Eternals Character Causes A 250% Increase In People Wanting To Learn Sign Language

Stewart Perrie 10 November.2021

Makkari is the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first ever deaf superhero and her presence in Eternals has been praised.

Fans have gone wild for the super fast immortal because it provides visibility to the deaf community and shows how they can be included in huge blockbuster movies.

Her inclusion in Marvel's latest film has caused a huge spike in people wanting to learn sign language.

Preply claims there has been a 250 per cent increase in online searchers for 'learn sign language for beginners' ever since Makkari's character was announced.

Lauren Ridloff played Makkari in the film and is deaf in real life. She was overwhelmed to see how big her impact is on the world.

She wrote on Twitter: "This is great. Do learn sign language from Deaf/HoH teachers/content creators."

The actor added: "What would be even more amazing is to see Google offer up courses by Deaf teachers!! Best to learn straight from the source-people who sign daily!"

She was praised by fellow Eternals star Kumail Nanjiani, who is also Marvel's first ever Pakistani superhero.

"This is amazing. Look what you did Lauren Ridloff!" he wrote on social media.

Ridloff's co-stars all learned American sign language so that they could communicate and understand her on set as well as accurately portray their lines to her in the movie.

She also explained how she 'cried tears of joy' watching her co-stars use sign language on the big screen knowing that it was going to be seen by millions of people around the world.

Credit: Marvel

The actor told Variety: "It was definitely life changing. And I hope that this has the same impact on different communities, people who have been marginalized or are underrepresented in this industry."

Ridloff also revealed that an entirely new set of sign language hand movements were created for the Eternals script.

There aren't any ASL (American Sign Language) movements for some of the characters names, so Ridloff worked alongside her husband, Douglas, who was used as an ASL consultant for the film, to address this shortfall, according to Tech Radar.

She told the outlet: "[Our director] Chloé Zhao doesn't know American Sign Language. So we had to work out how we'd be able to direct the cast and what they [signing each Eternal's name] would look like on screen.

"Our ASL consultant happened to be my husband, who also worked on A Quiet Place and its sequel.

"He and I worked with Chloé to give those nuances of what looked good on screen and to come up with specific signs for each character, which the entire cast and Chloé could use."

Featured Image Credit: Marvel

Topics: Entertainment, TV and Film

EVEN FAUX ARISTOCRATS GET IT 
Duchess of Sussex calls paid family leave a 'humanitarian issue'

The Duchess of Sussex wants all Americans to receive paid family leave.


9 November 2021

The Duchess of Sussex considers paid family leave to be a "humanitarian issue".


The Duchess of Sussex AKA MEGAN MARKLE  has called for change

The 40-year-old Duchess - who has Archie, two, and Lilibet, five months, with her husband Prince Harry - discussed the subject during the New York Times DealBook summit, insisting that campaigning for paid family leave for all Americans wasn't a political issue.

Speaking to Andrew Sorkin in New York City, she explained: "I don't see this as a political issue, frankly. There is a precedent among my husband's family, the royal family, of not having any involvement in politics. From my standpoint, this is a humanitarian issue.

"My husband has always said with great privilege comes great responsibility and before I had any kind of privilege, I always stood up for what was right. I've been gone from the US for a really long time, I was in Canada for seven years then I went to the UK. I've come back and I'm a mother of two.

"The US is one of only six countries in the world that didn't offer any kind of paid national level. I said, 'let me put pen to paper and make some calls.' To me it seems like a really logical and obvious thing to do."

The former 'Suits' actress - who married Prince Harry in 2018 - noted that lawmakers are often "surprised" to hear from her.

However, she also thinks they've been receptive towards her.

The Duchess said: "I introduce myself - these calls are not planned calls, right - I just get the phone number and I call. Yes, people are pretty surprised, I think. This is one of those issues that's not red or blue, we can all agree that people need support."

She also insisted that fame and success hasn't altered her outlook.

She shared: "I still see myself as the same as I have always been. I've always been a hard worker, people that know me well some of whom are here today know that, I've just always been the same.

"If you are grounded in who you are ... I show up in the same way that I always have

THE NEW P3

Call it the new world of "spooky finance"

In Silicon Valley, a new breed of investors is seeking closer ties to America’s military and spy agencies


Zach Dorfman
·National Security Correspondent
Thu, November 4, 2021

The Eye of Providence, or all-seeing eye, on a one-dollar bill. (Getty Images)

A budding group of venture capital firms and investors are working with the CIA and other U.S. intelligence and military agencies in an attempt to help shape the future of Silicon Valley, ensuring companies produce innovations useful for national security while avoiding funding from potential adversaries like China.

Call it the new world of "spooky finance."

These firms — like New North Ventures, Harpoon, Scout Ventures, and Razor's Edge — are often themselves staffed by former U.S. intelligence and military officials, and sometimes work together to cofund national-security-related startups in areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and next-generation communications.

The new world of "spooky finance" reveals an increasingly tight relationship between venture capital firms and U.S. spy and military agencies, which have long sought to tap into Silicon Valley’s technology base.

“What you’re seeing, and it’s basically been developing over time, is an ‘intelligence-industrial base,’” says Ronald Marks, a visiting professor at George Mason University and a former CIA officer.

“You had a military-industrial base before — now, you’ve got an intelligence-industrial base,” says Marks. “Why? Because, let’s face it: All the intel stuff together now is, like, 86 billion dollars. It’s the third-largest part of the discretionary budget of the United States. That’s a lot of money; that’s a Fortune 100 company.”

Greater coordination between Silicon Valley and Washington’s national security bureaucracies is much needed, according to Heather Richman, founder of the Defense Investor Network, a Silicon Valley-based group that connects senior officials from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies with venture capital firms and startups doing work with national security applications.

The Defense Investor Network is focused on “educating investors to stop taking Chinese money and be more transparent about who their LPs [limited partners] are,” says Richman. “We’re trying to get to investors and the companies before this becomes an issue.”

Colleagues discussing their financial plans. (Getty Images)

Richman has also pulled together a network of private investors who work together to try to weed out any “nefarious or adversarial ownership” from foreign countries — particularly hidden Chinese investment — before providing financial backing to the startups, she says.

“We call it ‘cap [capitalization] table exorcism’ — we’re actually going in there and removing people on boards and buying them out,” says Richman.

Inevitably, investors have followed the money. The Defense Investor Network has members from all the countries within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand — and includes a former Australian prime minister, as well as behemoths from the Silicon Valley venture capital world, Including Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as smaller dual-use venture firms and family offices, according to Richman.

“I feel like it’s every week I hear about two more [dual-use-focused venture capital funds] being launched, which is awesome,” Richman says.

A military service member at a computer in a control center. (Getty Images)

In some instances, the dual-use-focused firms leverage their connections within the U.S. intelligence community to procure contracts for the companies they fund, since the firms’ employees have an insider’s understanding of the technology gaps that the agencies are racing to close.

“The side door or the back door” to the intelligence agencies “is where all the big stuff, and the stuff that’s most important, really happens” when it comes to technology, says Brett Davis, a partner at New North Ventures, a national security-focused venture capital fund, who spent 34 years in the CIA and special operations world.

If it’s a technology priority for them, intelligence agencies are willing to cut through the red tape. “CIA totally gets it and is comfortable working with private industry and has a lot of authorities to do fast contracting, small teams, due diligence, and get contracts in place,” says Davis.

While the startups are receiving contracts within the classified realm, intelligence and military agencies understand that the companies will convert some of the lessons they've learned within the government into their commercial technologies, according to Davis. Intelligence and military agencies will also co-locate personnel and other resources with employees from these startups, which can give the tech companies a leg up.

“You’re able to outpace the commercial competition, because you’re working on the hardest issues that CIA and JSOC are working on,” says Davis, referring to the military's Joint Special Operations Command. "So the company is benefiting along the way, and the CIA and JSOC, they want to be able to defray some of their costs by these companies doing stuff in the commercial world.”

Sometimes, the dual-use-oriented firms will identify military or intelligence applications for a startup’s products, of which the company didn’t even conceive, according to Larsen Jensen, a co-founder of Harpoon and a former Navy SEAL.

“We help to educate founders and their boards in terms of the scope and opportunity in the federal market, and not just in the national security setting,” says Jensen, whose firm has helped secure contracts for companies it funds at Special Operations Command, the Air Force, Space Force, and Veterans Affairs.

A stock market price ticker board. (Getty Images)

The big data analytics firm Palantir serves as a model for some in the "spooky finance" world. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s own venture fund for emerging technologies, was an early investor in Palantir, a software firm founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. In-Q-Tel has long sought to market its products to spy and military agencies and big business alike. Palantir went public in 2020 with an initial valuation of about $22 billion, although it continues to face scrutiny over its appraisal.

“Palantir is the 800-pound gorilla,” says Davis. “That’s the company that opened everybody’s eyes” to the potential value of dual-use-oriented startups.

“Those of us on the intel side, we were like, ‘This is completely intuitive and obvious.’” says Davis. “People said, ‘This came out of nowhere,’ and we were like, ‘No, it didn’t.”

Relations between Silicon Valley and U.S. spy agencies have come a long way since the 2013 Snowden disclosures, when many tech firms tried to create as much distance as possible — at least publicly — from Washington, according to Marks, the former CIA official.

“As they’ve grown older, they see [government] as an opportunity; it’s ‘We gotta work with these guys,’” says Marks. Tech firms realized, he says, “‘F*** you’ is not a policy, it’s the start of a barroom fight.”

U.S. spy agencies have coveted new technologies for decades. But many intelligence officials now believe advances in technology are fundamentally altering the practice of spying.

The push to give the U.S. a tech-generated espionage edge has become a key CIA priority under the directorship of Bill Burns. In October, Burns announced that the agency was creating a “Transnational and Technology Mission Center” to “address global issues critical to U.S. competitiveness — including new and emerging technologies, economic security, climate change, and global health.”

Burns’s announcement follows the standing up in 2020 of CIA Labs, which created an “in-house research and development arm” within CIA, designed to encourage agency employees to collaborate with academics and private sector researchers on emerging technologies.

A woman looks at financial graphs on a computer. (Getty Images)

The CIA has long kept a finger in Silicon Valley with In-Q-Tel, but in 2015, the Pentagon founded the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which also tries to identify and fund technologies with uses in the national security space. Since then, roughly half a dozen other specialized units within the Pentagon have sprung up to ostensibly circumvent bureaucracy and fund technological innovation.

But the national security-focused venture capital firms — with their access to greater, unconstrained resources — may be able to leapfrog even these government-backed attempts to slash red tape, according to its boosters.

And this symbiotic relationship between the U.S. national security apparatus and finance may evolve into a de facto sort of industrial policy, something traditionally considered anathema to U.S. free-market principles but garnering increasing bipartisan support because of China’s perceived advantages in government-backed research and development.

This was a driving force behind the creation of the Defense Investor Network, according to Richman. The network “​​brings together a trusted community — these two worlds [of U.S. national security agencies and venture capital] have to start working in lockstep together,” says Richman, or the U.S. will risk being overtaken by China in the technological arms race.

“The metrics are saying that within the last 8 to 10 years there are over 3,000 companies within the top five areas of national security that have significant Chinese investment, because that’s what they’ve targeted,” says Richman. “Can I remove Chinese capital from 3,000 companies? No. Can I take out the top five [companies] and [focus on them] over the next six months? Yes I can.”

Some national security-focused tech startups are keenly aware of the great power dynamics surrounding their work.

“In the U.S., we’re kind of evolving toward a whole-of-nation approach to economics and national security, which is something I would argue the Chinese and Israelis have aggressively embraced in the last decade and are significantly ahead of us,” says Steven Witt, the co-founder of Anno.Ai, an artificial intelligence startup, and a former CIA official. (Anno.Ai has received funding from New North Ventures and Scout Ventures, among other firms.)

A CIA employee works at a computer. (Getty Images)

Anno.Ai’s “genesis was a CIA program about four or five years ago,” says Witt. A group of former agency officials realized that, contrary to conventional wisdom, they had leapfrogged private industry on some artificial-intelligence-related capabilities while they were at the CIA, and believed they could take these insights and apply them commercially, according to Witt.

Startups like Anno.Ai market their products to the national security bureaucracy and businesses alike. The same AI programs that can help filter and interpret data for Pentagon agencies can be used to, say, analyze economic activity at a granular level within urban areas for real estate firms, according to Witt, who says the company currently has clients in this space. (On the government side, Anno.Ai is under contract with the Air Force; Witt declined to discuss the company’s other federal clients.)

“With the war on terror and investments we made over the last 20 years, we deployed so many sensors all over the world that are collecting tremendous amounts of data. If we hired every single U.S. citizen, we still wouldn’t be able to process all that data in a timely manner,” says Witt. “So building these machine learning algorithms out is helping identify things of interest while they’re still relevant.”

Anno.Ai is working on something called “multi-modal sensor fusion” — essentially, the development of machine learning programs that can collect and interpret data across a wide range of platforms simultaneously, with the different sensors teaching each other to recognize patterns and objects.

“In the machine learning space today there’s a lot of focus on video camera data, but [that’s a] really a human-centric view of the world,” says Witt. “In reality there are so many kinds of sensor types that can take advantage of machine learning capabilities, like acoustic, radar, lidar, hyperspectral, biological” and others. Anno.Ai is currently experimenting with roughly three dozen sensor types, according to Witt.

So the same technology that may be used to understand anomalies in foot traffic in a city’s downtown for real estate valuation purposes could, in theory, also be contracted out by a three-letter government agency to analyze patterns of activity in another country that point to an illicit nuclear program.

The U.S. Pentagon building. (Getty Images)

The focus of startups like Anno.Ai on appealing both to government and private businesses underscores a fundamental dynamic within the "spooky finance" sector: These startups, and the venture firms and investors who fund them, are designed to make money. Supporters see it as part of a larger wave of “impact investing” — in areas like climate change and energy — that evangelizes the idea that investors can do well while doing good.

“It’s a low bar” for investors, says Richman. “I'm asking them not to do bad for their country” by directing their funding away from companies with sketchy, and often hidden, foreign investment, and toward startups with a clean bill of health, she says. “I’m trying to shame them into acting appropriately.”

Richman believes that coordinating or nudging private investment toward the Pentagon's or intelligence agencies' priorities represents a necessary evolution in the relationship between the private sector and government.

“We need to be building defense capabilities outside the Department of Defense,” says Richman. “So if there’s a situation where it should be something solved by the private capital markets, let's do that; let’s enable that.”

US Literary star Viet Thanh Nguyen on the roots of identity politics

Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling 'The Sympathizer'

 (AFP/Martin BUREAU)


Alexandra DEL PERAL
Tue, November 9, 2021, 11:11 PM·3 min read


By offering up a new perspective on US and French imperialism, Viet Thanh Nguyen has become a literary star.

But the Pulitzer-winning author insists that reducing everything to identity politics misses the point about the horrors of the past, and how to move forward.

"I'm often called a Vietnamese-American writer, which I don't have a problem with," Nguyen told AFP.


"But I do have a problem with it when other writers are just called 'writers'.

"My books are not only speaking about Vietnamese issues. They are speaking about France, the US, and global issues like colonialism, racism and imperialism."

Nguyen won international acclaim for his million-selling 2015 novel "The Sympathizer" about a half-Vietnamese, half-French double agent during the Vietnam War, who later remains embedded among exiles in the United States.

He has followed it with a sequel, "The Committed", which follows the same character to France where he confronts discrimination and his own guilt over the violence in his past.

"The identity crises in France and the US are only symptoms, and if we focus on symptoms we don't understand the actual problems," Nguyen said.

"We wouldn't have these identity crises if it hadn't been for colonisation and conquest that brought these people to these countries."

- 'Painful memories' -

Nguyen was speaking to AFP ahead of the release of the French translation of "The Committed".

The novels have particular resonance in France -- the former colonial power in Vietnam, and a nation that has often seemed reluctant to question its imperial past.

"The French still have a really hard time dealing with not only the Algerian past but the Indo-Chinese past," Nguyen said.

He is sympathetic to these historical blind spots, however -- having suffered some of his own.

Born in Vietnam, Nguyen arrived in the US at the age of five.

He remembers little of his native country or the war, though the memory of being separated from his parents when he arrived at a refugee centre in the US has stayed with him.

"Sometimes painful memories can scar you forever," he said.

Nguyen blanked out his experience in the refugee camp for many years -- "as a survival mechanism".

"I'm fully aware that memory is very unreliable whether we're talking about personal or national memory, and every nation is deeply reluctant to recognise the crimes it has committed in the past."

- Doomed approaches -

Growing up in California, Nguyen found refuge in books and his own tentative steps at writing, though literature could also be a dangerous pastime.

"As a very precocious young reader, I would venture outside the children's section -- for instance reading books about the Vietnam War by American soldiers where the Vietnamese were depicted very negatively."

Those painful early encounters fuelled his later studies, and he has ended up specialising in postcolonial memory at the University of Southern California.

France's official approach to race is often contrasted with the US -- promoting the idea of universal liberal values rather than multi-culturalism.

For Nguyen, both systems are lacking.

"The French and American systems are doomed because they are both racist in their own way," he said.

"They cannot solve the problems unless they are able to address their history of slavery and colonialism."

adm/er/ah

 PATRIARCHY IS MISOGYNY & FEMICIDE

Azerbaijan activists sound alarm over wave of killings of women

Azerbaijani Dilara Bagiyeva says her husband abused her for years (AFP/Tofik BABAYEV)

Elman MAMEDOV
Tue, November 9, 2021, 11:20 PM·4 min read

Dilara Bagiyeva's face grew pale as she recounted how, after suffering abuse from her husband for a decade, he turned on their eight-year-old daughter in a drunken fit last year.

That evening in November, he returned home intoxicated to their 13th-floor apartment in Azerbaijan's capital Baku, beating Bagiyeva first in the bedroom, then the hallway and finally the kitchen, where he tried to throw her from the balcony.

Before the 41-year-old English teacher lost consciousness, she remembered her daughter Farah pleading: "Daddy, don't hit my mom."


When she came to, Farah was nowhere to be seen. Police who arrived at the scene shortly after refused to let Bagiyeva see the body.

"He dragged me out onto the balcony that night to throw me off. Instead, he threw my baby out the window," Bagiyeva said.

"She was my everything," she added, looking at a picture of her daughter on her phone.

Bagiyeva is among thousands of women subjected to domestic violence in Azerbaijan, where activists are sounding the alarm over femicide despite considerable barriers in the conservative Caspian Sea country.

Seventy-one women were killed in the ex-Soviet republic by husbands or male relatives last year and 48 more in the first eight months of 2021, the office of Azerbaijan's prosecutor general told AFP in an email.

The first Muslim nation to introduce universal suffrage in 1919, Azerbaijan is one of the most secular countries in the Islamic world.

But wives and daughters are often limited to carrying out family duties in its male-dominated society, which tolerates abuse against women.

- 'Fear of retribution' -

Officials said the approximately 2,000 cases of domestic violence against women that are reported annually are just the tip of the iceberg, as most victims remain silent.

"Many women don't phone the police for fear of retribution from family members," said Taliya Ibrahimova of the state committee for women's affairs.

The government last year adopted a four-year action plan to combat domestic violence that included setting up a hotline and a state-run shelter for victims.

Ibrahimova said a 2010 law to tackle domestic violence was being updated, and the violation would soon become a separate category of offence in the penal code.

But activists say the measures are not enough, and accuse the authoritarian government of President Ilham Aliyev of failing to protect women.

"Femicide is a political issue because tackling the problem requires political will," said Gulnara Mehdiyeva, a prominent women's rights activist.

She described Azerbaijan's political system as "despotic", and said the authorities "don't want citizens to know their rights".

Mehdiyeva said activists had come under pressure from conservative groups since March 8 last year, when they held their first rally to raise awareness of violence against women.

She said a pro-government website had even leaked recordings of her conversations with a friend "to portray me as a whore and to shame me".

There is a prevalent "negative attitude in society that accuses us of eroding family values", Mehdiyeva said.

The US embassy this year raised concerns over the killings of women, while the British embassy urged Azerbaijan to join the 2011 Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women and domestic violence.

Azerbaijan is among just a handful of countries that have not ratified the first legally binding international treaty to address the issue.

Azerbaijan activists sound alarm over wave of killings of womenDilara Bagiyeva says she will fight 'until my last breath' for justice for her daughter (AFP/Tofik BABAYEV)

- 'Until my last breath' -

The United Nations says Azerbaijan lacks the statistics to accurately track trends on women's rights, including on the pay gap and physical and sexual harassment.

But it noted that, as of February this year, women held only 18 percent of seats in parliament.

"Women lack the foundational representation in public office that would ensure that others hear their voices," the Borgen Project, a US-based women's rights group said last year.

Lawyer Zibeyda Sadikova said police "don't take seriously" women who report domestic abuse, but instead "shame and subject them to psychological pressure".

"Many women I try to convince to report (abuse) to the police say they already did, and the police told them to reconcile with their husbands, who have since continued beating them," she said.

"Most people in society think a woman must be locked up at home and her husband has the right to beat her."

She said the flawed implementation of government policies and gaps in legislation added to the problem.

"The government must fill such legal gaps, initiate an awareness-raising campaign, and ensure women's access to psychological and judicial assistance," she said.

Bagiyeva said her husband was at first only charged for beating her and not for murdering her child, whose death was ruled a suicide.

But she said a murder probe was now underway, and she had appealed to the prosecutor general and even to strongman Aliyev for justice.

"I will fight until my last breath, until my strength expires, to restore justice, so the truth comes out," she said.

eg-im/jbr/mbx/ah

Still fighting: WWII Warsaw Uprising veteran defends EU

Still fighting: WWII Warsaw Uprising veteran defends EU'

I'm a soldier, I tell it like it is,' Traczyk-Stawska says (AFP/Wojtek RADWANSKI)

Stanislaw WASZAK
Tue, November 9, 2021, 

Wearing a military beret and a Polish wartime resistance armband, 94-year-old Wanda Traczyk-Stawska stunned the crowd at a pro-EU rally when she thundered "Be quiet, stupid boy! You lousy bastard" at a member of a far-right group attempting to disrupt the gathering over a loudspeaker.

Despite her advancing years and tiny stature, the Warsaw Uprising veteran has lost none of her fighting spirit when it comes to defending Poland's presence in the European Union and migrant rights.

Tens of thousands of people had turned out in October in support of Poland's EU membership after the Constitutional Court contested the primacy of EU law, in what experts saw as a step towards a "Polexit" given the nationalist ruling party's euroscepticism.

"I'm a soldier, I tell it like it is," Traczyk-Stawska told AFP, smiling coyly as she took a sip of tea at her home in Warsaw filled with Polish and EU flags.




- 'Doughnut' -

Traczyk-Stawska was a 12-year-old girl guide when the German army invaded Poland. She joined the resistance movement and went on to carry out acts of sabotage under the sweet pseudonym of "Doughnut".

At the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising on August 1, 1944, she was one of 50,000 fighters to revolt against the Nazis -- as well as a rare girl with a machine gun, an assignment usually reserved for men at the time.

Over the course of 63 days of battle, nearly 200,000 civilians and fighters died and the city was reduced to a pile of rubble.

Traczyk-Stawska later passed through four German prisoner-of-war camps, before Polish forces operating in the Netherlands and Germany freed her from a camp in Oberlangen, northwest Germany, in 1945. Once back home, she worked as a teacher at a centre for handicapped children.

The last order she received, her life's mission, has been to watch over the cemetery bearing the remains of nearly half of the wartime dead found in the ruins of the Polish capital.

- 'A fly against an elephant' -

Remaining in the EU "is a question of national security... Were we to quit the union, where would that leave us?" Traczyk-Stawska asked.

"We already know what 1939 was like," when Poland found itself alone in the face of a two-front invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

"It's our greatest danger... We'd end up like a fly up against an elephant," she added, her robust voice contrasting with her fragile frame.

She said she was "furious" at the rally when she chose to call out the far right, who have received funding from the state and plan to go ahead with a march through Warsaw on Thursday, Poland's Independence Day.

The controversial march, which has drawn upwards of 10,000 people in past years and has often turned violent, has been the subject of intense legal wrangling.

"I got up on stage to speak of the Poland of our dreams, us veterans of the uprising... a Poland that is kind and tolerant," Traczyk-Stawska added.

She soon received death threats.

- Death at the border -

Traczyk-Stawska also expressed concern over how migrants and refugees trying to cross the Belarus border into Poland have been treated. Most are repeatedly sent back and forth by the two countries, left to wander around the cold and humid woods.

At least 10 migrants have already died, including seven on Polish territory, according to the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

The EU accuses Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko of orchestrating the unprecedented influx in retaliation for the bloc's sanctions over a brutal crackdown by the regime on the opposition.

The Polish government has adopted a hardline approach, imposing a state of emergency that bans journalists and charity workers from the immediate border zone.

It has also reinforced the area with thousands of troops and legalised pushbacks, even in the case of women and children.

- 'Shameful' -

"I am invested in the case of the children at the border. If we don't change our attitude towards these children, they will die," Traczyk-Stawska said.

"You can't abandon a child in danger. It's shameful to treat the border children that way," she added, recalling the days when as a 12-year-old she witnessed Nazis "entertaining themselves by firing at babies".

Speaking of the veterans of the uprising, Traczyk-Stawska observed that "we are all very old, on the verge of death. For us, this situation is a disgrace."

"We no longer have the strength to take a stand. All we can do is weep. Well, not everyone. Me, I'm not used to crying. I was a soldier," she said.

"But I regret that I'm so old and frail."

sw-amj/mas/gd/kjm

Climate Change: A Syllabus - JSTOR Daily

A selection of stories to foster dialogue among students both inside and outside of the classroom.

Credit: NASA
By: The Editors
November 9, 2021

The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, wraps up this week. We’re left with lingering questions. Are the biggest polluters willing and able to cap their greenhouse gas emissions? And more existentially: how long do we have? What’s going to happen? How can we cope? At JSTOR Daily, we’re constantly acquiring new content that looks at the climate crisis from different angles, but in the meantime, these previously published stories consider what the past has to teach us and what the future may bring. We hope it will help foster dialogue among all our readers, whom we consider students of the world. As always, the stories here and the underlying scholarship are free to everyone. We’ll be updating this syllabus and welcome reader suggestions for coverage.

Paul Gosar has a long history of posting unhinged far-right memes on Twitter
Jerod Macdonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror
November 09, 2021

Gage Skidmore.

This story contains descriptions of videos and images of a racially charged nature, as do some of the links.

Paul Gosar has stoked national outrage for a Tweet depicting himself as an anime character killing and attacking prominent political figures, the latest in a string of posts from the Republican congressman that draw on far-right and racist memes and imagery.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the House Ethics Committee and law enforcement to investigate “this horrific video."

The tweet in question is a parody of the opening sequence of the popular anime series “Attack on Titan," based on the Japanese manga series of the same name.

The series has become widely popular with western audiences and has also garnered attention from the alt-right community, which has latched onto it. Recent themes in the manga have drawn parallels with real world antisemitism and far-right politics in Japan.

The video, which Gosar posted on his official congressional Twitter account, has been viewed over 3.4 million times. Twitter has deemed that the Tweet has violated the company's guidelines for hateful conduct. The social media company initially left it up due to “public interest," but it was no longer visible as of Tuesday afternoon. It is unclear if Twitter removed the post or if Gosar deleted it.

The video depicts Gosar as one of the main characters of the show — his face is digitally pasted over the actual character's face — killing and attacking enemies whose faces have been replaced with those of Democratic politicians.

In one shot, Gosar can be seen killing an enemy that has U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's face superimposed on it. Later, he is about to attack an enemy with President Joe Biden's face on it.

In a quote tweet on his personal account, Gosar thanked his “team" and said their creativity is “off the charts." However, the meme appears to be a rip-off of a similar 2016 meme that cast former President Donald Trump as the hero.

An account claiming to be the creator of the video shared an unfinished video in which Gosar is seen as a character from another anime called “Death Note" in which the main character has the power to kill people by writing their names in a journal. Gosar is seen killing Biden, Osacio-Cortez and Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee. Gosar's congressional Twitter account follows the supposed “team" member account.

That same account has posted homophobic remarks, mocked LGBTQ people and said that they want to “end all immigration."

Gosar's office did not respond to a request for comment about the account claiming credit for the video. After an Arizona Mirror reporter followed the account, its owner blocked the reporter and made the account private.

The anime video that sparked outrage this week isn't the first video tweet by the congressman that co-opted far-right meme culture.
White supremacists and Groypers

Just last month, Gosar tweeted out and deleted a meme which has roots in neo-Nazi and white nationalist meme culture.

The since-deleted tweet, which was saved by the Internet Archive, begins with a cartoon image of a man looking dismayed as a number of headlines are displayed while the song “Little Dark Age" by MGMT plays.

Before the song crescendos, a buff cartoon with Gosar's head superimposed on it appears in a doorway before the cartoon character, and a montage of Gosar is played before another photoshopped image of the congressman's head on a muscular man is shown while a spinning “America First" logo is shown around his head.

The meme follows a format that is popular among online neo-Nazis and white nationalists who take the same song and superimpose it with images from Nazi Germany, as well as other imagery, the Arizona Mirror found.

Gosar's office didn't respond to requests for comment about the origins of the video or if it was created by the same “team" that created the anime video and other meme related content the congressman has shared.

Before Gosar deleted the tweet, some white nationalists and white supremacists on Twitter discussed its similarity to popular alt-right memes. One, for example, said the only difference between Gosar's tweet and “w**nat" content was the lack of an image called a “spinsun."

The term “w**nats" is used by the alt-right to describe people within the white nationalist movement that generally advocate for violence, antisemitism and accelerationism.

The “spinsuns" and “spinny wheel" that other Twitter users complained about referred to an image known as a sonnenrad, also known as the sunwheel or Black Sun. The Nazi party adopted the sonnenrad and it has become used by a number of modern Neo-Nazi groups as well as in violent attacks. The man who killed 51 and injured 40 more in New Zealand had a sonnenrad on his manifesto.

The most popular version of the sonnenrad used by white nationalists and white supremacists is two concentric circles with crooked rays that come out from the center circle and to the outer circle. Some sonnenrads have a swastika in the center or another norse rune.

The meme that Gosar tweeted did have a spinning “America First" logo around the congressman's head.

Gosar has also posted other memes related to “America First," a slogan popular among the Groyper movement and white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes.

Groypers are white nationalists and far-right activists who often troll conservatives who they feel are not extreme enough. Though loosely organized and members of many different groups, groypers are almost all followers of Fuentes.

One of the main goals of groypers is to push conservatives in a white nationalist direction, and one way they attempt to do this is to present their views in a mainstream appearance or within mainstream organizations.

Gosar spoke at an event held by Fuentes but later attempted to distance himself by saying he denounced “white racism" and said he attended the event to reach a younger voting base, according to the Washington Post.

In March, on his personal account, Gosar tweeted out a meme depicting a man soliciting a prostitute telling the man that $50 will get him whatever he wants to which the man replies “tell everyone America First is inevitable."

The phrase “America First" was used as far back as 1896 by President William McKinley, but it became prominent in isolationist and xenophobic circles in the 1920s when the Ku Kluk Klan adopted the phrase “America First" in the 1920s. It was later promoted by American Nazi sympathizers. And David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, would go on to use the term when describing his foreign policy platform as a U.S. Senate candidate.

“America First" has now become the rallying cry for white nationalists, like Fuentes, a young podcast host and the leader of the white nationalist group that Gosar spoke to earlier this year.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Sorry, Josh Hawley, the left doesn't hate masculinity — women just don't want to make you a sandwich

Amanda Marcotte, Salon
November 08, 2021

Josh Hawley. (Photo: Screen capture)

Because right-wingers are nothing if not unoriginal, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, is centering his likely doomed 2024 presidential bid on the played "feminists are man-haters" schtick. It's a bit that was long in the tooth even when Hawley, 41, was running off potential prom dates by sneering at their Lilith Fair tickets. In the era of #MeToo and the Texas abortion bounty hunter law, this "men are the real victims" nonsense is particularly laughable. Still, Hawley is digging in. And, to illustrate why he's going to get trounced in the GOP primary by Donald Trump, he's doing so by attacking two very popular American pastimes: porn and video games.

On "Axios on HBO" Sunday night, Hawley defended a speech he made at a gathering of conservatives last week, in which he insisted that liberals are trying to create "a world beyond men" because liberals hate "traditional masculine virtues" like "courage and independence and assertiveness." In response, the supposedly braver, more independent, and more assertive gender, according to Hawley, is "withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games." True men of courage, it's well-known, react to even the slightest criticism by pouting in their mancaves like toddlers throwing a tantrum.

When pressed on this by Axios' Mike Allen, Hawley doubled down, insisting that liberals are saying "your masculinity is inherently problematic." But tellingly, he was extremely vague on examples of either liberals saying this or even what he means by "masculinity." Instead, he just said, "A man is a father. A man is a husband. A man is someone who takes responsibility."

So the charge is what, that liberals are against men being fathers, husbands, and people who take responsibility? Note that it was just last month that it was liberals defending Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg after he took paternity leave to care for his two prematurely born newborn babies. It was conservatives like Tucker Carlson and supposed masculinity icons like Joe Rogan who were bashing Buttigieg for having the courage and independence of mind to shrug off their childish bullying to do what was right for his family. Indeed, looking at that whole incident, what is clear is that whatever conservatives are defending about masculinity is something, but it sure doesn't have anything to do with taking responsibility or being devoted to family.

As is usual with these reactionary defenses of "masculinity," what Hawley is trying to say is left deliberately ambiguous. As Paul Waldman of the Washington Post recently pointed out, for instance, "assertiveness" can mean all sorts of things, as, "Harvey Weinstein was certainly an assertive man, but so is Sen. Bernie Sanders."

It's also worth noting that these "masculine" qualities are hardly exclusive to men. It's doubtful that even Hawley is a troll enough to deny that women should also want to be courageous, independent, and assertive. Indeed, it's hard to think up a supposedly "masculine" virtue that isn't also a quality non-men aspire to have. Strong? Honorable? Competent? All also virtues in women and non-binary folks.

No, Hawley is being vague because what is being defended here is not virtuous behavior at all, but sexism and male dominance. The left doesn't have ire for men who exhibit good or pro-social behaviors. The behavior Hawley whines is called "toxic masculinity" is cis straight men who act entitled and abusive, in ways that range from being merely gross (like mansplaining) to being downright criminal (such as Donald Trump's boast about how he "grabs 'em by the pussy.") You're not really seeing a lot of feminists bash, say, Barack Obama for being a good husband and father. You do, however, see a lot of criticism of, to pull a recent example, Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports for allegations that, as one woman texted a friend, "I was being raped he video taped me and spit in my mouth and choked me so hard I couldn't breathe."

Hawley's little word games cover up for the truly gross behavior that he and his audience are feeling defensive about. Men who long for when it was easier to get away with sexual harassment and abuse can project that behavior into the term "assertive." But if confronted on this, Hawley will just pretend he's talking about men speaking up for good causes, which, again, no one objects to. "Independence" sounds great, until you realize that a lot of crappy men are hearing a defense of men like Aaron Rodgers and Joe Rogan, who think being "independent" means believing you know better than doctors how immunity works. And by "courage," it's hardly likely Hawley's intended audience is imagining the true courage of a young drag queen performing for the first time or the men at NBC News who turned on Matt Lauer for his alleged sexual assaults. It's men who want to believe they're warrior princes of the highest order because they brave women's eyerolls with their "take my wife, please" jokes.

That it's sexism Hawley is defending is evident in this porn-and-video-games talk. That's just a tired sexist trope, that men's presence in women's lives needs to be purchased with women's submission, and if women demand equality, men will reject them entirely. This threat of male abandonment has been leveraged to keep women down for, well, ever. In recent decades, however, it's lost some teeth. Women are no longer barred from having checking accounts and jobs, and so aren't in danger of being destitute for the sin of being too uppity. The premise that a man's value is so self-evident that a woman should subjugate herself to keep a man happy, which was treated as gospel in the 50s era America the right is so nostalgic for, has also lost a lot of its shine. Straight women are increasingly asking men to demonstrate real worth, by being a partner instead of entitled and domineering. Hawley is speaking to an audience terrified of having to actually step up and be something more than a paycheck with a pulse to women.

The grim truth is a lot of men — and unfortunately, their female enablers — believe female submission is men's birthright and are quite angry about changing gender norms. It's why Donald Trump didn't lose any votes on the right for bragging about sexual assault. It's why there's so much whining about "cancel culture" from so many straight men who are criticized for acting like jerks or bigots. It's why groups like the Proud Boys wallow in "tradwife" fantasies, wishing for the days when women didn't have rights so had to put up their crap.

The audience Hawley is trying to reach isn't courageous or assertive or independent at all. They are whiny babies who are throwing a childish tantrum because women told them to make their own damn sandwiches. Those men are plentiful enough to be a voting bloc, as Trump has shown. Still, it's doubtful Hawley will break through to them with his dismissal of porn and video games. The voters he's seeking want more of that "grab 'em by the pussy" talk when imagining the rebirth of male dominance, not all this needlenecked whining about "responsibility."

New QAnon-style conspiracy theory links Astroworld tragedy with supposed mind control experiments

Brad Reed
November 09, 2021

Travis Scott performed at the Astroworld Festival in Houston on November 5th. © Jamaal Ellis/ AP

A video that's spreading across Facebook is falsely claiming that the tragedy at Astroworld over the weekend was part of an experiment in which the crowds at the show were mind-controlled using "graphene oxide" purportedly found in COVID-19 vaccines.

The Houston Chronicle on Tuesday published a fact check of this claim in which it explained that this conspiracy theory simply has no basis in reality.

First of all, contra the video, there's no evidence that graphene oxide turns people in "zombies." Additionally, none of the COVID-19 vaccines contain graphene oxide.

"We previously fact-checked a claim that falsely said graphene oxide — a material made by the oxidation of graphite — was used in Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine," the paper writes. "A company spokesperson told us that the material is used in some vaccines, but none by Pfizer. None of the listed ingredients is another name for graphene oxide, and the material doesn't appear in ingredient lists for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines. "

QAnon conspiracy theorists have also been claiming this that the Astroworld disaster was part of a "Satanic ritual" in which rapper Travis Scott was harvesting people's souls in a purported sacrifice to the devil.