Letters to the Editor: Vaccine mandates work, even for tantrum-throwing Canadian truckers

Sun, February 20, 2022


A demonstrator gestures as he stands before trucks during a protest by truck drivers over pandemic health rules in Ottawa, Canada, on Feb. 11. (Ed Jones / AFP)

To the editor: Columnist Jonah Goldberg parrots the typical Republican's COVID-19 vaccine stance when he says he personally is all for the vaccine, but there's no sense mandating it where only 20% remain unvaccinated. ("American reactions to Canada's trucker protests shows how much our politics have changed," Opinion, Feb. 15)

Memo to Goldberg: Achieving herd immunity from COVID-19 may require at least a 90% vaccination rate, along with periodic booster shots for years to come.

History provides a compelling example of how vaccine mandates help attain herd immunity.


In 1979, after suffering periodic measles outbreaks in schools despite having a childhood vaccine mandate, Mississippi, with the nation's most religious populace, rescinded religious exemptions. As a result, the schoolkids' vaccination rate vaulted to more than 99%, thereby preventing measles outbreaks.

That helps explain why residents of red states, with higher percentages of anti-vaxxers than blue states, are far more likely to suffer COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths. Plain and simple, vaccine mandates work.

Edward Alston, Santa Maria

..

To the editor: Goldberg has ample cause to contend that "neither side is right" in the raging culture war generally, and Canada's trucker protests in particular. But his criticism of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau falls flat.

Goldberg chastises Trudeau for citing a "smattering of ugly flags" among the protesting truckers as a guilt-by-association ploy. Au contraire. Any protest group that allows even a single Confederate banner should be denounced for abiding such an abject racist symbol, one that progressives would never allow in their demonstrations.

Sure, displaying Black Lives Matter signs in protests that have no significant connection to racial issues may be a progressive overreach, though relatively innocuous. But protesters who abide hoisting the Confederate flag betray their indulgence of a vile, visible racist symbol.

Roberta Helms, Santa Barbara

..

To the editor: "If I were to describe these protests to a left-winger 50 — or 150 — years ago, they would sound great," Goldberg writes. "Proletarian laborers spontaneously using their class-power to monkey-wrench the wheels of global capitalism to press their grievances!"

Not quite. The earlier protests were against inhumane living and working conditions, not whining about wearing a mask and getting vaccinated.

Frank Hochfeld, Albany, Calif.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

How The Ottawa Anti-Vax Trucker Occupation Collapsed

Paul McLeod
Sat, February 19, 2022


OTTAWA — Police succeeded Saturday in taking back control of downtown Ottawa from the Freedom Convoy truckers, methodically forcing out the anti-vaccine mandate protesters who occupied the city for three weeks.

Police formed lines and pushed forward a few feet at a time starting in the morning, shoving back protesters and then towing the cars and trucks that clogged city streets. No one was killed or seriously injured, police said. Protesters tried desperately to “hold the line” and push police back. But sapped by defections and freezing cold temperatures, they were overwhelmed. Several protesters were pepper sprayed and 170 were arrested as of Saturday afternoon.

By midday Saturday, protest leaders had thrown up the white flag figuratively and literally — organizer Pat King told his followers, quite wrongly, that waving a white flag meant they could not be arrested under international law. Another organizer, Tom Marazzo, held a press conference where he accused the police of brutality and excessive force, but also said truckers were willingly leaving the city.

“The vast majority of the truckers do want to withdraw, but it is an individual choice for any trucker,” said Marazzo.

It’s a shockingly fast collapse for the one-of-a-kind protest that was for weeks defined by how immovable it seemed. Just days ago, the overwhelming sentiment among the convoy was that the protesters were winning, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would soon be forced out of office, and all vaccine mandates would end.

But police abandoned their hands-off approach and brought in reinforcements from across Ontario and Quebec, starting Thursday. By Friday, they formed lines to move through the streets of Ottawa, retaking territory bit by bit. Sights of police shattering truck windows convinced many demonstrators to leave while they still could.

Spencer Bautz, a trucker from Saskatchewan, said earlier in the week that the warnings of arrests were merely scare tactics. By Saturday morning, staring down an incoming line of armored police, he had made a different calculation. “I’m going to hold the line as absolutely long as I can,” he said. “But my truck’s better off outside the city and smashed and dragged into some hole.”

Those who left willingly are not necessarily going to escape legal action. Interim Ottawa police chief Steve Bell said police will spend months pursuing charges. “If you were involved in this protest we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges, absolutely. This investigation will go on for months to come,” he said.

Private tow truck drivers played a key role in removing protest vehicles. When Trudeau declared a state of emergency Monday and granted the government sweeping new powers, one measure he specified was directing tow truck drivers to remove vehicles, for compensation. Protesters had been openly bragging about how tow truck companies did not want to work against the protests.

On Saturday, a line of tow trucks moved steadily into the downtown core, with identifying markers covered and drivers wearing yellow face masks to hide their identity.

Protesters reacted to the end of their encampment with a mix of anger and acceptance. There was widespread shock that police were cracking down, despite days of repeated warnings that the officers would take extraordinary action to end the occupation that has debilitated the city. Many accused the police of unnecessary violence. “We’ve only been peaceful for the last three weeks. This is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,” said Andrea, a protester who was walking the site with her pet pigeon Little Cloud on her shoulder.

Some were optimistic, saying that the demonstration has brought grassroots energy and widespread attention to their cause.

Cities around the world will look to analyze Ottawa’s successes and mistakes, as groups opposed to lockdowns and mandates look to emulate the Freedom Convoy. There have been copycat rallies in places like France, New Zealand, and Australia. In the United States, an American version of the convoy is planning to make its way to Washington, DC.

For many Ottawa residents, this moment couldn’t have come too soon. Exasperated locals had started physically pushing back, blocking convoy vehicles from entering the city.

As police work to lay charges against protesters, they will also come under strict scrutiny for how they handled the situation. Though this weekend’s operations were a clear success, many in Ottawa are demanding to know why hundreds of trucks were allowed into the downtown core to begin with. Some politicians are calling for the street in front of the parliament buildings to be permanently cut off to traffic.

Ottawa, a capital city of a million people, is largely populated by government workers and often described with adjectives like “sleepy.” Residents sometimes bristle at that characterization, but many were stunned to see the eyes of the world fixated on the dance parties, hot tub hangouts, and thousands of tons of chrome and steel clogging their downtown with apparent impunity.

Some residents lined up behind a new slogan: Make Ottawa Boring Again.

An Ode To Gay Cowboy Orgies Is The Anthem For The Ottawa Resistance

Paul McLeod · Feb. 16, 2022

These Photos Show What The Freedom Convoy In Ottawa Has Really Been Like

Kate Bubacz · Feb. 17, 2022

Robot dogs that could patrol the US-Mexico border would not 'take over' due to their 

4-hour operating capacity, CEO says

Sam Tabahriti
Sun, February 20, 2022

Robot dogs could potentially patrol the US-Mexico border, capturing evidence in remote areas.

The CEO of their manufacturer, Ghost Robotics, said they would not "take over anything."

The project remains in the research and development phase, CNN reported.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released images of robot dogs, which they are testing with the possible aim of having them patrol the US-Mexico border.

Officials have not said when the robot dogs — known as automated ground surveillance vehicles — might be deployed.

CNN reported the news on Saturday. The CNN report followed an article published earlier this month on the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate's website. The article said the machines could "potentially be a new best friend for CBP personnel in the field."

Brenda Long, S&T directorate program manager, said in the article: "The southern border can be an inhospitable place for man and beast, and that is exactly why a machine may excel there."

The CEO of Ghost Robotics, which developed the machines, told CNN that while the company is focusing on "doing the right thing" for national security, there's nothing to be afraid of.

Jiren Parikh added that "there's no way they're going to be taking over anything," because they only have a four-hour operating capacity. They also need to be remotely controlled by a human.

CNN reported that the new technology hasn't been welcomed by an umbrella group called the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

Vicki Gaubeca, the director of the group, told CNN: "This really felt like a slap in the face. There are other technologies that they're already using that we feel like they should cut back on, and yet they're adding on another type of surveillance technology that's frightening, to be honest."

Ghost Robotics did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment made outside of normal working hours.

Parikh told CNN that robot dogs on the US border aren't part of a military effort. "It's just another sensor carrier … It's really for sensing around the environment. It's not really interacting with people," he said.

Robot dogs have faced backlash previously. Another technology company, Boston Dynamics, had its $94,000 contract with the NYPD canceled over concerns about its robot dogs' role in policing.

In that case, some observers linked their use to police funding cuts and the increased militarization of policing in general.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Company behind robot-dogs headed to US-Mexico border insists they cannot malfunction

The company behind so-called “robot dogs” that will soon patrol the US border with Mexico has defended the technology from accusations of “militarisation” and resource waste.

Gino Spocchia 
The Independent

Jiren Parikh, the CEO of Ghost Robotics, said in an interview on Saturday there was “nothing to be afraid of” after images of the “robot dogs” were unveiled by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) this month.

“We’re focused on doing the right thing,” the CEO of the Philadelphia-based company said to CNN. “We want to do the right thing for the national security and for the country.”

Although the DHS has said the “robot dogs” are still a work in progress, images of the test runs carried out by Ghost Robotics and the agency attracted concern among human rights groups earlier this month.

Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who claimed investing in robot technology for the US-Mexico border was “shameful”, also said “immigrant and Latino communities” would be offended by the investment.

“It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth and nail to defend their ability to pump endless public money into militarisation,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez tweeted of the DHS “robot dogs” on 5 February.

“From tanks in police depts to corrupt military contracts, funding this violence is bipartisan and non-controversial, yet healthcare and housing isn’t. It’s BS,” she wrote. “Immigrant and Latino communities notice this hypocrisy on immigration big time too.”

It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth + nail to defend their ability to pump endless public money into militarization.

From tanks in police depts to corrupt military contracts, funding this violence is bipartisan + non-controversial, yet healthcare + housing isn’t. It’s BS. https://t.co/rIPMfjE8NV— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 5, 2022

The federal agency said a in press release that the robots were “critical to our nation’s security” and would eventually work along with DHS and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) personnel at the southern border.

Crimes cited by the DHS included drug smuggling and human smuggling, which it said was difficult to detect in more “extreme” parts of the border zone.

“The goal of the program is to leverage technology to force-multiply the CBP presence, as well as reduce human exposure to life-threatening hazards,” the agency said.


A robot dog operating alongside ATVs in the southwest US

 (Ghost Robotics via US Department of Homeland Security)

Responding to criticism and alarm, Mr Parikh continued by telling CNN: “It’s just another sensor carrier. It’s really at a distance.... It’s really for sensing around the environment. It’s not really interacting with people.”

“That’s not what it’s made for. There’s no weapons on it,” the CEO added of the militarisation claims. “It’s not being militarised for the border. It’s not stopping people, saying ‘don’t go here.’ It can’t do that. It’s a small robot.”

Vicki Gaubeca, the head of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, also reportedly said the initiative was “alarming and outrageous” as well a waste of resources.

“This really felt like a slap in the face,” said Ms Gaubeca. “There are other technologies that they’re already using that we feel like they should cut back on, and yet they’re adding on another type of surveillance technology that’s frightening, to be honest.”

She added: “This certainly seems like it’s something that’s built for something very aggressive, like the theaters of war, rather than in a community.”

Shout out to everyone who fought against community advocates who demanded these resources go to investments like school counseling instead.

Now robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of color with under-resourced schools 👍🏽 https://t.co/ZqKtnexctb— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 25, 2021

Ghost Robotic’s CEO added that the robots were “a battery-operated computer that moves around on four legs that literally stops operating in four hours. There’s no way they’re going to be taking over anything.”

“It’s a robot that’s remotely controlled by a human in the middle,” said Mr Parikh.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s criticism of the DHS “robot dogs” came after the New York Police Department (NYPD) was criticised by the New York congresswoman for introducing robotic “dogs” to the city in February 2021.

“Shout out to everyone who fought against community advocates who demanded these resources go to investments like school counseling instead,” she tweeted at the time. “Now robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of color with under-resourced schools.”

The NYPD’s contract with the robot supplier was axed shortly after.

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Will a presidential election mark the end of 

S. Korea's tattoo taboos?






Tattooist Kim Do-yoon attends to a customer in his tattoo studio in Seoul

Sun, February 20, 2022
By Ju-min Park and Daewoung Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) - Doy, one of South Korea's most famous tattoo artists having inked the likes of Brad Pitt, just wants to practice his craft without fear of going to jail or hefty fines.

South Korea is the sole developed country in the world where tattooing is considered a procedure that only medical professionals are capable of legally performing.

That leaves almost all of the country's 50,000 tattoo artists at the mercy of potential police raids and prosecution, facing fines of up to 50 million won ($42,000) as well as prison terms, in theory as much as life.

Doy, who like many fellow tattooists practises from a modest building with no signage, was himself fined 5 million won ($4,180) last year after a video of him inking a popular Korean actress went viral. The 43-year-old has appealed the ruling. A survey conducted by the union of 650 tattoo artists Doy leads has also found six cases since last April of artists being sentenced to jail - usually for two years.

But change could well be on its way.

Over the last 10 years, tattoos have become increasingly popular among young South Koreans. BTS band member Jungkook famously has several and while tattoos are usually covered up on TV, celebrities have not been reticent about showing them off on social media. At the same time, appreciation for "K-tattoos", often distinguished by fine-line drawing, intricate detail and bold use of colour, has grown at home and abroad.

That has not escaped the attention of the ruling party's candidate for the March 9 presidential election, Lee Jae-myung. In a move seen as courting young voters, Lee last month said it made no sense for the industry to be illegal, noted it was worth an estimated $1 billion and promised to back bills now pending in parliament to legalise tattooing.

"I'm really grateful for the pledge. It's probably the best artistic inspiration that tattooists have had recently," Doy, whose real name is Kim Do-yoon, said at his parlour.

Lee currently trails Yoon Suk-yeol from the conservative main opposition People Power Party, 34% to 41%, according to a public opinion poll by Gallup Korea. Yoon's party has not yet decided its position on traditional tattoos but supports legalising so-called cosmetic tattoos, which are semi-permanent and popular in South Korea for enhancing eyebrows, eyelines and hairlines.

Ahn Cheol-soo, a third candidate with 11% support who has had his eyebrows tattooed to look bushier, has not announced his position on the matter.

Public support for legalising the industry appears to be growing.

According to a Gallup Korea poll last year, 81% of South Koreans in their 20s and about 60% of those in their 30s and 40s are in favour of legalisation.

About 3 million people in South Korea have at least one tattoo and if semi-permanent cosmetic tattoos are counted that rises to 13 million, according to a 2018 estimate by a local medical device maker the Standard.

But for many of South Korea's older generation, tattoos are associated with gangs and go against the Confucian belief that altering the human body means disrespect to one's parents.

The country's main medical group, which contends tattooing with needles is an "invasive" procedure that can damage the body, also opposes legalisation.

"Except for like covering scars, from a medical perspective, I think tattooing through needles is self-harm, not an expression of freedom," Hwang Ji-hwan, a dermatologist and an advisor at the Korean Medical Association, told Reuters.

"We are trying to protect the public's health," he said.

Doy said many of his colleagues have already left to work overseas, some applying for an artist visa to the United States.

"Our country could have managed the industry better and grown it to add value to the economy. But it feels like we may have lost that timing so it is extremely sad," he said.

($1 = 1,196.1000 won)

(Reporting by Ju-min Park and Daewoung Kim; additional reporting by Yeni Seo; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

Nepal's Parliament debates US aid grant amid fierce protests

MAOIST ANTI IMPERIALISTS

 

Sun, February 20, 2022,

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Nepal’s government presented a contentious half-billion dollar aid grant from the United States for approval in Parliament on Sunday, triggering a fresh round of violent clashes between protesters and police outside the legislature.

Hundreds of protesters tried to push through barbed wire barricades and pelted riot police with stones. Police beat them with bamboo batons, fired tear gar and water canons, leaving injured on both sides.

Opposition to the aid grant comes mainly from two of the Communist parties that are part of the coalition government. They claim the conditions in the grant agreement will prevail over Nepal’s laws and threaten the country’s sovereignty. They say it’s part of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which has military components that could bring American soldiers to Nepal.

U.S. officials have spoken to Nepalese leaders recently to assure that the grant concerns only Nepal’s development. The money is meant to be used for the construction of power transmission lines and improvement of roads in the Himalayan nation.

Inside Parliament, government Minister Gyanendra Bahadur Karki presented the grant proposal while several lawmakers chanted slogans opposing the measure. A thick line of security personnel blocked the protesting members from approaching the minister.

The debate is expected to last several days before the grant agreement is put to a vote. The discussion was originally planned for last Wednesday but disagreements among political parties and clashes with police outside Parliament led to it being postponed.

Nepalese protesters opposing a proposed U.S. half billion dollars grant for Nepal clash with police outside as the parliament debates the contentious aid in Kathmandu, Nepal, Sunday, Feb. 20, 2022. Opposition to the grant comes mainly from two Communist parties that are part of the coalition government who claim the conditions in the grant agreement will prevail over Nepal's laws and threaten the country's sovereignty. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shreshta)More

How the Father of Flat-Earthers Arose From a Nutty Commune


Kelly Weill
Sun, February 20, 2022

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

They were beggars and scholars and out-of-work lace makers, dreamers and drunkards, decent farmers and hopelessly bad ones. They were bricklayers, some honest and some exploiting an obscure loophole in brickmaking law to commit tax fraud. They were at odds with the local press, accused of sex scandals, and eternally feuding among themselves. And from 1838 to 1841, they were all stuck there together in the worst little utopia in all of Cambridgeshire, England.

“They paid much more attention to the beer shops and the company of the lowest prostitutes” than to their work, one griped about his neighbors.

“To make a successful Community all parties must be economical and industrious, and must not, like Mr. Kirk, frequently get up after breakfast,” others complained of a comrade in an anonymous collective letter to the commune newspaper.

Inside the Flat Earth Conference, Where the World’s Oldest Conspiracy Theory Is Hot Again

This was Manea Fen, a short-lived socialist commune scooped out of the wetlands. Staffed by soft-handed idealists rebelling against England’s Industrial Revolution and local laborers seeking more than starvation wages, Manea Fen was a beacon for people chasing a new world. They found it, though not in a way they could have imagined. By its second year, the whole project would become an embarrassing flop that would send its founder into debt and most of its members slinking back into polite society. But as the weeds reclaimed Manea Fen’s homesteads, the commune’s real export would blossom across the country. Up from Manea Fen’s marshy plains rose modern Flat Earth theory, a conspiracy theory so audacious it could eclipse a planet. It was entirely one man’s fault.

Samuel Birley Rowbotham was twenty-two, radical, and, according to a socialist newspaper’s account, occasionally high off his mind on laughing gas when he began imagining a new world in 1838. That year, he was one of the first to answer a local farmer’s call to build the planned utopian society of Manea Fen. Rowbotham and the farmer comrade, William Hodson, were followers of Robert Owen, a utopian socialist who envisioned grand, sweeping paradises made up of cooperative worker communes. (Working before socialist heavy hitters like Karl Marx, Owen argued not for society-wide class struggle and revolution, but for model communes that would show the world how to live peacefully.) The year 1838 was a boom time for English utopians. Workers, dirt-poor and fed up near the end of the First Industrial Revolution, banded together in experimental live-work settlements where they hoped they could break the accelerating wheels of capitalism.

Few photographs exist of Rowbotham. If you ask around at a modern Flat Earth conference, someone might be able to sell you an old pamphlet with a picture of him as a stern, round-faced man of middle age. I like to imagine him in his early years, however, not as an aging man from an old book, but as a young idealist who would have gotten by just fine in the twenty-first century. The young Rowbotham liked to get high and litigate obscure political arguments with other socialists in their niche newspapers. Substitute those newspapers for social media, and he’d be indistinguishable from dozens of people I know in modern life. Rowbotham had one more commonality with contemporary Twitter users: he lived in a moment ripe for conspiracy theories.

Conspiratorial thinking is not a weird pathology, experienced by some and absent in others. It’s part of a mental process hardwired into all of us, from Rowbotham’s era and beforehand and afterward. The same powers of abstraction that make humans good at detecting patterns (like anticipating storms when dark clouds gather) can make us imagine patterns where they don’t exist, especially when we’re feeling stressed or powerless. Rather than languish in the unknown, we tell ourselves stories about the secret causes of our troubles. All of us do this. For instance, after failing my driver’s test three times, an explanation emerged in the back of my mind: maybe the Department of Motor Vehicles secretly had to flunk a certain quota of student drivers. The stress of the situation (being demonstrably bad at driving), coupled with a misunderstood pattern (the apparent impossibility of passing a road test) and a comforting explanation (I wasn’t a traffic hazard; I was being oppressed by the iron boot of the state) turned my botched parallel parking into a conspiracy theory. I passed on round four.

In short, conspiracy theories help us feel safe by providing an explanation for things that feel incomprehensible and beyond our control. This dynamic can influence us in measurably silly ways. Dutch psychologists, for example, found that if students were asked to describe a situation that made them feel powerless, they were more likely to subsequently believe conspiracy theories about a controversial train line near campus.

Moments of rapid industrialization and income inequality—like Rowbotham’s and arguably our own—are prime sources of precarity and uncertainty. In the United States, during the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, for example, newspapers logged a spike in conspiracy-minded letters to the editor, which contemporary researchers attribute to laborers’ worries that new technologies would cast them into unemployment. Though newspapers were not yet in widespread circulation during Rowbotham’s youth, the First Industrial Revolution produced many of the same anxieties as the Second, including those that inspired Owen to build worker-friendly communities.

Seeking to build an anti-capitalist utopia in rapidly industrializing England, Rowbotham and Hodson took a tour of existing Owenite communes in an attempt to drum up support for their own efforts in Manea Fen. But while Hodson, a devout socialist who would eventually bankrupt himself for the cause, was focused on earning membership and finding financial backing, Rowbotham might have been hatching a secret plot. It was one, he would later write, that he had fomented since childhood.

Since he was a boy, Rowbotham would later claim, he had always believed he lived on a flat planet. Even in the early 1800s, this was supposedly enough to get the young Rowbotham into trouble at school. Though twenty-first-century Americans love to portray Brits from past centuries as Flat Earthers (for instance, a 2020 Super Bowl commercial depicted English peasants talking about Flat Earth), people have known the planet was round for thousands of years. By Rowbotham’s time, schools had long been teaching a fairly modern model of the solar system.

Rowbotham claimed he never took to his school’s teachings, and that he tried sneaking out of a school astronomy lesson, which he believed was bogus. Those doubts compounded when he searched the Bible for confirmation of his beliefs. He concluded that if Sir Isaac Newton’s model of the solar system—round planets orbiting a round sun—was true, then God was dead. “Again and again, the feeling came over me that as the Newtonian system appeared so plausible and so grand in its extent and comprehensiveness, it might after all be correct,” Rowbotham later wrote of his path to Flat Earth, “and, if so, there could be no heaven for man’s future enjoyment; no higher existence than on this earth; no spiritual and immortal creatures, and therefore no God or Creator.”

Was Rowbotham really a childhood Flat Earther? We only have his questionable word for it. But even before Manea Fen broke ground, Rowbotham had begun shaping it in a way that would doom the commune and put Flat Earth theory on the map.

His early membership in Manea Fen gave the young Rowbotham considerable power over the collective. Hodson named him secretary of the group, and Rowbotham went to work looking for a suitable location for the project. He found it on the shores of Cambridge’s Old Bedford Canal. Rowbotham was adamant about starting the commune on the canal banks. They “would form a beautiful promenade in the summer evening,” Rowbotham told his comrades. When other Owenites panned his choice (not enough winding river bends and birdsong for a paradise), Rowbotham doubled down, his conviction becoming tinged with fanaticism; he had to have his commune there.

Why not, in the spirit of revolutionary harmony, just move Manea Fen to one of swampy Cambridgeshire’s many natural waterways? Rowbotham’s fixation on the Bedford Canal might have been more than socialist devotion. He may have been guided by ulterior motives. Pin-straight and pancake-flat to the untrained eye, the Bedford Canal, nicknamed the Bedford Level, looked rather like a flat line stretching across the visible length of a flat planet. It was a gift to anyone hoping to argue that Earth is not a globe. Early in his work to build the Manea Fen colony, Rowbotham began making repeat trips to the canal to conduct experiments.

Earth curves at approximately eight inches per mile squared. (Real mathematicians use more precise formulas, but for very short experiments like Rowbotham’s, approximations are fine.) If you lie on your stomach and gaze at the horizon from one mile away, a barely perceptible eight inches of Earth will be hidden behind the planet’s curve. If you can see two miles away, thirty-two inches of Earth will have curved out of view. Six miles away, the ground will have dropped twenty-four feet below your line of sight. This has been more or less the established model of the planet since Pythagoras proposed a spherical Earth around 500 BCE.

Rowbotham, however, saw the world differently. When wading neck-deep in the canal with a telescope, he claimed, he could see the full height of boats sailing at the far end. When the canal froze in winter, his telescope could spot ice-skaters six miles away. Those damp sojourns would go on to haunt the future. One hundred eighty years after Rowbotham’s experiments on the canal, I’ve met dozens of Flat Earthers who have cited the nineteenth-century experiments in their own writings or, despite their internet connections, traveled to the canal themselves to re-create the “Bedford Level test.” These modern Flat Earthers may as well have been citing a fantasy novel. Rowbotham was incorrect (archaeologists who studied Manea Fen are doubtful he even had an adequate telescope) or outright lying (those same archaeologists tried replicating his experiment and found it to show a round earth). For years, he wouldn’t even discuss his findings with the masses, and none of his commune peers appear to have adopted his burgeoning theory.

At the time, however, Rowbotham had other problems on his plate. Manea Fen was, functionally, a mess, and people blamed him. When the colony opened on the canal banks around Christmas 1838, Rowbotham recruited a sordid crew, many of them more interested in drinking than working. Visiting socialists were appalled and accused him of gathering the laziest leftists he could find. (The accusations were a little unfair. The laziest man on the commune was probably not a Rowbotham recruit, but a man named Kirk who moved in of his own accord and immediately demanded the right to build a cave and live in it as a hermit. And even the commune’s most ambitious workers were likely cutting corners: archaeologists who studied the commune suspect the Owenites routinely dodged their taxes by selling bricks mislabeled as “drainage” materials, in what looked pretty clearly like a scheme to cash in on a tax loophole for toilet products.)

Regardless of fault in recruitment strategy, the utopia had other issues. Despite the commune’s socialist mission, some early workers claimed they received no pay for their labor. “I am without home and without bread,” one man complained when he abandoned the commune after three unpaid months. As for Manea Fen’s intellectual aims, its early occupants spent their time “finding fault with one another and with everything about them,” engaging in “useless discussions,” and micromanaging their comrades, member E. Wastney later wrote. Other Owenite communes and newspapers, already suspicious of Rowbotham’s project, latched on to these stories.

The sex scandal made matters worse. Hodson, Manea Fen’s official founder, believed in equality for women. Like so many male feminists of his moment and the future, however, his ideological commitment wavered in practice, and Manea Fen never had any significant female leadership. For some time during Rowbotham’s tenure, though, commune leadership condemned the institution of marriage as oppressive to women and encouraged more independent sexual relationships. At this, all the leading Owenite newspapers pounced. The commune, already unpopular, was now practicing free love and polygamy, they alleged. The scandal spread. Owenite committees across the country held inquiries. Hodson’s and Rowbotham’s names began to float to the top of these investigations, and disillusioned Manea Fen members began quitting the commune en masse. Hodson was ultimately able to shake free of the allegations. But Rowbotham, who had made a name for himself by picking an undesirable plot of land by the canal and staffing it with hard-drinking layabouts, was not so fortunate. In a desperate plea to keep his spot in the commune, he wrote an April 1839 letter to Owen, asking the socialist leader to help resolve “a little confusion in our Society” with regard to whether or not marriage was bad. He did not receive a response.

By summer, the Manea Fen commune had cast him out. Rowbotham “is neither secretary to, nor a member of this society,” a curt article in the commune’s newspaper announced. The whole utopia was bankrupt and abandoned less than two years later.

So there Rowbotham was, drifting around the wetlands with little to his name besides a handful of counterscientific beliefs. For a short time, he tried his hand at social missionary work, but complaints against the argumentative young man piled up. He dropped out in a matter of months, abandoning his efforts and denouncing Owenism. Further fringes were already calling him. Casting off the name that had become associated with a socialist sex scandal, Rowbotham rebranded as “Dr. Birley.” His lack of any doctoral degree was irrelevant. Rowbotham was about to plunge into a career that, to this day, rubs shoulders with the Flat Earth movement and other conspiracy scenes. He was about to become a huckster of miracle cures.

From OFF THE EDGE: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Theories and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Copyright © 2022 by Kelly Weill. All rights reserved.

Beijing places sanctions on U.S. arms companies Lockheed and Raytheon

Mon, February 21, 2022

BEIJING, Feb 21 (Reuters) - China has placed U.S. companies Lockheed Martin Corp and Raytheon Technologies Corp under sanctions over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

The sanctions are countermeasures against the two companies over a $100 million Feb. 7 arms sale that "undermined China's security interests, seriously undermined China-U.S. relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait", foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular news briefing.

Beijing says that the self-ruled island of Taiwan is a breakaway province that must be reunified with the mainland.

"In accordance with the relevant stipulations in China's anti-foreign sanctions law, the Chinese government has decided to take countermeasures on the infringing acts of Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin," Wang said.

"Both are military enterprises that have long participated in U.S. arm sales to China's Taiwan region."

No further details were given on the nature of the sanctions.

This is the first time the companies have faced sanctions under China's new anti-foreign sanctions law drawn up last year in response to U.S. sanctions against Chinese companies.

On at least two previous occasions China has announced sanctions against Lockheed and Raytheon, in 2019 and 2020, though Beijing provided no further details. (Reporting by Eduardo Baptista and Emily Chow in Beijing and Ben Blanchard in Taipei Editing by David Goodman)

Chicago school renamed to honor civil rights activist Tubman

Sat, February 19, 2022

CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago elementary school has unveiled a new sign letting people know it is leaving behind the name of a racist and will instead honor a woman known for helping Black people escape slavery, Harriet Tubman.

The sign comes about a year after a group of parents successfully pushed for the school — long named after Swiss American biologist Louis Agassiz — to change its name to the Harriet Tubman Elementary School.

Officials at Chicago Public Schools are letting other schools in the city change their names after the Chicago Sun-Times reported in late 2020 that 30 of its schools were named after slaveholders and others were named after racists such as Agassiz.

The Board of Education could vote on an updated policy for school name changes next week, the Sun-Times reported.

CPS said in a statement that the new name is “more inclusive and representative” of the district's values.

"The CPS Office of Equity is committed to a comprehensive review process to consider new school names when a school is named after individuals who do not represent the values of our students, families, faculty and support staff,” CPS said.

Agassiz, was a biologist at Harvard in the 1800s and a proponent of scientific racism who sought to prove Blacks were inferior to other races. Two decades ago, a school committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts, voted to strip his name from a school there and rename it for Maria L. Baldwin, who years earlier was the first Black principal of the school.

The Harriet Tubman Elementary School on Chicago's North Side joins a long list of schools around the country to be named after the one-time slave who helped Black people to escape slavery in the South via the Underground Railroad in the 1800s.

TUBMAN $20 HOW'S THAT COMING?!

Harriet Tubman in the $20 Bill : Harriet Tubman

www.harriet-tubman.org/20-dollar-bill

Tubman also served as a spy and scout in the Civil War. On April 2016 the US Treasury announced that a new design of the $20 bill will have the portrait of Harriet Tubman on the front. The image of Andrew Jackson, who had been featured on the bill since 1928, will be removed from the bill because of his policy against Native Americans.

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Harriet Tubman $20 Bill Redesign to be Accelerated by ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/us/politics/tubman-20-dollar-bill.html

2021-01-26 · Jan. 25, 2021 President Biden’s Treasury Department is studying ways to speed up the process of adding Harriet Tubman’s portrait to the front of the $20 bill after the Trump

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for TUBMAN 

AMERICAN CULTISTS
Remembering the Mormon Battalion, brave and intrepid LDS Church members in the 1840s




Glenna Christensen
Sun, February 20, 2022

The 175th anniversary of the longest U.S. Army infantry march in history was celebrated in Old Town San Diego on Jan. 29. A little-known event in American history, it played a significant role in the country’s westward expansion, opening a southern wagon route to San Diego and Southern California.

Having been expelled from Missouri, and then suffering mob violence in Illinois, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints determined in the fall of 1845 that they would move a thousand miles to the west, beyond the Rocky Mountains. By agreeing to move by spring, they managed to negotiate a fragile peace with the vigilantes.

An advance party was sent in early 1846, and as they were able, additional groups crossed the Mississippi into Iowa to seek refuge until they were able to travel west. Being forced to leave their homes and most of their possessions, funds and resources were a problem. Many were destitute. Obtaining wagons and oxen, as well as supplies for the westward journey, would take time.

On June 1, 1846, Elder James C. Little met with President James K. Polk to suggest that Church members would be willing to do some labor along the trail to Oregon in return for financial aid. Coincidentally, the government had just received word of the outbreak of the war with Mexico, and the authorities decided that the “Mormons” might be able to provide a different type of service.

A call for 500 volunteers to form a battalion to join Col. Stephen Kearny, commander of the Army of the West, was received. Since many of the men had sought work in St. Louis and other towns, taking 500 of the remaining men from the various camps to travel westward significantly weakened the already struggling camps.

Before leaving on their 2,100-mile march, the Mormon Battalion was counseled by President Brigham Young to “live (their) religion while in the Army.” He instructed, “Hold sacred the property of the people, never taking anything that does not belong to you. Always spare life when possible. ... Teach chastity, gentility and civility.”

He also promised that the battalion would not have to fight a single battle in the Mexican-American War.

The battalion traveled from Winter Quarters, near Omaha, Nebraska, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they were outfitted with weapons and given a $42 clothing allowance (most of which they sent to their families.). From there they crossed the Kansas River and went west to the Arkansas River, which they followed upstream for 100 miles.

Turning southwest, they traveled to the Cimarron River and passed near the place Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma meet. After continuing southwesterly to Santa Fe, New Mexico, they followed the Rio Grande to El Paso. They then traveled west through Arizona to San Diego, a route utilized today by Interstates 25, 10 and 8.

The day following the battalion’s arrival in San Diego, Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke, battalion commander, issued the following orders:

“History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry. Half of it has been through a wilderness where nothing but savages and wild beasts are found, or deserts where, for want of water, there is no living creature. There, with almost hopeless labor, we have dug deep wells. ... With crow-bar and pick and axe in hand, we have ... hewed a passage through a chasm of living rock more narrow than our wagons. ... Thus, marching half naked and half fed, and living upon wild animals, we have discovered and made a road of great value to our country.”

Since their enlistment did not end until June, the battalion’s members were assigned duty at San Diego, San Luis Rey and Los Angeles. There they dug wells, made brick and built homes. At the end of their enlistment, 81 of them reenlisted for eight months, while others sought work in California before traveling to the Salt Lake Valley, where the first wagon train arrived on July 24, 1847.

While the $7 a month paid the volunteers was not a great amount, that money, forwarded to the struggling families in Winter Quarters, enabled them to make the trip across the Plains to the Salt Lake Valley. The aid the LDS Church had sought from the government came, albeit not in the form expected.

Glenna M. Christensen is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Idaho Statesman’s weekly faith column features a rotation of writers from many different faiths and perspectives.

WHITE NOISE

'60 Minutes' Releases Eerie 'Havana Syndrome' Audio After White House Incidents



Ed Mazza
Sun, February 20, 2022

New audio posted by “60 Minutes” on Sunday reveals what the noise linked to “Havana Syndrome” sounds like to those who claim to have experienced the mysterious condition.

Those who’ve suffered say it began after hearing this sound.

However, “60 Minutes” said listening to the audio, recorded by an unnamed former official, will not lead to any of the problems associated with the syndrome as the sound is a “byproduct” and not the cause.

Speaker alert: You might want to turn down the volume before playing this:



While most of the incidents linked to the condition happened overseas, the CBS News show reported several cases around Washington, D.C. ― including some on White House grounds.

“It was like this piercing feeling on the side of my head, it was like, I remember it was on the right side of my head and I got vertigo,” Olivia Troye, a homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to then-Vice President Mike Pence, told “60 Minutes.”

She said she felt it in 2019 on a staircase in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House campus, as well as three times on the nearby Ellipse.

“I was unsteady, I was, I felt nauseous, I was somewhat disoriented, and I remember thinking, ‘OK you’ve got to ― don’t fall down the stairs. You’ve got to find your ground again and steady yourself,’” she said.

Hundreds of U.S. officials have said they’ve suffered from a range of unexplained issues including headaches and nausea after hearing unusual sounds, with the first known cases traced to staff at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba in 2016, giving the condition its name.

The CIA last year said most cases did not appear to be caused by a foreign power, but investigations continue.

So far, no firm explanation has emerged but theories include a weapon using energy, such as microwaves. Others have speculated at a psychological origin, including mass psychogenic illness, more popularly known as “mass hysteria.”

While the Trump administration handled the condition with skepticism, President Joe Biden last year signed legislation to ensure care and compensation to victims.

Read the full “60 Minutes” report here.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Sufferer reveals recording of mysterious sound behind ‘Havana Syndrome’


Sufferer reveals recording of mysterious sound behind ‘Havana Syndrome’

Sravasti Dasgupta
Sun, February 20, 2022

An audio recording claims to reveal the sound associated with Havana Syndrome, the mysterious illness that has struck US bureaucrats, troops and intelligence officers in recent years.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes revealed audio recorded by a former US official who had heard the noise at his home in Cuba’s Havana.

The sound does not cause harm as it is a byproduct and not the sound itself.


Describing the sound to 60 Minutes, the former US official, who did not want to be named, described it as: “this just loud sound just absolutely filled my room.”

Since 2016, around 200 American personnel have been struck with symptoms that vary from headaches, to ringing in the ears, as well as loss of hearing, memory, and balance. Some victims have even suffered long-term brain damage.

A study commissioned by the State Department said the most likely source is a pulse of radio frequency energy “directed” at US targets.

Officials said that these incidents have not only occurred in far-flung embassies, but two cases have also been found near the White House.

Another former homeland security and counter-terrorism advisor to former vice president Mike Pence, Olivia Troye said to 60 Minutes that she had experienced symptoms in the White House.

Ms Troye said in 2019 she was descending the stairs in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building beside the West Wing when she heard a piercing sound.

“But it was like this piercing feeling on the side of my head, it was like, I remember it was on the right side of my head and I got like, vertigo,” she said.

“I was unsteady, I was, I felt nauseous, I was somewhat disoriented, and I was just, I remember thinking, ‘OK you gotta---don’t fall down the stairs. You’ve gotta find your ground again and steady yourself’.”

“It was almost like I couldn’t really process. It was like a paralysing panic attack. I’ve never had that. I’ve never felt anything like that.”

“And so I-- you know, I-- I thought to myself, ‘I mean, do I have a brain tumour out of the blue? Is this what happens? Am I having a stroke?’”

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor said to 60 Minutes that he believed he was targeted in two mysterious incidents at his Washington home.

“Someone is trying to send us a message that they can strike blows against us and we can’t strike back,” he said.

“That line being crossed into the United States takes this in some ways just shy of the realm of warfare.”