Using military to end trucker protest 'not in the cards': Trudeau

More protests against Covid vaccine mandates, like the one seen here in Ottawa last Saturday, are expected this weekend (AFP/Lars Hagberg)
Lars Hagberg


Michel COMTE
Thu, February 3, 2022

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday poured cold water on sending in the military to clear protestors opposed to Covid vaccine mandates, whose convoy of big trucks are clogging Ottawa's downtown.

The city's police chief, under pressure from locals weary of harassment and incessant honking, had pitched the idea during a briefing the previous day.

"That is not in the cards right now," Trudeau told a news conference, adding that governments must be "very, very cautious before deploying the military in situations against Canadians."


Since Saturday, Canada's capital has been beset by protestors led by truckers opposed to mandatory Covid vaccines for traveling between Canada and the United States.

By midweek, their numbers had dwindled to several hundred from a peak of 15,000 over the weekend, but they continued to make their case against public health measures loudly.

Trudeau, who's isolating after contracting Covid, said it was up to police to deal with them, but added that the federal government is ready to provide support from federal police and intelligence services.

At the same time he urged protestors to go home, saying locals had had enough of the "significant disruptions" caused by the protestors.

- Honking at parliament -

Outside parliament, protestors -- whose leaders vowed at a news conference Thursday to stay until all Covid restrictions are lifted -- strolled between the big rigs, Canadian flags draped over their shoulders and waving anti-Trudeau placards.

"I am here supporting the protest for my children," Caroline Leader, who lives a two-hour drive from the capital, told AFP.

"They're six and eight, and I believe they deserve full freedom, bodily autonomy. They should be free to move around, to travel regardless of their medical choices or status," she said.

Manning a grill on the street and serving pancakes, scrambled eggs and sausages to protestors, local resident Shannon Laurent agreed that people "should be allowed to choose whether or not to get vaccinated."

The so-called "Freedom Convoy" set out from Canada's Pacific coast in late January, with supporters along the way joining them for the 4,400-kilometers (2,700-miles) drive.

Bal Tiwana, from Calgary, lamented not being able to travel as much as he used to, due to pandemic restrictions.

"Me and my wife used to travel all the time, and now can't get on a plane or drive across the (Canada-US) border to leave the country," he said.

Since November, anyone traveling by train or plane within Canada or departing from a Canadian airport must present proof of vaccination against Covid-19.

- 'Fatigue has set in' -

Although most Canadians (68 percent, according to an Abacus poll) do not support the protest, it's clear that many are growing increasingly frustrated by public health restrictions on their daily lives.

"Fatigue has set in," explained Roxane de la Sablonniere, a psychologist at the University of Montreal.

In Canada, most measures enacted by provincial governments remain very restrictive, among the toughest in the West -- including lockdowns, a curfew in Quebec that has now been lifted, and capacity limits on restaurants, bars and other public venues.

"The majority of the population does not support the truckers in Ottawa, but there is still a significant minority who identify with it," Daniel Beland, a politics professor at McGill University in Montreal.

And it's much higher than the 10 percent of Canadian adults who have not received Covid jabs, he noted.

This upcoming weekend, the Ottawa protest is expected to swell again, while similar demonstrations are planned in other cities including Quebec City and Toronto.

"Our movement has grown in Canada and across the world because common people are tired of the mandates and restrictions in their lives that now seem to be doing more harm than good," convoy organizer Tamara Lich told a news conference.

"We will continue our protest until we see a clear plan for their elimination," she said.

Meanwhile in Alberta, a group of truckers and farmers protesting vaccine mandates at a border crossing to the US state of Montana allowed traffic to partially resume Thursday.

tib-amc/mdl

Shpongle - All Albums 1998 - 2017

All albums in Shpongological order! 7 hours of great psychedelic/psybiant music: 

-Are You Shpongled? (1998)

-Tales of the Inexpressible (2001)

-Nothing Lasts...But Nothing Is Lost (2005)

-Ineffable Mysteries from Shpongleland (2009) 

-Museum of Consciousness (2013)

-Codex VI (2017)

 

Shpongle Static Live at Ozora 2019 (FULL ALBUM)

TwistedMusicUK

Shpongle Static out now: https://shpongle.lnk.to/Shpongle_Static Follow Shpongle: https://www.facebook.com/shpongle/ https://twitter.com/Shpongle Sign up for the Shpongle newsletter: http://www.shponglemusic.com/

The Costs Of Climate Change — A Short Overview


Photo by CLEANTECHNICA

By Maarten Vinkhuyzen

The costs of climate change are multiple. This article will limit itself to a few big budget items associated with the consequences of burning fossil fuels and partly with forestry and land use change.

The type of costs of climate change are:
The costs of damage, health costs and cleaning up after the polluters
The costs of adaptation, living in a warmer world
The costs of mitigation, changes we have to make to live in a warmer world
The costs of transition to a zero-emission economy, aka as the mitigation of the ongoing climate change
The costs of a reversal of global heating to a preindustrial climate

The cost of transition must be paid now and in the next two decades ahead. This is what McKinsey recently wrote about and Steve captured in a few articles. Think about 10% of the Global Gross Product for the next 30 years. This is the cheapest way forward. Spending less per year and taking longer for the transition will rise the other costs with way more than what is delayed in spending on this budget.

The other four are our legacy to our children’s children and all generations after them. It is the legacy of this age of waste and abundance in polluting. While it is our legacy, we are starting with paying them now. That is on top of the costs of transition.

Damage: Health (including less cognitive capacity), pollution, destroyed environments, and abandoned installations.

We have started paying these costs decades ago and do not ask the fossil fuel industry to pay them. The health costs are now huge, but will decline when we stop polluting. The costs for repairing and cleaning can also be met after we transition to a fossil fuel-free world. The world will have a lot of cleaning to do. It also includes the cost of reforestation and reclaiming land for efficient, clean, green agriculture.


Adaptation: The costs of living in a hotter world. More people on less land. Desalination of seawater. Mostly vegetarian diets. Agriculture without chemical fertilizer or pesticides. Many at the moment unknown costs and benefits.

We have started to foot this bill. We are running our HVAC systems more often. We have to rebuild more houses destroyed by hurricanes and flooding. We have more wildfires. We must desalinate a lot of water to compensate for the droughts. Getting used to many new neighbors or living in different lands after we relocate over a billion people. It could also be over two billion people relocated. For all the MBA types among you, consider this the rise in opex caused by the climate change.

Mitigation: Building dykes. Building desalination plants. Relocating a billion people or more.

The sea levels will keep on rising for a while until a new equilibrium is reached. This can be decades or even centuries after reaching a net-zero economy.

The Global temperature will keep rising as long a new greenhouse gasses reach the greenhouse layer. The warming Earth will initiate a number of positive feedback loops. Most feared is the greenhouse gas methane from the melting permafrost. Another is less reflection and thus more absorption of solar energy from smaller ice caps around the poles and less snow and glaciers in the high mountains.

A new equilibrium will be reached. The temperature raises of 1.5Kelvin or more in the reports and Paris agreement is only the raise caused by direct human activities. How much more will be added by the positive feed back loops is yet not known. A higher temperature from human activities creates much bigger feedback loops. Hello Wall Street gurus, this is the capex for living in a warmer world.

Transition: The costs of using mainly wind, water, and sun as the sources of energy. It is the cost of closing all fossil fuel energy plants, replacing all fossil full heating equipment in factories, buildings, and homes with electric or other zero emission equipment.

It is making and installing billions of solar panels on roofs, above parking lots, in solar farms, and at numerous other locations our creativity can find. It is building large forests of masts with big wind turbines on top.

Making batteries, batteries, and batteries for mobile and stationary storage. A new transportation grid to connect the places where the sun does shine, and the wind does blow, with the places people where live without the wind blowing or the sun shining. A new distribution grid with about 5 to 10 times the capacity of the current distribution grids in the western world for the whole world.

It also includes building the mines and supply lines to produce all the new goods we need in this new economy. Retraining all the workers of the old economy to become productive in the new one.

And this is likely not half of it. It is also the most urgent. The faster we transition, the less we send greenhouse gases into the greenhouse layer. The less we have to spend on the other for type of costs.

Reversal: We have no real idea how to do it. Nor do we have any ideas about the costs. It could be more than the other four costs combined.

Or perhaps we just like a warmer world. Or the Earth likes a stable, warmer climate without mammals, like it was in the time of the dinosaurs.

Conclusion: The next generations will not thank us for our legacy — ask Greta. We need more children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren now! The robots can not do it alone.

Making children and raising them are the best part of most people’s life. At least that is not an undue burden.

An alternative take on our changing climate, from a leading meteorologist

Global average temperatures have changed over the years. 

By Scott Duncan • Updated: 29/01/2022

Scott Duncan is social media's favourite meteorologist. Based in London, Scott primarily forecasts for energy and power markets across Europe, with a heavy focus on renewable energy. More recently, he turned his attention to improving communication of key weather and climate events to those not in the scientific community. His work has received international recognition and has gone viral on several occasions.

Plagued with exceptional heat waves and record-breaking extremes, 2021 came in as Earth’s 6th hottest year on record according to NASA). But how does 2021 compare to various decades in the past century?

In order to keep track of our warming planet, climatologists refer to an ‘average’ as a way of benchmarking the progression of global temperature. The preindustrial average (usually taken between 1850-1900) is used to track temperature change since the industrial revolution. And the global average temperature for the year 2021 was approximately +1.2°C warmer than this preindustrial average - according to Berkeley Earth.


While this preindustrial average remains very important for tracking human impact on our climate, the pre-industrial climate average may be difficult to comprehend, given that it is based on a period before our time. As the climate rapidly warms, our individual perception of ‘average’ can change. There is often public confusion around the ‘average’ global temperature in which meteorologists and climatologists refer to.

The pre-industrial climate average may be difficult to comprehend, given that it is based on a period before our time.

Let’s explore some of the different climate averages (often referred to as ‘baselines’) over the last century and see how they look compared to 2021, starting with the last decade.

Comparing the global average temperature of 2021 to the 10-year average of 2011-2020 yields - a map that looks like this.

Graphic showing global temperatures from 2011-2020.Scott Duncan

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The red represents where 2021 was warmer than the last decade average, and the blue shows where it was cooler. There is plenty of variability across the globe. For example, 2021 was cooler than the average of the last 10 years for many countries, including almost all of Europe.

This doesn’t necessarily say 2021 was a cold year, the last 10 have just been very warm. Unsurprisingly, the nine hottest years in recorded history (globally) exist within the last 10 years and 2021 lies in 6th place.

Notice the red shading over Africa, Asia and especially North America. 2021 was warmer than the average from the last 10 years. Meanwhile Australia, Southern Africa and the Pacific join Europe as cooler than this 10-year average.

2021 was cooler than the average of the last 10 years for many countries, including almost all of Europe.

Cooler than average conditions can be closely linked to La Nina, a climate phenomenon that cools the sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific/ (link for more info: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/oceans/el-nino)

However, comparing 2021 to just 10 years of data doesn’t tell us much about a longer-term average. Meteorologists and climatologists usually use climate baselines running over at least 30 years.

Graphic showing global temperatures from 1991-1920.Scott Duncan

Notice the slight amplification of the reds and muting of the blues.

This tells us that the average of 1991-2020 is cooler than that of the last decade. Let’s step further back and compare 2021 to the 1961-1990 baseline.

Graphic showing global temperatures from 1961-1990.Scott Duncan

2021 holds very few places on the planet that are cooler than the 1961-1990 baseline. Many places across the world (including Europe) appear relatively ‘cool’ when compared to the last decade but are considered ‘warm’ when compared to the 1961-1990 average.

The La Nina signal in the pacific appears weaker with the only noticeable land-based cold anomaly found locally in Antarctica. Antarctica recorded an unusually severe cold season in 2021. Some of the most striking reds around the Arctic indicate rapid Arctic warming or ‘Arctic Amplification’ (link for more info: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/81214/arctic-amplification).

The Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the globe, latest research estimates that the Arctic has warmed four times faster than the global warming average rate since 1980.

Let’s step even further back…

Graphic showing global temperatures from 1931-1960.Scott Duncan

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When comparing 2021 to the 1931-1960 baseline, the La Nina signal in the Pacific has effectively disappeared.

Almost the entire planet is shaded red, flagging the fact that 2021 is warmer than the 1931-1960 average virtually in every country. Only the local cold core in Antarctica stands out on the warm planet.

Another way of looking at this climate baseline comparison can perhaps link our global warming trend to something more personal and relatable. Our grandparents and great grandparents would have rated 2021 an extremely warm year across the globe when comparing to a baseline from their youth.

Our grandparents and great grandparents would have rated 2021 an extremely warm year across the globe when comparing to a baseline from their youth.

Those of us born in the last couple of decades only have warm years to compare and rate 2021 among one of the cooler years in the last decade.

The fact that these climate baselines continue to warm, is the definition of climate change itself.

BC

Potential copper-gold deposits found in Prince George region

Geoscience BC hopes public modelling data will encourage mineral exploration in the region

Arthur Williams
3 days ago

A new study by researchers from Geoscience BC and UBC has identified potential copper-gold host rocks in the Prince George area. This map shows the 32,000 sq. kilometre area examined in the study, which was published on Monday.Geoscience BC handout image

New research by Geoscience BC and UBC’s Mineral Deposit Research Unit has identified potential copper-gold host rocks in the Prince George region, according to a statement issued by Geoscience BC.

The report was published at the Association for Mineral Exploration Roundup 2022 conference on Monday. The research was part of the New Porphyry Potential Under Cover in Central British Columbia project, and targeted the area between the Mount Milligan (Mackenzie), Mount Polley (Quesnel) and Gibraltar (Williams Lake) mines.

“These models and targets are the result of careful integration of public geological knowledge and geophysical data from central British Columbia,” UBC researcher Dianne Mitchinson said in a press release. “We hope that the work will spur exploration activity within this prospective part of B.C., and that it will provide useful guidance for explorers to make decisions with more confidence.”

The research identified copper-gold porphyry host rock hidden beneath a layer of glacial till - soil and rock left behind by receding glaciers - in the region. In some places that layer of glacial till can be hundreds of metres thick.

The copper-gold host rock is part of the Quesnel terrane, which holds significant mineral deposits in other parts of the province.

Researchers created a model, mapping the thickness of the glacier till overburden, using a combination of drilling, groundwater well, magnetic and gravity data.

“The results show high variability in overburden thickness through the project area, and numerous windows of thinner overburden 25 metres or less, where bedrock may be more accessible, and drilling less expensive,” information released by Geoscience BC said. “Geology inferred from geophysical models can help guide and prioritize targets for exploration. A summary of overburden thickness and land features that may influence mineral exploration decisions are included for each magnetic target chosen for this project and are available in the report.”

Geoscience BC vice-president Richard Truman said the project is a first step on the long road to commercial mining.

“It’s a long process to go from a project like this to an active mine. It can take 10, 20 or even 50 years,” Truman said. “If we talk about finding a needle in a haystack, this is about maybe helping locate where the haystack is.”

The data will also help regional Indigenous groups as they conduct resource planning in their traditional territories, he added. Copper, used extensively for electrical wiring and other electrical applications, will be a key resource as the world moves to a greener economy, Truman added.

Geoscience BC has been engaging with local communities and Indigenous groups since the start of the project in 2019, and intends to host a virtual open house later in February, he said. A date and time have not yet been set for the open house.

“Geoscience BC’s Central Interior Copper Gold Research projects are providing valuable data that focus and encourage mineral exploration and investment for metals like copper, which play an important role in meeting demands resulting from a transition to a net zero emissions economy,” Geoscience BC vice-president Christa Pellett said in a press release.

SOE HOK GIE’S DIARY

comments

The life of celebrated Chinese-Indonesian intellectual, anarchist, and activist

Jan 26, 2022

By Kevin Ng, from coconuts.co

Coconuts Jakarta

“I was born on 17th December, 1943 during the Pacific War,” Soe Hok Gie (史福義) began in his journal entry on Mar. 4, 1957. A rant followed.

“Today is the day when vengeance starts to petrify,” he continued. That day, he wrote about his geography exam score being deducted from 8 to 5. Believing himself to be the smartest kid in class, a 14-year-old Gie – as he was affectionately called – was livid about his score.

“An accumulation of vengeance goes into the heart and hardens like a rock. I threw away the exam paper. It’s okay if I am punished, but I never fail my exams.”

To Gie, the deduction was a grave act of injustice, as his teacher offered no valid reason for doing so. In a way, the entry showed Gie had a spark of intellectual rebelism about him even in his formative years, and how his unwavering fighting spirit led him to become a student activist during the Soekarno regime in the 1960s.

Gie’s diary, Catatan Harian Seorang Demonstran (A Diary of a Demonstrator), was published as a book in 1983. It has since become a celebrated must-read in Indonesia for activists and the general public alike. Gie wrote his diary and opinion columns for a national newspaper and student publications in a small, mosquito-infested dimly-lit room, according to Arief Budiman, Gie’s brother and academic-cum-activist, in the book’s introduction.

During his junior high school years, the legendary activist widened his horizons through reading, never constraining himself to any particular discipline as he absorbed everything from philosophy to classic Western literature.

Gie went to a Catholic school, where strict rules and order were a way of life.

“Most teachers in Catholic schools are dictators,” he said in an entry dated Feb. 14, 1958.

It was clear that Gie didn’t shy away from criticizing his teachers. In one incident, he retraced a debate that went down with his literature teacher over André Gide’s short story, The Return of the Prodigal Son. The teacher had argued then that the work was written by Chairil Anwar, an Indonesian poet and member of the “1945 Generation” of writers, while Gie was adamant that it was originally written by Gide and translated by Chairil.

“A teacher is not a God and is always right. And a student is not a cow,” Gie wrote at one point, casting suspicion that his scores may have been deducted because of his defiant attitude. He said that those who feel themselves to be beyond criticism should find their place in the trash.

Against the current

Gie may have been viewed as a headstrong radical by the powers that be. But he was shaped by the grim reality of his surroundings, constantly bearing witness to suffering among the working class. The post-National revolution era where Soekarno, Indonesia’s founding father, and his cronies seized power was to blame, according to Gie.

He wrote of his distrust of the Soekarno regime on Dec. 10, 1959: “I met a person (not a homeless person) who ate mango peel. He was hungry. This is a growing symptom in the capital city. I gave him 2.50 rupiah. I only had 2.50 rupiah at the time. Two kilometers from that person, our ‘majesty’(President Soekarno) is probably having fun, having a feast with his beautiful wives.”

After graduating from senior high, Gie started his journey towards activism at the University of Indonesia (UI), where he enrolled in 1961. As a student, he considered it an obligation to address social injustices. “The happy select few,” he described students. He also began to regularly write opinion pieces for national newspapers at this time.

Gie had a colourful life as a university student. He hiked mountains regularly and helped to found the first nature exploration club at UI. In addition, he and his friends hosted film screenings and discussions on national politics, philosophy, and more.

Gie joined a student movement against the Soekarno regime in 1966, raising three demands from the government: disbandment of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), a reshuffle of Soekarno’s Dwikora executive cabinet, and lowering the price of essentials. The mass demonstration was spearheaded by the Indonesian Students Action Union (KAMI) and other groups, such as the Indonesian Labour Action Union (KABI) and the Indonesian Teacher Action Union (KAGI).

The mass demonstrations began on Jan. 10, 1966, often descending into chaos until Mar. 11, 1966, when Soekarno authorized military general Soeharto to conduct “Supersemar,” the Indonesian abbreviation for Order of Eleventh March. Supersemar gave Soeharto the authority to restore order by whatever means necessary, triggering the eventual transfer of executive power from Soekarno to the general. Soeharto went on to rule for 33 years in what is called the New Order era.

Although Gie was not officially a member of KAMI and did not hold any executive power in the students guild, he was influential in planning a protest on Jan. 11, 1966. He believed that all students should reject political pragmatism.

Life under Soeharto was not better than under Soekarno, by any means. Military influence was immense and corruption was widespread. Many of the era’s activists became complacent, turning a blind eye to the injustices to cozy up to Soeharto’s government and help build a fascist empire. Gie, however, was steadfast in holding onto his principles and never held any political position nor worked for the government during his lifetime, taking a teaching position at his alma mater until the end of his life.

“It’s better to be exiled rather than fall into hypocrisy,” Gie wrote on Jul. 30, 1968. He was depressed by the political climate and thought there were only two options for most people: apathy or flow with the current. But he chose to be a “liberated person,” exercising his right to criticize former friends and corrupt politicians, naming and shaming them in his published writing.

Like his fierce criticism against Soekarno’s government, Gie defied what Soeharto and his cronies stood for. He may have been anti-Soekarno and anti-communism, but still advocated for the release of the founding father’s supporters and left-leaning political prisoners.

It was during this time that Indonesia went through one of its darkest periods in history: the commmunist purge of 1965-66, during which an estimated 1 million people perished. Troubled by the genocide, Gie actively sought to tell the world about its horrors. He flew to Bali to witness the killings himself and wrote an investigative report for Mahasiswa Indonesia newspaper in December 1967 under the pseudonym Dewa. He became one of the first to publish horrific details about thousands of political prisoners being held in prisons and internment camps, and the despair of their families.

For many, it’s difficult to determine Gie’s political beliefs, as he had never committed to any mainstream political groups. But it was apparent that he was, first and foremost, a humanist, as well as anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment. In Gie’s obituary written by political scientist and friend Benedict Anderson in a journal, Gie used to refer to himself as an “anarchist,” often saying it with a smile.

“I write in part simply to relieve my sense of nausea at our condition. Sometimes, though, I feel as if it’s all useless. I feel that all there is in my articles is a few firecrackers. And I’d like to fill them with bombs,” Gie wrote to Anderson in a letter.

Gie’s legacy

In Indonesia, it wasn’t (and isn’t) easy to be an activist, much less to be an activist and Chinese-Indonesian. Every Chinese-Indonesian may have been told, at least once in their lives, to stay under the political radar in order to survive.

As we have come to learn throughout the years, Gie’s activism made him a target of racial hatred. In one instance, he received hate mail that said, “What an ungrateful Cina, go back to your country!” using a derogatory slur towards the ethnic Chinese minority group.

Arief Budiman said their mother had often worried about the youngest son. “Gie, what is the worth of your actions? You only find enemies [and] don’t receive any money,” Arief recalled his mother telling Gie. At the time, Gie simply responded: “You don’t understand, mom.”

Yet toward the end of his life, Gie began to contemplate what his mother had tried to say. Before he died in December 1969, Gie shared his worries and desperation with Arief: “I keep thinking these days, what is the worth of the things I did? I write and criticize many people that I consider corrupt. After all of that, I got more enemies and more people who misunderstood me. And my critics don’t change anything. I want to help the oppressed working class, but the situation isn’t changing, and what is the worth of my criticism? Doesn’t it feel like a joke? Sometimes I feel extremely lonely.”

I’ve felt that same loneliness. Chinese-Indonesians are often considered outsiders, and it’s challenging when we try to make ourselves heard. When we raise questions and fight against social or political injustice, we become subjects of ridicule, often on the receiving end of unduly hatred. Then, nothing changes.

As a Chinese-Indonesian, I know I have the option to stay silent. I can be a model minority and keep quiet about the injustices happening around me, while preparing myself to one day become a victim. But it was Soe Hok Gie who opened my eyes.

I learned his name when I was 16, and then I read his book. He has helped me navigate through my identity as a Chinese-Indonesian, and showed me the injustices that persist in Indonesia.

Every day, I read his journal entries, which are relatable to my own experiences. It often feels like Gie knows about my feelings and problems, as a Chinese-Indonesian who often has to face racism and bullying – as if I’m having an honest conversation with a good friend.

I’m 21 now, and I still regularly read his diary. For me, it’s not just a diary, but a reminder to hope for a better future – that it’s okay to dream. He’s shown me how to fight and say: “Enough is enough. I don’t want to be a victim in this unfair system anymore.”

Soe Hok Gie’s life is perhaps a poignant example of human tragedy, one that may be described as poetic too. He now rests in peace in his favorite place: the mountain.

It seems that he had foreseen his passing prior to hiking Mount Semeru, where he inhaled toxic gas and died.

On Dec. 2, 1969, Gie wrote, “I don’t know why I feel melancholic tonight. Maybe it was the long nap. I saw streetlamps on the streets in Jakarta with a new color. Seems like it was diluted into a face of humanism. Everything felt romantic but empty. I felt like I was liberated… A strong loving feeling dominated me. I want to give this love to every human, dog, and everything.”

“Tonight is so strange. This feeling is not a common feeling for me.”

On Mount Semeru sits a placard dedicated to Gie and Idhan Lubis, a friend who had also passed away during the hike.

Gie died one day before his birthday on Dec. 16, 1969. He was 26.

Gie had once considered what it means to die at a young age, writing down the following entry on Jan. 22, 1965.

“A Greek philosopher once said that the most well-fated destiny is not to be born, the second is to die young, and the worst is to age. I kind of agree with this. Be happy for those who die young.

Small creatures come back.

From nothingness to nothingness.

Be happy in your nothingness.”

I believe Soe Hok Gie has found his joy, while his spirit lingers to this day, standing up for the oppressed through all of us who dare to stand up against injustice

25 YEARS AGO, CHUMBAWAMBA SMUGGLED ANARCHIST IDEALS ONTO THE U.S. POP CHARTS

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01

2022

10comments

By thecollective

By Mike Vanderbilt, via The A.V. Club

Everyone remembers where they were when they learned that Chumbawamba was more than a ‘90s one-hit-wonder and actually a long-running anarcho-communist punk band with a loyal following in jolly ol’ England; it may even be happening to you right now! Mel Magazine is marking the 25th anniversary of 1997 and wrote about the alcohol-propelled Trojan horse that was “Tubthumping,” a song that brought the band’s subversive politics to the top of the Billboard Alternative charts and provided the pop culture zeitgeist with one of the most memorable choruses of the decade.

It’s a rock ‘n’ roll tale as old as time: a band that has been working at it for years decides their next album needs to be hit they’ve been searching for or they’re packing it in. And then, through the grace of A&R—or maybe just luck—they finally score the chartbuster of their career with a tune that steps outside of their comfort zone and might even alienate their long-time fans.

Chumbawamba had experimented in punk, ska, folk, and electronica, but “Tubthumping” was pure pop from the songwriting to the production with horns, hooks, and an anthemic chorus quite literally meant to be sung at the top of your lungs in a crowded bar. But underneath the surface, the band remained true to its roots with lyrics conveying a deeper message of the workers “surviving the daily grind” as explained by band member Alice Nutter to CNN 1997. “Tubthumping” would debut at #2 on the UK Singles Chart in August of 1997 and would overtake the states over the following months, hitting #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 that November.

“We decided to use the situation to our own ends. At that time, we thought, ‘What can we do with this,” explains lead vocalist Dunstan Bruce. “The song itself is evidence of the fact that if you can find ways to invade your way into culture—you can use that as a kind of smokescreen to say the other stuff that you want to say.”

Chumbawamba did just that, like a merry gang of anarchist pranksters, they weaponized their success to bring to light their political and social beliefs and take on major corporations through the power of pop music.

The band replaced the lyrics of “Tubthumping” to “Free Mumia Abu-Jamal” on a Late Show performance, encouraged people to steal their album from Virgin Megastores on Politically Incorrect, and (this writer’s personal favorite) allowed General Motors to play a song of theirs in a car commercial and then donated all their profits to anti-GM groups. “They were incredibly subversive, but they also were trolls,” explains Chumbawamba enthusiast and Eve 6 singer, Max Collins. Not all trolls are bad.

Chumbawamba called it quits in 2012, performing their final show at Leeds City Varieties on Halloween night and Bruce is currently in production on a documentary on the band due out later this year.

These days, countless copies of Tubthumper line used CD stores across the country while the real message of “Tubthumping” is still lost on nostalgic 40-somethings on their fifth or sixth whiskey drink, vodka drink, lager drink, or cider drink.

via Mel Magazine

HOW CHUMBAWAMBA TRICKED EVERYONE INTO THINKING ‘TUBTHUMPING’ WAS A POP SONG

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2022

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By thecollective

by Magdalene Taylor, via Mel Magazine

2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the year that everything happened — 1997. It was an ear-biting, Pierce Brosnan-loving, comet-obsessed world, and we’re here to relive every minute of it. Twice a week over the next 12 months, we will take you back to the winter of sheep cloning and the summer of Con Air. Come for the Chumbawamba, and stay for the return of the Mack.

Somewhere in the depths of my childhood bedroom — maybe on a shelf in the closet, or stashed in a little ceramic jewelry box atop a dresser — is a cerulean, second-generation iPod Nano. On that iPod Nano, one might find various Good Charlotte songs misattributed to blink-182, and vice versa. On that pop-punk mix, however, one would also find a track that, with its raucous horns and frat-boy style chanting, didn’t sound quite like the rest: “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba.

I was a year old when the song was first released in 1997, and I surely caught blips of it throughout my childhood. But it wasn’t until age 12, when I watched the 2009 movie Fired Up!, that I became perpetually hooked. In it, the female protagonist’s douchebag boyfriend sings along to the song with his similarly douchebaggy friends. “Awesome song, Chumbawamba. That’s the soundtrack to my life,” he says. I promptly downloaded the song on Limewire. In the context of the movie, “Tubthumping” didn’t seem all that cool, but god, was it catchy. More than that, though, it was uplifting. Who doesn’t need a good dose of encouragement? Even as a preteen, I did get knocked down, plenty. And I would get back up again. I wouldn’t let anyone ever keep me down, and I would keep listening to “Tubthumping” as a reminder of that.

Honestly, even 25 years later, everyone can still sing along to “Tubthumping” (on global music charts, “Tubthumping” reached number two in the U.K., number six on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and number one in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy and New Zealand). It’s a song so persistent, so repetitive and so unwilling to not exist that we all know the words.

Yet, there’s little the general public can recite about Chumbawamba. After “Tubthumping,” they were scarcely heard from, so most of the world never got to know the band who had made such a ubiquitous song. It’s worth telling their story, though. Because despite their relative obscurity, one fact remains: Chumbawamba is the most outwardly anarchist group to ever sneak their radical leftist messages into mainstream consciousness via the slick camouflage of a Top 40 pop song.

“The song has become part of popular culture, and that’s been an incredibly powerful thing for us,” Dunstan Bruce, lead vocalist of Chumbawamba, tells me. “We were never interested in the career of a successful band. We just wanted to live in the moment.” Now 61, Bruce lives in Brighton, England, and was a founding member of Chumbawamba back in 1982. He’s since traded his bleach blond hair for grey and his 1990s flannels for suits in the style of David Byrne. But his anarchist ideology remains the same. I Get Knocked Down, his forthcoming documentary on the band, and his own artistic future, is due sometime later this year.

As Bruce explains in the documentary, Chumbawamba spent 15 years as active members of the music and counterculture scene around the working-class town of Leeds, where the band lived together in a squat house. They worked as little as possible, sharing resources amongst each other while participating in miner’s strikes and protests like Stop the City, an anti-military demonstration that took place in London in 1983 and 1984. Much of their music was explicitly political in nature, exploring topics like anti-fascism, union strikes and animal welfare. In terms of sound, their work is best described as experimental, crossing the boundaries of punk into folk, ska and even electronica. The list of instruments played by members includes everything from the flugelhorn to the turntable. But with “Tubthumping,” the band seemed to want to stumble into popular music. It was all an experiment — they just wanted to see if they could.

“They were overt anarchists,” says Max Collins, lead singer of Eve 6 and a prominent Chumbawamba defender on Twitter (his song “Inside Out” hit the Billboard Hot 100 in 1998). “Politically, they were on the left of the left at a time when that really wasn’t on people’s radar. They were incredibly subversive, but they also were trolls.”

By “trolls,” Collins is referring to the ways in which Chumbawamba managed to dabble in a variety of genres without ever taking any of them too seriously. By 1997, the band had seven albums to their name. In that time, they messed around as punks, as a ska group and as pop performers, all while continuing the real work of anarchism. At one point, they even snuck their way onto an Oi! compilation album under the name Skin Disease with a track that only featured the lyric “I’m thick” repeated over and over, seemingly just for the hell of it.

But “Tubthumping” was different. Although the element of repetition remained, the lyrics were more like an optimistic mantra surrounded by boisterous trumpets, glittering guitars and subtle techno beats — it was gleeful Top of the Pops stuff, not a hardcore, harsh sound. “That song worked on a couple of different levels,” says Collins. “It was an undeniable smash of a feel-good song at the surface, while simultaneously being an anthem for the working class.” CNN immediately clocked it as such, though many others cited it as a dumb, if not catchy, song about drinking.

Bruce’s attitude toward the intentionality of “Tubthumping”’s success is mixed. On the one hand, he says it was a complete accident that the song blew up. On the other hand, the song was kind of a last-ditch effort for the group — it was either find success with this, or give up. But once “Tubthumping” somehow found an audience, they took every advantage of every ounce of fame it brought.

“When the song went mainstream and became a massive hit, we had to make a decision about whether to go along with it and use that situation to do something creative and worthwhile,” says Bruce. “We decided to use the situation to our own ends. At that time, we thought, ‘What can we do with this?’ The song itself is evidence of the fact that if you can find ways to invade your way into culture — you can use that as a kind of smokescreen to say the other stuff that you want to say.” Even the song’s title snuck that message in — ”tubthumping” is another word for aggressive political protest.

With that, “Tubthumping,” a goofy, anthemic, horn-filled pop song, became Chumbawamba’s Trojan horse for spreading leftism to the masses. Its popularity gave them the chance to pull outlandish stunts and make controversial, wide-reaching public statements that spread their gospel. Case in point: In 1997, they famously announced that they liked it when cops are killed, saying, “We mean that. You choose sides, don’t you?” On Letterman, they replaced the lyrics of “Tubthumping” to say “Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,” and at the BRIT Awards, they voiced support for the Liverpool Dockworkers Union. At that same event, drummer Danbert Nobacon dumped water on the U.K.’s Deputy Prime Minister. They made no concessions about their politics, no apologies for their statements. Of course, they did have to sign to EMI Records, despite having previously contributed to an indie compilation album titled Fuck EMI due to the label’s links to weapons manufacturing. But this was one of the necessary hoops to jump through in order to get messages of anarchism out into the world — or so they told themselves.

“There’s an interesting line here in the anarchist-outsider-to-mainstream pipeline,” Steve Albini, a musician and producer best known for his work with Nirvana and Pixies, tells me. He compares Chumbawamba to musician Derek Birkett of the group Flux of Pink Indians, now manager of the label One Little Independent Records, to which Chumbawamba was once signed. According to Albini, One Little Independent Records is now “a huge music conglomerate,” having lost many of the anarchist values Birkett and the label claim to have held.

“There’s the argument that broadly appealing commercial music can ‘smuggle’ progressive ideas into mainstream culture,” Albini says. “I’ve always been suspicious of this idea, as it’s a convenient cover for the more conventional aspirations of making good money and being generally popular. I don’t think Birkett has acquitted himself well in this regard. Chumbawamba, on the other hand, had made more pop-and-dance-inflected music within the underground prior to their breakthrough hit, and they wear the populist mantle a little more cleanly.”

The fact that Chumbawamba didn’t have continued commercial success or latch on to the mainstream music industry in any major way only further establishes their bona fides as legitimate anarchists — and again, while other bands like the Sex Pistols or Black Flag seemed willing to give up their politics for these “conventional aspirations,” Chumbawamba never was. Instead, Albini points out, they used the money they made to support anti-corporate groups like Indymedia and CorpWatch, and to “help underwrite their friends’ unprofitable projects.”

In other words, they put their newfound cash where their mouth was. Sometimes, they even forced corporations to do the same. In 2002, they allowed General Motors to use their music for a Pontiac spot, only to turn around and donate all the profits to anti-GM groups. They also turned down $1.5 million from Nike and announced on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect that anyone who couldn’t afford their album should steal it from a megastore.

All of which might also explain why we didn’t hear from Chumbawamba much after that. Once their agenda became clear, they seemed to go silent. And though they weren’t censored or “canceled” as we know it today, they were never given the same platform after “Tubthumping.” They got in, spread their message and got out.

The attachment to “Tubthumping,” however, has never wavered. The song has 145 million listens on Spotify alone, and a still-active comments section on the official YouTube listing. During the pandemic, the song also became a renewed anthem for the historically working-class city of Leeds.

Bruce, though, chalks up such longevity to something far different than politics. “The message appears to be very much about drinking,” he points out. He’s absolutely correct. The lyrics “He drinks a whiskey drink / He drinks a vodka drink / He drinks a lager drink / He drinks a cider drink / He sings the songs that remind him of the good times / He sings the songs that remind him of the best times,” describes the situation many people find themselves in when they hear the song — drunk in a dive bar, singing along.

The thing is, a song about drinking and a song about the working class aren’t antithetical. The pub has always been a locus of worker camaraderie, and drinking songs are practically their own genre of working-class folk music. “99 Bottles of Beer” is one of the sillier examples, with its emphasis on communal singing giving it the same sort of “all-for-one” feeling “Tubthumping” conveys. Songs like these represent the voice of the common man, his woes mirrored in hordes of comrades who sing and drink to escape the crush of oppression. “It has an implicit class consciousness,” Bruce explains. “I don’t think that song has middle-class intentions, at all.”

“It’s not a song for the rich, really,” band member Alice Nutter said in 1997. “[It’s] all about surviving the daily grind, but doing it with dignity.”

The other thing is — at least in terms of “Tubthumping”’s continued relevance — left-leaning politics are now a part of mainstream political discourse. “People [now] are more amenable to ideas like Chumbawamba’s,” explains Collins. “In the late 1990s, even for people who fancied themselves as ‘left-leaning,’ the word ‘communist’ might have been a bridge too far. But not so much anymore. Not even the most cynical conservative in the late 1990s could have predicted the amount of wealth such a tiny few would hold while the cost of living and income stays stagnant for everyone else. We’re not at a critical mass yet, but these things have certainly moved the needle in more people being amenable to the ideas of leftism.”

And so, perhaps now more than ever, we need a song about the resistance and resilience of the working class. We need “Tubthumping” as a reminder of the radical potentials of camaraderie — maybe only then we can escape the tyranny of capitalism and the One Percent.

In the end, the answer to the staying power of “Tubthumping” after 25 years is right there in the chorus: It might get knocked down, but it will get back up again. The rest of us will, too — the workers of the world and the oppressed and the subjugated, or maybe even just the 12-year-olds who need an extra push of confidence.