WINNIPEG --
Hundreds of people in cars filled the parking lot of a Winnipeg church
Sunday morning, defying provincial COVID-19 restrictions.
Springs Church on Lagimodiere Boulevard held three drive-in services Sunday morning and one Saturday night.
With a large screen set up in the parking lot, a steady stream of cars could be seen filing in Sunday morning.
Public health restrictions, however, forbid in-person worship services,
including drive-in masses. Groups can also not exceed more than five
people inside or outside.
Winnipeg police cruisers were parked in several spots around the church.
A spokesperson for the province could not say if any tickets were handed out but that an update would be made on Tuesday.
CTV News has reached out to Springs Church for comment.
NEW YORK, NY—Time's Person of the Year issue has highlighted some of
the world's most influential, important, and controversial figures for
almost 100 years. After weeks of intense internal deliberation,
Time Magazine has officially announced its Person of the Year: Karen.
"Karen could
be any of us. She could be all of us," said Edward Felsenthal, Editor
in Chief of Time. "For years, we have been under the watchful protection
of everyday heroes who are dedicated to righting all wrongs, no matter
how tiny or insignificant. Today, that watchful protector has a name,
and her name is Karen."
The
announcement was met with mixed reactions and fierce debate. Some
Karens have celebrated the news as a huge step forward for Karen
representation and human rights. Other Karens took issue with the cover
photo and demanded to speak to the manager of Time Magazine. Some have
questioned Time choosing Karen in 2020 after already choosing Greta
Thunberg last year, who is kind of like a "climate Karen."
Karen
will be joining Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Bill Anders, and Hitler as
one of the most important and newsworthy people of the last 100 years.
Donald Trump supporters, outraged by Time's snub of the president, wrote
letters to the editor and threatened to call the police.
I
was finally able to make contact last week via the internet with an
eyewitness in Afrin who gives a grim but compelling account of her
personal experience of ethnic cleansing.
Her name is Rohilat Hawar, a 34-year-old Kurdish woman with three
children who had worked as a mathematics teacher in a school in Afrin
City before the Turkish attack. She tried to flee in February 2018
“because there were Turkish airstrikes every day,” but she was refused
entry to Syrian government-held territory through which she needed to
pass to reach the Kurdish-controlled autonomous region.
She returned to Afrin City where her house had been looted and where
she is now trapped. She says that Turkish-backed Syrian jihadi militias
shoot anybody trying to leave: “A friend of mine was killed with her
10-year-old child last year while trying to flee.” At the same time, the
militiamen make it impossible for Kurds to stay.
As one of the few Kurds remaining in her old neighbourhood where the
houses have been taken over by Arabic-speaking jihadis and their
families, she does not dare speak Kurdish in the street. She has found
that the Turkish army considers all Kurds to be “terrorists”, but that
the militiamen are even more dangerous, regarding “Kurds as pagans,
disbelievers who should be killed on orders from God.”
Rohilat had no alternative but to put on a Hijab, which Kurdish women
normally do not wear. She did not do so for seven months but was
harassed and intimidated by jihadi neighbours from other parts of Syria.
She appealed to a Turkish officer, but he said that she should respect
the social norms in her neighbourhood. “So I had to put on the Hijab,”
she said. “My children laughed at me and mocked me at the beginning, but
they have got used to the situation.”
The surviving Kurds in Afrin are defenceless and are preyed on by
roving militiamen. When going to the market earlier this week, Rohilat
saw two Kurdish girls walking in the same direction. Two militiamen with
guns on a motorcycle cruised slowly beside them. “Suddenly the
motorcycle came close to the girls and the militiamen sitting on the
back grabbed the breast of one of them,” says Rohilat. Both girls
started crying. The militiamen got off their motorcycle and started
kissing them and fondling their breasts, only leaving them when a crowd
gathered and Rohilat took the girls to her home.
On another occasion, she was buying bread in the market, when she saw
an Islamist gunman tell a Kurd working in a restaurant to leave the
city. When he protested, saying he had nowhere else to go, the
militiaman slapped him across the face and said: “You Kurds are pagans
and disbelievers in God [though the Kurds are almost all Sunni
Muslims].”
In the two formerly Kurdish zones in Syria, the cutting edge of the
Turkish occupation is Arab militiamen, who are mostly jihadis from
elsewhere in Syria. The Kurds in Afrin were largely farmers, cultivating
fruit and vegetables and, above all, olives. But Rohilat says that the
new settlers are city people “so they cut down the olive trees and sell
them as firewood”. As a result, foodstuffs have to be imported and are
sold at a higher price.
By turning over on the ground control of Kurdish populated areas to
anti-Kurdish Islamist gunmen, the Turkish government ensures ethnic
cleansing, but without appearing to be directly responsible. Until
recently, the militiamen were paid $100 a month by Turkey, but they
could supplement this by looting and confiscating Kurdish property while
the Turkish army allegedly turned a blind eye.
But since August the militiamen’s pay has been reduced and Turkish
army patrols are clamping down on looting. The aim of this is to
persuade the militiamen to volunteer to fight as Turkish proxies in
Libya and against the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Many have been
killed. Rohilat has seen numerous traditional mourning tents for men who
died in the fighting abroad, though the bodies do not come back for
burial.
Aside from the chronic insecurity, Rohilat has to cope with the rapid
spread of coronavirus in Afrin since August. She herself has contracted
the illness, having tested positive at a Turkish medical facility, but
says she and many others will not go to a military hospital for
treatment because few people who do go return alive. Instead, they stay
at home, taking paracetamol and eating lentil and onion soup. She
herself cannot afford to buy face masks, and can only buy bread because
her children do odd jobs in the market and relatives in Turkey send her a
little money every couple of months.
Grim though life is for Rohilat, she is one of the survivors while
other Kurds have fled, live in insanitary camps, been killed, held for
ransom or have simply disappeared. Nor is the Turkish campaign against
the 3 million Syrian Kurds likely to de-escalate; on the contrary,
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch another
invasion that would in practice finish the job of cleansing the Kurdish
population.
Knick Reaves was gnashing medication his teeth, he wore orange vintage dungarees, his hair was adorned with
plastic beads (and other Keith Richard bits and pieces), Tintin Ribs
removes herself from the bus and shows her greeting hand to me. The heel
of her palm is pink, I don’t know what this means: but, surely, it
don’t bode well. Her wrist, of course, …
Refurbished newspaper boxes transformed to offer free books and food for Hartford neighborhood
By Darcie Ortique
Hartford Courant|
Oct 07, 2020 at 6:00 AM
HARTFORD
— While some people may think of a newspaper vending machine with
nostalgia, MakerspaceCT has a whole new use for the old metal boxes:
refurbishing them to create mini libraries and food pantries for a
Hartford neighborhood.
MakerspaceCT, a community workshop and skills development center on
Main Street, partnered with the Free Center, which provides access to
space and support for organizing and programs in the old the Goodwin
Library at 460 New Britain Ave, on the
“Like any other project that comes through here, there was no
hesitation in my staff to step up and help out,” said Mark Colbert,
chief operations officer for MakerspaceCT. “It’s a feel-good project and
everyone that works here understands the value,” Colbert added.
The old newspaper honor boxes were transformed into “read and feed
centers” and placed in front of the Free Center, where non-perishable
food items and gently used books are available for anyone in need.
“The concept for the little free library and the little free food
pantry is about community trust and community contributions,'' said Zoe
Chatfield, director of the Free Center.
MakerspaceCT chief of operations Mark Colbert, left, and Free Center
Hartford director Zoe Chatfield stand next to a "Read and Feed Center"
outside of Free Center Hartford. MakerspaceCT has converted newspaper
honor boxes into these centers for Free Center.
This initiative is supported by the City of Hartford with a “Love
Your Block” grant, which helped the Free Center purchase and revamp the
boxes, while MakerspaceCT members were hands-on with construction and
installation. In just three days, two newspaper boxes were painted and
delivered to the Free Center. Without financial support from the city,
the idea would’ve never been brought to life, Chatfield said.
“Trying to get funding for a little project like this can be a
challenge sometimes because it might not necessarily fit into a specific
type of grant that a foundation may be looking to fund,'' she said.
The mission of MakerspaceCT is to ''positively impact lives by
enabling access, innovation and education.’' Through workshops and
skills development training, MakerspaceCT provides residents with
opportunities to obtain new skills, beneficial to themselves and the
communities they serve. “This is one, small piece of what we can do to
help the community and help a place like the Free Center,” Colbert said.
Chatfield, along with other Free Center volunteers, plan to monitor
“The Read and Feed Centers” weekly to ensure the boxes are filled with
food and quality books. Chatfield has been networking and planning to
expand read and feed centers in other neighborhoods, such as in
Middletown. “That small amount of funding is also allowing us to use
this project as a catalyst for more community engagement opportunities,”
Chatfield said. “If we can just continue to find ways to just support
our community and whatever way we can, that makes me feel good."
The black newspaper boxes can be found in front of the Free Center
building, for anyone in need and for anyone looking to donate. All
donations can be made by simply opening the newly constructed doors to
the boxes and dropping items inside; this goes for anyone looking to
help themselves to items as well.
“Our mission is to always invest in opportunities for community
members to lead and to collaborate and partner with other individuals
and organizations around the city,” Chatfield said. “If anybody wants to
stop by today, tomorrow, any time before or after our drive and leave a
can of soup or leave a box of pasta or leave a book that’s in good
condition, they can do that at any time.''
In
a time of pandemic, and chaotic news and when anger over
all these issues is beginning to boil over—in such a time the occasion
of the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
first novel, This Side of Paradise, might seem to warrant
little more than perfunctory acknowledgment. After all, it is a flawed
work, set primarily on the tranquil lawns and walks of Princeton
University, and following the moral education of a privileged and
narcissistic protagonist.
First edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920)
Nevertheless, as the initiation of Fitzgerald’s novel-writing career alone, This Side of Paradise
warrants consideration, and the novel does reward the contemporary
reader with its psychological complexity, with Fitzgerald’s
characteristically glittering lyrical sentences and with his equally
characteristic trenchant insight into American class society.
Francis
Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, but spent
the first 11 years of his life in Syracuse and Buffalo, New York. The
Fitzgeralds returned to Minnesota in 1908, and in 1911 F. Scott was sent
to the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he
demonstrated exceptional intelligence and an aptitude for literature. In
1913, Fitzgerald entered Princeton and wrote for a number of campus
publications, but he left the university in 1917, without graduating, to
join the Army upon the United States’ entry into World War I. He never
served overseas, a fortune he regretted.
Best known for The Great Gatsby
(1925), taught in virtually every American high school and college and
generally acclaimed to be one of the finest novels in American
literature, Fitzgerald completed only four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), Gatsby and Tender Is the Night (1934). A fifth novel, The Last Tycoon,
was completed by Fitzgerald’s longtime friend, the critic Edmund Wilson
after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. F. Scott was a prolific short story
writer, however, and a number of his stories are still widely
anthologized, most notably “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920) and “Winter
Dreams” (1922).
F. Scott Fitzgerald, c. 1920
Taken
as a whole, Fitzgerald’s literary output is at once brilliant and
uneven, a fact that is to be attributed not primarily to any failing on
the author’s part, not even to his notorious alcoholism, so much as to
the hand-to-mouth existence capitalism imposes on the serious artist.
While he enjoyed some fleeting prosperity after the publication and
great success of This Side of Paradise, during which he and his
wife Zelda Sayre became the iconic figures of “the Jazz Age,” a term
Fitzgerald coined, his career mirrored that of many other artistic
writers of his time. He was often in debt and had to buy the time to
write an ounce of gold by producing a pound of relative dross.
Fitzgerald’s main source of income became the Saturday Evening Post. It was to the Post
that he sold his short stories, many of which are quite fine—Fitzgerald
was a gifted and skilled practitioner of the story form—but some of
which were banged out for the money. By the mid-1930s, the Post
was paying Fitzgerald $4,000 per story, top dollar at the time, but
still too infrequent a paycheck to allow him the freedom necessary to
develop more serious work. After Gatsby, it would be nine years before Fitzgerald would produce his next novel, the magnificent Tender Is the Night.
In
1930, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald suffered her first mental breakdown.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she would spend the majority of her
remaining years in a series of mental hospitals and clinics, dying sadly
in a fire in a North Carolina hospital in 1948. Among Fitzgerald’s
papers are lengthy, impassioned letters to Zelda’s psychiatrists in
which the writer attempts to assist in his wife’s diagnosis and care.
Zelda Sayre, c. 1919
In
1937, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, as many other writers did, to
write for the movies and get out of debt, but the movies and Fitzgerald
never quite understood each other, it seemed. “My great dreams about
this place are shattered and I have written half a novel [ The Last Tycoon
] and a score of satiric pieces. .. about it,” he would write to
friends in 1940. Later that year, having suffered years of heart disease
as a result of alcoholism, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in his
Hollywood apartment.
This Side of Paradise
As noted above, This Side of Paradise has its genuine merits.
Begun as The Romantic Egotist while Fitzgerald was awaiting deployment and published when he was just twenty-three years old, This Side of Paradise
is a semi-autobiographical treatment of the author’s youth. The
protagonist of the novel is Amory Blaine who, like Fitzgerald, is born
into an upper-middle-class Minnesota family. As a young boy, Amory
travels the US and Mexico with his eccentric mother, Beatrice, visiting
one resort after another. From his mother, whom the young Amory calls by
her first name and about whom he has “no illusions,” he learns
classical art and class snobbery, e.g., “at eleven he could talk glibly,
if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven.”
Like
Fitzgerald, Amory is born into comfortable circumstances during
America’s Progressive Era, before the crisis of world capitalism
culminates in the eruption of the Great War in 1914. Observant but not
politically conscious, young Amory witnesses a world of
upper-middle-class pretensions and rigid class stratification, where
servants are ordered about by moody children and one sinks into the
leather sofas at the Minnehaha Club.
We follow Amory to an eastern
prep school where “he went all wrong at the start, was generally
considered both conceited and arrogant, and universally detested.”
Conceited and arrogant Amory certainly is, and at times early in the
novel the reader has difficulty finding him a sympathetic character,
looking on his emotional adventures as on a curiosity. Of Amory’s time
at Princeton, Fitzgerald stresses that “the best of Amory’s intellect
was concentrated on matters of popularity, the intricacies of a
university social system and American Society as represented by Biltmore
Teas and Hot Springs golf links.”
Among the young Amory’s other
faults are an infatuation with the Nietzschean concept of the superman, a
wistful affection for the “homogeneity” of the Confederacy and a
certain elitist disdain for, in fact a revulsion from, non-Anglo
immigrants—all symptoms of American ruling-class ideology of the time.
Fitzgerald’s own feelings on matters of race and ethnicity have been a
topic of critical debate (most notably involving Nick Carraway’s
allegedly anti-Semitic portrait of the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim
in Gatsby ), but as a character, Amory would hardly be
believable if he did not share the prejudices of his class. It can also
be argued that, by the end of This Side of Paradise, Amory has matured beyond such ideas.
In
the first half of the novel, Amory’s saving grace for the reader, apart
from his undeniably quick intelligence, is his capacity for suffering.
The occasion for his emotional pain is usually his romantic and
ill-fated attachment to a girl or woman. The primary object of his
attraction in this half of the novel is the coquettish and conceited
Isabelle Borgé (apparently based on Chicago debutante Ginevra King,
Fitzgerald’s first love), about whose personality Fitzgerald is incisive
and understanding: “She had begun as [Amory] had, with good looks and
an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible
popular novels and dressing room conversation culled from the older
set.” Yet Isabelle, like Amory, is conscious of her social role and
plays it “with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.”
In fact, one is struck again and again by the high degree of
self-awareness on the part of the characters, a tendency that may have
contributed to most critics’ finding This Side of Paradise to be not a fully mature work of art.
Ginevra King, c. 1916, the inspiration for one of the prominent characters in This Side of Paradise
In
the second half of the novel, after a brief “Interlude” that stands in
for Amory’s experience of the Great War, three other female characters
excite Amory’s ardor and contribute to his growth. Clara Page, Amory’s
beautiful, semi-impoverished cousin, presents him with a kind of human
ideal. “Her goodness,” Amory thinks, “was above the prosy morals of the
husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.”
Rosalind
Connage, said to be based on Fitzgerald’s soon-to-be wife Zelda, is an
intelligent and passionate young socialite and Amory’s most enduring
love interest. Rosalind’s decision not to marry Amory provides the
emotional nova from which the remainder of the novel travels.
Eleanor
Savage, Amory’s last romantic partner in the novel, is a fascinating
character. Like Clara, she is every bit Amory’s intellectual equal, but
Eleanor shares as well his restlessness and desire for a fulfilling
social role, though she believes such a role is denied to women. As a
result, Eleanor becomes unbalanced and seems ultimately a tragic
character, an insight on Fitzgerald’s part that proves painfully ironic
given Zelda’s later mental breakdown.
Amory shows himself capable
of forming male friendships at Princeton, usually based on some form of
intellectual admiration, as with the poet Tom D’Invilliers and the
radical Burne Holiday. The conversations between Amory and these
classmates provide some of the novel’s finest intellectual
satisfactions, as the young men argue poetry, character and war
propaganda. Amory also maintains a close friendship with Monsignor
Darcy, a kind of confessor and cultural mentor to the young man and
based upon Father Sigourney Fay, Fitzgerald’s own mentor at the Newman
School.
It is in his last year at Princeton that Amory’s
consciousness emerges somewhat from its narcissistic thicket, and he
begins to credit the significance of the larger world. Still, like
Fitzgerald himself, Amory leaves Princeton without graduating to join
the army. This decision goes largely unexplained, in the novel and in
Fitzgerald’s letters, but it appears that both Amory and F. Scott felt
some degree of patriotic duty to fight in the war.
Following the
“Interlude” of the war and throughout the second half of the novel,
Amory develops, at material cost, an intellectual independence and
maturity. In the novel’s final scene, an unemployed Amory accepts a lift
from two businessmen. When the men make conversation with him, Amory
surprises even himself by telling them he is a socialist. Here
Fitzgerald primarily uses Amory as a mouthpiece, putting forth an
argument for a socialist society as an answer to a bourgeois class that
has begrudged the working class even the reforms of trade unionism:
“You’ve brought it on yourselves,” insisted Amory. “You people never
make concessions until they’re wrung out of you.”
Fitzgerald/Amory
meets head-on in this conversation the common arguments against
socialism that one still encounters. To the objection that state
ownership of industry has been proven a failure (in Russia), he replies,
“No—it merely failed.” Amory’s assessment of the Russian Revolution’s
prospects from the vantage point of 1919 notwithstanding, he states that
such a system of nationalized industry would benefit from the oversight
of “the best analytical business minds in the government working for
something besides themselves.”
Confronted with the violence of
revolution and asked, “Don’t you believe in moderation?” Amory responds,
“You won’t listen to the moderates, and it’s almost too late. The truth
is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things
that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.”
Neither
Amory nor Fitzgerald, unsurprisingly, has a solid grasp of Marxism,
unclear as they are on the incapacity of reform—“moderation”—to contain
the inner contradictions of capitalism. Nevertheless, in addition to
being alive and open to the 1917 October Revolution and Bolshevism,
Fitzgerald was aware of the economic downturn and international labor
uprisings that followed World War I. Anti-worker and anti-socialist
sentiments invariably find expression in the mouths of the book’s least
savory characters, and Amory’s emphatic defense of socialism in this
scene provides an invigorating note on which to close the novel.
With these points in mind, one finds in This Side of Paradise
a flawed work of art that nonetheless speaks to our own political
moment and that reads as an intimate portrait, and ultimately an
incisive critique, of American ruling class culture by one of that
culture’s most sophisticated critics.
Gold
Harbour beach packed with Southern Elephant Seals (Mirounga leonina)
and King penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus), South Georgia, South
Georgia and the Sandwich Islands, Antarctica
One of the world’s largest icebergs is on a collision course with a South Atlantic island oasis, potentially threatening a rich ecosystem of wildlife including penguins, seals and krill.
The “A68a” iceberg, which broke off from Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf in
July 2017, is currently cruising through open waters just a few hundred
kilometers away from the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia.
If the 4,700 square kilometer (1,815 square mile) mass — greater than
South Georgia itself — stays on its current path and reaches the
island’s shores, scientists fear it could have a devastating effect on
its wildlife populations for years to come.
Professor Geraint Tarling, Senior Biological Oceanographer at the
British Antarctic Survey (BAS), told CNN that the iceberg could block
seals and penguins from being able to access their normal feeding
grounds at a time of year that is crucial for the colonies’ growth.
“If they have to make massive detours around the iceberg to
make the same trip they normally would, they likely won’t be able to get
back in time (to feed their young),” Tarling explained.
And because the iceberg is so huge, it could remain stuck on the
island’s doorstep for years, potentially leading to catastrophic marine
life population failure, he added.
Currently traveling at a speed of around 1 kilometer per hour, A68a
could reach the British Overseas Territory in as little as three to four
weeks if it travels in a straight line, Tarling said — though he
explained that it was likely to take a more circuitous route.
South Georgia and the neighboring South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI) are
home to approximately 5 million seals of four different species. Its
surrounding waters serve as an important habitat for migrating whales
and diverse fish populations, according to the local government.
As the iceberg moves closer to shore, it will “scour” the seafloor,
killing off the diverse marine life that plays a critical role in
balancing the global climate.
That’s because that marine life acts as a carbon sink. But if that
wildlife is disturbed, the carbon will release into the water and
ultimately into the atmosphere, Tarling explained, with the potential to
“upset the balance for years to come.”
Scientists who have followed the A68a since it “calved” away from the
Larsen C Ice Shelf more than three years ago say they are surprised by
how intact it has stayed throughout its journey north.
Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist and professor of geology at Swansea
University told CNN that the “area-to-thickness ratio of A68a is
approximately the same as a few sheets of copier paper stuck together,
so it is remarkable that it has stayed pretty much intact despite over
three years of drifting in the Southern Ocean.”
It has only been in the last year that the iceberg has picked up
considerable pace, even acting as a positive fertilizing force as it
makes its way through the ocean.
In open water, the iceberg is accumulating significant amounts of
dust from the atmosphere that act as essential nutrients that open
waters lack. But as soon as that mass hits the island’s shallow waters,
it will have the opposite effect.
Shallow waters are already heavily fertilized and the iceberg’s
excess fresh water and shading will prevent the growth of marine algae —
the fuel that so much of that biodiverse marine life depends on.
While icebergs calving from glaciers is a natural process, the rate of melting and calving is getting faster.
Walking in the dark evening through the streets of New York. Rain, snow, both?
Where the two events on the same day? I don't know.
My time walking the streets of New York waiting for the midnight bus all seem to blend into one series of events, as if they all happened on the same Saturday in Manhattan.
When I was young I learned a philosophy of life from watching the Rod Serling television program 'The Twilight Zone." I didn't know the genre term 'film noir' then, but I got the concept of a shifting world where nothing is ever certain and rules that apply somewhere else might or might not apply as one tries to figure out what other people's motives are, and who is friend or foe.
"Kill me, or I will kill you," is a most basic level of conflict. People are killed every day in New York City. People die naturally every day in NYC. There are about ten million people in the metro area, so just about everything that can happen to a person throughout life and into death is going to happen in New York on any given day. Live with it, or, die with it.
I found some books on the street. Nobel Prize winner Ulysses by James Joyce. Antique China with Pearl S. Buck resurrected from the library dust by Oprah Winfrey.
My main problems related to 'killing' in NYC was 'killing time.' I also was constantly looking for bathrooms. In order to sit in a restaurant or shop one must at least buy a drink. So, one must relive one's self at some point. I found that I could just go into the Port Authority Bus Terminal and descend three floors to the bathroom because I had a bus ticket and a right to be in the building and the bathroom. I also learned to go up to some construction dumpsters and pee while not looking down or holding my dick.
After relieving myself one rainy night I went back to Times Square to sit in the open public area and watch people until my time for the bus back to Boston came. I sat under an awning of a food stand and also had my umbrella to one side as a steady rain fell. I was a little cold and damp, but not to bad in my warm jacket and snug against the hot dog stand wall.
I was near the NYC Port Authority Bus Terminal with time to kill on
the streets of New York. So I strolled down the street past the gaudy
Madame Trousseau Museum and a two story McDonald’s carts with sausage
grilling and smoking and other carts with giant pretzels with giant salt
and giant prices. What a carnival. People where near the curb selling
posters and pictures and books and post cards. There were a number of
sketch artists who would have a person sit in front of them and they
would produce a quick sketch for … I don’t know, $5 or was it $10? Some
of the works I saw in charcoal on a 12″x14″ sketch pad looked very
good. I could never produce that kind of portrait or caricature of a
person in front of me. Everything I draw seems to be from my “Isometric
Period.” Kind of like Picasso when he was cubist and abstract. But
not as detailed. I think my sketches look like something from Jean
Cocteau in the 1920’s.
As I strolled along the wide sidewalks in the greying evening sky I
came upon a small group of four or five watching a woman sketching a
young man sitting for his portrait. I had my clip board in my hand, and
a thick crayon stub in the other. I looked over the woman’s shoulder
as she sat on a portable chair in front of me. She made an interesting
hovering movement over the paper with her charcoal stick before she put
down a line.
A man standing next to me leaned toward me with his hands in his pockets. “What do you think?”
Call him a blowhard and a bully, declare him vulgar and vain, just stop the comparisons with Hitler. And Goebbels. And Nazism in general. Stop invoking the Holocaust and Nazi Germany when describing Trump’s America in 2020. Stop it. Failing to do so means you are guilty of the very crimes you accuse Trump of: immorality, spreading lies, false equivalence, and sowing division.
From CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour’s claim last week that the Nazi genocide, which kicked off with the Kristallnacht pogrom, was “an attack on fact, knowledge, history & truth,” to Joe Biden’s comparison of Trump to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, the net effect of these comparisons is to twist the story of the Nazi enterprise into one about dishonesty and not about hatred and the genocide of an entire people.
And in case I need to spell it out, that is dangerous. Far more dangerous, than, say, an offhand comment about “very fine people.” (Which, since we’re already on that topic, let’s just get out the way again for the bazillionth time by reminding the memory-challenged among you of the continuation of that quote in which Trump says, “and I’m not talking about the Neo-nazis and white supremacists because they should be condemned totally” – a nugget of context that is conveniently culled from MSM-fueled groupthink.)
Such callous weaponization of the worst atrocity in human history is criminal: at best it constitutes Holocaust revisionism and at worst, Holocaust denial.
Why are the woke masses not foaming at the mouth at such heinous comparisons? Why are the cancel-culture vultures not ripping these pundits apart?
What kind of warped moral calculus does it take for someone to compare Trump, who is recognized by the world’s singular Jewish state as the greatest friend it has ever had in the White House, to that same nation’s arch nemesis, Hitler?
In case anyone needs reminding, Trump, father to a Jewish daughter and grandfather to Jewish grandchildren, brokered the first normalization deal between Israel and Arab countries in 26 years — and followed up with two more within three weeks — recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, among a host of other pro-Israel decisions.
Yet Trump-as-Hitler is nothing new.
Louis CK charged that Trump “is Hitler. And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the 30s.” That was in 2016, back when a pre-scandal ridden Louis CK had an opinion that some people still cared for. Around that time, Former Mexican President Vicente Fox said Trump “reminds me of Hitler.”
American newspapers have printed images of Trump as Hitler, so too have Democratic politicians.
The Washington Post has opined it’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust and the Los Angeles Times, while benevolently admitting that “Donald Trump isn’t a dictator,” nevertheless maintains Trump, in his attempts to question the 2020 elections, strikes an uncanny resemblance with the Führer.
The New York Times, never outdone, has drawn parallels between Trump and Nazi-era Germany here and here and here and here and, well, you get the idea.
It is all the more repugnant when such comparisons are made by Jews, such as the recent ad by the Jewish Democratic Council of America which juxtaposed Trump rallies alongside Nazi rallies from the 1930s.
And entirely mind-scrambling when Jewish Holocaust historians, such as Deborah Lipstadt, justifies such comparisons.
So just why do liberals think its ok to demonize and dehumanize Trump — and indeed, his supporters — to the extent of comparing him with the greatest monster who ever lived?
Insofar as the media is concerned, frankly the answer lies in the hackneyed truism: it sells papers. As CBS CEO Leo Moonves quipped prior to the 2016 election, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
The rest of the liberal chattersphere is so paralyzed by fear of four more years of Trump, that they deem anything, anything, to be kosher in the quest to unseat him.
But it never should be.
In the words of Nobel Laureate and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, “I don’t compare anything to the Holocaust.”
In case
anyone is confused, the logo to the left is not endorsed or supported
by Wal-Mart, the mega retailer often criticized for its stores’ negative
impact on communities, the pay and benefits provided to its workers and
its promotion of products made in overseas sweatshops where workers
toil in inhumane conditions for nominal pay. A Georgia man who came up
with the logo as part of
his protest campaign
against the retailer got sued by the billion-dollar corporation for his efforts. But today, in a resounding win for the First Amendment
(and for Public Citizen, which defended the man), a federal judge told
Wal-Mart that nobody in their right mind would buy their trademark
infringement claims.
Political and social parody, like the type Charles Smith of Conyers, Ga. used at his
web sites, is a cherished tradition that goes back to the founding of this
country. If Wal-Mart had won, think of the impact the ruling might have
had on blogs, artists, photographers and writers who use parody to
criticize companies.
“This
ruling shows that even the biggest company in America is subject to
parody, and that trademark rights must yield to the right of free
speech. This is a resounding victory for First Amendment rights and
sends a clear message to big corporations that would try to use their
deep pockets to intimidate and silence their critics.”
Over the years I have taught drawing to middle school, high school, college, and adult education students. One of my favorite classes to teach, after many years of technical drawing, was 'rapid visualization.' Using graphic expression on paper, or a screen, to render the notable parts of an object depicted for some use later. This is not 'fine art' where one is drawing a portrait, or a moody landscape by the sea. 'Rapid Viz' should have little to do with self expression or the agonies of one's soul.
Just as one can learn to write without becoming a 'writer' one can utilize drawings without becoming 'an artist.'
So... the level of skill one uses when taking visual notes is ultimately irrelevant. The drawing is a tool of memory and recording, not an object to hang on a wall in a frame and be fetishized.
Consumer sentiment unexpectedly dropped in early November as Americans witnessed the presidential election and surging coronavirus infections.
The University of Michigan’s mid-month read of consumer sentiment showed a sharp decline in consumer outlook and a small dip in current conditions, indicating that consumers are increasingly wary about the near-term future.
The Index of Consumer Sentiment fell from 81.8 to 77. Economists had forecast an improvement to 82.
The gauge of current economic conditions ticked down to 85.8 from 85.9. The measure of expectations dropped nearly 8 points from 79.2 to 71.3.
“The outcome of the presidential election as well as the resurgence in covid infections and deaths were responsible for the early November decline,” said Richard Curtin, the chief economist of the survey.
Curtin said that interviews conducted following the election recorded a substantial negative shift in expectations of Republicans, but recorded no gain in positive outlooks among Democrats. Curtin said it is likely that fears about the pandemic had overwhelmed any positive feelings about Democrats following the election.
This contrasts starkly with the reaction of consumers following the 2016 election. Following Trump’s victory, the index jumped 4.4 points to 91.6 in the mid-November reading, more than a full point above the consensus forecast. The final November reading was even better, hitting 93.8.
“The initial reaction of consumers to Trump’s victory was to express greater optimism about their personal finances as well as improved prospects for the national economy,” Curtin said at the time.
That reaction was in part due to Trump’s populist message. By contrast, Joe Biden was strongly backed by Wall Street, Republican neo-cons who wanted new wars and sections of the 'deep state' FBI and CIA who detested Trump and ran on an agenda seen as friendlier to the economic, political, and cultural establishments in the U.S.
In 2016, there also appeared to be an improvement in expectations due to relief that the election was in the past. That is not evident in the November 2020 survey, perhaps because the results of the election are still being contested.
Democrats are fare more likely to say that the pandemic is having an impact on their lives. According to the survey, 59 percent of Democrats reported that their normal life had changed to a great extent due to the coronavirus compared with just 34 percent among Republicans.
Peter Weatherby QC, who is
representing 18 individuals and organisations who have been spied on,
played a video of an officer known as EN34, whose undercover name was
“Lynn Watson”, on Tuesday.
In
the clip, filmed in Leeds in 2004, she appears in costume and clown
make-up, waving a feather duster, as part of the Clandestine Insurgent
Rebel Clown Army (Circa) – a street performance campaign group.
Mr
Weatherby said EN34 infiltrated the group, along with a series of other
peace and environmental campaigns, over a five-year period during which
she “befriended and tricked countless individuals”.
He
also showed a picture of HN118, whose assumed name was “Simon
Wellings”, who he said used his time undercover to build an orange
military tank out of plywood and cardboard.
The
officer was photographed at an anti-arms trade protest in the tank with
the Globalise Resistance group, which he infiltrated from 2002 until he
was unmasked in 2004.
Mr Weatherby asked: “How is that legitimate policing?”
He
told the inquiry: “The absurdity of investing massive resources into
infiltrating a clown army and groups which oppose wars and the arms
trade is well illustrated by these images.
“This is what the debacle of the last 50 years of undercover political policing looks like.”
“It
goes from the farcical yet deeply damaging involvement of the state in
activist organisations and campaigning to the outrage of the deceitful
relationships of trust formed with our CPs (core participants), their
children, their families and friends, and to the abuse of intimate
liaisons, which have been the subject of submissions by others, and
which have been profoundly devastating for those involved.
“This
is what millions of pounds of money, diverted from budgets that could
have been allocated to the police to protect our communities, or that
could have been allocated to other public budgets ‑ to the NHS, to
schools to libraries or to the arts – was misspent on.
“It
was misspent over the course of decades and decades of state sanctioned
clandestine activities by the police monitoring justice campaigns,
anti-racism, anti-police violence groups, environmental campaigns,
community solidarity networks, animal rights groups, and the political
activism, rebel clowns, musicians, artists, campaigners and others.”
Mr
Weatherby told inquiry chairman Sir John Mitting “there is nothing
funny” about the images shown and that he was not making a
“light-hearted point”.
“It’s
profoundly sinister, and an affront, not just to the basic fundamental
rights of those I represent, but to democracy itself,” he added.
The
Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) was set up in 2015 by then-home
secretary Theresa May after a series of disclosures about undercover
tactics.
It is looking
at two units – the Metropolitan Police SDS which existed between 1968
and 2008, and the undercover section of the National Public Order
Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), which existed between 1999 and 2010.
The group was particularly prominent in many of the actions organised around the 31st G8 summit held in Gleneagles during July 2005.[2] Members of CIRCA entertained children in Auchterarder while waiting for permission to march near the summit.[1]
Those participating in CIRCA actions typically dress in military-style camouflage
clothing supplemented with brightly coloured trimmings and political
logos. The costumes both create a comical atmosphere and serve to
maintain anonymity during protests. 'Armaments' are usually limited to feather dusters, although some carry water pistols.
The complete ensemble of the costume and traditional clown make-up
(usually consisting of a white face and red nose) creates a sense of
ridiculousness which seeks to challenge preconceptions of radical
activists.
Beliefs
CIRCA claims that there is more to the group than simply dressing up and being playful. There is also a psychology which informs its actions: the clown persona can be used to defuse tense situations and engage with police
in public order situations. In order to learn this 'recruits' must
participate in a training workshop aka Big Shoe Camp before deployment.[3]
In an article about the G8 protests, the Edinburgh Evening News described CIRCA as "an anarchist splinter group," but a member denied this, saying that while some members would describe themselves as anarchists "...most would consider themselves 'horizontalists' where we engage people without the need for leaders."[4]
The beloved pizza from the now-closed Alumni Cafe in Wollaston will soon be sold at a new spot called Alumni Pizza.
QUINCY — It’s been seven years since the Alumni Café served up
its last slice of bar pizza and cold beer at its original location in
Wollaston, but it’s still remembered by neighbors, city officials and
pizza lovers as a Quincy institution.
“It was like a Cheers.
Everybody just got along,” Courtney Rego, a bartender at the original
Alumni, said. “We had a lot of regulars. People called me crying for
weeks when we closed.”
For politicians, it was the place to grab a
beer and talk shop. For families, it was a cheap place for a dinner
that would please everyone. For city natives looking to reunite with old
friends, it was the place to gather on the night before Thanksgiving.
Until
now, the memories of Alumni’s crispy crust and bubbling cheddar and
mozzarella have been reserved for those who were around during the bar’s
heyday. But soon, a new generation will know what it means to eat
Alumni pizza in Quincy.
The owners of Rags Tavern in Quincy Point have renovated the
space next door on Washington Street and will open Alumni Pizza in the
coming weeks. It’s not a reopening of the Alumni Café — more like a nod
to the original — but the new joint will have some of the same
employees, pizza-makers and bartenders, as well as use the same pizza
pans and recipes.
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“The
name Alumni Pizza returning to Quincy is like Carnegie Deli returning
to New York City with the same pastrami and brisket recipes, even if in a
new location,” Kerry Byrne, a restaurant promoter who works with the
City of Quincy, said.
Rego, who now manages Rags and is overseeing
the opening of Alumni Pizza, said the tavern has always used the same
recipe as the original café, but bringing the name “Alumni” back to town
is sure to also bring back memories. When it opens, Alumni Pizza will
sell the famous bar pie, sandwiches and other food.
Rego said the shop will likely be ready to open in a few weeks.
If the walls could talk, the original Alumni Café’s would have stories to tell.
Brothers
Robert and Gerald Player, of Hingham, owned the Café until selling it
to Thomas Bellotti, brother of former Norfolk County Sheriff Mike
Bellotti, in 1995.
The Café was the site of an illegal sports
gambling bust in 1970 that led to 20 arrests, a 10-day suspension and
three years of probation by the licensing board.
The Player
brothers also owned the Player’s Lounge on Pear Street in Braintree,
which was cited by police for gambling and after-hours drinking in 1972,
according to Patriot Ledger archives.
A 2005 feature in the Ledger described the Alumni Café as a “fast, cheap, crowd-pleasing dinner.” At the time, pizzas cost $5.
When it closed in 2013, Quincy officials were quick to mourn the neighborhood staple.
“It
was more or less an institution,” former Mayor William Phelan told the
Ledger. “On Friday nights, they sold more pizzas out of there than you
can imagine.”
“The Alumni was as much a part of the Wollaston scene as
Barry’s Deli, Brigham’s (ice cream store) and the Wollaston Theatre,”
Quincy native Doug Gutro said at the time.
The spot of the original café, at 708 Hancock St., is now home to Winsor Dim Sum Café & Bar.
