Saturday, December 24, 2022

Links - 24th December 2022 (2 - Ukraine War)

Why the Ukraine conflict isn’t a new Cold War | HistoryExtra - "‘[Russia is still] you know, from our perspective, of course, still a Eurasian empire, it reaches still in its smaller form. You know, from the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait to the Pacific, it's still the biggest country in the world, it has the biggest nuclear arsenal. And yet, a man like Putin, from the security services, experienced himself by being in East Germany, a sense of humiliation, a sense of, you know, a trauma that this empire fell apart and was allowed from his perspective, that Gorbachev allowed this to happen. He has no sentiment for the fact that, you know, Western leaders also feared the collapse of the Soviet Union, they feared anarchy, that, in fact, they actually clung on to Gorbachev. He has no feeling for, you know, in the way Yeltsin emerged that, Yeltsin was a parade of sovereignty, and just declaring Russia sovereign, in some ways, opted out of the Union and destroyed the Union, for his own power hunger. That is completely left outside the story. I think but what it's really important to, to also see historically, that Russia has always grappled also with its identity. What is it to be Russian? To be Russian Orthodox? To hark back to the Kievan Rus? To, to think about, you know, these Russian values that he declared in his Millennium manifesto that were so important, this is a strong state and a leader that serves that strong state, and that Russia has about, Russia deserves to be, you know, a great power, perhaps even a world power. And that doesn't want to have anybody above it, it has to be recognized as equal. And he really sensed that, you know, what happened through the collapse of the Soviet Union was, in that sense, a humiliation for Russia, and he needed to revise it. So what we see is, first, he dealt in his first eight years, with the consolidation of his own authority, of creating stability and also retiring auspices in Russia politically, he stabilized the economy, because that had been in complete freefall. But of course, after that little changing of chances, Medvedev, when he came back the second time, it was about the foreign policy agenda. And that was about putting Russia back at the top table in international diplomacy. And that's why he took so much offense, you know, when Obama said that Russia was a regional power, not a world leading power. And of course, equally we see why is there the sort of awkward, unholy alliance emerging between China and Russia. Lover [sp?] has declared, you know, that Russia wants the post-west world order, Putin speaks about the liberal order being obsolete. He hates any references to unipolarity. He said so in 2007. He said, so again in 2019, in this famous Financial Times interview, and the Chinese want to be a world order and world power by 2050. So they both come together by saying, we want recognition of multipolarity and we want, you know, to undo that normative structure that has been binding us since 1945. And certainly since 1991, we perceive that as a Western dominated world order and we don't want this anymore, so that needs to be challenged and changed and TVC, you know, the reversion to the old power political tools where if you don't get by diplomacy, what you want, you apply force...
[In Ukraine] there was an independence referendum in December 1991, where even Crimea, more than 50%, more than 80% in the Donbass, more than 80% in general in Ukraine, voted for independence from the Soviet Union. And by default, also had made clear that didn't want to go into Russian dominated union, with Belarus and Kazakhstan... Ukraine also joined the Non Proliferation Treaty under the Budapest Memorandum by getting security guarantees from Britain, America and Russia for its territorial integrity and security by giving up its nuclear weapons arsenal, which was the former 1/3 of the Soviet arsenal...
The fact that it's turned to China, to look, you know, for military material, for financial aid, and done so openly, in defiance of that, the Americans, of course, have told the Chinese that they shouldn't do this. But of course, and Russia is looking east, not west. And it's the first time in a long time history since Peter the Great that the Russians are really doing this. And that is a completely new situation, you sort of wonder, this such, two different narratives, two realities, the Russians are fed a completely different reality and history by Putin, especially now, also, this, all the censorship. And, you know, we have to not forget the Gallup show that more than 60% of Russians say that they support this, in fact, Putin's popularity has gone up since the warfare in Russia. And that's, from our perspective, truly shocking’"

Mobilised Russians call hotline to ask how to surrender

Number of Russians Fleeing Draft Bigger Than First Invasion Force: UK - "Since Putin announced on September 21 that he would call up 300,000 reservists, there has been a mass rush for the border as Russians attempt to evade being sent to the front lines. Putin had pledged in March not to introduce conscription, a move that has helped to keep Russian civilians removed from the realities of the invasion of Ukraine. That was sharply interrupted with last week's announcement.  The Associated Press reported that as of Wednesday, at least 194,000 Russians had fled to Georgia, Kazakhstan and Finland alone.  Bloomberg, citing data from the European Union, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, put the figure at 200,000. Those estimates exceed what the US had estimated to be a 190,000-strong invasion force that massed at Ukraine's border just before the invasion. On Monday, the satellite-imaging company Maxar shared pictures of huge traffic buildups at Russia's borders with Georgia and Mongolia.   Ten thousand people have crossed into Georgia each day since the announcement, double the normal traffic... Plane tickets to countries with friendly visa agreements with Russia sold out almost immediately after Putin's announcement, with seats on private jets going for up to $27,000... "The better off and well educated are overrepresented amongst those attempting to leave Russia.""
Damn CIA, faking satellite photos!

Ukrainian refugee slams 'liar' security guard who 'treated her like a dogsbody' - "Tony has now also ended their relationship amid a furious bust-up in which he accuses her of not being able to handle alcohol and using a knife to damage a wall at their rented home... Meanwhile, Lorna said a reconciliation with the father of her two daughters, Tony, was not on the cards after he dumped his new lover... Lorna has accused Sofiia of flirting with Tony during the ten days they all lived together... Tony moved out with Sofiia in May this year just ten days after she moved into live with him and his partner of nearly ten years Lorna at their home in Bradford, West Yorkshire.  He ended his four-month relationship with her after a furious bust-up last Saturday when she allegedly used a knife to stab the wall of their rented home in Bradford.  She was arrested and taken away by police who warned her not to go back to the property.  But MailOnline told exclusively yesterday how Sofiia went back to the cottage they used to share and kicked the door on Monday evening while screaming: 'Tony, I love you'.  Police were called again by neighbours and she fled by jumping over a wall before officers found her hiding under a nearby hedge and arrested her for a second time, but she was released without charge... Lorna revealed that she saw early signs that Sofiia was a heavy drinker on their first trip together to a supermarket, when she put a bottle of wine and four beers into her basket  She also bought a bottle of whiskey and drank it in two days. The empty bottles were left under Sofiia 's bed.  Lorna added: 'She is a very flirty woman 100 per cent and clearly likes a drink too.  'She would brush up against Tony and the way she had a laugh with him was different and she had more eye contact with him... 'I love Tony because he the father of my two kids, but I'm not in love with him anymore... 'When we were going to court, the judge said to us that if there were any more articles, then we could be fined or jailed.  'A few days later, I walked into our local Asda and Sofiia was on the cover of two magazines. She had sold her story... Heavily-tattooed Tony said: 'We need to put this whole episode behind us and be great parents for our girls.  'I just need some time for me now as well. To evaluate what is going on.  'I'm not going to get into a relationship with anybody, although I've had quite a few offers on the Internet with people even sending me nude pictures of themselves."

‘Putin Is a Fool’: Intercepted Calls Reveal Russian Army in Disarray - The New York Times - "The calls, made by dozens of fighters from airborne units and Russia’s National Guard, have not previously been made public and give an inside view of a military in disarray just weeks into the campaign. The soldiers describe a crisis in morale and a lack of equipment, and say they were lied to about the mission they were on — all conditions that have contributed to the recent setbacks for Russia’s campaign in the east of Ukraine.  The conversations range from the mundane to the brutal, and include blunt criticisms of Mr. Putin and military commanders, remarks that may be punishable under Russian law if they were publicly expressed at home... Previously published security camera footage from a shipping company in Belarus and shipping documents obtained by The Times confirmed that soldiers from the 656th Regiment of the National Guard, the same unit identified with some of the call intercepts, sent packages home in the days after withdrawing. The documents record at least one soldier, Aleksandr, whom The Times identified in the intercepts as an owner of one of the cellphones used, shipping clothes to his wife on April 4. Cut off from the outside world and frustrated by commanders who the soldiers say keep them in the dark, the soldiers rely on the calls home for updates on the war they’re fighting. But what they hear from their families — a rosy picture propagated by Russian state media — is often at odds with their reality."
Naturally, there're Russia shills who claim this is fake

Lawrence Freedman: ‘Autocracies tend to make catastrophic decisions. That’s the case with Putin’ - "Russia’s war against Ukraine has been hampered by failings experienced by autocratic states during conflict, according to a far-reaching new study of command in war by one of the UK’s most prominent academics in the field.  Command, a wide-ranging analysis of post-second world war conflicts by the leading strategic studies expert Lawrence Freedman, examines a series of well-known conflicts, from the Cuban missile crisis to the French defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, through to the Falklands war and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, up to the present war in Ukraine.  “The big theme,” said Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, “is that autocracies are very bad at this. A lot of most catastrophic decisions come from autocratic decision-making. That is certainly the case with Vladimir Putin but also Saddam Hussein and even [the Argentine military dictator Leopoldo] Galtieri during the Falklands war.”... in key interactions between military and political leaders – which even in the best circumstances can be characterised by tensions and personal conflicts – it is the lack of open and often critical feedback that leads to bad decision-making. “Autocracies don’t have the feedback mechanism, and dig themselves in by believing that the advantage of autocracy is bold and decisive decision-making... And while Russian military operations for more than a century have often relied on using overwhelming numbers (often with little consideration for losses), in Ukraine, Russia appears to have been constrained by domestic political considerations from introducing a general mobilisation, which has limited the scale of forces it can deploy. One issue that has intrigued Freedman, as well as other analysts, is why Putin – whose use of force had been limited in scope before Ukraine – embarked on such a dangerous and badly prepared-for gamble in Ukraine.  “Military force had been quite good for Putin up until now. He used it effectively in Chechnya, Crimea, Georgia and Syria. He used it in quite a limited fashion in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014 where those doing his dirty work wanted him to take an even more aggressive approach.  “But his approach to the current Ukraine conflict has clearly been deluded."... A key failure, in Freedman’s view, was that while Russian intelligence had widely infiltrated Ukraine – as even Kyiv has acknowledged – the key figures around Putin either did not understand Ukraine or acted as an echo chamber for him... Even now, six months into the war, Freedman struggles to understand the logic of the Kremlin, not least its tactic of creating a wintertime energy crisis in Europe to undermine support for Kyiv. “I think the only ‘theory of victory’ the Kremlin has at the present is that the west turns on Ukraine because of the energy crisis. But the surprise there is that Moscow has not asked for a ceasefire now. That would put Zelenskiy on the spot because he couldn’t agree to one.  “Instead, Putin is still acting as though he expects more from this war than he has already got. Why I think there are some signs of desperation on the Russian side is that some are beginning to recognise that an energy crunch is not going to lead to a betrayal of Ukraine. In the long term, that signals the risk of deep damage to Russia’s economy.”"

Russian gas exports slump by a third in blow to Putin - "Production has slumped at Russia’s state gas giant Gazprom as it struggles to replace European buyers...   Fields that supply Europe are not currently connected to China, meaning supplies not sent to Europe cannot easily be diverted elsewhere... If it cannot sell the gas, Russia may have to shut down fields, which may affect future production...   The fall in Russia’s gas exports has pushed gas prices in Europe and the UK to record levels, triggering a major cost of living crisis and soaring inflation... Gazprom claimed gas prices in Europe this winter could climb above $4,000 per 1,000 cubic metres, which would equate to about €372 per megawatt hour – about 40pc higher than current high prices."

Julia Davis on Twitter - "Meanwhile in occupied Crimea: *old men as soldiers*"

Meme - "I would rather not be murdered by russia for no reason."
Chomsky: "Have you considered that the United States has also done bad things? I am a Linguistics Professor"

Facebook - "John Mearsheimer, on why Ukraine, NATO and the west are responsible for the Russian invasion: "It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate."
Also John Mearsheimer, on the Israel-Palestine conflict: "There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the lobby of the United States it has become the de facto enabler of Israeli occupation in the occupied territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians."
This is the great scholar people hold up to 'prove' that NATO and Ukraine was so aggressive against those peaceful Russians and brought this upon themselves. What a joke, lol."

Facebook - "Leftists are more upset about imperialism that took place over half a century ago than the blatant, flagrant, open imperialism happening in Ukraine literally right this second, being forced upon them by the barbaric Russian state"

Where’s the Peace Movement When You Need It? - "Almost exactly 19 years ago, some of the biggest demonstrations in modern history were held across the world. Millions of people in Europe, America, and elsewhere went out into the streets to protest against the coming invasion of Iraq. Peace movements across the world were mobilized and left-of-center political parties were inflamed.  Now, as Russia masses troops and warships near Ukraine on a scale not seen since the Cold War, there is an eerie silence in the West. How can this be? Russia has already waged war against Georgia in 2008 and has been fighting against Ukraine since 2014. It is a known aggressor. Why are there no mass protests in the West?...   A unifying feature among self-described peace activists is an unwillingness to place the sovereignty of small or newly restored countries on a par with that of larger and longer-established entities, a view succinctly put by Putin to President George W. Bush in 2008 when he said, “George, you have to understand Ukraine isn’t even a country.” It is a statement now widely repeated in the West.  This indifference to the fate of a major European state is not new. It dates back to the Cold War era when the student rebellions of the1960s were deeply influenced by socialism and Marxism, and linked to anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. Less well-known, Soviet and satellite intelligence services worked hard to use, and sometimes even control parts of the Western left and the peace movements. When students rebelled against a conservative society, they did so under red flags, buying into a view of the world that described the US as the home of capitalism, imperialism, and unjustified warfare.   As far back as 1945, George Orwell noted one of the key distinguishing markers of Western pacifists was apportioning blame for international crises “almost entirely against Britain and the United States.” Such people did not “as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of the western countries.”  While the Warsaw Pact invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia (which also drew some protests), as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, made clear that the Cold War was not a battle of good Soviet vs. the bad US, it did little to alter a seemingly instinctive response from the European left. That was reinforced by Ronald Reagan’s rearmament program in the 1980s and the positioning of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe following Russia's deployment of SS-20s. This spawned a new era of protests in Germany and the UK.   The Cold War ended, but much of the far-left has struggled to understand Russia’s evolution into a murderous kleptocracy where social justice is not a goal of state policy. Putin’s use of military and intelligence services for state-sanctioned acts of aggression abroad — think Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, Salisbury, Berlin, plus numerous other attacks — dovetails with a domestic social conservatism designed to make life difficult and dangerous for liberals, gay people, and others, while sanctioning a raw form of capitalism which rewards super-rich individuals closely tied to the Kremlin. Russia might be different from the Soviet Union in many ways, but its security services are not."
From February

Jeremy Corbyn urges west to stop arming Ukraine - "Jeremy Corbyn has urged western countries to stop arming Ukraine, and claimed he was criticised over antisemitism because of his stance on Palestine, in a TV interview likely to underscore Keir Starmer’s determination not to readmit him to the Labour party.  “Pouring arms in isn’t going to bring about a solution, it’s only going to prolong and exaggerate this war,” Corbyn said. “We might be in for years and years of a war in Ukraine.”... “What I find disappointing is that hardly any of the world’s leaders use the word peace; they always use the language of more war, and more bellicose war.”... Corbyn also suggested that he had been criticised over antisemitism because of his stance on the Middle East. “I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that my clearly stated support for the right of Palestinian people to be able to live in peace free from occupation, free from being under siege as in Gaza, and for those living in refugee camps … played a factor in all this. Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t wait to condemn me for my support for the Palestinian people.”... In a Guardian article earlier this year, Starmer said of Stop the War: “At best they are naive, at worst they actively give succour to authoritarian leaders who directly threaten democracies. There is nothing progressive in showing solidarity with the aggressor when our allies need our solidarity and – crucially – our practical assistance now more than ever.”"
Turns out he's not anti-"Imperialism" - he's just anti-West
If someone points out that global support for Palestine isn't going to bring about a solution, but just prolong and exaggerate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...

Russian Air Force draws a giant penis in the sky over Crimea — pointing into Ukraine. Second video shows view from Odessa : ThatsInsane

Facebook - "It was once said, when history supposedly ended decades ago, that no two countries with a McDonalds has ever gone to war. It was meant as a celebration of the supposed forever peace that would come with globalization. That observation has been ripped to shreds by the war in Ukraine.  Perhaps instead the unintended consequence of globalization was that we got so fat and happy that nefarious enemies could use our fatness and happiness as a weapon against us. Both unintentionally, but also by design, Europe got used to Russian gas, and now that is simply another weapon Putin can wield to try to break the will of NATO from preventing him from remaking Eastern Europe just as he desires.  Even if this war ends in a negotiated settlement, every western country is better off divorcing itself from Russia. We were fools to think countries like Russia or China would get nice as they got rich. We should have used the immense leverage we had in the 1990s to really demand these be different countries before we let them in to this billionaires club. It’s too late to replay that scenario, but we certainly don’t have to grant them membership in the future, and whatever temporary sacrifices we have to make now to make that a reality will be far smaller than if we continue to put this off till a later, seemingly more convenient date"

Russian energy executive who worked under Putin dies after falling off a boat at full speed - "Ivan Pechorin, 39, was the managing director of the Corporation for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic... In February, 43-year-old Igor Nosov, the corporation's former CEO, reportedly died suddenly from a stroke... Ukrainian officials said on 10 September that their armed forces had retaken the city of Kupiansk, which had been an important supply hub for Russian troops.  In response, Russia's defence ministry announced they were pulling back forces from parts of Ukraine's eastern Kharkiv region."
Looks like Russia's defence ministry is a victim of "psy ops"

Russian oil executive dies in fall from Moscow hospital window - "Ravil Maganov was chair of Russia’s biggest private oil company, Lukoil, which has criticised Ukraine invasion... Baza, a Russian news site with close ties to the police, suggested he may have slipped from a balcony while smoking and that no CCTV was available because cameras had been turned off for repairs... Half a dozen businesspeople with ties to the Russian energy industry have died in apparent suicides or in mysterious circumstances since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. None of the deaths have been classified as murders."
Are the West haters claiming the CIA did it yet?

Meme - "Russians, what we do to win this conflict?"
"More troops"
"Nukes"
"Just stop the war"
*defenestration*

Top Russian aviation expert dies after falling down stairs - "Anatoly Gerashchenko is said to have slipped and tumbled down the stairs - he is one of a number of Russian elites who have died in recent months."

Russia struggles to replenish its troops in Ukraine - "The prisoners at the penal colony in St. Petersburg were expecting a visit by officials, thinking it would be some sort of inspection. Instead, men in uniform arrived and offered them amnesty — if they agreed to fight alongside the Russian army in Ukraine... As Russia continues to suffer losses in its invasion of Ukraine, now nearing its sixth month, the Kremlin has refused to announce a full-blown mobilization — a move that could be very unpopular for President Vladimir Putin. That has led instead to a covert recruitment effort that includes using prisoners to make up the manpower shortage. This also is happening amid reports that hundreds of Russian soldiers are refusing to fight and trying to quit the military."

Ukrainian hackers created fake profiles of attractive women to trick Russian soldiers into sharing their location, report says. Days later, the base was blown up. - "Nikita Knysh, a 30-year-old IT professional from Kharkiv, told the FT that when Russia's invasion began in February this year, he wanted to use his hacking skills to help his country.  He recruited other hackers and founded a group nicknamed Hackyourmom, which now consists of 30 hackers from across the country... "The Russians, they always want to fuck," Knysh told the FT. "They send [a] lot of shit to 'girls,' to prove that they are warriors."... Knysh told the FT that his team had participated in other hacks, including leaking the databases of Russian military contractors and tricking Russian TV stations into playing news clips about Ukrainian civilian casualties."

Kremlin's pro-war propaganda is so boring a quarter of Russian TV viewers are switching off - "The Moscow Times quoted a survey by the independent Rosmir polling centre which found that only 65 per cent of respondents said that they now watched Russian state-run TV stations, down from 86 per cent at the start of the war... It’s not unusual for the TV analysts to veer into racist diatribes, calling Ukrainians “sub-humans”. Analysts and commentators who appear on Russian state TV are all resolutely pro-Kremlin and pro-war. There is generally no debate during broadcasts save for criticism that the Kremlin is being too soft on Ukraine.   It’s not unusual to hear the analysts, generally professors or journalists or retired military officers, talking up the prospect of bombing Britain for its support for Ukraine.   But although the Kremlin may consider this to be a winning strategy, it has never had to maintain its iron grip over the TV schedule for such a sustained period and it seems to be wearing thin.   Genuinely popular TV personalities such as talk show host Ivan Urgant have quit Russia because of their disgruntlement with the war... Opinion polls now suggest only 55 per cent of people in Russia saying that they are in favour of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, compared to 66 per cent a few months ago.  This is partly because of general war fatigue that has set in and partly because Russia has become a more difficult place to live as a result of western sanctions.  Another survey has said that the number of people dining out in Moscow restaurants has dropped to a five-month low because it has become too expensive and cinema owners have warned that without major state support, the sector is going to collapse.  Hollywood no longer distributes its blockbuster releases to Russian cinemas."
This suggests that sanctions do work - one mechanism being that propaganda cannot spin changes you see in your daily life as not happening

Mikhail Gorbachev Reportedly "Upset" Over Vladimir Putin's War in Ukraine - "“Gorbachev’s reforms – political, not economic – were all destroyed,” Venediktov said. “Nilch, zero, ashes.”...   “I can tell you that [Gorbachev] is upset,” Denediktov concluded. “Of course, he understands that […] this was his life’s work. Freedoms were brought by Gorbachev. Everyone forgot who gave freedom to the Russian Orthodox Church. Who was it? Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. The freedom of press, the first media law, who brought it? Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Private property? Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.  “So what would [Gorbachev] be able to say now?”"
Maybe that's why he died

The hard truth: Ukraine has left both the West and Russia reeling - "In the sixth month of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, it is timely to conduct an interim audit into the progress of the war. The question is often asked as to who is winning and who is losing, but such binary questions are confounded by the complexity of the situation. Indeed, one wonders whether winning or losing is a meaningful concept at all... With the obvious exception of the Second World War, most modern conflicts have ended in negotiation not outright victory on the battlefield. Ukraine will almost certainly follow this pattern... The Russians will not withdraw voluntarily, the Ukrainians are most unlikely to be strong enough to throw them out, and the West will never contemplate an Iraq-style operation to eject them."

Wrecked Russian fighter planes found with rudimentary GPS receivers ‘taped to dashboards’ - "British defence secretary Ben Wallace said a chargesheet of the Russian army’s failure, including poor battle preparation and inadequate equipment for its invasion in Ukraine, should be placed at the feet of Moscow’s General Staff of the Russian Army.  Mr Wallace’s comments came after GPS receivers were allegedly found taped to the dashboards of downed Russian SU-34s... “As an aside, the sheer amount of footage from Ukrainian drones suggests to me that they also lack wider air defence and counter-UAV system”... many vehicles are frequently found with 1980s paper maps of Ukraine in them... while “Russia have large amounts of artillery and armour that they like parading, they are unable to leverage them for combined arms manoeuvre and just resort to mass indiscriminate barrages.”"

Russian Oil Billionaire Dies of ‘Toad Poisoning’ - "Oil billionaire Alexander Subbotin on Sunday became the sixth Russian oligarch to die under mysterious circumstances since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.  According to Moscow police, Subbotin was laid low by a toxic toad during a hangover cure administered by a shaman. Subbotin, 43, was formerly an executive with Lukoil, Russia’s largest privately-owned oil company, and was the owner of a successful shipping operation based in Finland called the New Transport Company.  Subbotin’s body was recovered by police from the basement of a house in Mytishschi, a suburb of Moscow, on Sunday evening. The house is owned by a man named Aleksei Pindyurin, who claims to be a shaman with mystical powers working under the supernatural alias “Magua Flores.” (Not every sorcerer is fortunate enough to be born with a cool name like “Stephen Strange.”) Shaman Magua, along with his female partner Tina Cordoba (real name Kristina Teikhrib), offered their clients a variety of services, from communing with spirits to providing extreme alternative medical cures. Subbotin allegedly came to them looking for a hangover cure after overindulging in alcohol and drugs...   The string of mysterious oligarch deaths began on February 25, the day after the launch of the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, when a top executive for Russia’s state energy company Gazprom named Aleksandr Tyulyakov was found hanged in his garage, a suicide note close at hand.  Another Russian tycoon named Mikhail Watford supposedly hanged himself in his garage in the United Kingdom three days later. On March 24, medical supply billionaire Vasily Melnikov was stabbed to death along with his wife and two sons in their apartment in Russia.   On April 18, financial tycoon Vladislav Avayev was killed in his Moscow apartment along with his wife and daughter. The police claimed Avayev shot his family and then turned the gun on himself.  The billionaire death spree continued on April 21 with the alleged murder/suicide of 55-year-old Sergei Protosenya, who was found hanged in a villa near Barcelona, Spain with his wife and daughter stabbed to death beside him.  A seventh billionaire death might be connected to the pattern, as top Gazprom executive Leonid Shulman was found dead along with a suicide note in his St. Petersburg cottage in January, a few weeks before the attack on Ukraine began."

Cost of Sex Calculator

In the old days of the Internet, there was a Cost of Sex Calculator at http://www.costofsex.com/. Unfortunately, it is no longer online. Even more unfortunately, it was last up so far back (2004 - the only reference I can find to it) that the Wayback Machine does not archive it.

I have thus taken it upon myself to recreate it as best as I remember (albeit using monthly numbers instead of weekly for greater accuracy [e.g. some people may have sex less than once a week and in general weekly variance is going to exceed monthly]). And here it shall stay - until Blogspot goes down, uCalc goes down and/or uCalc decides to no longer support calculators created on expired free trials.

Of course, the calculator is not gender neutral, because we know the dynamics of non-heterosexual relationships are different. 

 

If uCalc does down or restricts my account, here're the relevant variables:

Number of times a month you have sex with her
Amount of money you spend on her every month
Number of hours a month you spend in pointless conversations/arguments with her
Number of hours a month you spend doing things you don't want to do for/with her
Hourly wage

Someone suggested I make multiple calculators to compare "diy vs wife vs hooker vs sugar baby etc", but the calculator above can be used for such purposes as well, once one understands how to impute the differing cost/time inputs involved.

Links - 24th December 2022 (1 - History Extra Quoting)

Australian Bushrangers: Folk Heroes Or Common Criminals? | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Most people see Bushrangers as national heroes. And there's actually popular government support for that as well. There's a, there's a government webpage about Bushrangers. A lot of Australians self identity with the bushranging mythology, with the kind of mystique, the idea of the underdog, the fighting against adversity, the idea that you're somehow making the world a better place through bringing about a more kind of rough but also a very real form of justice. That mythology is so pervasive that there are many studies of the sociology of bushranging in Australia today. So there are even studies about people with Ned Kelly tattoos are apparently more likely to die violent deaths than the regular population... My research tries to really challenge and destabilize our understanding of bushranging as a white male phenomenon. Because it categorically wasn't. Even if you look at the numbers and say, well, there were more white men committing bushranging than these other racial or gendered groups, when you look back through the records, the very tangible, visceral fear that people felt about these other bushrangers. And the extent to which they really did have influence, discussions about these figures changed legislation, led to intense Parliamentary Debate, changed the whole composition of certain communities, and had enduring legacies that remain till the present day'"

The Cold War Battle For Berlin | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘How bad a state was the city and its population in at the end of the war?’
‘Well, you've got to remember that Berlin is a city in total ruins, you know, the the RAF, the Americans, they've been bombing it from the air for, you know, for several years, intensely. And then you had the Red Army has come in and just you know, mortared and shelled the city. So it's a city in ruins. There's no city administration, no functioning government, there's no water, there's no gas, there's no electricity, and there's almost no food. So, and all the hospitals have been destroyed completely. So it's a city, and people are living in, in ruins, in their basements, in the cellars. It's an absolute, you know, humanitarian disaster in the waiting. And so the, when the both the Soviets move into their sector of the city and the Western Allies into their sector sectors, they they've got an absolute disaster to deal with. They've got in the western sectors alone, they've got two and a half million Berliners who are starving, and they've got to bring food in and they've got to bring it in pretty quickly… The Soviet Army, the Red Army, has captured Berlin and got there two months before the Western Allies. So the Soviets already control the whole city. And by the time they deign to allow the Western Allies into their sectors, the Soviets had done what they can, and they've done quite a good job at repairing water supplies and some electricity supplies in their sector of the city. But they have declined to do to do anything in the western sectors, except of course, loot those those sectors and take away whatever they can. So when the, when the Americans and the British arrive in their sectors, not only is the no water, no electricity, no gas supplies, as I've said, but also they find that all the great industrial factories, many of which are in the British, British sector, have been totally looted. The the Soviets have simply carted off off everything, as they see it for reparations for all the damage that the German army has, you know, has done to Soviet Russia, of course. So they, it's, you know that they walk into an absolute disaster...
‘Stalin's vow, was that Adolf Hitler was still alive. I think he might have said possibly in British held territory, when all the while Stalin had confirmation that the German leader was in fact dead. And he was so so determined to sort of spin this story that Hitler was still alive that he had the person who confirmed Hitler's dead locked up in a gulag so the truth couldn't leak home. Why was Stalin so hell bent on misleading the allies on this point?’
‘Yeah, this is absolutely extraordinary. And you read what happened is the Soviets found the the grisly charred corpse of Hitler. And most importantly, they found the jaw, his jaw bone, and the head his teeth. So they they went to they found his the dental nurse that looked after Hitler's teeth. And she was able to find the radiographs of his teeth and prove without a shadow of a doubt that this was Hitler's corpse. And this was told to Stalin who immediately saw this as a potential way of, you know, getting one over on the allies but on the Western Allies. So yeah, he had it absolutely hushed up, the fact that Hitler was indeed, had committed suicide, his body has been burnt. And he started to insinuate that the British were holding a still alive Hitler in their, in their zone of occupied Germany. It's an extraordinary accusation to make against, against your supposed ally, you know, and this will be repeated time and again, and it just made the British look really, really bad, because they couldn't offer any proof really. So this this story, run and run and Stalin was very happy to let it run and run...
So the Red Army comes in first. So the the Russians are there for two months with no, no Americans and no Brits in the city. Berliners are desperate for the West, Western allies to arrive because, of course, the Soviets, I mentioned they've been looting. But also they've been raping. I mean, the accounts of rapes are, they're pretty grim to read, it has to be said. Some 90,000, Berlin, women had to have medical treatment for rapes at the hand of the Red Army. But that number, the number of rapes is known to be infinitely higher than that’"
The tankies will have some convenient excuses for Stalin's perfidy. Presumably lying about Hitler was justified in the name of anti-fascism. And maybe they will say the women in Berlin had to be comfort women for the brave Red Army soldiers

Contraception, consent & erotic connection: sex through history - HistoryExtra - "'Instead of this kind of period of intense, horrific persecution, and horror and kind of destruction or removal of gay men, the 19th century, the Victorian period is actually very different. We start out with the removal of the death penalty for sodomy, we start out with camp, huge campaigns, really kind of incredible things that are done by magistrates, and by the people who are in charge to sort of say, we should not be giving the death penalty for this anymore, you know, you know, this is, it's wrong, and we get a period, really from the 1830s through to the 1890s. Every time I found a consensual case, now that's not someone who has committed an act of like an assault on a child or an assault on another man, or, or abused an animal, which also falls, kind of under the sodomy laws, those those cases I don't count, when you find a consensual case, where it's clearly two men who are gay, who have been in a relationship together, who've had a sexual encounter, every every single time they come before the courts, pretty much, they are found not guilty. That was incredible to me, because it completely shifted my understanding of our legal system, it completely understanded my understanding of how society saw these men… you find that if two men who are clearly in a relationship together are brought before the court, the only thing they will ever be prosecuted for, prosecuted for is not the act. And often they've been caught in the act. But it's not the act, it's for getting caught in a in a park or a field in a public place. And, and so it's a very quick kind of slap on the wrist and off you go. In other cases, they're often found, if they are found guilty, their sentences are then commuted, you know they're, or they're pardoned. And if you have that kind of legal backdrop where the legal system itself is not prosecuting, not taking these convictions or not putting those people in jail, then you also start to unpick what the reality of sexual culture and gay culture was at this time. And that's when you find the real lives. The people like Edward Byrne Hodge, who really at the end of kind of the 19th century, becomes someone who is prosecuted for being a gay man in a very rare successful prosecution solely because he, he pleads guilty, which doesn't happen very often...
A lot of people will say to me… lesbians were banned because Victoria didn't, Queen Victoria didn't believe they existed. We've got no evidence... I have an abbess who was basically secretly abusing her entire nunnery by taking them to bed over an evening and sort of saying, this is God, God is telling me to do this to you...
Often the women who are involved in sex work are the ones who are the most free in terms of finding some form of independence, writing down their thoughts, their ideas and their attitudes and, making a name for themselves. And that's, that's tough for a lot of people who want us view sex work as purely victimhood. I think the, one of the worst things we do as historians is denying agency in the past just because it doesn't fit our view of what agency should be. Just because we feel that we disagree with someone's choices, somehow they aren't, that means they don't have agency, their own freedom. And this is where my love of the problematic comes from...
I think one of the things I love about the history of contraception is the moment someone says to you, sex was repressed in the past, they weren't talked about it, no one did it, you say, you know, there was a condom shop in like the 17th and 18th centuries in London. And you know, that, that we have first hand accounts of men who would take their, you know, their sheep skin condoms to be washed by the laundry women… all the agricultural almanacs, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, for housewives would include instructions for how to make your own sheep and goatskin condoms… contraception was something that was written about and discussed by men and women… as far as the Victorians and the 18th and 17th centuries, we're concerned, consent is the most fundamental part of any sexual encounter… it must not happen any other way. And that contraception was absolutely celebrated and known and acknowledged, whether that was the withdrawal method or condoms being safe. Making sure you're not transmitting an STD was as much an issue to someone in the 16th and 17th centuries, as it is to today… There's a wonderful pamphlet that I've I first saw in the Museum of London archive a long time ago, for that's printed in 1863. And it's on the art of the, getting handsome children… it's kind of ripped from a 16th, 16th century, 17th century physician’s Guide to Sex that has been constantly printed and constantly kind of shared and repeated across the globe for for centuries… It's important to, how to make your wife have an orgasm... you could not get pregnant if the woman didn't have an orgasm. This was the standard this was like the the like the first bit of sex education anyone learned in any century before us, was the importance and the power of the female orgasm. But because the female orgasm was so important, consent was equally important. Because if you're not comfortable, if you're not happy, if you're not relaxed, these are all the things that people felt, were key to making sure a woman was going to have an orgasm and therefore get pregnant. So I really do think, you know, when we look at the past and we look at consent, it was absolutely tied to joy and connection. They're kind of the wholehearted embracing of the physicality and animalistic joy of sex that happened in every century before our own. We really are, we've really lost out and we're really missing out on a thing.'"
So much for the simplistic blaming of the British for anti-sodomy laws

Piano In Musical History | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Something that I, I had never even really realized, of course, it's so obvious, until I read the book is that the piano was an instrument is designed for male hands.’
‘Yes, I'm glad you’ve, I'm glad you’ve picked up on that, because I, I put, put that in the introduction with a certain amount of trepidation because it's an, I actually have never seen it stated just quite as sort of boldly as I stated it that, that most piano music was written by men for their own hands for the ha-, or expecting that the music would be played by by other men with with with typical male hands. And there are women who have large hands. And just as there are men who have small hands, but generally speaking, the male hand is on a slightly larger scale than the female hand. And so for a lot of piano music, particularly of the Romantic era, where they're using wider intervals, and they require greater stretches between individual fingers, to get your hands on big chords, that is easier for men, it just, it just is. Because they can more easily stretch. For example, the Russian composer Rachmaninoff, end of the 19th century, had an enormous hand and he wrote music, which his own hand could play. So he could stretch something like an octave and a fifth, which is, you know, a stretch that I could never manage, I can stretch an octave. And if I'm given time to stretch my hand a little bit more, I can put my hands on an octave plus one note, that's all. So I could not possibly put down the chords that Rachmaninoff played all in one, all at one moment, I would have to go up bum bum bum bum. And that means that for me, a lot of romantic music, I have to say spread the chords, meaning to ripple from the bottom to the top, it just makes a different, a different effect.’"

Kate Morgan On The Legal History Of Murder | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘So in around the 10th and 11th centuries, there's this concept of Mordor that emerges into into the legal system. It comes across from from France, and also from Germany. And what that denotes is, is secret killing. So it's not just the fact that you've killed somebody that makes it a crime, it's the fact that you've done it in secret is what makes the law tak an interest in it effectively. And then over the next couple of 100 years, that got finessed a little bit, it got anglicised, and that then led into the crime of murder that has been part of the law… all murders are homicides, but not all homicides are our murders. And there's been an ongoing challenge for the law really to, to draw those demarcation lines between the kinds of killings, that it that it deems to be murder, and that's shifted almost continuously since since back in those Anglo Saxon days, really...
There was a lot of circumstances that it wasn't, a killing wasn't even treated as being unlawful. I mean, it was, I think we, you know, in the modern era, we kind of forget how dangerous daily life was back in those days and, and actually violent death at somebody else's hands wasn't necessarily that the shocking thing that we see as today because life expectancy was was so much lower. There were so many other threats to people's safety, that actually the the act of of murder wasn't really given the prominence that it is in our culture today. So at that point, it would only be those secret killings that were effectively treated as murder back in those days, and then it's it's as the law progresses probably over the next few hundred years. So by the sorts of 15th and 16th century, it's come to be attached with this concept of sort of premeditation and malice, of forethought that really defines murder from from the lesser homicides, like like manslaughter...
Certainly from like the Middle Ages onwards, it would be death for those killings that were found to be deliberate. Originally, before the, before the concept of Mordor entered the law. Very often, the killing was attoned for by by paying something known as bot, which was effectively financial compensation to the, to the victim of the person that had been killed. And that then was was the end of the matter really, as far as the law was concerned. So it didn't become a crime that was punishable by the state. Until this concept of Mordor and then murder emerged a couple of centuries later. And really ever since then, murder has been punishable by death in in almost all circumstances. What did change over the course of sort of more recent history is the fact that there were so many other crimes that were punishable by death as well. When you get into the, so in the 17th, and particularly the 18th centuries, there are almost 200 criminal offenses that were punishable by death. So murder really wasn't anything special, you know, you could be hung for stealing a loaf of bread, just in the same way that you could be hung for murdering someone. It's only in the middle of the Victorian era where the death penalty for crimes other than murder and treason is abolished. That murder sort of assumes this, this prominence within the criminal law, based largely on the fact that it is the only crime in effect punishable by death. And I think that gives it an extra layer of notoriety from that point onwards...
I think what happened was in the Georgian era, there's a lot of focus on the law as being a means of protecting property and money and finance and somebody interfering with those those rights were seen, you know, as no better than a murderer. And that was reflected in the punishment of the, of the law. And I think, as society progresses, and the law gets a little bit more enlightened, that seems to seems to drop away, really. So that by, and certainly by the 1820s, 30s, that there's beginning to be the stirrings of an abolition movement for the death penalty in general anyway, so that sort of adds on the pressure for for the law to slim it down and really focus on which crimes should should be punishable by death, and that that progresses throughout the Victorian era. So it's very difficult to point to a sort of big bang theory, I think there's a, there's just a gradual realization that this is not a civilized way to, for a legal system to conduct itself...
There's some quite poignant testimony, certainly in some of the Victorian cases where people are pleading insanity where their lawyers are saying, look, you know, this is, this is not an easy way out you. Mental, mental health care at the time was such that actually being found to be insane and confined to an asylum to, for a lot of people would  be a fate worse than death.’"

Lea Ypi On Living Through The Fall Of Communism | History Extra - "‘Now, one of the big themes in your book is freedom. And in, over the course of your life, you've lived through communism in Albania, then capitalism in Albania. And then obviously, you've spent many years living in the West. What have those different experiences taught you about freedom and the limits of it?’
‘In a way, the story that I tell the book is about sort of how different people interpret different ideas of freedom. And so what I do is to try and think about different characters that I have met in my life and how they had thought about freedom and the limitations of that outlook on freedom in both the decisions they make and in sort of their orientation. So I talk about my mother, for example, as someone who is committed to what might might call a very liberal idea of freedoms, you are free insofar as you're not told where to go, or what to wear, and what to do what to say, which were all the kinds of freedoms that were lacking in socialist Albania. You know, you couldn't travel, you couldn't wear what you wanted, you were always told to think in a certain way. And so these impediments were what she thought were freedom. And then my father had a different idea of freedom he had, he had a more what one might call the kind of positive idea of freedom. So you're free only insofar as you also have certain opportunities. Which is why, for him, it wasn't just the question of not being told to do certain things. But it was also a question of being given the means to do what you want to do, and to kind of have a life that is flourishing. And that's also why for him, it was very difficult to make those decisions, for example, at the port about sacking people, because he realized that if someone doesn't have a job, or if someone doesn't have money, yes, they are formally free to travel, but they can't go anywhere, because they don't have the money to buy a ticket to go anywhere. And so, and so that system, and that way of thinking about freedom, in some ways, is also deficient, it's not enough to just be given the sort of formal guarantees, to realize what you want to realize, if you don't also have a sense of opportunity. And if you don't have real opportunities, and if those opportunities are not distributed equally. So that was sort of a different understanding of freedom, which in his life, he could, he was committed to this, but he could also see the limitations of it. And it became very difficult for him when he was the person in charge of making those decisions, that he knew what actually obstruct other people's freedom in terms of, you know, telling them that they would not have this job from day, the next day. And, and then the other one, the other idea of freedom that I find very interesting, and that I felt like my grandmother embodied is this idea of freedom as moral agency. In other words, the idea that we always, we are free because we have a free will. And that free will shows itself even in circumstances that seem oppressive. And even when there are obstacles to realizing it. She, in her life, this book was sort of the message that she always passed on to me, was this idea that circumstances will always be stacked against you. And she was someone who in her life had experienced this because she came from this some elite family who had lived scattered in the Ottoman Empire for many generations and then came to Albania. She was an advisor to the Prime Minister, was the first woman to work in the Albanian administration, and then ended up being the wife of someone who went to prison and then was deported, had to work in the field. And so she had this very fundamental shifts in her life. And she always, what I found incredible was that throughout her life when I asked her about her life, and so on, she insisted that she had always been free. And I found this always completely bewildering, because I thought, well, how can someone who's gone through this level of oppression, whose fortunes have changed so much, who had all these things and then didn't have them, how could they say that you, you’re still free, and she said to me, well, because look, freedom is something that is inside us. And it's to be, to have the will to sort of assert yourself even against the circumstances. And we remain free for as long as we retain that dignity and retain that free will. And it doesn't matter, you know, how the world is behaving itself around you, if you have that moral capacity, then you, no one can take away your freedom, they can take away this sort of other things. But these are all in some ways, obstacles that enable you to assert that you are free by sort of rising yourself above them. And by showing that you're still able to behave morally and to do the right thing. And so she kept saying to me, for example, you know, you have to keep studying and keep doing things, even if it doesn't look like you will be rewarded in the end because we don't do the right thing expecting rewards, we do just because it's the right thing to do. And this was actually something an idea of freedom that I had sort of grown up with my grandmother asserting it and then I became really invested in philosophically afterwards when I started to study and to yeah, to, to read philosophy and to look at different theories of freedom and different conceptions and different understandings of freedom. I found this one really powerful because I felt that it gives you a really good understanding of I think, what is fundamentally a human being, and also what kind of society you can create with that conception of the human being at its core, and I found that was a very powerful notion of freedom, which is also sort of thrown in there in the mix in the book and discussed through characters and through dialogues and through the stories that each of them tells.'"

Cricket as a colonial weapon | History Extra - "‘Why was this game as opposed to say football, or boxing, regarded as a symbol of English integrity?’...
‘Cricket started in England almost seven centuries ago, back in the 13th century. It was mostly associated with gambling, rustic people, all sorts of violence, it was often banned by different monarchs in the 15th, 17th centuries, and on Sundays, when most people would go out to play cricket, sometimes the local parish or the vicar would put a ban on cricket because that was distracting people from church service. Everything suddenly changed in the middle of the 19th century, when suddenly there was a huge upsurge of enthusiasm among the British elit [sic] regarding cricket. Why cricket and not in any other sport, we don't really have a very clear answer to it. But somehow cricket become the sport that they would all favor, as that pursuit of excellence as citizen, as patriot, as the ideal person to uphold the virtues of the nation, and also the Empire. To prepare people for administrative and military functions of the Empire so that the Empire can be further glorified. It can be strengthened, and all its bulwarks can be reinforced... It also had a very distinct military function because after the Crimean War, there was suddenly a big question put around the military functions of the British Army and also after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, there were question marks around the efficiency of the British military. These kind of questions were further strengthened by the debacle of the Boer War when England faced like severe casualties. So these were the processes which influenced the British people to think that we need to make our bodies more martial, we need more sport, and cricket became the kind of paradigm of discipline, teamwork, sacrificing oneself in the face of adversity or for the nation. So these were the virtues which were instilled in cricket actively in this period of 50 years. So cricket served a huge and significant ideological function around this period. And these virtues generally become so entrenched in British psyche that we can't even think about Victorian England without cricket...
Some of the writers on cricket… would conjure up this bucolic, this image of the bucolic pasts of England, the rusticity which were at the core of Englishness. So this was started in the late 19th century, when writers would usually ascribe good qualities into being back to nature. The connection with nature was extolled in most of these writings of this period. And also people were getting disaffected with industrial modernity. So they were saying that industrial Britain was making huge profits, but it was actually getting people away from what England really meant. So there was this mythologisation, and romanticisation of rustic rural England. And since the portraits of cricket photographs were not really very popular at the time that came much later, we always see most of the portraits of cricket, the game being played in on the village green by people who were like mostly amateurish, and not really professionals. So they would just play cricket for fun. So these kind of images, gradually became very strong reminders of what was English about England. And these also serve to differentiate England from its other parts of the United Kingdom like Scotland, or Wales. So cricket was something that differentiated England from Britain and also other parts of the British Empire.’"

Giving birth in the 17th century | History Extra - "‘I always think that people in early modern England had a lot more knowledge about labor and childbirth, than probably we do. Now. If you think about going as a first time Mum to antenatal classes, and you've not probably ever been to a labor, you've not heard anybody in labor, you've probably never even in some cases touched a newborn or held a newborn. Whereas in the early modern period, because everybody gave birth at home or almost everybody, birth was part of life. And so you wouldn't escape the sights and sounds of birth in this period, when you were growing up, childhood, adolescence, you wouldn't be in the birthing chamber, necessarily, but you would hear sounds, you'd see people coming and going, you, you’d be holding babies. So I think that people in general had much more of an idea about childbirth than we do nowadays, certainly...
Almost two thirds of children made it past 15 into adulthood’"

Tsiang Tingfu: Why He Deserves To Be Remembered | HistoryExtra - "Many of his analyses of the crisis of China in the mid-20th century, you know, agricultural crisis, the ability to create a stable government, which he looked at actually as a historian and a clear-eyed historian, have stood up to time very well in certain ways. I've read many of his essays and in some ways you can look at the debates that he goes through the 1930s about, will strong man dictatorships overcome democracies and should they? Well, goodness me, we've having these debates today. In today's debates, China is usually on the other side, on the strong man side, rather than the democracy side, but people like Tsiang Tingfu show that any idea, any careless idea that there is no basis for liberal and democratic thought in China is completely wrong. Figures like Tsiang were very important in theorising exactly how that could be maintained in a culture that was distinctly Chinese but also distinctively liberal. That's a very important intellectual contribution and even if Tsiang Tingfu's contributions are now less well remembered than they might well be, I would say they deserve to be looked at again... He's well remembered amongst specialists but I don't think he's a name that has a huge amount of popular recognition in either Taiwan or China... His condition and his ideas and his situation do provide an insight into that now somewhat forgotten but actually at the time very important world in which China was going to be a major actor. It was probably, if anything, going to be relatively oriented towards the West, but it also wanted to maintain its own governmental and constitutional settlement which might not look either like a Western democracy nor indeed like the old Chinese empire but as a sort of distinctive republic that was going to shape its own destiny. That particular republic was pretty much cut off in 1949 with the communist victory, but Tsiang Tingfu is looked at, even in the mainland... even though he was an official of the anti-Communist nationalist government. Because it seemed that he sits in that wider continuity of one of the big questions, which is still being answered today, which is what does modernity mean in China? And Tsiang Tingfu is a very good lens into exactly that question"

Malintzin | The Indigenous Nahua Woman Who Translated for Cortés | HistoryExtra - "She is seen as sort of the mother of the Mestizo nation. The mixed Mexican nation, and that's a story that's been told about her throughout history at various times when people are trying to promote the idea of Mexico as a mixed nation. But she also became seen very much as a traitor to the indigenous peoples. The word malinchista means betrayer or traitor in Mexico, in particular people who betray their culture or their nation and the difficulty with that idea is that there is no one indigenous culture in Mexico at the time the Spanish arrive. She was enslaved by the Maya, having been a Nahua person. Does she be loyal to the Maya, who she's enslaved by, or to the Nahua who sell her into slavery potentially? Who is she supposed to be loyal to? Is she loyal to the Tlaxcala who are allied with the Spanish? There are so many complexities here that the idea of her, this young girl as a betrayer of the nation is very very problematic. But of course she does ally with the Spanish and make the best of her situation. But she's become a figure of complexity... She's actually just a young woman who has remarkable skills... and it's difficult to disentangle that from the narratives about her"

Kleisthenes | Athenian Founder Of Democracy | HistoryExtra - "When that word democracy gets picked up and coined and starts being used as a label, they're so proud of it and they're so convinced it's a good thing, that by the 460s BCE, they're actually naming their male children, Demokritos. That was a popular boys' name in Ancient Athens in the 460s, to call your kid "Democracy""

How the Persians were written out of history | HistoryExtra - "Herodotus has got a very clear agenda, that is he’s writing an inquiry into the wars, for an Athenian audience. That's, that's, that's his base. And so what he tries to do in the histories is, of course, is to create a mythology, a series of legends in a way in which Athens itself take takes pride in place the, it's the major player, and of course, has to set itself up as a kind of mirror image against the despicable, despotic Persians. What's incredible is the the legacy that that historical approach has had on Western historians ever since. So, in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill was able to write for instance, and this is really incredible, he once said, as an episode in British history, the Battle of Marathon is more important than the Battle of Hastings"

Cathedrals: from bishops' seats to tourist hotspots | HistoryExtra - "‘The cathedrals in their cities become the kind of embodiment of the Protestant British state. When you get to Victorian times, there are huge changes made to British institutions and British life. And in the 1820s and 30s, many things get reformed parliament, local government, the judicial system, and cathedrals as well, cathedrals can no longer expect to be representing the whole of the population or the whole of the governing order, because Catholics and nonconformists can now become members of Members of Parliament and, and so on. So, they then have to acquire some kind of new purpose in life, which I suppose goes back to being more religious again. And in modern times it’s become more cultural, I think. That is something that actually you can trace back to the beginning of the 18th century. In the 1710s, the three cathedrals of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford began to hold an alternating festival, the Three Choirs Festival, which happens in one of these cathedrals every year, a music festival. You then see other music festivals starting up later in the 18th century, but particularly taking off in the 19th. And cathedrals become, in Victorian England, what they've never been before, which is concert halls. You start by staging something that's very definitely religious, like Messiah by Handel. But you gradually, you file out from that, but it's very slow to happen. And there's a famous occasion when Beethoven's Mass was done in a cathedral. They didn't dare call it a mass. They called it Beethoven’s service, I think. But when people realized they were actually listening to a setting of the Latin Mass, people walked out. So it took quite some time for the this novel idea that you could go to a cultural event in a cathedral to take hold... Cathedrals are very much a record of our history… when I go to one of the ancient ones, but you've got all periods of English history represented. The building itself comes through from Saxon or Norman or later times, you've then got a whole series of monuments… you've got the traces of the Reformation in cathedrals if you go to Gloucester or Worcester or Canterbury, as soon as you get out of the cathedral itself, you will be in the remains of the monastic buildings, the cloisters and the ancillary buildings, they may be ruined, in part in Canterbury still got most of them, in fact, so you've got the mark of the Reformation there. You've got the mark of the 18th century, I think in these these tablet tombs that you get, you get in, in cathedrals, or these wall tablets, to clergy, merchants, Gentry, laying out all their virtues, how benevolent they were, how caring for the poor, how hospitable they were free of all traces of enthusiasm… there are tremendous traces of the 19th century because some cathedrals are 19th century like say Birmingham's Catholic Cathedral and and Westminster Cathedral and Truro and Liverpool and the cathedral will have been extensively restored in the 19th century because one of the things that the Victorians did was to rescue cathedrals from comparative neglect that they had fallen into and embark on big programs of restoration... restoring meant to Victorians very often putting new things in instead of the old... The putting in of, of chairs, or pews, where everybody gets exactly the same sort of seat, you wouldn't have had that back in in the further past. Privileged people had privileged seats, either they had bigger ones, or they were up the front. The idea of a cathedral that is completely uniform in its seating is a reflection of the growth of democracy in the 20th century. And then another aspect of what you might call democracy is the wish to bring religion closer to ordinary people. If you imagine a Victorian service and certainly in previous areas, the laity who go are very much an audience. And the service is done by clergy, often at a considerable distance from the congregation...
The Vikings were not particularly hostile to cathedrals or even to Christianity. I think they were not above grabbing treasures. And churches had treasures. But the interesting thing about vikings is that you know, they sacked the cathedral at Lindisfarne, famously in the second 90s, the first Viking attack on England. But actually the cathedral didn't leave Lindisfarne for many years. When it eventually left, it didn't move to the most remote area from the Vikings, it actually moved into the Viking area. And there was clearly a much more of a symbiosis between cathedrals and Vikings than you might think... The next challenge is the Reformation… the king could have seized the property, he could have made himself even richer than he was. But there was a problem that cathedrals alone could solve. There were an awful lot of clergy who were younger sons of noble men and gentlemen, who wanted a kind of easy position in life. And cathedral canonries were the obvious thing for them. You see if they went into a parish, they'd be stuck out in the sticks somewhere ministering to people far below them in social route. If they had a canonry, it was quite well paid, had almost no duties because there was always a sec, a secondary dogsbody [sp?] who would do your duties for you. You would live in the cathedral city, in a reasonably civilized society with similar people.’"

Friday, December 23, 2022

Links - 23rd December 2022 (2 - George Floyd Unrest: McCloskeys in St Louis etc)

Facebook - "⁉️ Armed St Louis Couple Pointed Guns at Protesters After Breaking Iron Gate to Community- Was It Legal? Peaceful protest or not, the protesters were trespassing.  In Missouri, Unlawfully entering someone's property or staying on their property without their permission, means you've committed the offense of trespass if the Property owners gives you notice that you can't come onto the property... As for the husband and wife, the husbands gun handling in this situation was recklessly atrocious, but he still had every right to do what he did.  Missouri is an open-carry state and he was on his property, so if he wanted to carry his rifle while standing on his property with no shoes on and a pink polo as a precaution to the protest, have at it chief, because that’s his constitutional right whether you like it or not.  His wife, however, is a different story.  There is a huge difference between carrying a firearm and pointing a firearm.  Someone in the crowd may have directly threatened her life and if you take their word for it that’s what they said happened. But it’s he said she said at this point.  Just understand, if you’re going to point your gun at someone you better be doing it because your life is in immediate danger and not just to scare and intimidate because that my friends is an assault.  Not to mention how incredibly dangerous it is to point a gun at someone while your finger is on the trigger... 500 protesters storming your gated community after seeing how fast some of these protests, not all but some can devolve into pure chaos is scary as hell."

Armed St. Louis couple who defended their home from angry mob speaks out | The Post Millennial - "Mark McCloskey said he and his family were eating dinner as the protestors passed through an iron gate that said “Private Street” and “No Trespassing.”... "This is all private property. There are no public sidewalks or public streets. We were told that we would be killed, our home burned and our dog killed. We were all alone facing an angry mob." Many mainstream media reports about the incident painted the couple in a negative light and failed to disclose that the mob were uttering violent threats and trespassing on private property."

Shaun King - "I’ve seen those eyes before. That evil has been around for generations. Centuries. Those eyes were on plantations. Those eyes lied on Emmett Till. Those eyes watched lynchings. Those eyes. Patricia McCloskey and are her husband Mark McCloskey, attorneys in St. Louis, lost their damn minds."
White people have no right to self defence

Meme - "Kenidra4Humanity ~ KHHL ~: Here are two cowards, Patricia And Mark Mccloskey as they point guns AT protestors on Portland Place in St.Louis, MO. They are both supposedly attorneys at McCloskey Law Center
Kenidra4Humanity ~ KHHL ~: Y'all do y'all understand how dangerous doxxing someone can b? A mayor, @LydaKrewson doxxed protestors in St. Louis, MO - she put out their full names & addresses. Do y'all understand that this could cost someone's life? Apparently, she does not or is just choosing to b reckless."

Protesters Return To St. Louis Home Where Owners Drew Guns, Heckle Couple From Outside Gates - "Hundreds of protesters again gathered outside the home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey in St. Louis, Missouri, on Friday, taunting the pair of homeowners, who last week tried to defend their property from a demonstration that had broken through the gates of their private community by brandishing a pair of firearms... Mark McCloskey detailed his interaction with “peaceful” demonstrators.“A guy stands in front of me, pulls out two loaded pistol magazines, snaps them in front of my face, and says, ‘You’re next.’ If you were there, Chris, I think you’d feel like you had a right to defend yourself, as well,” McCloskey told host Chris Cuomo."

Prosecutor Had Crime Lab Fix Inoperable Prop Pistol Before Charging St. Louis Woman - "The gun that a St. Louis woman waved at protesters who stormed her neighborhood was an inoperable prop from a court case until prosecutors reassembled it and charged her with a crime.St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s staff ordered the crime lab to disassemble and reassemble the handgun Patricia McCloskey had voluntarily surrendered to police via an attorney... in order to charge Patricia McCloskey under Missouri law, the gun had to be “readily” capable of lethal use... there no was no reference to the fact the gun didn’t work in the charging documents against Patricia McCloskey that were written by Hinkley... some of the protesters stayed in front of the McCloskeys home antagonizing and challenging them, yelling obscenities and threats"

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "The St. Louis prosecutor who charged the McCloskeys for standing on their property while holding firearms as a trespassing mob walked by, has been removed from the husband’s case because she was using the incident to fundraise for her campaign, even before charges were filed...
“Circuit Judge Thomas Clark II on Thursday dismissed Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and her entire staff, saying campaign fundraising emails Gardner sent to constituents that alluded to Mark and Patricia McCloskey's case "raise the appearance of impropriety and jeopardize the defendant's right to a fair trial""

Law professor: CWE couple who pointed guns didn't break law - "The couple who pointed guns at protesters outside their mansion in the Central West End didn’t break the law, according to a constitutional law professor.  Anders Walker, a professor of constitutional and criminal law at Saint Louis University, said there are two prongs to his reasoning: Missouri’s Castle Doctrine and the uniquely private street where the encounter occurred...   Walker said in this case, it appears it’s the protesters who broke the law.  “The protesters themselves are trespassing”"

The Vindictive Spirit of St. Louis - WSJ - "By now all America knows Mark and Patricia McCloskey from the video showing the St. Louis couple holding legal firearms as they defended themselves and their home from a crowd of protesters trespassing on their property. A politically motivated prosecutor on Monday charged the couple with unlawful use of a weapon.  The felony count is because they pointed their weapons at protesters. Mr. McCloskey said he did so because he was “scared for my life,” and that of his wife. No shots were fired. Yet now prosecutor Kim Gardner is charging them on grounds they made the trespassers fear for their safety. The good news is that there’s been plenty of official blowback. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson... has promised a pardon if they’re convicted. Attorney General Eric Schmitt is working to get the case dismissed, noting that, in addition to the U.S. and Missouri constitutions, Missouri law recognizes the “castle doctrine.” This allows residents to use force against intruders, including deadly force, based on self-defense and the notion that your home is your castle... again we have a public official responsible for upholding law and order wink at a mob while treating law-abiding citizens as criminals. If police cannot be counted on to deal with mobs, it’s even more vital that law-abiding Americans are free to exercise their Second Amendment right to protect themselves."

High court won’t hear appeal over McCloskeys’ law licenses | The Star - "The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the husband-and-wife attorneys whose law licenses were placed on probation for pointing guns at racial injustice protesters outside their St. Louis mansion in 2020... The Missouri Supreme Court in February placed the couple's licenses on probation for one year, allowing them to continue to practice law. They must also provide 100 hours of free legal service... They pleaded guilty to misdemeanors for the gun-waving incident and were fined. Republican Gov. Mike Parsons pardoned them"

McCloskeys say they support BLM and fight for civil rights, but were ‘victim of a mob’ - "Mark and Patricia McCloskey have fought for the civil rights of clients for decades and support the Black Lives Matter movement... Protest organizers admitted they want to be disruptive and say trespassing is part of their civil disobedience."

VIDEO: Police Drag Away Man Attacked By BLM Mob, Take Orders From Protesters Via Megaphone - "Video footage reportedly captured in the town of Stillwater, Minnesota shows a man being detained in his own neighborhood by police after he was attacked by a mob of Black Lives Matter protesters. Protest march leaders later bragged via megaphone that police had detained the man and forced him move his vehicle to accommodate the demands of the angry mob"

White Thomson Reuters data scientist said he was FIRED by woke BLM bullies at the newswire - "A former director of data science at Thomson Reuters said he was fired for sharing research on the company's internal social media platform that showed police killed more unarmed white people than black people and that the Black Lives Matter movement allegedly caused the deaths of thousands.   Zac Kriegman, who worked at Thomson Reuters for six years before being fired last summer, claimed he was let go from his $350,000 job because he stood against the company's reporting conventions on BLM in order to dispel what the 'false narrative' that black people were the largest victim of police violence... Kriegman said the rhetoric was incomplete and when he tried proving it, he said he received backlash from fellow white co-workers.   'I was publicly derided as a 'troll,' 'confused,' 'laughable,' and 'not worth engaging with or even attempting to have an intelligent conversation' with'... Kriegman had argued that rather at looking at the population as a whole to see who was truly more impacted by police violence, reporters needed to instead take into account what racial groups police felt more threatened from.   To this end, Kriegman cited the FBI's research into the racial demographics of those who had killed or assault police officers.   The FBI's data, which records violence against officers from 2010 to 2019, found that there were 199 instances of black people attacking officers but 537 cases of where white people were the offenders.   He said these instances better aligned with the Washington Posts findings, concluding that unarmed black people are not disproportionately affected by the police killings. Kriegman added that the rhetoric that they were only fueled anti-police sentiments, which he claimed has led to the uptick in crime nationwide, specifically in predominantly black neighborhoods.   He cited the Ferguson Effect... Kriegman said he wanted his research to open up conversations into how they could better report the issue and 'accurately' depict the reality of police shootings.   Instead, he saw his post get taken down because it was allegedly 'antagonistic' and 'provocative'.  He claimed one colleague at Thomson Reuters had told him: 'I do not believe that there is any point in trying to engage in a blow-by-blow refutation of your argument, and I will not do so.  'My unwillingness to do so doesn't signal the strength of your argument. If someone says, 'The KKK did lots of good things for the community—prove me wrong,' I'm not obligated to do so.' Kriegman claimed his bosses at Thomson Reuters stayed quiet while he endured the criticism, and when he emailed HR about the alleged attacks, he was told he would be fired if he discussed his experience on the company's internal channels... Kriegman filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in July for being allegedly 'fired in retaliation for complaining about a racially hostile work environment'.   The case is the latest instance of a professional in journalism claiming they received backlash for failing to conform to a woke mob.   Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss quit her job at the paper in 2020 with a resignation letter that went viral where she railed against the liberal newspaper's alleged bias and said it no longer served journalism.  Weiss claimed that the papers private Slack channel was filled with bullying and harassment against those who failed to conform to woke ideology and said the editors 'live in total fear of internet mobs.'... Weiss' wife, Nellie Bowles, a former tech reporter at the Times, said she too was bullied out last November by colleagues who allegedly leaked stories to embarrass her.   She claimed she began at the paper as a 'very happy, lauded bulldog liberal of a writer' but that the outlet and the culture in general shifted toward a 'charismatic new ideology' that she felt pressured to 'cheer on or otherwise carefully ignore.'   'When I didn't, I became suspect,' she wrote. 'My colleagues started leaking stories to other publications to embarrass me.'... Conservative talk show host Amber Athey also slammed woke culture after she was fired from her Washington D.C. radio station for making fun of Vice President Kamala Harris' clothes in March... These clashes against woke culture were not secluded to only America, as Canadian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Tara Henley made the stunning claim that she quit the company in January due to 'woke' policies implemented by senior staffers that hindered her ability to do her job."
A troll is anyone who disagrees with a liberal

Professor Fired Over Tweets Questioning BLM Movement Gets Reinstated, Awarded Back Pay After Arbitrator Finds In His Favor - "An arbitrator has ruled that a University of Central Florida professor, Charles Negy, has to be reinstated and given back pay after the University fired the professor for being publicly skeptical of the BLM narrative... Negy tweeted out some controversial but legitimate questions in regards to BLM.
'One deleted tweet from Negy in the summer of 2020, shortly after Minneapolis resident George Floyd was killed by police and riots erupted across the country, asked: "If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism' exists?"  In another deleted tweet, Negy said: "Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they're missing out on much needed feedback."'...
This professor's actions were "unacceptable" and "dangerous." Just because he asked whether or not BLM could back up their systemic racism claims.  Yes, asking for evidence is BEYOND THE PALE for UNIVERSITIES now."

Brett Favre criticizes kneeling athletes, politics in sports - "Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre says he believes athletes who kneel during the national anthem have "created more turmoil than good."... "I know when I turn on a game, I want to watch a game. I want to watch players play and teams win, lose, come from behind," Favre told Klavan, per USA Today. "I want to watch all the important parts of the game, not what's going on outside of the game, and I think the general fan feels the same way.  "I can't tell you how many people have said to me, 'I don't watch anymore; it's not about the game anymore.' And I tend to agree.""

Former Hillary campaigner accused of hitting cop in the face with baton at Columbus, Ohio BLM protest - "An Ohio State University student who volunteered for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was arrested at a violent Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus, Ohio on Tuesday night. Police say Hunter Martin was part of a mob that forced their way into the police headquarters using bolt cutters, and that he assaulted an officer on the face and chest with a wooden baton"

White lecturer tells students she's 'sick' of talking about BLM - "A white lecturer at a college in upstate New York is under probe by the school — because she told students she was “sick” of talking about the Black Lives Matter movement.  A video posted to Instagram on Monday was recorded in the fall during a video conference call for a writing course at SUNY Buffalo State College, the Buffalo News reported Tuesday.  “This is me, but speaking honestly, and you guys have to respond honestly with what you think, with what you feel about this,” said the part-time lecturer, identified by a student as Erica Cope... Student Jahnay Morehead told the newspaper she recorded Cope’s comments during a writing course in the fourth week of the fall semester. She said she contacted the college’s diversity committee weeks later, but didn’t take part in a subsequent Zoom call to address the matter...   The remark to a class of predominantly black students was “insensitive” and came as an example of an opinion that would lead Cope to get “canceled”...   “She asked us to share an opinion that might be considered controversial and I guess that was her example”...   The full 26-minute video, however, made clear that Cope was saying she was “tired of having superficial conversations” about the social movement...   The attorney accused the college of being misguided in condemning Cope’s comments, saying an investigation into the video would have a “chilling effect” on future class discussions about BLM."
Ironic. Guess she proved her point

Space Colonization Racism - Do Black Lives Matter in Outer Space? - "Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is ramping up its efforts to inhabit Mars, raising crucial questions about who gets left out of fantasies of space colonization."
Weird how we're told that all decent people support Black Lives Matter. But somehow that means that you need affirmative action in spaceships

Feds Bust Black Lives Matter Organizer for Blackmailing Local Businesses - " The riot in Madison was inspired by the arrest of organizer Devonere Johnson for 'organizing' in a restaurant. The resulting violence saw statues toppled and a Democrat state senator beaten.  Now the Feds have busted Johnson for blackmailing businesses."

Black Lives Matter Storm Target: We Will Shut Your Business Down

VIDEO: Elementary School Administrator Boots Police Officer Off Campus - "A South Bend police officer conducting a routine walk-through at a local elementary school was told by a school administrator to leave campus because his presence could make people uncomfortable...   South Bend Police Officer James Sweeney was conducting a routine unannounced walk-through at Coquillard Elementary School when he was confronted by South Bend Empowerment Zone CEO Cheryl Camacho"
So much for "community policing"

Is BLM Based On a Conspiracy Theory? - "Liberation—black or otherwise—is a neo-Marxist concept based loosely upon Marx’s notion of the “emancipated man” who has been freed from the oppressive system of capitalism as it naturally evolves into communism. “Liberation” specifically refers to the liberation from systemic oppression, to frame it as the neo-Marxists would, which is to say liberation from the liberal order and Enlightenment rationalism, if we translate it into plainspeak.  “Freedom is liberation, a specific historical process in theory and practice, and as such it has its right and wrong, its truth and falsehood,” wrote neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse in his famous 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance.” And what does it require? Suppression and the revocation of the civil rights of those in “power”...   So, black liberationism is the effort to free black people from every conceivable form of systemic oppression as analyzed by a Marxian conspiracy theory about how capitalism and the related liberal order allegedly intrinsically oppress them through tools like “equal opportunity,” “justice,” “social equality,” and, we could add, Enlightenment rationality, equality theory, and neutral principles of constitutional law (which Critical Race Theory explicitly and cynically calls into question). I don’t think this is what a lot of people think the otherwise pleasant-sounding term “black liberation” really refers to. Why not? For the simplest of reasons—who could be against liberation?  When people think of Black Lives Matter, as a decentralized confederacy of co-belligerent movements operating effectively under one umbrella, they may not realize that what they’re actually observing is a re-assertion of the Black Liberation Movement of some fifty years ago, which is in turn based literally upon a neo-Marxist conspiracy theory about free (liberal) capitalist societies. Perhaps this change of name by BLM UK will help them understand that."

On Confrontations Between Blacks And The Police: “They Knew the Risk When They Took the Job” Shows How Out of Touch These Radicals Are - "The people who make the excuse for the violence against the police by stating that “They Knew the Risk When They Took the Job” shows how out of touch these radicals are in their disdain for law and order and the police.  The poster that refers to this statement is as follows: “When police are killed in the line of duty, you always hear the same sentiment from the left: “They knew the risk when they took the job”. How come we can’t apply this same logic when they knew the risk when criminals are killed during arrests? “They knew the risk when they did the crime”. It seems most all confrontations between blacks and the police are a result of a reported crime being committed and the non-compliance of the suspected criminal to the orders of the police. Even before all the facts of a case comes out, the radical mobs have turned these criminals into martyrs and an excuse to cause mayhem and havoc in the areas where these confrontations took place. The groups that have used these instances of police confrontations to perpetrate violence and destruction of property are BLM (Black Lives Matter) and ANTIFA. The overwhelming truth, in most all these confrontations, is that the black person (mostly black males) being confronted or arrested resists arrest, sometimes with a weapon or a facsimile... When a perpetrator or an alleged perpetrator violently resists or attacks the police officer, bad things tend to happen, sometimes leading to the death of the resister"

Arlington, Va. man who torched Pennsylvania state police car during Philly’s racial injustice protests sentenced - "The first protester to face sentencing for setting police cars ablaze during the 2020 racial injustice protests in Philadelphia received a 364-day federal prison term on Monday — nearly nine months less than the time he’s already spent behind bars since his 2020 arrest.  Ayoub Tabri, 25, of Arlington, Va., has been incarcerated since he confessed to FBI investigators that he threw a lit road flare into a Pennsylvania State Police car during the demonstrations that erupted in Center City"
Iowa man sentenced to 15 years after burning church's LGBTQ flag - "Adolfo Martinez, 30, of Ames, was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years for the hate crime of arson and given a year for reckless use of explosives or fire and 30 days for harassment"

BLM issues demands: convict Trump, investigate conservative troops, don’t compare Jan 6 to summer of ‘peaceful’ riots - "Convict and ban Trump from future political office:
Expel Republican members of Congress who attempted to overturn the election and incited a white supremacist attack
Launch a full investigation into the ties between white supremacy and the Capitol Police, law enforcement, and the military
Permanently ban Trump from all digital media platforms
Defund the police
Don’t let the coup be used as an excuse to crack down on our movement
Pass the BREATHE Act"

BLM’s Problems Are Bigger Than the Grift - WSJ - "Jason Riley is right that Black Lives Matter’s popularity has declined since its 2020 peak and that news “about the organization’s spending habits” will make things worse... The IRS doesn’t know where millions raised in 2020 have gone. California and Washington, no bastions of conservatism, have suspended fundraising by the group’s flagship, the BLM Global Network Foundation, because it is delinquent on its 2020 financial reports.  But the foundation’s biggest problem has never been the grift. Nor has it been that its self-avowed Marxist founders have gone on a mansion-buying spree with money well-intentioned Americans and craven corporations donated.   The worst is that organizations founded by leftist revolutionaries have so profoundly transformed America already. In my book “BLM,” I detail how Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Melina Abdullah, BLM’s founders, are Marxists with an abiding hatred of the American way of life.  Ms. Cullors and Ms. Garza were trained by theoreticians steeped in cultural Marxism, or the idea that to dismantle society you must first infiltrate the culture and indoctrinate Americans. Ms. Tometi is a devotee of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro, while Ms. Abdullah says, “In order to eliminate police violence, and the killings of our people at their hands, we must also target the economic systems that built it and rely on it.” It is because of them, and the havoc they’ve visited on America since 2013, that we’re having to fight culture wars in classrooms, offices, churches and army barracks.   Grifters will always be with us. What we never had was Marxist ideologues changing America."

Red Bull Fires ‘Woke’ Diversity Directors Who Tried to Push For BLM Support - "Red Bull has fired two ‘diversity directors’ who tried to force the company into virtue signaling about Black Lives Matter while also dissolving several ‘culture teams’ who were pressuring Red Bull to take a more aggressive ‘woke’ political stance.  Stefan Kozak, its North America chief executive, and Amy Taylor, its North America president and chief marketing officer, have both left the Austrian drinks company after they tried to create a schism within the business about its supposed “inaction on the Black Lives Matter movement.”"

De Blasio: Street in each New York borough will be renamed ‘Black Lives Matter’ - "a street at a “crucial” location in each of the city’s five borough’s will be renamed “Black Lives Matter.”...   The move follows a similar initiative by Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser (D)."

WATCH: White woman in Black Lives Matter shirt attacks black Trump supporter and her young children

Meme - Stevie Joe Payne @StevijoPayne: "My hardware is male, 1944 model, minimal pigment. My software is that was raised in small town Pawhuska, Oklahoma in the 1950's. My software has been updated numerous times. Recent software update reflected in attached image. *Black Lives Matter*"

College students confront White peers with 'Police Lives Matter' sticker: 'You are racist' - "Two white students appearing to be on Arizona State University’s campus were confronted over a "racist" sticker on a computer reading "Police Lives Matter" and were told to leave the area, according to a viral video of the incident... The other students respond that the sticker is making them "uncomfortable."  "You're white, do you understand what a multicultural space is? It means you're not being centered," the students filming tell the white students.  "White’s not a culture?" the student in the anti-Biden shirt says.    "White is not a culture, say it again to the camera, you think whiteness is a culture."  "This is the violence that ASU does and this is the type of people that they protect. Okay, this white man thinks he can take up our space. And this is why we need a multicultural space, because they think they can get away with this s--t," the student continues, appearing to refer to Arizona State University."
If you don't think the police should be killed, you're racist

Police allow pro-lifers to paint 'black preborn lives matter' outside Baltimore Planned Parenthood - "“You must allow SFLA and FDF to paint its BLACK PREBORN LIVES MATTER message. Your original decision to paint 'Black Lives Matter' on the street may very well be government speech. However, your decision to allow private citizens to paint additional messages such as 'Defund the Police' and 'Black Trans Lives Matter' and to intervene on behalf of a public display of another’s speech indicates that public areas are now an open forum for free speech. You are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint in making determinations relating to public assemblies in public fora. The message of the preborn will not be silenced.”... “Though only 13 percent of the female population, African American women make up 38 percent of all reported abortions. Perhaps that is because 4 out of 5 Planned Parenthood vendors are within walking distance of minority-dense neighborhoods, according to a Supreme Court amicus brief.”"
Since we are told disparate impact is proof of racism...

Abilene black man claims he was beaten for wearing 'white lives matter too' t-shirt - "Abilene resident Niko Nance, who is black, claims he was beaten for wearing a t-shirt that said "white lives matter too."  Nance posted a picture of himself wearing the shirt on Facebook.  A few hours later, he claims he was beaten by several black men in the parking lot of a local bar... Nance said he had the t-shirt made to spread the message that we are all equal.  "I wanted to show my support for other cultures also that are supporting us because that's the way to be a union," said Nance.  Nance -- who supports the Black Lives Matter movement -- said the recent riots and violent protests have had a negative effect on him.  "The violence right now is not the dream Martin Luther King had," said Nance.  We asked him if he would wear the t-shirt again.  "Definitely, because I stand for something bigger""

A New Radical Centrism on Twitter - Pramila Jayapal @PramilaJayapal: "Today marks eight years since Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, MO.  We need to honor Michael’s life with action. Let’s keep fighting to dismantle white supremacy, so we can ensure racial justice for all."
"Ms. Jayapal, If we "dismantle white supremacy" will your ethnic group still have a median annual household income that's $55,000 more than that of white Americans?"
i/o on Twitter - "Here's the Gentle Giant having a friendly exchange with a local business owner a few minutes before he lunged at a cop. Sweet guy, much missed. A Rosa Parks for this generation. Hands up, don't shoot!"
The H2 on Twitter - "He wasn’t murdered. But you know that."
Peter Moskos on Twitter - "If you repeat the lie enough, that Brown was murdered, you might get more people to believe it. But that doesn't make it true. Stop repeating lies. Democrats should do better."
Chris Armiger on Twitter - "You know this is a lie and yet you tweet it anyway? You do know there was a very thorough investigation and the killing was justified. Why would you tweet something so dishonest?"
Jorden Collins on Twitter - "Michael Brown was a hideous criminal. Who attacked an old man while he stole a box of cigars from his store. Prove me wrong."
Mark Naughton on Twitter - "Mike Brown reached into Officer Wilson’s patrol vehicle, struck Ofc Wilson and also pulled at his weapon even getting it out from the holster and he only let go when a round was fired through the vehicle’s door. Just some DNA👇facts"

Tom Elliott on Twitter - "SUERCUT! Media: Yes, violence is the answer"