the road to space,” he said. “That’s the theme he’s employing.”

Advocates for space exploration and the advancement of science and technology can hope that the road to space is a well-thought-out one, with the no-good optics and naked commercialism of this past week’s 11-minute flight quickly replaced with efforts that more clearly serve the greater good.

HOORAH CAPITALI$TS IN SPACE

Space: the final frontier of tycoon rivalry

Billionaires who want to be masters of the universe may benefit us all

FT EDITORIAL BOARD 

Jeff Bezos is launched with three crew members this week © Joe Skipper/Reuters

As visual metaphors go, it was not subtle. Billionaire one-upmanship took on a new, disturbingly priapic form this week as Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, became the latest corporate titan to launch himself to the heavens. Bezos, the world’s (and now near-space’s) richest man followed Virgin Galactic’s Sir Richard Branson, who travelled to the edge of space earlier this month. But strip back the self-congratulatory bombast and the silly outfits, and this new, privatised space race should be welcomed. 

Last century’s space race was one between superpowers. The frontier of this century’s race to commercialise space travel is instead being fought over by magnates of multinational corporations. Arguably, it is neither Bezos nor Branson who is winning this race. While the pioneers of space tourism’s two companies jostle over who actually touched space, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has already become indispensable for delivering cargo and crew to the International Space Station.

Taxpayers may well see the outsourcing of space exploration to private companies as a good thing. Nasa shelved its shuttle programme a decade ago because the cost-benefit relationship no longer made sense. It took SpaceX to develop technologies such as reusable rockets that made those costs plummet, which therefore encouraged innovation and competition once more in the space industry, from which Nasa can benefit. Once budgetary constraints are loosened, teams are freer to experiment, and a virtuous circle is created.

Private wealth’s contribution should not be overstated: SpaceX dominates a formerly state-owned industry after receiving taxpayer-funded grants, and has developed a market where the government is a key customer. Space exploration more generally benefits from US government largesse as part of efforts to compete with the ambitions of China, which recently sent a rover to Mars.

Admittedly, the timing of this month’s rocket launches jarred, as much of the world suffered devastating heatwaves and floods. Creating a space-tourism industry for the rich to enjoy, which has taken 20 years, billions of dollars — and in Virgin Galactic’s case, the lives of four people — seems distasteful to many in a year marred by the pandemic. The post-launch thanks bestowed by Bezos, whose personal wealth increased by an estimated $73bn during the pandemic, on Amazon employees and customers “because you guys paid for all this” rang only too true, if not exactly in the way he had hoped. Many asked why the tycoons’ wealth could not be better used in solving more pressing terrestrial problems.

But this misses the point. The space race is not a philanthropic endeavour, or (entirely) a vanity project. Some analysts believe the space-tourism industry could grow by $5bn by 2025. In any case, for Bezos, space tourism is merely one step towards the giant leap of creating space colonies to take the burden off Earth. Meanwhile, Musk wants to boost “interplanetary life” and take humans not just to the moon but even to Mars. Their endeavours may ultimately benefit mankind.

What must be hoped is that these would-be masters of the universe listen to Michael Collins, who flew the Apollo 11 around the moon in 1969 as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their historic moonwalk. Days before his death in April, Collins reiterated how seeing the Earth from the vantage point of a shuttle window highlighted its fragility, and our need to protect the planet. It is not the size of your fortune that matters but what you do with it.

https://www.ft.com/content/532c41c9-0087-4fed-8168-078c8aed3f5a

 

Wildfire crews arrive in B.C. from Mexico as hot, dry conditions persist

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Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth welcomed Mexican firefighters Saturday

Maryse Zeidler · CBC News · Posted: Jul 24, 2021 

A wildfire near Kimmel Creek, close to Valemount, B.C. There are more than 250 wildfires burning across the province as of Saturday. (B.C. Wildfire Service)

The British Columbia government welcomed 100 firefighters from Mexico on Saturday to help combat hundreds of wildfires raging across the province.

B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth greeted the Mexican firefighters in Abbotsford and provided an update on the province's wildfire situation. 

Farnworth said difficult fire conditions will persist in B.C.'s Interior for the foreseeable future.

"We will see the other side of this fire season," he said.

There are currently 3,320 firefighters in B.C., including 94 from out of province.

Nearly 5,000 properties remain under evacuation order and more than 16,000 are under evacuation alert over the weekend as hundreds of fires burn across the province, some fuelled by consistently warm temperatures and strong winds.

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The B.C. Wildfire Service says there are 258 blazes across the province as of Saturday morning, most of them in the Kamloops fire district in the B.C. Interior.

That's down from 275 fires reported Friday and about 300 earlier in the week.

'No relief in sight'

On Thursday, the wildfire service said conditions are extremely dry in the southern half of the province and there is "no relief in sight."

The Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen Emergency Operations Centre continues to monitor some wildfires of note in the area, including the Nk'Mip Creek, Thomas Creek and Brenda Creek wildfires near Oliver and Osoyoos.

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On Saturday morning, the district expanded an evacuation order for two properties because of the Nk'Mip Creek wildfire.

The district also said the Osoyoos Indian Band had rescinded an evacuation order and instead issued an evacuation alert for six properties.

Environment Canada has issued a special air-quality statement for nearly a quarter of B.C., in the southeast, because of smoke from the wildfires.

Firefighters from Mexico land in B.C., heading to the Interior soon

Kathy Michaels

An unidentified firefighter is pictured in this B.C. Wildfire Service photo posted to Twitter.

Image Credit: TWITTER/B.C. Wildfire Service

July 24, 2021 - 2:23 PM

A contingent of 100 Mexican firefighters landed in B.C. today, offering much-needed aid to ongoing efforts.

"These highly trained crews will be on hand for 30 days working shoulder to shoulder with our wildfire service crews," solicitor general Mike Farnworth said.

"We can't thank these men and women enough for heeding our call for support."

After clearing customs, the Mexican firefighters are heading to a nearby air tanker base to undergo rapid COVID-19 testing and meet with BC wildfire representatives. Then they will travel to the interior, to get to work.

"The province will continue to do everything possible, as we have from the start to source additional firefighting resources to protect communities," Farnworth said.

Additionally, members of the Canadian Armed Forces arrived in Vernon to debrief and receive their tasks and more are arriving midweek.

It's expected that there will be 350 armed forces members on hand.

"We also have our province crews and resources from Alberta, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Parks Canada," he said.

"The details of these deployments are being finalized now and more information will be available in the coming days."

Deployments, he said, are coordinated through the Interagency Fire Center Winnipeg, and they are stretched this year given the number of wildfires in both Canada and the U.S.

Farnworth said difficult fire behavior and conditions throughout the Central and Southern interior are expected to persist for the foreseeable future, given the weather expected in the days ahead.

That is also taxing resources to house those who have been evacuated.

"In Kamloops hotel space is limited and Kamloops is not able at this point to take any more evacuees, but there are 21 reception centers around the province that are able to take evacuees," he said.

"We've been working with local governments to ensure that there is space in communities. So for example, while there may not be space in Kamloops .... there are places in  Kelowna and Prince George, Williams Lake and Spences bridge, for example."

He said there are also reception centers as far away as Chilliwack.

"We are working with communities to ensure that there is there enough space," he said.

Farnworth added that there are currently 4,100 people evacuated due to wildfires in B.C.

Sisters With Transistors: inside the fascinating film about electronic music’s forgotten pioneers

They turned drawings into symphonies and made black boxes sing. Why were they never given their due? The maker of a new film, full of revealing archive footage, aims to put this right

Turned down Hitchcock … Clara Rockmore, virtuoso of the theremin 

Photograph: University of New Hampshire/Gado/Getty Images

Jude Rogers
@juderogers
Fri 23 Apr 2021 

Wearing a black cocktail dress and a foil-bright silver headscarf, a woman stands in the corner of a drawing room performing The Swan by Saint-Saëns, while a group of men look on. Although the scene has a sedate Edwardian air to it, this is actually 1976. The woman whirls her red nails around a mysterious black box, making it sigh and lament, whisper and sing. This is Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso of the theremin, and her audience – all there to learn – includes Robert Moog, inventor of the synthesiser.

A year later, aged 66, Rockmore would release her first album, recorded by Moog, 35 years after she made her concert debut on the instrument at New York’s City Hall, where she arranged spirituals for a black male sextet with composer Hall Johnson. Rockmore also toured widely with the bass baritone Paul Robeson in the 1940s, and turned down a request to perform on the spooky soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound, as she wanted her instrument to be valued, not treated like a novelty.

Rockmore is one of 10 electronic music pioneers featured in Sisters With Transistors, Lisa Rovner’s debut documentary, released this weekend. Aiming to connect these women’s disparate, noisy stories, the film teems with spliced-together archive footage that recalls the mash-up style of Adam Curtis: nuclear tests and beauty competitions swirl around the many revealing clips of the musicians.

Composer at work … Wendy Carlos in her New York recording studio in 1979.

EARLY TRANSEXUAL FORMERLY WALTER CARLOS OF SWITCHED ON BACH. 

Photograph: Len DeLessio/Corbis/Getty

One of the first performers Rovner became captivated by was Daphne Oram, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who she saw in the 2003 documentary The Alchemists of Sound. Oram was a pioneer in making music from tape and developed her own compositional method, Oramics. “A quote of hers really spoke to me,” Rovner says. It came from Oram’s 1972 book, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics. “It said, ‘Do not let us fall into the trap of trying to name one man as the “inventor” of electronic music. As with most inventions, we shall find that many minds were almost simultaneously excited into visualising far-reaching possibilities.’ I wanted my film to show all those connections.”

We hear Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, Oram and fellow workshop co-founder Desmond Briscoe’s groundbreaking 1957 work, the first radiophonic composition played in full on the BBC, on the Third Programme (which became Radio 3). It was their first “attempt to convey a new kind of emotional and intellectual experience”. We then see Oram – a dead ringer for the young Margaret Thatcher – in 1963, having been awarded £3,500 (the equivalent of £62,400 today) by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Her manner is frightfully polite as she’s interviewed by a reporter, and almost apologetic. “I’ve got some little grasp of this sort of equipment,” she says, before introducing Oramics, which converts drawings into music.

There’s also a rare clip of Wendy Carlos from 1969, explaining her modular synthesiser to a French TV network, as well as 8mm footage of Pauline Oliveros that Rovner acquired from one of her old lovers. Oliveros is fascinating on screen and off. Born in 1932 and openly gay from the start of her career, she was a pioneer of the concepts of “deep listening” and “sonic awareness”. These asked the listener to spend time focusing on the depths and layers of sound, a concept Oliveros developed later in her career, recording in cathedrals and caves.

Daphne Oram, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Photograph: National Media Museum/Daily Herald Archive/Getty Images

“There has to be a complete change of consciousness throughout the musical field,” said Oliveros in 1970, calling for the teaching of “music that’s written by women as well as men as well as all colours”. She added: “It will effect a great change. Listening is the basis of creativity of culture.” Although she co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center, one of the first electronic music collectives, she’s not listed as such on its Wikipedia entry. (Its male co-founders Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender get top billing.)

Oliveros wrote a piece for the New York Times in 1970 titled And Don’t Call Them Lady Composers, focusing on the difficulties of women being noticed and taken seriously in her field. It’s still online and could have been written yesterday. “Men do not have to commit sexual suicide in order to encourage their sisters in music,” is one of many compelling phrases.

Some of them wanted to do nothing less than change the way people listened

Laurie Anderson

Rovner’s big coup for Sisters With Transistors is getting Laurie Anderson to narrate: the avant-garde composer signed up, delighted to hear that Oliveros and French composer Éliane Radigue would be properly getting their dues. Anderson’s 1981 hit O Superman used a vocoder and a polyphonic synthesiser and her delivery – knowing, icy and inviting – connects the parallel marches of technology, modernity and women’s liberty. “The spirit of modern life was a banshee,” she says, “screeching into the future.”



“It’s very interesting,” Anderson says today, “that a lot of that early work in electronics was done by women. Some of them wanted to do nothing less than change the way people listened, which is telling. They wanted to think about how sound could recalibrate our body and mind.” They also wanted to make their own machines to express themselves as music-makers and performers, as Anderson did. Her inventions include a tape-bow violin, which has magnetic tape where the bow’s horsehair should be, and a 6ft “talking stick”, a wireless instrument that can replicate any sound.

Some clips in Sisters With Transistors are more familiar, such as the much-played BBC footage of Delia Derbyshire explaining her tape machines. (A more inventive film about the composer – Caroline Catz’s Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes – premiered to acclaim at the London film festival last year, and airs next month on the BBC.) Indeed, the status of many female electronic artists has rocketed in recent decades: Oram’s name sits on a Performing Right Society prize, and her 1949 composition Still Point, written for orchestra and turntable, was performed at the 2018 Proms.

‘Don’t call us lady composers’ … Pauline Oliveros. Photograph: Mills College




Isn’t there a risk that by saying these women are still unsung, we might be discrediting the singing that has already been done? Or that we might be fetishising them as a specialist interest? “Some people know them, but others don’t,” Rovner says bluntly. “Plus their stories quickly get forgotten again.” Suzanne Ciani, who forged a successful commercial career in electronic music from the 70s, says this explicitly in the film: “It’s two steps forward, one step back. To this day, it irks me to turn on my favourite radio station and it’s just this male parade.”

Ciani revolutionised the sound of US commercials, inventing an electronic bubbling sound for a bottle of Coke, and became the first woman to score a Hollywood film: Joel Schumacher’s 1981 comedy The Incredible Shrinking Woman. “I didn’t know it would be 14 years until another woman was hired,” she says. “We are casualties of a day-to-day system that operates without awareness that we’re even there.”

This is still an industry problem. Hildur Gudnadottír was the first woman to win a best original score Oscar for Joker, but another composer, Hannah Peel, said to me recently in the Observer: “We have to remind ourselves the number of female composers [in film] is something ridiculous. It’s gone down this year from 6% to 4%. We need to know why.”

Because of the nature of the instruments, electronic music-making is often an isolated pursuit. Nevertheless, one artist featured in Sisters With Transistors, Laurie Spiegel, tells me how struck she was by the fact that the women in the film barely knew of each other. “How different would things have been if we had?” Spiegel studied composition in London in the late 60s but heard of Oram and Derbyshire only in the past decade or so. That said, she never thought explicitly about being a female musician. “It wasn’t about me. It was about the tech, the freedoms it gave me, and the musical vistas it opened up for me to explore.”
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Technology, says Spiegel, can be a liberator: “It blows up power structures.” The younger women who populate the film give weight to this statement – from producer Marta Salogni (Björk/the xx) who does its sound design, to such artists as Ramona Gonzalez (AKA Nite Jewel) and Holly Herndon who provide glowing voiceovers. Towards the end of the film, Herndon talks of the psychological thrill “that happens when you can see yourself in the people who are being celebrated”. As she speaks, you hear other women turning up the volume, powering up for the future.

Sisters With Transistors is released on 23 April via Modern Films. Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes is on BBC Four in May as part of the BBC’s spotlight on Coventry, UK city of culture.

‘It has never been more pertinent’ – Margaret Atwood on the chilling genius of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science

‘A refugee from within America’ … Anderson in the early 80s. Photograph: Leon Morris/Getty Images

The seminal album, with its extraordinary hit single O Superman, was unlike anything the writer had ever heard. As Big Science returns, Atwood pays tribute to its prophetic dissection of 80s America

Margaret Atwood
Thu 8 Apr 2021 

Here come the planes. They’re American planes! Musicologists and the less young will recognise those lines, which are from Laurie Anderson’s 1981 unlikely voice-synthesiser hit O Superman. This song, if it is one – try humming it in the shower – led to Anderson’s first multi-song album, 1982’s Big Science.

Big Science is being reissued at a very timely moment: America is reinventing itself again. It’s a self-rescue mission, and just in time: democracy, we have been led to believe, has been snatched from the jaws of autocracy, maybe. A New Deal, leading to a fairer distribution of wealth and an ultimately liveable planet, is on the way, possibly. Racism dating back centuries is being addressed, hopefully. Let’s hope these helicopters don’t crash.

I didn’t understand, back in 1981, that O Superman was about the mission to retrieve embattled Americans during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, in which 52 US diplomats were held by Iran for more than a year. Anderson herself has said that the song is directly related to Operation Eagle Claw, a military rescue operation that failed: a failure that included a helicopter crash. This catastrophe demonstrated that the American military-industrial Superman was not invincible, and that the automation and electronics mentioned in the song would not always win. The helicopter crash, said Anderson, was the initial inspiration for the song or performance piece. When O Superman became a hit, first in the UK and then elsewhere, Anderson claims to have been astonished. What were the chances? Very slim, you would have said ahead of time.

‘An eerie sound came over the airwaves’ … Atwood in the early 80s. Photograph: Wally Fong/AP

You can always remember what you were doing at certain key moments in your life. Such moments are different for everyone. Some of my moments have been attached to public tragedies: when Kennedy was assassinated, I was working at a market research company in downtown Toronto; when 9/11 struck I was in Toronto airport, thinking I was about to fly to New York. Some of my moments have been weather-related: witnessing hurricanes, caught in ice storms. And some have been musical. I was four, sitting in an armchair in Sault Ste Marie ineptly sewing my stuffed bear into its clothes, when I first heard Mairzy Doats on the radio. Blue Moon came to me sung by a live band, while I was oozing across a high-school dance floor in the clinch favoured in those days. Bob Dylan revealed himself to me in 1964, curly-headed and be-mouth-organed, on a Boston stage with barefoot Joan Baez, queen of the folkies.

Jump cut. It was 1981. Time had passed. Unsurprisingly, I was older. Surprisingly – or it would have been a surprise to me in 1964 – I now had a partner and a child, not to mention two cats and a house. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, and the morning he was promising for America was going to be a lot different from the new age of hippiedom and feminism we’d been living through in the 70s. The religious right was on the rise as a political force. I’d already had the idea for The Handmaid’s Tale, and was struggling with whether or not I should write it. Surely it was too far-fetched?

Had I known Laurie Anderson then, she might have said: “There’s no such thing as too far-fetched.”

‘Like something out of a sci-fi movie’ … Anderson’s album. Photograph: Nonesuch

So, 1981. We had the radio on while cooking dinner, when an eerie sound came pulsating over the airwaves.

“What was that thing?” I said. It was not the sort of music, or even sound, that you ordinarily heard on the radio; or anywhere else, come to think of it. The closest to it was when, back in the days of record-players and vinyl, we teenagers used to play 45s on 33 speed because it sounded funny. A soprano could be reduced to a slow, zombie-like baritone growl, and often had been.

What I’d just heard, however, wasn’t funny. “This is your mother,” says a chirpy midwestern voice on an answering machine. “Are you coming home?” But it isn’t your mother. It’s “the hand, the hand that takes”. It’s a construct. It’s something out of a sci-fi movie, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers: it looks human but it’s not human, which is both creepy and sinister. Worse, it’s your only hope, Mom and Dad and God and justice and force having proved lacking.
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“That thing” I’d been mesmerised by was O Superman. As you can see, I’ve never forgotten it. It was not like anything else, and Laurie Anderson was not like anyone else, either.

Or anyone you would ordinarily think of as a pop musician. Up until her breakout single, she’d been an avant garde performance artist and inventor, trained initially in the visual arts, and collaborating with like-minded artists such as William Burroughs and John Cage. The 70s – remembered not only for wide ties, long coats and high boots, and the ethnic look, but also for active second-wave feminism – was a period of high energy for performance art events. These were evanescent by nature, emphasising process over product. They had roots that went back to dada in the teens of the 20th century, to Group Zero, a late 50s attempt to create something new from the rubble of the second world war, and to Fluxus, active in the 60s and 70s.

Double visions … Anderson, left, and Atwood in 2019. Photograph: Hillel Italie/AP

Anderson’s large project in Big Science was a critical and anxious examination of the US, though not exactly from without. She was born in 1947, and was thus 10 in 1957, old enough to have witnessed the surge of new material objects that had flooded American homes in that decade, 15 in 1962 during a highly active period of the civil rights movement, and 20 in 1967, when campus unrest and anti-Vietnam war protests were in full swing. The upending of norms, for a person of that age, must have seemed normal.

But although New York became her cultural base camp, Anderson was not a big-city girl. She grew up in Illinois, the heart of the heart of America. She came by her perky Mom voice and her “Howdy stranger” tropes honestly. She was a refugee, not to America but from within America: a Mom and apple pie America, an America of the past that was being rapidly transformed by material inventions, and by the freeways, malls, and drive-in banks cited in the song Big Science as landmarks on the road to town. What might be bulldozed next? How much of the natural matrix would be left? Was America’s worship of technology about to obliterate America? And, more largely, in what consisted our humanity?


Laurie Anderson: where to start in her back catalogue

As the 20th century has morphed into the 21st, as the consequences of the destruction of the natural world have become devastatingly clear, as analogue has been superseded by digital, as the possibilities for surveillance have increased a hundredfold, and as the ruthless hive mind of the Borg has been approximated through online media, Anderson’s anxious and unsettling probings have taken on an aura of the prophetic. Do you want to be a human being any more? Are you one now? What even is that? Or should you just allow yourself to be held in the long electronic petrochemical arms of your false mother?

Big Science has never been more pertinent than it is right now. Have a listen. Confront the urgent questions. Feel the chill.

A new red vinyl edition of Big Science is released on 9 April on Nonesuch.