The Coronavirus in a Tiny Drop - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/01/science/coronavirus-aerosol-simulation.html
-
-
Opinion | Tom Morello: The skies parted and my future was decided - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/10/opinion/tom-morello-guitarist.htmlBy Tom Morello
Mr. Morello has spent over three decades melding music and political activism as a power guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with the acoustic chords of the Nightwatchman and in protests around the country.
Songs provided by Spotify
I didn’t choose to be a guitar player. It chose me.
It was on an ordinary afternoon in the spring of ’83, my freshman year at Harvard, that I trudged down to a small basement rehearsal room between some vending machines and a foosball table. With the neon lights blazing overhead I was crunching power chords and wailing pedestrian solos when I unexpectedly slipped into a higher gear and felt a moment of transcendent improvisational bliss. The skies parted and my future was decided.
I had received a calling. I had no choice in the matter. My other interests retreated. I would be a guitarist.
Now, my great-uncle Carlo did play violin for 40 years in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and my grandfather was a talented pianist, but here I was, clad in spandex, with the prison notebooks of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in one hand and a Gibson Explorer in the other, just another radical leftist heavy-metal dreamer in an honors major at an Ivy League school.
I started seriously playing late, at 17 years old. I had heard of only one guitarist who made records who began playing at such an advanced age. That was Robert Johnson, and he had to sell his soul to the devil to get good!
This is the third in a 12-week series of essays.
Sign up to get them directly in your inbox, for Times subscribers only.My Catholic upbringing precluded that option, and so there was only one way to fulfill my calling. Practice my ass off. First it was two hours a day, every day, without fail, noodling away in an empty campus stairwell. Then four hours, then six, then eight! Every day. Without fail. Fever of 102, exam in the morning. Eight hours. Not seven hours and 56 minutes.
Two hours technique, two hours music theory, two hours learning songs, two hours freestyle jamming along with my favorite metal songs.
I’ve often reflected on this maniacal, perhaps somewhat unhealthy, practice regimen. Perhaps in a world in which I felt I had control over very little in the way of romance and race relations, the guitar provided a clarity of purpose where my will, which was not lacking, would be the sole determiner of success or failure. And no one was going to stop me.
Once saddled with this calling, though, I had to figure out how to use the damn thing to great purpose.
I loved metal but it was silly. I loved punk but they couldn’t play their instruments very well. I loved the fledgling genre of hip-hop but those artists rarely used guitars.
And was it possible to combine revolutionary politics with screaming electric guitar? Was it possible to make my guitar a divining rod for truth? An Excalibur of righteous fury? Well I sure as hell wasn’t going to find out in Harvard Yard.
So after graduation I packed my bags and moved to Hollywood. I brought my practice regimen with me, tirelessly running through scales and amassing technique. But to what end? I was technically proficient but sounded like every other million-notes-per-minute wannabe on the Sunset Strip.
My playing transformed with Rage Against the Machine when I began to identify as the D.J. in the band. With the rise of hip-hop, music pundits at the time were saying that the guitar was obsolete, because D.J.’s could make any sound a guitar could make with samples. I took it upon myself to try to make D.J.’s obsolete by making any sound they could make with my bare hands. After all, the electric guitar is a relatively new instrument. It’s just wood and wire that can be manipulated in a variety of nontraditional ways. By deconstructing the possibilities of that wood and wire, I took the first tentative steps to be an artist. Simply being a musician requires technique. Being an artist requires ideas. Now my eight hours a day were spent practicing the eccentricities in my playing. Make a mistake? Repeat it 16 times and make it the cornerstone of the song.
The toggle switch, the tuning pegs, the power jack, every inch of the guitar became fair game for creating sound and texture. And more and more I became inspired by sounds, and ideas, outside of rock ’n roll: police helicopters, animal noises, sci-fi films. I began to find my own voice on the instrument and began forging a sonic vocabulary that was uniquely my own. The guitar was squealing, beeping, mooing! My playing was one part R2-D2, one part Old McDonald’s Farm. You can hear it when you listen to “On the Shore of Eternity” from my new album.
“On the Shore of Eternity” by Tom Morello feat. Sama’ AbdulhadiI found inspiration even farther afield. The standup of Richard Pryor, the bravado of Muhammad Ali, the moxie of Evel Knievel and Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont Stakes victory were on my mood board as I tried to create a new way to look at the instrument.
I know, that Secretariat thing sounds crazy, but Secretariat was not just a great racehorse; there are plenty of those. That 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes defied physics and biology. It was a supernatural performance that upended the sport and left everyone shaking their heads and marveling, “What the hell just happened?”
That’s what I was aiming for in my guitar playing. The blinders were off. I was for the first time hearing riffs and sounds come out of my guitar that I never heard coming out of anybody’s guitar. The sonic horizon was wide open, and on tracks like “Suburban Guerilla” from my “Commandante” album I could soar.
“Suburban Guerilla” by Tom MorelloI wish I had a dime for every time some jackass complained about me, a musician, mouthing off about a political opinion. As if strapping on a guitar somehow triggers a First Amendment exemption. But I realized that even with my mouth shut, I might still be able to stir up a good deal of trouble.
Music can be revolutionary even without lyrics. In the atonal glissando of John Coltrane, the cacophonic funk of Public Enemy, Hendrix feedback frenzy, the rhythm is the rebel.
If an instrument can be utterly transformed by creativity and will, might society be utterly transformed by creativity and will as well? It’s worth finding out.
-
Opinion | Tom Morello: Shadows of the Klan, the Ghost of Hendrix, and Fans Who Think I’m White - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/03/opinion/tom-morello-race-music.htmlBy Tom Morello
Mr. Morello has spent over three decades melding music and political activism as a power guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with the acoustic chords of the Nightwatchman and in protests around the country.
Songs provided by Spotify
In 1965, I literally integrated the town of Libertyville, Ill., at least according to the real estate agent who helped my mom and me find our first apartment.
My Irish-Italian mom had excellent teaching credentials, but the school boards in Northern Illinois made clear that while as a single mother she was welcome to teach in their town, we would have to live elsewhere because we were an interracial family.
I was the interracial part, as my dad is from Kenya. Libertyville, however, was willing to give my mom a shot, with the caveat that the residents of the apartment complex across the street from the school approved. Our helpful real estate agent assured the neighbors that this was no ordinary 1-year-old “Negro” child entering their building, but rather an exotic East African princeling. This false tale haunted me throughout my youth, but it gave my mom and me a toehold among the locals.
The ruse worked until I was old enough to date their daughters, and then every Midwestern dad in sight could have cared less if I was the King of Zambia, there was no way he was going to let me cross the welcome mat on Homecoming Night.
The issue of race was omnipresent throughout my youth. My grounding in activism began not from reading Chomsky or Zinn but from mixing it up on the playground at age 5. In day care there was this much older kid who every day would attack me and call me all the names you might imagine one might call the only Black kid in town. So I’d go home looking sad, and one day, my mom asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Well, there’s this kid at day care N-wording me. Hits me a lot.”
“Well,” she said, “I’ll tell you what we are going to do. There’s this guy named Malcolm X, and he says whenever racism rears its head, you are the one who has to stop it.”
I said, “Mom … I’m 5!” And she said, “Well, this is what you are going to do tomorrow.”
She took my little brown hand and curled it into a little brown fist and kind of swung it through the air like a punch. And repeated, “This is what you are going to do tomorrow.”
She then made me memorize some salty epithet as my battle cry. I didn’t know what any of the words meant. It was something like “deadbeat honkie.”
So the next day I went into day care and this huge kid is on me and is triple N-wording me and attacking me. But that day, for the first time, I started to fight back to the best of my ability, shouting, “Take that, you … heat bat donkey!”
I got pummeled. But it caused a big scrum in the day care and resulted in me standing by the side of the sink with smug satisfaction, watching the racist bully get his mouth washed out with soap.
At the end of the day, I thought, perhaps there is something to be said for having the courage to stand up to racism.
When I was 13, we found a noose in our garage. Apparently the K.K.K. was active in Libertyville in the ’70s and ’80s. The occasional cross was burned on a lawn. Racist slogans were scrawled on my mom’s blackboard. (I sang about some of this in my song “One Man Revolution”.)
“One Man Revolution” by Tom Morello: the NightwatchmanAt 15, I faced an especially menacing confrontation in the parking lot of Brown’s Chicken on Milwaukee Avenue, when two dudes swung a noose at me, opened the trunk of their car and invited me to get inside.
At the time I was very much swayed by the nonviolent philosophy of Gandhi and Dr. King. After relating these incidents a few years later to a friend, he asked, “If the Klan were coming up your driveway with another noose tonight, would you rather turn the other cheek, or would you rather me and my friends were in the bushes with baseball bats?”
Much of my career has been spent wrestling with and writing about that question, and questions of race in general.
When I began performing, I was plagued by what I call the ghost of Jimi Hendrix. Jimi was the only African American rock guitar touchstone at the time, and so as much as I wanted to rip Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads riffs, at every single gig I ever played, some jackass would yell, “Play ‘Foxy Lady’! Play ‘Purple Haze,’ bro!” I mean, why can’t I shred “Eruption” or even “Hotel California,” for goodness sake!
It’s crazy, though, that while my skin tone has always been the same, I’ve miraculously changed colors over the years. Growing up, everyone in Libertyville was crystal clear that I was Black. Kids touched my curly hair, marveled over the color of my gums and palms, openly questioned whether I was their intellectual equal. Cops occasionally cuffed me for walking down the sidewalk, and we’ve already discussed my rocky relationship with the local K.K.K.
So, you see, I was Black.
Then, later on, I played in a famous band whose music had many of the markers typically associated with white hard rock music. We appeared in magazines and on radio stations generally reserved for white artists. My speech and vocabulary in interviews were not stereotypically “urban.”
So, behold, there is a segment of my audience that freaks out whenever I refer to being Black. To them, I must be white. Music that sounds like that must be made by people who look like them. This cognitive dissonance has haunted me throughout my career. There’s this mental discomfort triggered when their belief (“I’m a fan of Tom! Tom is white!”) clashes with the evidence (“Tom says he’s Black!”). These people don’t sleep well at night. And while I sincerely appreciate the good-hearted fans who chime in with, “I don’t see you as any color, Tom. I’m colorblind. I just enjoy the music” — thank you, but this is America, and you’re missing the whole damn point. And so over the course of 20 albums and three decades I’ve walked the tightrope of rock and race.
And Libertyville? It’s still there. A few years ago I was asked to be the grand marshal of the Libertyville Days Parade, the highest honor afforded a past or current resident. I agreed as kind of a lark. There I was, sitting in the convertible with my family, rolling down Milwaukee Avenue, laughing. Flags waving. Kids chasing candy in the street. Fun.
Then we drove past the Brown’s Chicken parking lot. And it all came flooding back. No dudes swinging a noose at me with an open trunk this time, though. Just residents in lawn chairs … cheering. “We’re proud of ya, Tommy! Rock on, Tommy! Don’t always agree with ya, but I loved ya in Guitar Hero, Tommy!”
One fella had the candor to snicker, “Hey, Tommy, just shut up and play guitar!”
Shut up and play guitar? Oh, I’m gonna play my guitar, all right. But when I pick up that guitar, now you’re going to hear what I have to say. As Damian Marley and I sing in “The Achilles List,” “ghost stories of social injustice shall be heard.”
-
Opinion | Tom Morello : How I Taught My Son to Shred Like Crazy and Change the World - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/27/opinion/tom-morello-teaching-guitar-music.htmlSuite des colonnes de Tom Morello pour le New York Times.
La vidéo des enfants musiciens (dont la batteuse géniale Nandi Bushell) est super impressionnante.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-2V65bWqhABy Tom Morello
Mr. Morello has spent over three decades melding music and political activism as a power guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with the acoustic chords of the Nightwatchman and in protests around the country.
At 13, I got a $50 Kay electric guitar and gleefully marched down to Rigoni Music on Milwaukee Avenue in Libertyville, Ill., with a Kiss and Led Zeppelin songbook under each arm.
I plunked down my $5 in front of their guitar instructor and said, “Teach me ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Detroit Rock City.’”
He said: “Hold on there, son. This is a guitar lesson and today we’re going to learn to tune the guitar.”
I thought that seemed like a big waste of time and money, but, willing to pay my dues, I sat in my bedroom for the next week, bored out of my mind, wrenching my guitar’s tuning pegs back and forth.
This is the second in a 12-week series of essays.
Sign up to get them directly in your inbox, for Times subscribers only.Back the next week, I plunked down another fin and demanded to learn my Kiss and Led Zeppelin songs.
“You’re nowhere near ready to do that,” he told me. “Today we’re going to learn the C major scale.”
Well that was the end of that. Disgusted, I went home, put the guitar in a closet and didn’t touch it again for four years. It wasn’t until I discovered punk rock, with its do-it-yourself, no-lessons-required ethos that I found the fun in guitar playing, setting me on a trajectory that I’m still on today.
Years later, as a struggling musician in Hollywood, I taught guitar to make ends meet, and remembered those two crummy lessons that I had when I was 13. I vowed to never make a student feel the way that I had felt.
Absolute beginners would come in and I’d help them learn whatever song they wanted to play, or I would insist that they “write” a song — before knowing a note, before knowing a chord, just making sounds in a pattern. A couple of times through and, boom! You’re a songwriter, in the same tent as McCartney and Dylan. Let your fingers dance among the Tetris pile of possibilities of notes and chords and you’re on your way.
My two young sons had no interest in following in their father’s footsteps to become a musician. There’s plenty of instruments around the house, but they took a hard pass and gravitated toward their own passions.
Then came the lockdown and the prospect of endless days at home, each one like the one before, with spotty Zoom schoolwork, little opportunity to connect with peers and plenty of opportunities for kids and parents to drive each other crazy.
My youngest son, Roman, 9 at the time, is a bit of a classic rock fan, and one day I timidly asked him if he’d like to learn the first three notes to “Stairway to Heaven.” He assented, figuring it wouldn’t be too much effort and he could always just go right back to playing Among Us on his computer.
Well, he learned those first three notes, and it sounded just like the song. Encouraged, he came back the next day, three more notes. Over the course of the next couple of months, we worked our way through the entire song. By building on these small successes, he began to take pride in his ability to master a Led Zeppelin standard as a brand-new player. We moved on, and a couple of songs later, he was really digging it and showing a kind of natural aptitude that I never really found in myself.
But every once in a while, I would slip into the voice of my old awful guitar teacher, trying to hammer home some point about music theory or fingering on the instrument. His reaction was immediate. He would put the guitar down, threatening not to pick it up again. So I said: “All right, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to run before we walk. All we’re going to do from here on in is improvisational soloing.”
[Read more about this project from Jane Coaston and Kathleen Kingsbury here.]
I showed him a pattern or two. And since that day, I basically am the rhythm guitarist in the family, as Roman Morello shreds like crazy, across different genres, with fire and passion. The way he is able to let loose and just have uninhibited joy on the instrument, no obsessive tuning or C major scale required, makes his dad very proud.
Another young musician who’s shown the world her passion and talent is the British-Zulu phenom Nandi Bushell, who may very well be the future of rock’n’roll.
She gained global Instagram fame for her amazing multi-instrumentalist covers of rock classics. She dueled with Dave Grohl in a drum off for the ages and came out on top.
I was so impressed with her talent, moxie and effervescent spirit that I sent her one of my signature “Soul Power” Fender guitars. We became Insta friends and when she asked if I’d like to write a song with her, I said, “That sounds fantastic, but I’ve got a 9-year-old in my house who might be better than I am. Why don’t you two kids write a song together?”
They did. Writing virtually across the Atlantic Ocean, Roman came up with a few power riffs and Nandi played drums, bass and sang on the track.
Like me, they are stirred not just by the power of the music, but the need to change the world.
The song they created is “The Children Will Rise Up,” an anthem proclaiming that only the courage and fortitude of their generation can stop the impending environmental catastrophe facing humanity. We wrangled Jack Black and Greta Thunberg for the video and it’s an absolute mosh pit-inducing banger with a stratospheric solo that might just make that Rigoni Music guitar instructor repent.
-
Un article du NY Times plein de dataviz : Who Had Covid-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Cases ?
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-breakthrough-cases.htmlBasé sur les chiffres du CDC :
▻https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-statusNon vacciné : 6 fois plus de chance de contracter la maladie que les vaccinés. 12 fois plus de chance d’en mourir.
-
Est-ce qu’il ne serait pas intéressant de poser ici la question de l’impact de la vaccination sur le taux de reproduction effectif du virus (R_e) ? Vous vous souvenez : si le taux est supérieur à 1, l’épidémie est en expansion ; si le taux est inférieur à 1, l’épidémie va finir par se résorber. Et pendant des mois on cherchait tous les moyens de grappiller quelques dixièmes sur ce taux de reproduction avec telle ou telle mesure ciblée. Alors qu’on a désormais une vaccination qui réduit par 6 la probabilité d’être contaminé (donc qui fait chuter le taux de reproduction du virus à un niveau qui devrait mener à l’extinction parmi les populations vaccinées).
Ce qui veut dire clairement que, dans les pays où la vaccination est disponible, l’épidémie est artificiellemment maintenue par les gens qui ont décidé de refuser d’être vaccinés. Voilà. Libertay libertay.
-
-
Avec zob futur président et les pyronimbus qui nous guettent on peu commencer à parler de chance...
-
Là, on a R₀ = 1,1 et il faut se rappeler que le vaccin n’empêche pas la contamination et réduit juste la fenêtre de transmission et la charge virale transmise (ce qui est déjà pas mal) et qu’il ne faut donc en aucun cas tomber le masque.
Sans compter les 14% et quelques qui sont vaccinés correctement mais quand même à poil devant le virus. -
Oui, mais si tu divise par 6 la probabilité d’être positif, ça signifie que la vaccination a un effet massif sur le taux de reproduction. Certes ça n’empêche pas totalement la contamination, mais l’effet est tout de même énorme. Je me souviens qu’on avait eu au moins une étude (Pasteur ?) l’année dernière qui tentait de calculer les dixièmes de R_e qu’on gagnait avec telle ou telle mesure (port du masque dans différentes situations, fermeture de certains lieux, confinement…), et rigoureusement rien n’approchait une division par 6 de la probabilité d’être contaminé.
Tu ne peux certes pas évoquer deux taux de reproduction différents, puisque les populations sont totalement mélangées, mais ça signifie que les vaccinés font tendre le R_e vers des valeurs basses, sans doute inférieures à 1, et les non-vaccinés le maintiennent au plus haut.
Ces derniers temps, on était plutôt à continuer sur le thème « Ah oui mais Israël » (mais Israël a un niveau de vaccination désormais inférieur à la plupart des pays européens), et à se demander si la vaccination réduisait de 10 à 30% le risque d’être contaminé : et là le CDC nous sort une division par 6 (une baisse de 83%). Du coup, l’argument « ça n’empêche pas une contamination » doit être utilisé de manière bien plus limitée : ça n’empêche certes pas, oui les gestes barrière, mais quand même…
Autre idée que ça réintroduit : l’efficacité pratique du passe sanitaire. Avec une telle réduction de la probabilité d’être contaminé (donc contaminant, et en plus sans doute moins quand tu es tout de même vacciné mais contaminé) , il y a bien un intérêt réel à filtrer certains lieux sur la base de la vaccination. (Pas juste pour obliger les gens à se vacciner, donc, mais bien parce que ça réduit de 83% le risque d’être en contact avec une personne contaminée.)
Et sinon, évidemment : puisque la vaccination a un effet aussi massif sur la probabilité d’être contaminé/contaminant, retirer le masque en collectivité à la seule tranche d’âge qui ne peut pas être vaccinée (les moins de 12 ans), c’est carrément criminel.
-
Ah, celui-là je croyais l’avoir bloqué. C’est donc chose faite (et message supprimé).
-
-
Opinion | Tom Morello on the Music of Power and Justice - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/20/opinion/tom-morello-protest-music.htmlJe suis un fan de RATM, de la droiture de leur musique/combats (en particulier le soutien sans faille à Mumia Abu-Jamal). Un très beau texte sur le lien entre le chant et le syndicalisme révolutionnaire, derrière la figure légendaire de Joe Hill. Très émouvant.
By Tom Morello
Mr. Morello has spent over three decades melding music and political activism as a power guitarist with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, with the acoustic chords of the Nightwatchman and in protests around the country.
Songs provided by Spotify
Harmonizing and hell-raising, rhythm and rebellion, poetry and politics, singing and striking. The Industrial Workers of the World — the shock troops of the early-20th-century labor movement — virtually invented the protest song for the modern age.
The I.W.W. was formed in 1905, advocating a militant revolutionary unionism, a cocktail of socialist, syndicalist and anarchist labor theory put into practice. It was always known as a singing union, and its songs were written by hobos and the homeless, itinerant workers and immigrants. I.W.W. songs — like “The Preacher and the Slave” and “Solidarity Forever” — looked an unjust world square in the eye, sliced it apart with satire, dismantled it with rage and then, with mighty sing-along choruses, raised the roofs of union halls and holding cells, “from San Diego up to Maine, in every mine and mill.”
The goal of the Industrial Workers of the World — or Wobblies, as members were widely known — was revolution, not just winning strikes. Unlike other unions of the time, it accepted all workers as members: Black people, women, unskilled laborers, sex workers, immigrants of every race and creed. It sought to forge “one big union” of the entire global working class and used direct action, sabotage and the power of song in class war against the ruling class. Its reputation as a kick-ass union fueled by kick-ass songs remains the stuff of legend.
“Solidarity Forever” by Tom Morello: the NightwatchmanIts songs, some more than 100 years old, addressed the same issues facing us today: poverty, police brutality, immigrant rights, economic and racial inequality, militarism, threats to civil liberties, union busting. “Casey Jones (The Union Scab),” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years,” “Bread and Roses,” “Ain’t Done Nothin’ if You Ain’t Been Called a Red” — often set to familiar tunes and popular hymns of the day, these songs united workers from diverse backgrounds under the banner of solidarity. What’s the antidote for divide and conquer? Work together, fight together, sing together.
Defiant and hopeful, these songs have an unapologetic mission: to fan the flames of discontent by lifting the spirits of those fighting for a more just and humane planet. The I.W.W. aimed to “create a new society within the shell of the old,” and I hope you can hear that new world echoing here, where song meets struggle.
The Wobbly songwriters also laid the sonic and ideological groundwork for those who followed: Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, Utah Phillips, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Nina Simone, Bruce Springsteen, the Clash, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, System of a Down and Rage Against the Machine. Without them, there’d be no “This Land Is Your Land,” no “We Shall Overcome,” no “Masters of War,” no “London Calling,” no “Killing in the Name.”
Much of my career has been one long audition to become a part of that legacy. I’m a union man and an unapologetic musical rabble-rouser. I’ve been a member of the Local 47 musicians’ union in Los Angeles for 32 years, and I’m a proud card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World — it lives on! My mom was a union high school teacher, and the Morellos were hardworking coal miners in central Illinois. The cause of workers’ rights is in my blood.
[Read more about this project from Jane Coaston and Kathleen Kingsbury here.]
I’ve been greatly influenced by many of the songs and songwriters who carried that red union card. Playing acoustic protest music under my folk singer Nightwatchman moniker, I’ve written and sung dozens of tunes that owe a significant debt to this union’s remarkable musical history. My song “Hold the Line,” from my new album, is an example of how I’ve tried to carry forward that legacy.
“Hold the Line” by Tom Morello (feat. grandson)My guide has been Joe Hill, who epitomized the I.W.W.’s anarcho poet warrior. He is my favorite musician of all time, even though there are no known recordings of him playing or singing. He was a tireless crusader for justice through his music, and his jams are a fine starting point for aspiring rebels. Hill was an I.W.W. organizer and a true musical and political revolutionary. He walked it like he sang it. That’s why the mine owners and the other bosses out West, and the politicians who did their dirty work, were afraid of him. And in the end, that’s why in 1915 he was executed in Utah on a trumped-up murder charge.
“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over,” Hill famously said. His songs (“There Is Power in a Union,” “We Will Sing One Song,” “Joe Hill’s Last Will”) are sung today and will be tomorrow.
I’ve traveled far to pay my respects to the heroes of the I.W.W. I’ve placed flowers on Mother Jones’s grave in Mount Olive, Ill. I’ve hummed “The Internationale” at the resting place of Big Bill Haywood’s ashes in the Kremlin wall. And while on tour in Sweden, I made the hundred-mile trek from Stockholm to Gavle, Hill’s birthplace.
I sat by a little tree in the backyard that blooms where his ashes were spread, and I sang “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” written in the 1930s by Earl Robinson from a poem written by Alfred Hayes in the years after Hill’s death. The tiny room in the building where he and his family lived now serves as a union headquarters and museum. Fascists bombed the place 20 years ago. After all these years, they’re still afraid of Hill; they’re still afraid of his songs.
And they should be.
“‘The copper bosses killed you, Joe. They shot you, Joe,’ says I. ‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’ says Joe. ‘I didn’t die.’”
“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” by Tom Morello: the NightwatchmanThe songs live on wherever working people stand up for their rights, dreaming and scheming and struggling for something better than what was handed to them. These tunes are still sung on picket lines, at the barricades and through the tear gas haze of Group of 8 protests. They’re even more relevant now as workers throughout the country — like those at Kellogg’s, Nabisco and John Deere — are striking and taking to the picket line.
The I.W.W.’s mighty music of equality, justice and freedom is a reminder of struggles won and lost, as well as the battle hymns of struggles to come.
So get out there and start creating that new world. Maybe learn some of these world-changing jams. Then write some of your own.
-
See How Vaccines Can Make the Difference in #Delta Variant’s Impact - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/12/science/covid-delta-breakthrough.htmlHere’s how a Delta-driven outbreak might unfold in two hypothetical groups of people, all of whom are exposed to enough of the virus to infect a person:
In either scenario, the infected group is just the start. The Delta variant is the most transmissible version of the virus yet. Those infected are likely to spread the virus to others at an even higher rate than older versions of the virus would have spread.
With a higher number of people infected in the group with the low vaccination rate, many more people in their larger community are also likely to become infected with the virus, especially if the #vaccination rate is similarly low elsewhere in that community.
This is true even among people who have been infected with #Covid-19 before: Those who have previously had the virus are more than twice as likely to become reinfected by the Delta variant if they are unvaccinated.
Conversely, there is a lower risk in general of virus exposure in a highly vaccinated community. But experts say outbreaks that have occurred in heavily vaccinated groups, like the July 4 cluster in Provincetown, Mass., or those in two San Francisco hospitals, have shown the power of the vaccines: Remarkably few people faced severe illness, contrasted with how a similar outbreak may have played out in a community with a low vaccination rate.
Of at least 965 positive cases that were traced to heavily vaccinated Provincetown, where around 60,000 people had gathered for the holiday weekend, not a single death was reported and just seven people were hospitalized.
While a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report suggested it’s possible that fully immunized people may also transmit the virus to others as easily, another recent study has shown that those who are fully vaccinated may carry the virus, and therefore be contagious, for fewer days than their unvaccinated counterparts. That suggests an even bigger overall difference in #transmission between places with high and low vaccination rates.
-
Prof. Gavin Yamey MD MPH sur Twitter : ““Rich nations have bought up most doses long into the future, often far more than they could conceivably need.” Rich nations will have 1 billion excess (unused) doses in 2021. A public health & moral catastrophe, & the defining crisis of our time.” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/GYamey/status/1416029739639246849Africa’s Covid Crisis Deepens, but Vaccines Are Still Far Off - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/16/world/africa/africa-vaccination-rollout.html -
They Were Only Children - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/26/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-children.htmlWhen asked to describe how they felt, many parents answered with a simple “It’s God’s will,” their voice often reduced to a whisper, the words conveying resignation. They said their children had wanted to be doctors, artists and leaders.
“I’m in disbelief,” said Saad Asaliyah, a taxi driver from Jabaliya, who lost his 10-year-old daughter. “I try to calm myself by saying it was God’s will for her to go.”
During 11 days of fighting this month between Israel and Hamas, at least 67 children under age 18 were killed in Gaza and 2 in Israel, according to initial reports.
These are the children who died.
-
Khaled Beydoun@KhaledBeydoun
▻https://twitter.com/KhaledBeydoun/status/1398325299306283010Wow, the NYT published the faces and names of the children killed in Gaza
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/26/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-children.html?referringSource=articleShare
““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““"
Israeli newspaper Haaretz shares images of killed Palestinian children on front page | le 27 mai 2021•28 mai 2021
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Xu_8Fw0l4&t=20s -
-
-
-
Facial Recognition: What Happens When We’re Tracked Everywhere We Go? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/18/magazine/facial-recognition-clearview-ai.htmlHelping to catch sex abusers was clearly a worthy cause, but the company’s method of doing so — hoovering up the personal photos of millions of Americans — was unprecedented and shocking. Indeed, when the public found out about Clearview last year, in a New York Times article I wrote, an immense backlash ensued.
After Clearview’s activities came to light, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts wrote to the company asking that it reveal its law-enforcement customers and give Americans a way to delete themselves from Clearview’s database.
In 2019, the agency found that many algorithms were less accurate in identifying people of color, meaning their use could worsen systemic bias in the criminal-justice system. In the last year, three cases have been unearthed (none involving Clearview) in which police officers arrested and briefly jailed the wrong person based on a bad facial-recognition match. All three of the wrongfully arrested were Black men.
-
In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/02/climate/atlantic-ocean-climate-change.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=curIn the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers
The warming atmosphere is causing an arm of the powerful Gulf Stream to weaken, some scientists fear.
-
Opinion | Every Country Has Its Own Climate Risks. What’s Yours? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/28/opinion/climate-change-risks-by-country.html -
Covid-19 Global Vaccinations Tracker - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html -
How Far Does Wildlife Roam? Ask the ‘Internet of Animals’, by Sonia Shah (The New York Times)
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/12/magazine/animal-tracking-icarus.htmlAn ambitious new system will track scores of species from space — shedding light, scientists hope, on the lingering mysteries of animal movement.
