person:jerry

The complicated political legacy of Jerry Rawlings
▻https://africasacountry.com/2019/05/the-complicated-political-legacy-of-jerry-rawlings

Jerry John Rawlings has long held a complicated place in Ghanaian popular politics and historical memory. On May

L’explosion de la navette Challenger, lancée contre la recommandation des ingénieurs
▻http://enuncombatdouteux.blogspot.com/2019/04/lexplosion-de-la-navette-challenger.html

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Diane Vaughan, dans son étude sur la décision de lancer Challenger, décrit de façon minutieuse la réunion tenue la veille du lancement. Elle souligne l’étonnant silence de nombreux participants qui auraient pu, en intervenant, accroître sensiblement la puissance du signal d’alerte.

 Jerry Harvey, l’auteur d’Abilene Paradox, a reçu une lettre d’un participant à la réunion où s’est décidé le lancement de la navette Challenger. Il raconte qu’il était assis dans la salle de réunion avec une fiche entre les mains sur laquelle il avait écrit : « En aucun cas, ne lancer Challenger. Les joints sont trop instables. » Mais quand vint son tour de parler, il dit comme les autres : « Lançons-la. »

#internet vs #blockchain Revolution : Origins of Disruptive Companies (Part 2)
▻https://hackernoon.com/internet-vs-blockchain-revolution-origins-of-disruptive-companies-part-2

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This article is part of the Internet vs Blockchain Revolution Series. If you are interested in reading the other articles, check out this post.Looking back at the Internet revolution, the founders of a lot of disruptive companies didn’t necessarily had business in mind first but came from various backgrounds, such as hobbyists, researchers from universities, hacker channels, and ex-employees of successful companies. This list is not exhaustive, but we will go through some examples.HobbyistThe origin of Yahoo began as a hobby, in which Jerry Yang and David Filo, Ph.D. students at Stanford at the time (1994), were collecting and trading new website links during the early time of the web. After discovering Mosaic, the first web browser, the two became obsessed with the World Wide Web. At (...)

#history #cryptocurrency #technology

The Knesset candidate who says Zionism encourages anti-Semitism and calls Netanyahu ’arch-murderer’ - Israel Election 2019 - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium.MAGAZINE-knesset-candidate-netanyahu-is-an-arch-murderer-zionism-e

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6936943.1550154858!/image/2455198730.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/2455198730.jpg

Few Israelis have heard of Dr. Ofer Cassif, the Jewish representative on the far-leftist Hadash party’s Knesset slate. On April 9, that will change
By Ravit Hecht Feb 16, 2019

Ofer Cassif is fire and brimstone. Not even the flu he’s suffering from today can contain his bursting energy. His words are blazing, and he bounds through his modest apartment, searching frenetically for books by Karl Marx and Primo Levi in order to find quotations to back up his ideas. Only occasional sips from a cup of maté bring his impassioned delivery to a momentary halt. The South American drink is meant to help fight his illness, he explains.

Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election.

Indeed, the assault on him began as soon as he was selected by the party’s convention. The media pursued him; a columnist in the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Ben-Dror Yemini, called for him to be disqualified from running for the Knesset. It would be naive to say that this was unexpected. Cassif, who was one of the first Israeli soldiers to refuse to serve in the territories, in 1987, gained fame thanks to a number of provocative statements. The best known is his branding of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked as “neo-Nazi scum.” On another occasion, he characterized Jews who visit the Temple Mount as “cancer with metastases that have to be eradicated.”

On his alternate Facebook page, launched after repeated blockages of his original account by a blitz of posts from right-wing activists, he asserted that Culture Minister Miri Regev is “repulsive gutter contamination,” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an “arch-murderer” and that the new Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, is a “war criminal.”

Do you regret making those remarks?

Cassif: “‘Regret’ is a word of emotion. Those statements were made against a background of particular events: the fence in Gaza, horrible legislation, and the wild antics of Im Tirtzu [an ultranationalist organization] on campus. That’s what I had to say at the time. I didn’t count on being in the Knesset. That wasn’t part of my plan. But it’s clear to me that as a public personality, I would not have made those comments.”

Is Netanyahu an arch-murderer?

“Yes. I wrote it in the specific context of a particular day in the Gaza Strip. A massacre of innocent people was perpetrated there, and no one’s going to persuade me that those people were endangering anyone. It’s a concentration camp. Not a ‘concentration camp’ in the sense of Bergen-Belsen; I am absolutely not comparing the Holocaust to what’s happening.”

You term what Israel is doing to the Palestinians “genocide.”

“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.

“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’”

You say you’re not comparing, but you repeatedly come back to Holocaust references. On Facebook, you also uploaded the scene from “Schindler’s List” in which the SS commander Amon Goeth picks off Jews with his rifle from the balcony of his quarters in the camp. You compared that to what was taking place along the border fence in the Gaza Strip.

“Today, I would find different comparisons. In the past I wrote an article titled, ‘On Holocaust and on Other Crimes.’ It’s online [in Hebrew]. I wrote there that anyone who compares Israel to the Holocaust is cheapening the Holocaust. My comparison between here and what happened in the early 1930s [in Germany] is a very different matter.”

Clarity vs. crudity

Given Cassif’s style, not everyone in Hadash was happy with his election, particularly when it comes to the Jewish members of the predominantly Arab party. Dov Khenin, for example, declined to be interviewed and say what he thinks of his parliamentary successor. According to a veteran party figure, “From the conversations I had, it turns out that almost none of the Jewish delegates – who make up about 100 of the party’s 940 delegates – supported his candidacy.

“He is perceived, and rightly so,” the party veteran continues, “as someone who closes doors to Hadash activity within Israeli society. Each of the other Jewish candidates presented a record of action and of struggles they spearheaded. What does he do? Curses right-wing politicians on Facebook. Why did the party leadership throw the full force of its weight behind him? In a continuation of the [trend exemplified by] its becoming part of the Joint List, Ofer’s election reflects insularity and an ongoing retreat from the historical goal of implementing change in Israeli society.”

At the same time, as his selection by a 60 percent majority shows, many in the party believe that it’s time to change course. “Israeli society is moving rightward, and what’s perceived as Dov’s [Khenin] more gentle style didn’t generate any great breakthrough on the Jewish street,” a senior source in Hadash notes.

“It’s not a question of the tension between extremism and moderation, but of how to signpost an alternative that will develop over time. Clarity, which is sometimes called crudity, never interfered with cooperation between Arabs and Jews. On the contrary. Ofer says things that we all agreed with but didn’t so much say, and of course that’s going to rile the right wing. And a good thing, too.”

Hadash chairman MK Ayman Odeh also says he’s pleased with the choice, though sources in the party claim that Odeh is apprehensive about Cassif’s style and that he actually supported a different candidate. “Dov went for the widest possible alliances in order to wield influence,” says Odeh. “Ofer will go for very sharp positions at the expense of the breadth of the alliance. But his sharp statements could have a large impact.”

Khenin was deeply esteemed by everyone. When he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv in 2008, some 35 percent of the electorate voted for him, because he was able to touch people who weren’t only from his political milieu.

Odeh: “No one has a higher regard for Dov than I do. But just to remind you, we are not a regular opposition, we are beyond the pale. And there are all kinds of styles. Influence can be wielded through comments that are vexatious the first time but which people get used to the second time. When an Arab speaks about the Nakba and about the massacre in Kafr Kassem [an Israeli Arab village, in 1956], it will be taken in a particular way, but when uttered by a Jew it takes on special importance.”

He will be the cause of many attacks on the party.

“Ahlan wa sahlan – welcome.”

Cassif will be the first to tell you that, with all due respect for the approach pursued by Khenin and by his predecessor in the Jewish slot, Tamar Gozansky, he will be something completely different. “I totally admire what Tamar and Dov did – nothing less than that,” he says, while adding, “But my agenda will be different. The three immediate dangers to Israeli society are the occupation, racism and the diminishment of the democratic space to the point of liquidation. That’s the agenda that has to be the hub of the struggle, as long as Israel rules over millions of people who have no rights, enters [people’s houses] in the middle of the night, arrests minors on a daily basis and shoots people in the back.

"Israel commits murder on a daily basis. When you murder one Palestinian, you’re called Elor Azaria [the IDF soldier convicted and jailed for killing an incapacitated Palestinian assailant]; when you murder and oppress thousands of Palestinians, you’re called the State of Israel.”

So you plan to be the provocateur in the next Knesset?

“It’s not my intention to be a provocateur, to stand there and scream and revile people. Even on Facebook I was compelled to stop that. But I definitely intend to challenge the dialogue in terms of the content, and mainly with a type of sarcasm.”

’Bags of blood’

Cassif, 54, who holds a doctorate in political philosophy from the London School of Economics, teaches political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Sapir Academic College in Sderot and at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. He lives in Rehovot, is married and is the father of a 19-year-old son. He’s been active in Hadash for three decades and has held a number of posts in the party.

As a lecturer, he stands out for his boldness and fierce rhetoric, which draws students of all stripes. He even hangs out with some of his Haredi students, one of whom wrote a post on the eve of the Hadash primary urging the delegates to choose him. After his election, a student from a settlement in the territories wrote to him, “You are a determined and industrious person, and for that I hold you in high regard. Hoping we will meet on the field of action and growth for the success of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state (I felt obliged to add a small touch of irony in conclusion).”

Cassif grew up in a home that supported Mapai, forerunner of Labor, in Rishon Letzion. He was an only child; his father was an accountant, his mother held a variety of jobs. He was a news hound from an early age, and at 12 ran for the student council in school. He veered sharply to the left in his teens, becoming a keen follower of Marx and socialism.

Following military service in the IDF’s Nahal brigade and a period in the airborne Nahal, Cassif entered the Hebrew University. There his political career moved one step forward, and there he also forsook the Zionist left permanently. His first position was as a parliamentary aide to the secretary general of the Communist Party, Meir Wilner.

“At first I was closer to Mapam [the United Workers Party, which was Zionist], and then I refused to serve in the territories. I was the first refusenik in the first intifada to be jailed. I didn’t get support from Mapam, I got support from the people of Hadash, and I drew close to them. I was later jailed three more times for refusing to serve in the territories.”

His rivals in the student organizations at the Hebrew University remember him as the epitome of the extreme left.

“Even in the Arab-Jewish student association, Cassif was considered off-the-wall,” says Motti Ohana, who was chairman of Likud’s student association and active in the Student Union at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. “One time I got into a brawl with him. It was during the first intifada, when he brought two bags of blood, emptied them out in the university’s corridors and declared, ‘There is no difference between Jewish and Arab blood,’ likening Israeli soldiers to terrorists. The custom on campus was that we would quarrel, left-right, Arabs-Jews, and after that we would sit together, have a coffee and talk. But not Cassif.”

According to Ohana, today a member of the Likud central committee, the right-wing activists knew that, “You could count on Ofer to fall into every trap. There was one event at the Hebrew University that was a kind of political Hyde Park. The right wanted to boot the left out of there, so we hung up the flag. It was obvious that Ofer would react, and in fact he tore the flag, and in the wake of the ruckus that developed, political activity was stopped for good.”

Replacing the anthem

Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic.

“Peace will not be established without a correction of the crimes of the Nakba and [recognition of] the right of return,” he shouted, and the crowd cheered him. As one senior party figure put it, “Efraim talked about workers’ rights, Yaela about the Negev, Noa about activity in Tel Aviv – and Ofer was Ofer.”

What do you mean by “right of return”?

Cassif: “The first thing is the actual recognition of the Nakba and of the wrong done by Israel. Compare it to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, if you like, or with the commissions in Chile after Pinochet. Israel must recognize the wrong it committed. Now, recognition of the wrong also includes recognition of the right of return. The question is how it’s implemented. It has to be done by agreement. I can’t say that tomorrow Tel Aviv University has to be dismantled and that Sheikh Munis [the Arab village on whose ruins the university stands] has to be rebuilt there. The possibility can be examined of giving compensation in place of return, for example.”

But what is the just solution, in your opinion?

“For the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.”

That means there will be Jews who will have to leave their home.

“In some places, unequivocally, yes. People will have to be told: ‘You must evacuate your places.’ The classic example is Ikrit and Biram [Christian-Arab villages in Galilee whose residents were promised – untruly – by the Israeli authorities in 1948 that they would be able to return, and whose lands were turned over to Jewish communities]. But there are places where there is certainly greater difficulty. You don’t right one wrong with another.”

What about the public space in Israel? What should it look like?

“The public space has to change, to belong to all the state’s residents. I dispute the conception of ‘Jewish publicness.’”

How should that be realized?

“For example, by changing the national symbols, changing the national anthem. [Former Hadash MK] Mohammed Barakeh once suggested ‘I Believe’ [‘Sahki, Sahki’] by [Shaul] Tchernichovsky – a poem that is not exactly an expression of Palestinian nationalism. He chose it because of the line, ‘For in mankind I’ll believe.’ What does it mean to believe in mankind? It’s not a Jew, or a Palestinian, or a Frenchman, or I don’t know what.”

What’s the difference between you and the [Arab] Balad party? Both parties overall want two states – a state “of all its citizens” and a Palestinian state.

“In the big picture, yes. But Balad puts identity first on the agenda. We are not nationalists. We do not espouse nationalism as a supreme value. For us, self-determination is a means. We are engaged in class politics. By the way, Balad [the National Democratic Assembly] and Ta’al [MK Ahmad Tibi’s Arab Movement for Renewal] took the idea of a state of all its citizens from us, from Hadash. We’ve been talking about it for ages.”

If you were a Palestinian, what would you do today?

“In Israel, what my Palestinian friends are doing, and I with them – [wage] a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggle.”

And what about the Palestinians in the territories?

“We have always been against harming innocent civilians. Always. In all our demonstrations, one of our leading slogans was: ‘In Gaza and in Sderot, children want to live.’ With all my criticism of the settlers, to enter a house and slaughter children, as in the case of the Fogel family [who were murdered in their beds in the settlement of Itamar in 2011], is intolerable. You have to be a human being and reject that.”

And attacks on soldiers?

“An attack on soldiers is not terrorism. Even Netanyahu, in his book about terrorism, explicitly categorizes attacks on soldiers or on the security forces as guerrilla warfare. It’s perfectly legitimate, according to every moral criterion – and, by the way, in international law. At the same time, I am not saying it’s something wonderful, joyful or desirable. The party’s Haifa office is on Ben-Gurion Street, and suddenly, after years, I noticed a memorial plaque there for a fighter in Lehi [pre-state underground militia, also known as the Stern Gang] who assassinated a British officer. Wherever there has been a struggle for liberation from oppression, there are national heroes, who in 90 percent of the cases carried out some operations that were unlawful. Nelson Mandela is today considered a hero, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but according to the conventional definition, he was a terrorist. Most of the victims of the ANC [African National Congress] were civilians.”

In other words, today’s Hamas commanders who are carrying out attacks on soldiers will be heroes of the future Palestinian state?

“Of course.”

Anti-Zionist identity

Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”

He continues, “Zionism also sustains anti-Semitism. I don’t say it does so deliberately – even though I have no doubt that there are some who do it deliberately, like Netanyahu, who is connected to people like the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, and the leader of the far right in Austria, Hans Christian Strache.”

Did Mapai-style Zionism also encourage anti-Semitism?

“The phenomenon was very striking in Mapai. Think about it for a minute, not only historically, but logically. If the goal of political and practical Zionism is really the establishment of a Jewish state containing a Jewish majority, and for Diaspora Jewry to settle there, nothing serves them better than anti-Semitism.”

What in their actions encouraged anti-Semitism?

“The very appeal to Jews throughout the world – the very fact of treating them as belonging to the same nation, when they were living among other nations. The whole old ‘dual loyalty’ story – Zionism actually encouraged that. Therefore, I maintain that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same thing, but are precisely opposites. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no anti-Zionists who are also anti-Semites. Most of the BDS people are of course anti-Zionists, but they are in no way anti-Semites. But there are anti-Semites there, too.”

Do you support BDS?

“It’s too complex a subject for a yes or no answer; there are aspects I don’t support.”

Do you think that the Jews deserve a national home in the Land of Israel?

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘national home.’ It’s very amorphous. We in Hadash say explicitly that Israel has a right to exist as a sovereign state. Our struggle is not against the state’s existence, but over its character.”

But that state is the product of the actions of the Zionist movement, which you say has been colonialist and criminal from day one.

“That’s true, but the circumstances have changed. That’s the reason that the majority of the members of the Communist Party accepted the [1947] partition agreement at the time. They recognized that the circumstances had changed. I think that one of the traits that sets communist thought apart, and makes it more apt, is the understanding and the attempt to strike the proper balance between what should be, and reality. So it’s true that Zionism started as colonialism, but what do you do with the people who were already born here? What do you tell them? Because your grandparents committed a crime, you have to leave? The question is how you transform the situation that’s been created into one that’s just, democratic and equal.”

So, a person who survived a death camp and came here is a criminal?

“The individual person, of course not. I’m in favor of taking in refugees in distress, no matter who or what they are. I am against Zionism’s cynical use of Jews in distress, including the refugees from the Holocaust. I have a problem with the fact that the natives whose homeland this is cannot return, while people for whom it’s not their homeland, can, because they supposedly have some sort of blood tie and an ‘imaginary friend’ promised them the land.”

I understand that you are in favor of the annulment of the Law of Return?

“Yes. Definitely.”

But you are in favor of the Palestinian right of return.

“There’s no comparison. There’s no symmetry here at all. Jerry Seinfeld was by chance born to a Jewish family. What’s his connection to this place? Why should he have preference over a refugee from Sabra or Chatila, or Edward Said, who did well in the United States? They are the true refugees. This is their homeland. Not Seinfeld’s.”

Are you critical of the Arabs, too?

“Certainly. One criticism is of their cooperation with imperialism – take the case of today’s Saudi Arabia, Qatar and so on. Another, from the past, relates to the reactionary forces that did not accept that the Jews have a right to live here.”

Hadash refrained from criticizing the Assad regime even as it was massacring civilians in Syria. The party even torpedoed a condemnation of Assad after the chemical attack. Do you identify with that approach?

“Hadash was critical of the Assad regime – father and son – for years, so we can’t be accused in any way of supporting Assad or Hezbollah. We are not Ba’ath, we are not Islamists. We are communists. But as I said earlier, the struggle, unfortunately, is generally not between the ideal and what exists in practice, but many times between two evils. And then you have to ask yourself which is the lesser evil. The Syrian constellation is extremely complicated. On the one hand, there is the United States, which is intervening, and despite all the pretense of being against ISIS, supported ISIS and made it possible for ISIS to sprout.

"I remind you that ISIS started from the occupation of Iraq. And ideologically and practically, ISIS is definitely a thousand times worse than the Assad regime, which is at base also a secular regime. Our position was and is against the countries that pose the greatest danger to regional peace, which above all are Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the United States, which supports them. That doesn’t mean that we support Assad.”

Wrong language

Cassif’s economic views are almost as far from the consensus as his political ideas. He lives modestly in an apartment that’s furnished like a young couple’s first home. You won’t find an espresso maker or unnecessary products of convenience in his place. To his credit, it can be said that he extracts the maximum from Elite instant coffee.

What is your utopian vision – to nationalize Israel’s conglomerates, such as Cellcom, the telecommunications company, or Osem, the food manufacturer and distributor?

“The bottom line is yes. How exactly will it be done? That’s an excellent question, which I can’t answer. Perhaps by transferring ownership to the state or to the workers, with democratic tools. And there are other alternatives. But certainly, I would like it if a large part of the resources were not in private hands, as was the case before the big privatizations. It’s true that it won’t be socialism, because, again, there can be no such thing as Zionist socialism, but there won’t be privatization like we have today. What is the result of capitalism in Israel? The collapse of the health system, the absence of a social-welfare system, a high cost of living and of housing, the elderly and the disabled in a terrible situation.”

Does any private sector have the right to exist?

“Look, the question is what you mean by ‘private sector.’ If we’re talking about huge concerns that the owners of capital control completely through their wealth, then no.”

What growth was there in the communist countries? How can anyone support communism, in light of the grim experience wherever it was tried?

“It’s true, we know that in the absolute majority of societies where an attempt was made to implement socialism, there was no growth or prosperity, and we need to ask ourselves why, and how to avoid that. When I talk about communism, I’m not talking about Stalin and all the crimes that were committed in the name of the communist idea. Communism is not North Korea and it is not Pol Pot in Cambodia. Heaven forbid.”

And what about Venezuela?

“Venezuela is not communism. In fact, they didn’t go far enough in the direction of socialism.”

Chavez was not enough of a socialist?

“Chavez, but in particular Maduro. The Communist Party is critical of the regime. They support it because the main enemy is truly American imperialism and its handmaidens. Let’s look at what the U.S. did over the years. At how many times it invaded and employed bullying, fascist forces. Not only in Latin America, its backyard, but everywhere.”

Venezuela is falling apart, people there don’t have anything to eat, there’s no medicine, everyone who can flees – and it’s the fault of the United States?

“You can’t deny that the regime has made mistakes. It’s not ideal. But basically, it is the result of American imperialism and its lackeys. After all, the masses voted for Chavez and for Maduro not because things were good for them. But because American corporations stole the country’s resources and filled their own pockets. I wouldn’t make Chavez into an icon, but he did some excellent things.”

Then how do you generate individual wealth within the method you’re proposing? I understand that I am now talking to you capitalistically, but the reality is that people see the accumulation of assets as an expression of progress in life.

“Your question is indeed framed in capitalist language, which simply departs from what I believe in. Because you are actually asking me how the distribution of resources is supposed to occur within the capitalist framework. And I say no, I am not talking about resource distribution within a capitalist framework.”

Gantz vs. Netanyahu

Cassif was chosen as the polls showed Meretz and Labor, the representatives of the Zionist left, barely scraping through into the next Knesset and in fact facing a serious possibility of electoral extinction. The critique of both parties from the radical left is sometimes more acerbic than from the right.

Would you like to see the Labor Party disappear?

“No. I think that what’s happening at the moment with Labor and with Meretz is extremely dangerous. I speak about them as collectives, because they contain individuals with whom I see no possibility of engaging in a dialogue. But I think that they absolutely must be in the Knesset.”

Is a left-winger who defines himself as a Zionist your partner in any way?

“Yes. We need partners. We can’t be picky. Certainly we will cooperate with liberals and Zionists on such issues as combating violence against women or the battle to rescue the health system. Maybe even in putting an end to the occupation.”

I’ll put a scenario to you: Benny Gantz does really well in the election and somehow overcomes Netanyahu. Do you support the person who led Operation Protective Edge in Gaza when he was chief of staff?

“Heaven forbid. But we don’t reject people, we reject policy. I remind you that it was [then-defense minister] Yitzhak Rabin who led the most violent tendency in the first intifada, with his ‘Break their bones.’ But when he came to the Oslo Accords, it was Hadash and the Arab parties that gave him, from outside the coalition, an insurmountable bloc. I can’t speak for the party, but if there is ever a government whose policy is one that we agree with – eliminating the occupation, combating racism, abolishing the nation-state law – I believe we will give our support in one way or another.”

And if Gantz doesn’t declare his intention to eliminate the occupation, he isn’t preferable to Netanyahu in any case?

“If so, why should we recommend him [to the president to form the next government]? After the clips he posted boasting about how many people he killed and how he hurled Gaza back into the Stone Age, I’m far from certain that he’s better.”

#Hadash

Régulation du numérique : comment la Californie veut contrer Washington
▻https://www.latribune.fr/technos-medias/internet/regulation-du-numerique-comment-la-californie-veut-contrer-washington-8070

Au fil de trois lois différentes encadrant les pratiques en ligne, le « Golden State » s’est doté en 2018 d’un dispositif juridique sans pareil dans le reste du pays. #Protection_des_données, *neutralité_du_Net, régulation de l’intelligence artificielle : la Californie prend le contre-pied de la ligne officielle à Washington, alors que l’administration Trump était tentée jusqu’ici de déréguler la Toile.

À coup d’ambitieux projets de loi, la Californie semble déterminée à redéfinir les règles en vigueur sur Internet. Tandis que le gouvernement fédéral prend le parti de déréguler, comme l’illustre la suppression de la loi sur la neutralité du Net, le « Golden State » fait le pari inverse, allant parfois jusqu’à défier ouvertement l’administration Trump. Tout a commencé en juin 2018, lorsque le Golden State a adopté le California Consumer Privacy Act de 2018. Cette loi, qui entrera en application le 1er janvier 2020, est largement inspirée du #RGPD européen, dont elle reprend les grandes lignes : plus grand contrôle des internautes sur leurs données personnelles, possibilité de refuser qu’elles soient employées à des fins commerciales, protections supplémentaires concernant les données des mineurs.

La Californie ne s’est toutefois pas arrêtée en si bon chemin, et en septembre 2018, le gouverneur Jerry Brown a signé une autre loi encadrant le comportement des « #bots », ces intelligences artificielles conversationnelles simples. Cette régulation, qui prendra effet le 1er juillet 2019, oblige les bots à s’identifier lorsqu’ils communiquent avec des humains en ligne. L’objectif : empêcher que ces agents virtuels ne soient utilisés pour manipuler leurs interlocuteurs en se faisant passer pour des humains, que ce soit à des fins commerciales (vendre un produit) ou politiques (influencer une élection).

Mais la mesure la plus forte est sans aucun doute celle qui concerne la neutralité du Net, ratifiée en septembre dernier par le gouverneur Jerry Brown. Cette loi, la plus stricte du territoire américain, interdit aux fournisseurs Internet de bloquer ou ralentir les contenus, et de favoriser la bande passante de certains sites ou services au détriment d’autres. Elle restaure dans les grandes lignes la loi sur la neutralité du Net instaurée par Barack Obama en 2015, et abrogée par l’administration Trump en décembre 2017.

Ex-Wargaming, Riot employees form Ganymede Games
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-07-ex-wargaming-riot-employees-form-ganymede-games

Jerry Prochazka and Lynn Stetson co-found Las Cruces studio, taking advantage of special state tax credit

#Development

Jerry Falwell Jr. can’t imagine Trump ‘doing anything that’s not good for the country’ - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/jerry-falwell-jr-cant-imagine-trump-doing-anything-thats-not-good-for-the-country/2018/12/21/6affc4c4-f19e-11e8-80d0-f7e1948d55f4_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/ZGmbM4RxC8XyutxfGVF8HcIcc-Y=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/6N4YUZXJFUI6RBCJD7ZGGYE2GE.jpg

It’s a distortion of the teaching of Christ to say Jesus taught love and forgiveness and therefore the United States as a nation should be loving and forgiving, and just hand over everything we have to every other part of the world. That’s not what Jesus taught.

#évangélistes #Etats-unis

Who writes history? The fight to commemorate a massacre by the Texas #rangers

In 1918, a state-sanctioned vigilante force killed 15 unarmed Mexicans in #Porvenir. When their descendants applied for a historical marker a century later, they learned that not everyone wants to remember one of Texas’ darkest days.

The name of the town was Porvenir, or “future.” In the early morning hours of January 28, 1918, 15 unarmed Mexicans and Mexican Americans were awakened by a state-sanctioned vigilante force of Texas Rangers, U.S. Army cavalry and local ranchers. The men and boys ranged in age from 16 to 72. They were taken from their homes, led to a bluff over the Rio Grande and shot from 3 feet away by a firing squad. The remaining residents of the isolated farm and ranch community fled across the river to Mexico, where they buried the dead in a mass grave. Days later, the cavalry returned to burn the abandoned village to the ground.

These, historians broadly agree, are the facts of what happened at Porvenir. But 100 years later, the meaning of those facts remains fiercely contested. In 2015, as the centennial of the massacre approached, a group of historians and Porvenir descendants applied for and was granted a Texas Historical Commission (THC) marker. After a three-year review process, the THC approved the final text in July. A rush order was sent to the foundry so that the marker would be ready in time for a Labor Day weekend dedication ceremony planned by descendants. Then, on August 3, Presidio County Historical Commission Chair Mona Blocker Garcia sent an email to the THC that upended everything. Though THC records show that the Presidio commission had been consulted throughout the marker approval process, Garcia claimed to be “shocked” that the text was approved. She further asserted, without basis, that “the militant Hispanics have turned this marker request into a political rally and want reparations from the federal government for a 100-year-old-plus tragic event.”

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Four days later, Presidio County Attorney Rod Ponton sent a follow-up letter. Without identifying specific errors in the marker text, he demanded that the dedication ceremony be canceled and the marker’s production halted until new language could be agreed upon. Ponton speculated, falsely, that the event was planned as a “major political rally” for Beto O’Rourke with the participation of La Raza Unida founding member José Ángel Gutiérrez, neither of whom was involved. Nonetheless, THC History Programs Director Charles Sadnick sent an email to agency staff the same day: “After getting some more context about where the marker sponsor may be coming from, we’re halting production on the marker.”

The American Historical Association quickly condemned the THC’s decision, as did the office of state Senator José Rodríguez, a Democrat whose district includes both Presidio County and El Paso, where the ceremony was to be held. Historians across the country also spoke out against the decision. Sarah Zenaida Gould, director of the Museo del Westside in San Antonio and cofounder of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, responded in an email to the agency that encapsulates the views of many of the historians I interviewed: “Halting the marker process to address this statement as though it were a valid concern instead of a dog whistle is insulting to all people of color who have personally or through family history experienced state violence.”

How did a last-gasp effort, characterized by factual errors and inflammatory language, manage to convince the state agency for historic preservation to reverse course on a marker three years in the making and sponsored by a young Latina historian with an Ivy League pedigree and Texas-Mexico border roots? An Observer investigation, involving dozens of interviews and hundreds of emails obtained through an open records request, reveals a county still struggling to move on from a racist and violent past, far-right amateur historians sowing disinformation and a state agency that acted against its own best judgment.

The Porvenir massacre controversy is about more than just the fate of a single marker destined for a lonely part of West Texas. It’s about who gets to tell history, and the continuing relevance of the border’s contested, violent and racist past to events today.
–

Several rooms in Benita Albarado’s home in Uvalde are almost overwhelmed by filing cabinets and stacks of clipboards, the ever-growing archive of her research into what happened at Porvenir. For most of her life, Benita, 74, knew nothing about the massacre. What she did know was that her father, Juan Flores, had terrible nightmares, and that in 1950 he checked himself in to a state mental hospital for symptoms that today would be recognized as PTSD. When she asked her mother what was wrong with him, she always received the same vague response: “You don’t understand what he’s been through.”

In 1998, Benita and her husband, Buddy, began tracing their family trees. Benita was perplexed that she couldn’t find any documentation about her grandfather, Longino Flores. Then she came across the archival papers of Harry Warren, a schoolteacher, lawyer and son-in-law of Tiburcio Jáquez, one of the men who was murdered. Warren had made a list of the victims, and Longino’s name was among them. Warren also described how one of his students from Porvenir had come to his house the next morning to tell him what happened, and then traveled with him to the massacre site to identify the bodies, many of which were so mutilated as to be virtually unrecognizable. Benita immediately saw the possible connection. Her father, 12 at the time, matched Warren’s description of the student.

Benita and Buddy drove from Uvalde to Odessa, where her father lived, with her photocopied papers. “Is that you?” she asked. He said yes. Then, for the first time in 80 years, he began to tell the story of how he was kidnapped with the men, but then sent home because of his age; he was told that the others were only going to be questioned. To Benita and Buddy’s amazement, he remembered the names of 12 of the men who had been murdered. They were the same as those in Harry Warren’s papers. He also remembered the names of the ranchers who had shown up at his door. Some of those, including the ancestors of prominent families still in Presidio County, had never been found in any document.

Talking about the massacre proved healing for Flores. His nightmares stopped. In 2000, at age 96, he decided that he wanted to return to Porvenir. Buddy drove them down an old mine road in a four-wheel-drive truck. Flores pointed out where his old neighbors used to live, even though the buildings were gone. He guided Buddy to the bluff where the men were killed — a different location than the one commonly believed by local ranchers to be the massacre site. His memory proved to be uncanny: At the bluff, the family discovered a pre-1918 military bullet casing, still lying on the Chihuahuan desert ground.

Benita and Buddy began advocating for a historical marker in 2000, soon after their trip to Porvenir. “A lot of people say that this was a lie,” Buddy told me. “But if you’ve got a historical marker, the state has to acknowledge what happened.” Their efforts were met by resistance from powerful ranching families, who held sway over the local historical commission. The Albarados had already given up when they met Monica Muñoz Martinez, a Yale graduate student from Uvalde, who interviewed them for her dissertation. In 2013, Martinez, by then an assistant professor at Brown University, co-founded Refusing to Forget, a group of historians aiming to create broader public awareness of border violence, including Porvenir and other extrajudicial killings of Mexicans by Texas Rangers during the same period. The most horrific of these was La Matanza, in which dozens of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were murdered in the Rio Grande Valley in 1915.

In 2006, the THC created the Undertold Markers program, which seemed tailor-made for Porvenir. According to its website, the program is designed to “address historical gaps, promote diversity of topics, and proactively document significant underrepresented subjects or untold stories.” Unlike the agency’s other marker programs, anyone can apply for an undertold marker, not just county historical commissions. Martinez’s application for a Porvenir massacre marker was accepted in 2015.

Though the approval process for the Porvenir marker took longer than usual, by the summer of 2018 everything appeared to be falling into place. On June 1, Presidio County Historical Commission chair Garcia approved the final text. (Garcia told me that she thought she was approving a different text. Her confusion is difficult to understand, since the text was attached to the digital form she submitted approving it.) Martinez began coordinating with the THC and Arlinda Valencia, a descendant of one of the victims, to organize a dedication ceremony in El Paso.
“They weren’t just simple farmers. I seriously doubt that they were just killed for no reason.”

In mid-June, Valencia invited other descendants to the event and posted it on Facebook. She began planning a program to include a priest’s benediction, a mariachi performance and brief remarks by Martinez, Senator Rodríguez and a representative from the THC. The event’s climax would be the unveiling of the plaque with the names of the 15 victims.

Then the backlash began.
–

“Why do you call it a massacre?” is the first thing Jim White III said over the phone when I told him I was researching the Porvenir massacre. White is the trustee of the Brite Ranch, the site of a cross-border raid by Mexicans on Christmas Day 1917, about a month before the Porvenir massacre. When I explained that the state-sanctioned extrajudicial execution of 15 men and boys met all the criteria I could think of for a massacre, he shot back, “It sounds like you already have your opinion.”

For generations, ranching families like the Brites have dominated the social, economic and political life of Presidio County. In a visit to the Marfa & Presidio County Museum, I was told that there were almost no Hispanic surnames in any of the exhibits, though 84 percent of the county is Hispanic. The Brite family name, however, was everywhere.

White and others in Presidio County subscribe to an alternative history of the Porvenir massacre, centering on the notion that the Porvenir residents were involved in the bloody Christmas Day raid.

“They weren’t just simple farmers,” White told me, referring to the victims. “I seriously doubt that they were just killed for no reason.” Once he’d heard about the historical marker, he said, he’d talked to everyone he knew about it, including former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Mona Blocker Garcia.

I visited Garcia at her Marfa home, an 1886 adobe that’s the same age as the venerable Marfa County Courthouse down the street. Garcia, 82, is Anglo, and married to a former oil executive whose ancestry, she explained, is Spanish and French Basque. A Houston native, she retired in the 1990s to Marfa, where she befriended the Brite family and became involved in local history. She told me that she had shared a draft text of the marker with the Brites, and they had agreed that it was factually inaccurate.

Garcia cited a story a Brite descendant had told her about a young goat herder from Porvenir who purportedly witnessed the Christmas Day raid, told authorities about the perpetrators from his community and then disappeared without a trace into a witness protection program in Oklahoma. When I asked if there was any evidence that the boy actually existed, she acknowledged the story was “folklore.” Still, she said, “the story has lasted 100 years. Why would anybody make something like that up?”

The actual history is quite clear. In the days after the massacre, the Texas Rangers commander, Captain J.M. Fox, initially reported that Porvenir residents had fired on the Rangers. Later, he claimed that residents had participated in the Christmas Day raid. Subsequent investigations by the Mexican consulate, the U.S. Army and state Representative J.T. Canales concluded that the murdered men were unarmed and innocent, targeted solely because of their ethnicity by a vigilante force organized at the Brite Ranch. As a result, in June 1918, five Rangers were dismissed, Fox was forced to resign and Company B of the Texas Rangers was disbanded.

But justice remained elusive. In the coming years, Fox re-enlisted as captain of Company A, while three of the dismissed lawmen found new employment. One re-enlisted as a Ranger, a second became a U.S. customs inspector and the third was hired by the Brite Ranch. No one was ever prosecuted. As time passed, the historical records of the massacre, including Harry Warren’s papers, affidavits from widows and other relatives and witness testimony from the various investigations, were largely forgotten. In their place came texts like Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, which played an outsize role in the creation of the heroic myth of the Texas Rangers. Relying entirely on interviews with the murderers themselves, Webb accepted at face value Fox’s discredited version of events. For more than 50 years, Webb’s account was considered the definitive one of the massacre — though, unsurprisingly, he didn’t use that word.
–

An Observer review of hundreds of emails shows that the state commission was aware of potential controversy over the marker from the very beginning. In an email from 2015, Executive Director Mark Wolfe gave John Nau, the chair of the THC’s executive committee, a heads-up that while the marker was supported by historical scholarship, “the [Presidio County Historical Commission] opposes the marker.” The emails also demonstrate that the agency viewed the claims of historical inaccuracies in the marker text made by Mona Blocker Garcia and the county commission as minor issues of wording.

On August 6, the day before the decision to halt the marker, Charles Sadnick, the history programs director, wrote Wolfe to say that the “bigger problem” was the ceremony, where he worried there might be disagreements among Presidio County residents, and which he described as “involving some politics which we don’t want a part of.”

What were the politics that the commission was worried about, and where were these concerns coming from? Garcia’s last-minute letter may have been a factor, but it wasn’t the only one. For the entire summer, Glenn Justice, a right-wing amateur historian who lives in a rural gated community an hour outside San Angelo, had been the driving force behind a whisper campaign to discredit Martinez and scuttle the dedication ceremony.

“There are radicals in the ‘brown power’ movement that only want the story told of Rangers and [the] Army and gringos killing innocent Mexicans,” Justice told me when we met in his garage, which doubles as the office for Rimrock Press, a publishing company whose catalog consists entirely of Justice’s own work. He was referring to Refusing to Forget and in particular Martinez, the marker’s sponsor.

Justice has been researching the Porvenir massacre for more than 30 years, starting when he first visited the Big Bend as a graduate student. He claims to be, and probably is, the first person since schoolteacher Harry Warren to call Porvenir a “massacre” in print, in a master’s thesis published by the University of Texas at El Paso in 1991. Unlike White and Garcia, Justice doesn’t question the innocence of the Porvenir victims. But he believes that additional “context” is necessary to understand the reasons for the massacre, which he views as an aberration, rather than a representatively violent part of a long history of racism. “There have never been any problems between the races to speak of [in Presidio County],” he told me.

In 2015, Justice teamed up with former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Sul Ross State University archaeologist David Keller on a privately funded excavation at the massacre site. He is working on a new book about the bullets and bullet casings they found — which he believes implicate the U.S. Army cavalry in the shooting — and also partnered with Patterson to produce a documentary. But they’d run out of money, and the film was taken over by noted Austin filmmaker Andrew Shapter, who pitched the project to PBS and Netflix. In the transition, Justice was demoted to the role of one of 12 consulting historians. Meanwhile, Martinez was given a prominent role on camera.

Justice was disgruntled when he learned that the dedication ceremony would take place in El Paso. He complained to organizer Arlinda Valencia and local historical commission members before contacting Ponton, the county attorney, and Amanda Shields, a descendant of massacre victim Manuel Moralez.

“I didn’t want to take my father to a mob scene,” Shields told me over the phone, by way of explaining her opposition to the dedication ceremony. She believed the rumor that O’Rourke and Gutiérrez would be involved.

In August, Shields called Valencia to demand details about the program for the ceremony. At the time, she expressed particular concern about a potential Q&A event with Martinez that would focus on parallels between border politics and violence in 1918 and today.

“This is not a political issue,” Shields told me. “It’s a historical issue. With everything that was going on, we didn’t want the ugliness of politics involved in it.” By “everything,” she explained, she was referring primarily to the issue of family separation. Benita and Buddy Albarado told me that Shields’ views represent a small minority of descendants.

Martinez said that the idea of ignoring the connections between past and present went against her reasons for fighting to get a marker in the first place. “I’m a historian,” she said. “It’s hard to commemorate such a period of violence, in the midst of another ongoing humanitarian crisis, when this period of violence shaped the institutions of policing that we have today. And that cannot be relegated to the past.”
–

After communicating with Justice and Shields, Ponton phoned THC Commissioner Gilbert “Pete” Peterson, who is a bank investment officer in Alpine. That call set in motion the sequence of events that would ultimately derail the marker. Peterson immediately emailed Wolfe, the state commission’s executive director, to say that the marker was becoming “a major political issue.” Initially, though, Wolfe defended the agency’s handling of the marker. “Frankly,” Wolfe wrote in his reply, “this might just be one where the [Presidio County Historical Commission] isn’t going to be happy, and that’s why these stories have been untold for so long.” Peterson wrote back to say that he had been in touch with members of the THC executive committee, which consists of 15 members appointed by either former Governor Rick Perry or Governor Greg Abbott, and that an email about the controversy had been forwarded to THC chair John Nau. Two days later, Peterson added, “This whole thing is a burning football that will be thrown to the media.”

At a meeting of the Presidio County Historical Commission on August 17, Peterson suggested that the executive board played a major role in the decision to pause production of the marker. “I stopped the marker after talking to Rod [Ponton],” Peterson said. “I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with the chairman and vice-chairman [of the THC]. What we have said, fairly emphatically, is that there will not be a dedication in El Paso.” Through a spokesperson, Wolfe said that the executive committee is routinely consulted and the decision was ultimately his.

The spokesperson said, “The big reason that the marker was delayed was to be certain about its accuracy. We want these markers to stand for generations and to be as accurate as possible.”

With no marker to unveil, Valencia still organized a small commemoration. Many descendants, including Benita and Buddy Albarado, chose not to attend. Still, the event was described by Jeff Davis, a THC representative in attendance, as “a near perfect event” whose tone was “somber and respectful but hopeful.”
–

Most of THC’s executive committee members are not historians. The chair, John Nau, is CEO of the nation’s largest Anheuser-Busch distributor and a major Republican party donor. His involvement in the Porvenir controversy was not limited to temporarily halting the marker. In August, he also instructed THC staff to ask the Presidio historical commission to submit applications for markers commemorating raids by Mexicans on white ranches during the Mexican Revolution, which Nau described as “a significant but largely forgotten incident in the state’s history.”

Garcia confirmed that she had been approached by THC staff. She added that the THC had suggested two specific topics: the Christmas Day raid and a subsequent raid at the Neville Ranch.

The idea of additional plaques to provide so-called context that could be interpreted as justifying the massacre — or at the very least setting up a false moral equivalence — appears to have mollified critics like White, Garcia and Justice. The work on a revised Porvenir massacre text proceeded quickly, with few points of contention, once it began in mid-September. The marker was sent to the foundry on September 18.
“It’s hard to commemorate such a period of violence, in the midst of another ongoing humanitarian crisis, when this period of violence shaped the institutions of policing that we have today.”

In the end, the Porvenir descendants will get their marker — but it may come at a cost. Martinez called the idea of multiple markers “deeply unsettling” and not appropriate for the Undertold Marker program. “Events like the Brite Ranch raid and the Neville raid have been documented by historians for over a century,” she said. “These are not undertold histories. My concern with having a series of markers is that, again, it casts suspicion on the victims of these historical events. It creates the logic that these raids caused this massacre, that it was retribution for these men and boys participating.”

In early November, the THC unexpectedly announced a dedication ceremony for Friday, November 30. The date was one of just a few on which Martinez, who was still planning on organizing several public history events in conjunction with the unveiling, had told the agency months prior that she had a schedule conflict. In an email to Martinez, Sadnick said that it was the only date Nau could attend this year, and that it was impossible for agency officials to make “secure travel plans” once the legislative session began in January.

A handful of descendants, including Shields and the Albarados, still plan to attend. “This is about families having closure,” Shields told me. “Now, this can finally be put to rest.”

The Albarados are livid that the THC chose a date that, in their view, prioritized the convenience of state and county officials over the attendance of descendants — including their own daughters, who feared they wouldn’t be able to get off work. They also hope to organize a second, unofficial gathering at the marker site next year, with the participation of more descendants and the Refusing to Forget historians. “We want people to know the truth of what really happened [at Porvenir],” Buddy told me, “and to know who it was that got this historical marker put there.”

Others, like Arlinda Valencia, planned to stay home. “Over 100 years ago, our ancestors were massacred, and the reason they were massacred was because of lies that people were stating as facts,” she told me in El Paso. “They called them ‘bandits,’ when all they were doing was working and trying to make a living. And now, it’s happening again.”

#mémoire #histoire #Texas #USA #massacre #assassinat #méxicains #violence #migrations #commémoration #historicisation #frontières #violence_aux_frontières #violent_borders #Mexique

The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-complicated-legacy-of-stewart-brands-whole-earth-catalog

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bec9af95a759a2d75a9f905/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/Wiener-WholeEarth.jpg

At the height of the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, the “Whole Earth Catalog” offered a vision for a new social order—one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools. The latter category included agricultural equipment, weaving kits, mechanical devices, books like “Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia,” and digital technologies and related theoretical texts, such as Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics” and the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a programmable calculator. “We are as gods and might as well get used to it” read the first catalogue’s statement of purpose. “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

The communes eventually collapsed, for the usual reasons, which included poor resource management, factionalism, and financial limitations. But the “Whole Earth Catalog,” which published quarterly through 1971 and sporadically thereafter, garnered a cult following that included founders of Airbnb and Stripe and also early employees of Facebook.

Last month, on a brisk and blindingly sunny Saturday, over a hundred alumni of the “Whole Earth Catalog” network—Merry Pranksters, communards, hippies, hackers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and futurists—gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication, and, per the invitation, to come together “one last time.” The event was held at the San Francisco Art Institute, a renovated wharf warehouse with vaulted ceilings, views of Alcatraz, and the cool sterility of an empty art gallery. A number of early-Internet architects, including Larry Brilliant, Lee Felsenstein, and Ted Nelson, floated around the room. Several alumni had scribbled their well usernames onto their badges.

A week after the reunion, Brand and I spoke over the phone, and he emphasized that he had little nostalgia for “Whole Earth.” “ ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’ is well and truly obsolete and extinct,” he said. “There’s this sort of abiding interest in it, or what it was involved in, back in the day, and so the reunion was a way for the perpetrators to get together and have a drink and piss on the grave.” Brand continued, “There’s pieces being written on the East Coast about how I’m to blame for everything,” from sexism in the back-to-the-land communes to the monopolies of Google, Amazon, and Apple. “The people who are using my name as a source of good or ill things going on in cyberspace, most of them don’t know me at all,” he said. “They’re just using a shorthand. You know, magical realism: Borges. You mention a few names so you don’t have to go down the whole list. It’s a cognitive shortcut.”

Brand now describes himself as “post-libertarian,” a shift he attributes to a brief stint working with Jerry Brown, during his first term as California’s governor, in the nineteen-seventies, and to books like Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” which describes the Trump Administration’s damage to vital federal agencies. “ ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ was very libertarian, but that’s because it was about people in their twenties, and everybody then was reading Robert Heinlein and asserting themselves and all that stuff,” Brand said. “We didn’t know what government did. The whole government apparatus is quite wonderful, and quite crucial. [It] makes me frantic, that it’s being taken away.” A few weeks after our conversation, Brand spoke at a conference, in Prague, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation, which supports an eponymous, open-source, blockchain-based computing platform and cryptocurrency. In his address, he apologized for over-valorizing hackers. “Frankly,” he said, “most of the real engineering was done by people with narrow ties who worked nine to five, often with federal money.”

While antagonism between millennials and boomers is a Freudian trope, Brand’s generation will leave behind a frightening, if unintentional, inheritance. My generation, and those after us, are staring down a ravaged environment, eviscerated institutions, and the increasing erosion of democracy. In this context, the long-term view is as seductive as the apolitical, inward turn of the communards from the nineteen-sixties. What a luxury it is to be released from politics––to picture it all panning out.

#Stewart_Brand #Utopie_numérique

Working Through the Pain at TeslaReveal
▻https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-medical-clinic-designed-to-ignore-injured-worker

https://www.revealnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/stephon-nelson1-630x356.jpg

Inside Tesla’s factory, a medical clinic designed to ignore injured workers
By Will Evans / November 5, 2018

When a worker gets smashed by a car part on Tesla’s factory floor, medical staff are forbidden from calling 911 without permission.

The electric carmaker’s contract doctors rarely grant it, instead often insisting that seriously injured workers – including one who severed the top of a finger – be sent to the emergency room in a Lyft.

Injured employees have been systematically sent back to the production line to work through their pain with no modifications, according to former clinic employees, Tesla factory workers and medical records. Some could barely walk.

The on-site medical clinic serving some 10,000 employees at Tesla Inc.’s California assembly plant has failed to properly care for seriously hurt workers, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

The clinic’s practices are unsafe and unethical, five former clinic employees said.

But denying medical care and work restrictions to injured workers is good for one thing: making real injuries disappear.

“The goal of the clinic was to keep as many patients off of the books as possible,” said Anna Watson, a physician assistant who worked at Tesla’s medical clinic for three weeks in August.

Watson has nearly 20 years of experience as a medical professional, examining patients, diagnosing ailments and prescribing medications. She’s treated patients at a petroleum refinery, a steel plant, emergency rooms and a trauma center. But she said she’s never seen anything like what’s happening at Tesla.

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Anna Watson was a physician assistant at the medical clinic inside Tesla’s electric car factory in Fremont, Calif. She was fired in August after raising concerns. Credit: Paul Kuroda for Reveal

“The way they were implementing it was very out of control,” said Watson, who was fired in August after she raised her concerns. “Every company that I’ve worked at is motivated to keep things not recordable. But I’ve never seen anybody do it at the expense of treating the patient.”

Workers with chest pain, breathing problems or extreme headaches have been dismissed as having issues unrelated to their work, without being fully evaluated or having workplace exposures considered, former employees said. The clinic has turned away temp workers who got hurt on Tesla’s assembly lines, leaving them without on-site care. And medical assistants, who are supposed to have on-site supervision, say they were left on their own at night, unprepared to deal with a stream of night-shift injuries.

If a work injury requires certain medical equipment – such as stitches or hard braces – then it has to be counted in legally mandated logs. But some employees who needed stitches for a cut instead were given butterfly bandages, said Watson and another former clinic employee. At one point, hard braces were removed from the clinic so they wouldn’t be used, according to Watson and a former medical assistant.

As Tesla races to revolutionize the automobile industry and build a more sustainable future, it has left its factory workers in the past, still painfully vulnerable to the dangers of manufacturing.

An investigation by Reveal in April showed that Tesla prioritized style and speed over safety, undercounted injuries and ignored the concerns of its own safety professionals. CEO Elon Musk’s distaste for the color yellow and beeping forklifts eroded factory safety, former safety team members said.

The new revelations about the on-site clinic show that even as the company forcefully pushed back against Reveal’s reporting, behind the scenes, it doubled down on its efforts to hide serious injuries from the government and public.

In June, Tesla hired a new company, Access Omnicare, to run its factory health center after the company promised Tesla it could help reduce the number of recordable injuries and emergency room visits, according to records.

A former high-level Access Omnicare employee said Tesla pressured the clinic’s owner, who then made his staff dismiss injuries as minor or not related to work.

“It was bullying and pressuring to do things people didn’t believe were correct,” said the former employee, whom Reveal granted anonymity because of the worker’s fear of being blackballed in the industry.

Dr. Basil Besh, the Fremont, California, hand surgeon who owns Access Omnicare, said the clinic drives down Tesla’s injury count with more accurate diagnoses, not because of pressure from Tesla. Injured workers, he said, don’t always understand what’s best for them.

“We treat the Tesla employees just the same way we treat our professional athletes,” he said. “If Steph Curry twists his knee on a Thursday night game, that guy’s in the MRI scanner on Friday morning.”

Yet at one point, Watson said a Tesla lawyer and a company safety official told her and other clinic staff to stop prescribing exercises to injured workers so they wouldn’t have to count the injuries. Recommending stretches to treat an injured back or range-of-motion exercises for an injured shoulder was no longer allowed, she said.

The next day, she wrote her friend a text message in outrage: “I had to meet with lawyers yesterday to literally learn how not to take care of people.”

Tesla declined interview requests for this story and said it had no comment in response to detailed questions. But after Reveal pressed the company for answers, Tesla officials took time on their October earnings call to enthusiastically praise the clinic.

“I’m really super happy with the care they’re giving, and I think the employees are as well,” said Laurie Shelby, Tesla’s vice president for environment, health and safety.

Musk complained about “unfair accusations” that Tesla undercounts its injuries and promised “first-class health care available right on the spot when people need it.”

Welcome to the new Tesla clinic
Back in June, on stage at Tesla’s shareholder meeting, Musk announced a declining injury rate for his electric car factory.

“This is a super important thing to me because we obviously owe a great debt to the people who are building the car. I really care about this issue,” Musk said to applause.

It wasn’t long after that that Stephon Nelson joined the company. Working the overnight shift Aug. 13, Nelson got a sudden introduction to Tesla’s new model of care.

He was bent over putting caulk inside the trunk of a Model X. Something slipped and the hatchback crunched down on his back. Nelson froze up in agonizing pain. He had deep red bruises across his back.

“I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t even stand up straight,” said Nelson, who’s 30 and used to play semiprofessional football.

He asked for an ambulance, but the on-call Tesla doctor said no – he could take a Lyft to the hospital instead.

“I just felt heartbroken,” Nelson said. “What they was telling us in the orientation, that Tesla is a company that cares about their employees’ safety, it just seemed like it was just a whole reversal.”

No one was allowed to call 911 without a doctor’s permission, said Watson and two medical assistants who used to work at the clinic under Besh’s direction. Anyone who did so would get in trouble, they said.

“There was a strong push not to send anybody in an ambulance,” Watson said.

https://www.revealnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/stephon-nelson2.jpg

“I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t even stand up straight,” Stephon Nelson says of what happened when he injured his back while working on a Tesla Model X. Credit: Paul Kuroda for Reveal

It’s unclear why there was such a focus on avoiding 911, though some former employees thought it was to save money. Also, 911 logs become public records. And first responders, unlike drivers for ride-hailing services, are required to report severe work injuries to California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, the state’s workplace safety agency. Besh said ambulance use is based on “clinical judgment only.”

The system was especially problematic on the night shift, as the factory continued churning out vehicles around the clock, but there were no doctors or nurses around, former employees said.

Two medical assistants who used to work there said they often were left on their own – one on duty at a time – and struggled to tend to all the injured. Both had to do things such as take vital signs, which medical assistants aren’t allowed to do without on-site supervision, according to the Medical Board of California. Reveal granted them anonymity because they fear speaking out will hurt their careers. Besh said no one works alone.

For a severely injured worker lying on the assembly line, it could take 10 to 15 minutes for a medical assistant to arrive and then contact on-call doctors, a medical assistant said. Getting a code for Tesla’s Lyft account was a drawn-out process that could take hours, she said.

The medical assistants said they were alarmed and uncomfortable with the doctors’ orders to use Lyft because they worried some patients could pass out or need help en route. One worker directed to take a Lyft was light-headed and dizzy. Another had his fingers badly broken, contorted and mangled.

Besh, who often serves as the on-call doctor, said anyone could call 911 in a life-threatening situation. He said he recommends using Lyft for workers who don’t need advanced life support.

Besh gave the example of a worker who had the top of his finger cut off. He needed to go to the hospital, but not by ambulance, Besh said. He likened the situation to people at home who get a ride to the hospital instead of calling an ambulance.

“We right-size the care,” he said. “Obviously, it’s all about the appropriate care given for the appropriate situation.”

It’s a doctor’s judgment call to use Lyft, but many on the factory floor found it inhumane. In some cases, including the worker with an amputated fingertip, factory supervisors refused to put their employees in a Lyft and instead drove them to the hospital, according to a medical assistant.

Injured workers sent back to work

In Nelson’s case, he called his girlfriend to take him to the hospital. But he said his supervisor told him that he had to show up for work the next day or Nelson would get in trouble.

Nelson needed the job, so he forced himself to come in. He shuffled slowly, hunched over in pain, to his department, he said. When it was clear he couldn’t do the job, he was sent to the Tesla health center, a small clinic on an upper level of the factory.

Workers too injured to do their regular jobs are supposed to receive job restrictions and a modified assignment that won’t make the injury worse.

But the health center wouldn’t give Nelson any accommodations. He could go home that day, but he had to report to work full duty the following day, he said.

By law, work-related injuries must be recorded on injury logs if they require medical treatment beyond first aid, days away from work or job restrictions. The clinic’s practices were designed to avoid those triggers, said Anna Watson, the physician assistant.

There was a clinic rule, for example, that injured employees could not be given work restrictions, Watson said. No matter what type of injuries workers came in with – burns, lacerations, strains and sprains – clinic staff were under instructions to send them back to work full duty, she said. Watson said she even had to send one back to work with what appeared to be a broken ankle.

Medical clinics are supposed to treat injuries and keep workers safe, she said, “and none of that’s happening. So at the most acute time of their injury, they don’t have any support, really.”

A medical assistant who formerly worked at the clinic remembered an employee who was sent back to work even though he couldn’t stand on one of his feet. Another employee passed out face down on the assembly line – then went back to work.

“You always put back to full duty, no matter what,” said the medical assistant.

Dr. Basil Besh said patients are given work restrictions when appropriate. He said those hurt at night get first aid and triage, followed by an accurate diagnosis from a physician the next day.

“There’s always going to be somebody who says, ‘No, I shouldn’t be working,’ ” he said. “But if you look objectively at the totality of the medical examination, that’s not always the case.”

Four days after Nelson’s injury, Watson herself sent him back to work with no restrictions, according to medical records he provided. Nelson said this happened repeatedly as he hobbled in pain.

But Watson did what she could to help: She referred him to Access Omnicare’s main clinic, about 5 miles from the auto factory. It was allowed to give work restrictions, Watson said. But most workers aren’t sent there, and it can take a while to get an appointment.

Eight days after his injury, the outside clinic diagnosed Nelson with a “crushing injury of back,” contusions and “intractable” pain. He finally was given work restrictions that said he shouldn’t be bending, squatting, kneeling, climbing stairs or lifting more than 10 pounds.

Even after that, the health center at one point sent Nelson back to his department in a wheelchair, he said.

“And I’m rocking back and forth, just ready to fall out of the wheelchair because I’m in so much pain,” he said.

In September, Nelson got a warehouse job at another company. It was a pay cut, but he quit Tesla right away. “I feel like it’s really not safe at all,” he said.

Besh said he couldn’t comment on a specific case without a signed release from the patient. But, he said, “a physician examined that patient and saw that there was not a safety issue.”

Besh was named chairman of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ Board of Councilors this year. A Tesla spokeswoman set up and monitored his interview with Reveal.

There’s been a “culture shift” at the health center since Tesla hired him to take over, he said.

“So culturally, there were folks in the past who were expecting that any time they come to the clinic, they would be taken off of work,” he said. “And when we told them, ‘No, we really want to do what’s best for you’ … it’s taking some time to get buy-in.”

In the end, Tesla counted Nelson on its injury logs, which is how Reveal identified him. That’s another reason the system didn’t make sense to Watson: Some workers whose injuries were so serious that they eventually would have to be counted still were denied proper care when they needed it most, she said.

Many more injured workers never were counted, she said. Tesla’s official injury logs, provided to Reveal by a former employee, show 48 injuries in August. Watson reviewed the list for the three weeks she was there and estimated that more than twice as many injuries should have been counted if Tesla had provided appropriate care and counted accurately.

Other ways Tesla’s clinic avoids treating workers
The clinic seemed geared toward sending workers away instead of treating them, Watson said. The culture of the clinic, she said, was to discount workers’ complaints and assume they were exaggerating.

The clinic would look for reasons to dismiss injuries as not work-related, even when they seemed to be, former employees said.

Watson recalled one worker who had passed out on the job and went to the hospital because of her exposure to fumes in the factory. Even though a work-related loss of consciousness is required to be counted, no such injury was recorded on Tesla’s injury logs.

Temp workers hurt on the production line also were often rebuffed by the clinic, said former clinic employees. At one point, there was a blanket policy to turn away temps, they said.

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Tracy Lee wears a brace to help with a repetitive stress injury she developed while working at Tesla’s factory. She says the in-house health center sent her away without evaluating her because she wasn’t a permanent employee. Credit: Paul Kuroda for Reveal

Tracy Lee developed a repetitive stress injury over the summer when a machine broke and she had to lift car parts by hand, she said. Lee said the health center sent her away without evaluating her because she wasn’t a permanent employee.

“I really think that’s messed up,” said Lee, who later sought medical treatment on her own. “Don’t discriminate just because we’re temps. We’re working for you.”

By law, Tesla is required to record injuries of temp workers who work under its supervision, no matter where they get treatment. But not all of them were. Lee said her Tesla supervisor knew about the injury. But Lee’s name doesn’t appear on Tesla’s injury logs.

Besh pushed back on the claims of his former employees.

He said the clinic didn’t treat some temp workers because Access Omnicare wasn’t a designated health care provider for their staffing agencies. About half of the agencies now are able to use the clinic, and the rest should be early next year, he said.

Besh said a physician accurately and carefully determines whether an injury is work-related and the clinic is not set up to treat personal medical issues. He said the clinic is fully stocked.

As for prescribing exercises, Besh said the clinic automatically was giving exercise recommendations to workers who were not injured and simply fixed the error.

https://www.revealnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/workstatus1-1.jpg https://www.revealnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/workstatus2.jpg https://www.revealnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/workstatus3.jpg

These sample Work Status Reports, posted in Tesla’s health center, show how clinic staff were instructed to handle different situations. The document on the left, labeled “Work Related,” is marked “First Aid Only” and “Return to full duty with no limitations or restrictions,” scenarios that would mean Tesla wouldn’t have to count the injury. Those were the only options, says Anna Watson, a physician assistant who used to work there. One document for contract employees such as temp workers (center) and another for non-occupational injuries (right) both say to refer the patients elsewhere. Credit: Obtained by Reveal

Clinic source: Tesla pressured doctor
Access Omnicare’s proposal for running Tesla’s health center states that Tesla’s priorities include reducing recordable injuries and emergency room visits, according to a copy obtained by Reveal.

It says Access Omnicare’s model, with more accurate diagnoses, reduces “un-necessary use of Emergency Departments and prevents inadvertent over-reporting of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) recordability.”

Even before Access Omnicare took over the on-site health center in June, Tesla sent many injured workers to its main clinic as one of the automaker’s preferred providers.

Tesla exercised an alarming amount of pressure on the clinic to alter how it treated patients in order to keep injury rates down, said the former high-level Access Omnicare employee.

“There was a huge, huge push from Tesla to keep things nonrecordable,” said the former employee.

A Tesla workers’ compensation official routinely would contact the clinic to intervene in individual cases, said the former employee. Tesla would take issue with diagnoses and treatment decisions, arguing that specific workers should be sent back to work full duty or have their injuries labeled as unrelated to work. The clinic gave Tesla what it wanted, the former employee said.

For example, Bill Casillas’ diagnosis suddenly was changed by Access Omnicare after discussions with Tesla.

In December, Casillas was working in Tesla’s seat factory. When he touched a forklift, he felt an electric shock jolt him back. Later that shift, it happened again. He said he felt disoriented and found he had urinated on himself.

Casillas said he hasn’t been the same since. He struggles with pain, tingling and numbness. At 47, he’s unsteady, uses a cane and hasn’t been able to work, he said.

A doctor at Access Omnicare diagnosed a work-related “injury due to electrical exposure” and gave him severe work restrictions and physical therapy, medical records show.

Then, nearly two months after his injury, another Access Omnicare physician, Dr. Muhannad Hafi, stepped in and dismissed the injury.

“I have spoken again with (the workers’ compensation official) at Tesla and he informed that the forklift did not have electric current running. With that said, in my medical opinion, the patient does not have an industrial injury attributed to an electrical current,” he wrote.

Hafi, who’s no longer with Access Omnicare, didn’t respond to questions. Besh said he can’t discuss patient details.

The co-worker who was in the forklift during the second shock, Paul Calderon, said he disagrees with the Tesla official but no one asked him. He backed up Casillas’ account and said Tesla “tried to really downplay what happened to him.”

Hafi’s January report noted that Casillas said he was “miserable,” used a cane and had pain all over his body. But he discharged him back to work full duty, writing, “No further symptoms of concern.”

A Tesla safety team manager informed Casillas last month that his injury was not counted because it was “determined to not be work-related.” Casillas is still a Tesla employee, but he’s off work because of his injury. His workers’ comp claim was denied based on Hafi’s report, but his lawyer, Sue Borg, is seeking an independent medical evaluation.

Besh said Tesla does not pressure him to dismiss injuries.

“What Tesla pressures us on is accurate documentation,” he said. “What they want is their OSHA log to be as accurate as possible, so what they’ll push back on is, ‘Doctor I need more clarity on this report.’ And we do that for them.”

“They are not in the business of making clinical determinations at all,” he said. “We make those clinical determinations only based on what the patient needs.”

State regulators not interested
By late August, Watson, the physician assistant, reached her breaking point. She got into an argument with Besh, who fired her for not deferring to doctors.

Afterward, she filed a complaint to Cal/OSHA, California’s workplace safety agency.

“I just see the workers at Tesla as having absolutely no voice,” she said. “I do feel extra responsible to try to speak up for what’s going on there.”

Watson thought Cal/OSHA would put an immediate stop to the practices she witnessed. But the agency wasn’t interested.

Cal/OSHA sent her a letter saying it folded her complaint into the investigation it started in April after Reveal’s first story ran. The letter said it had investigated and cited Tesla for a recordkeeping violation.

But Cal/OSHA already had closed that investigation two weeks before Watson’s complaint. The agency issued a fine of $400 for a single injury it said was not recorded within the required time period. Tesla appealed, calling it an administrative error.

Reveal had documented many other cases of injuries that Tesla had failed to record. But the agency had only about six months from the date of an injury to fine a company. By the time Cal/OSHA concluded its four-month investigation, the statute of limitations had run out.

After Reveal reported that the time limitation makes it difficult to hold employers accountable, state legislators passed a bill giving investigators six months from when Cal/OSHA first learns of the violation. It was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, but it was too late for the Tesla investigation.

A Cal/OSHA spokeswoman said the investigation found four other “injury recording violations that fell outside of the statute of limitations.” Even if those other violations had been included, the spokeswoman said Cal/OSHA would have had to combine them in a single $400 citation.

Tesla, meanwhile, inaccurately cites Cal/OSHA’s investigation as vindication.

“We do get these quite unfair accusations,” Musk said on his October earnings call. “One of them was that we were underreporting injuries. And it’s worth noting that OSHA completed their investigation and concluded that we had not been doing anything of the sort.”

Watson called Cal/OSHA officials to insist they investigate her complaint. She told them that she had detailed knowledge of a system that undercounted injuries by failing to treat injured workers.

But Cal/OSHA officials told her that it wasn’t the agency’s responsibility, she said. They suggested contacting another agency, such as the medical board or workers’ compensation regulators.

As Watson kept pushing and Reveal began asking questions, a Cal/OSHA spokeswoman said her complaint now is being investigated.

Watson has a new job at an urgent care clinic. She said she just wants someone to make sure that Tesla workers get the care they need.

“You go to Tesla and you think it’s going to be this innovative, great, wonderful place to be, like this kind of futuristic company,” she said. “And I guess it’s just kind of disappointing that that’s our future, basically, where the worker still doesn’t matter.”

#USA #Tesla #Arbeit #Krankheit

Urban Planning Guru Says Driverless Cars Won’t Fix Congestion - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/technology/driverless-cars-congestion.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/28/business/25CALTHORPE03/25CALTHORPE03-facebookJumbo.jpg

Mr. Calthorpe is a Berkeley-based urban planner who is one of the creators of New Urbanism, which promotes mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods. His designs emphasize the proximity of housing, shopping and public space.

He is not opposed to autonomous vehicles. Mr. Calthorpe’s quarrel is with the idea that the widespread adoption of personally owned self-driving cars will solve transportation problems. In fact, he worries it will lead to more urban congestion and suburban sprawl.

“One thing is certain: Zero- or single-occupant vehicles,” even ones that can drive themselves, “are a bad thing,” he and the transportation planner Jerry Walters wrote in an article last year in Urban Land, an urban planning journal. “They cause congestion, eat up energy, exacerbate sprawl and emit more carbon per passenger-mile.”

“The key distinction is the number of people per vehicle,” said Mr. Walters, a principal at Fehr & Peers, a transportation consultancy in Walnut Creek. “Without pretty radically increasing the number of people per vehicle, autonomous systems will increase total miles traveled.”

He used his software to show that by changing just commercial zoning to permit higher density along El Camino Real — the 45-mile boulevard that stretches through the heart of Silicon Valley from San Francisco to San Jose — it would be possible add more than a quarter-million housing units.

The Valley’s housing crisis can be explained in data that shows that since 2010, the region has added 11 jobs for every new home built; the median home price has reached $934,000; and rents have gone up 60 percent since 2012. One of the consequences of the growing imbalance between housing and jobs is the increasing traffic and congestion, according to an Urban Footprint report.

To avoid congestion, the plan requires efficient mass transit. Mr. Calthorpe has proposed an alternative — autonomous rapid transit, or ART — using fleets of self-driving vans in reserved lanes on main arteries like El Camino Real. Those lanes would allow the vehicles to travel faster and require a lower level of autonomous technology. And the vans could travel separately or be connected together.

Mr. Calthorpe’s plan is an evolution of the concept of “transit-oriented development” he pioneered while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1980s. It focuses on designing urban communities that encourage people to live near transit services and decrease their dependence on driving.

“You have to redesign the street itself,” he said. “You need to add autonomous transit, and you need to get rid of parallel parking and put in bikeways and better sidewalks.”

#Mobilité #Automobile #Communs_urbains

Les enterrés vivants Jean-François Nadeau - 9 Octobre 2018 - Le Devoir
▻https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/538605/les-enterres-vivants

Ornée de son pourpoint de velours, de son étole mitée en fourrure d’écureuil et de sa perruque de père Noël, la Justice a beau garder la tête haute, surtout lorsqu’elle regarde le monde d’en bas, elle semble parfois, ne lui en déplaise, avoir le coeur passablement érodé.

En 2015, Jerry est condamné à 39 mois de prison. Il n’a pas payé les quelque 35 000 $ de contraventions que lui réclame l’État. Qu’a-t-il donc fait, Jerry, pour mériter cela ? Flânage, itinérance, état d’ébriété, désordre sur la voie publique.

Jerry Anichinapéo est un Autochtone. La semaine dernière, lors des travaux de la commission Viens, on a pu apprendre que Jerry vit à Val-d’Or. Mais ce n’est pas tout à fait vrai. Comme d’autres Autochtones, Jerry vit moins qu’il ne survit. L’avalanche de contraventions qui s’est abattue sur lui avait d’ailleurs pour but, a-t-on compris, de l’enterrer vivant au plus sacrant.

À Val-d’Or, 75 % de ces contraventions crachées en rafale l’ont été à l’encontre d’Autochtones, alors que ceux-ci représentent à peine 3 % de la population. La police avait même donné un nom à cette façon de faire mortifère : l’opération Centre-Ville.

C’était en 2015. Les temps ont-ils changé depuis ? La police affirme que oui. À sa défense, elle indique que les contraventions de ce type ont diminué de 81 %. Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire en pratique ? Dans le cas de Jerry, cette réduction de l’intensité du pilonnage par contraventions voudrait dire qu’on lui aurait enjoint de payer seulement 6500 $ plutôt que 35 000 $. Mais quand on n’a pas un sou, que ce soit 6000$ ou 600 000 $ de dettes, cela reste impossible. En gros, au lieu de l’écraser avec un tank on se contente de prendre un autobus. La misère des personnes emprisonnées pour cause de pauvreté révèle bien la pauvreté de notre pensée à leur égard.

Taxer la misère d’une charge supplémentaire demeure pourtant monnaie courante. Pas seulement pour les Autochtones. Des cas semblables ont suscité l’indignation à Québec et à Sherbrooke ce printemps encore. Mais combien d’autres cas du genre échappent aux radars de l’actualité ?

Pour éradiquer la pauvreté, faire la guerre aux pauvres est une stratégie qui ne date pas d’hier. De grandes campagnes d’enfermement des pauvres ont eu lieu au royaume de France en 1724, en 1750 et en 1764. Et dans la France d’aujourd’hui, le président Macron vient de s’établir en génie au registre d’un pareil mépris pour la vie : la solution générale à la misère du pays, a-t-il laissé entendre, ce serait tout bonnement d’apprendre à ne pas s’en plaindre ! Les conditions sociales ne changent pourtant pas du seul fait qu’on décrète que leurs effets doivent être abolis.

Quelle stratégie le nouveau gouvernement de François Legault entend-il adopter pour contrer le problème criant de la pauvreté ?

On sait que le nouveau premier ministre est opposé à l’augmentation du salaire minimum. Pour lui, insistait-il lors du débat des chefs, la situation précaire de près d’un million de Québécois s’améliorera lorsque d’autres qu’eux seront encore mieux. En un mot, François Legault croit que l’argent des possédants finit par ruisseler jusqu’aux dépossédés.

Vieil habitué des caméras de TVA, le député caquiste François Paradis, jusqu’ici porte-parole du parti en matière de services sociaux, avait beaucoup fait jaser en 2016 pour avoir fait de la pauvreté dans sa circonscription un marchepied pour sa modeste personne. Dans une vidéo, sur fond de violon et de piano mélancoliques, le député mettait en scène deux femmes éprouvées avant de se présenter auprès d’elles dans un rôle de père Noël de composition. Le voilà offrant une journée chez le coiffeur et une dinde Butterball, puis levant son verre à leur santé à la veille des célébrations de fin d’année. Voulait-il, par ce procédé grossier, souligner aux électeurs l’importance de revoir les politiques publiques pour que des situations aussi navrantes soient chose du passé ? Nenni. Le député concluait plutôt en recommandant à ses concitoyens de donner aux banques alimentaires ! En somme, la charité privée comme solution à un problème public.

Depuis longtemps, les banques alimentaires ne suffisent plus en ce demi-pays. Au cours des neuf dernières années, le nombre de gens forcés d’y avoir recours a augmenté de 33,7 %. Un tiers des bénéficiaires sont des enfants. De ceux qui fréquentent ces lieux, 11 % sont des gens qui touchent des revenus d’emplois. De ceux qui doivent ainsi mendigoter à manger, 8 % sont des vieillards.

Mais le grand spectacle de la charité privée demeure plus populaire que jamais. Il sert de chambre de compensation sociale à des gens fortunés, qui s’assurent ainsi qu’on leur prête des lettres de noblesse, ce qui ajoute paradoxalement à leur capital.

La semaine dernière encore, de puissantes entreprises s’affichaient d’un air faraud dans le cadre de leur participation prochaine à « Une nuit dans la rue », une activité de financement d’un organisme voué à lutter contre les effets d’une pauvreté qui n’est pourtant pas tombée du ciel. Ces géants du rendement croissant que sont la Financière Sun Life, Ivanhoé Cambridge, Power Corporation et autres Pfizer invitaient même la population à prendre exemple sur leur générosité autoproclamée. Pareille générosité de façade n’engage évidemment aucune réforme substantielle d’un ordre social qui préside au problème croissant de la dépossession.

 #peuples_autochtones #terres #canada #nations_premières #peuples_premiers #autochtones #guerre_aux_pauvres #violence #contraventions #pauvreté #discrimination #Centre-Ville

Khrys’presso du lundi 1er octobre
▻https://framablog.org/2018/10/01/khryspresso-du-lundi-01-octobre

Comme chaque lundi, un coup d’œil dans le rétroviseur pour découvrir les informations que vous avez peut-être ratées la semaine dernière. Brave New World Gov. Jerry Brown signs bill to restore net neutrality in California (nbcnews.com – en anglais) Fight … Lire la suite­­

#Claviers_invités #Internet_et_société #Libr'en_Vrac #Libre_Veille #DRM #espionnage #Facebook #GAFAM #Internet #Revue_de_web #Surveillance #veille #webrevue

Before the Trump Era, the “Wall” Made In Arizona as Political Performance

“Trump’s Wall” illustrates the US obsession with ever-greater militarization of the Mexican border, independently of the actual numbers of unauthorized crossings. Yet these debates began revolving around the slogan “Build The Wall” long before the rise of Trump. Between 2010 and 2013, the activities of a coalition of activists, politicians and Arizona security experts had already legitimized recourse to a “wall”. Border-security debates thus concern more than mere control of border crossings. More crucially, they structure local and national political life in accordance with the interests and agendas of the political players whom they bring together.

The Governors of California and Arizona reacted unevenly to President Trump’s announcement on April 4th, 2018, that National Guard soldiers were to be sent to the Mexican border1 to reinforce the Border Patrol and local police. Doug Ducey, Republican Governor of Arizona, displayed his enthusiasm: “I’m grateful today to have a federal administration that is finally taking action to secure the border for the safety of all Americans” 2. Jerry Brown, Democrat Governor of California, was more circumspect. He insisted upon the limits of such a measure: “”This will not be a mission to build a new wall […] It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life. […] Here are the facts: There is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California3”. These contrasting reactions illustrate the US rift over migration and border-security issues. To the anti-migrant camp, the border is insufficiently secured, and is subject to an “invasion4”. For opponents of the border’s militarization, this deployment is futile.

On the anti-migrant side, between 2010 and 2013, Republican state congressmen in Arizona set up a unified Committee to gather all the political players who demanded of President Obama that he increases militarization of the border5. This included Sheriffs and Arizona State ministers—but also a breeders’ organization, the border Chambers of Commerce, militiamen who patrol the desert, and Tea Party groups. In May 2011, this Committee launched a fundraising drive dubbed “Build the Border Fence”. They portrayed cross-border migration as a threat to the public, consecrated the “Fence” as a legitimate security tool, and, seeking to force the hand of the Federal Government, accused it of failing in its duty to protect. Examining this mobilization prior to Trump’s election enables illustrating how militarization and the debates around it came to acquire legitimacy—and therefore to shed light on its current crystallization around the rhetoric of the “Wall”. This article will, first, briefly describe stages in the performative militarization of the border within which this political mobilization is embedded. It then presents three stages in the legitimization of the “Wall”, drawing on pro-“Border Wall” activism in Arizona.

#Militarization by One-Upmanship

Parsing differences over migration debates in the United States requires situating them within the framework of the long-term political performance of militarization of the border. The process whereby the border with Mexico has become militarized has gone hand in hand with the criminalization of unauthorized immigration since the 1980s-6. In the border area, militarization is displayed through the deployment of technology and surveillance routines of transborder mobility, both by security professionals and by citizen vigilantes7. The construction of “fences”8 made the borderline visible and contributed to this policy of militarization. The Trump administration is banking on these high-profile moments of wall-construction. In doing so, it follows in the footsteps of the G.W.Bush administration through the 2006 Secure Fence Act, and California Republicans in the 1990s. This is even while the numbers of unauthorized crossings are at historically low levels9, and federal agencies’ efforts are more directed towards chasing down migrants within the US. At various stages in the development of this policy, different players, ranging from federal elected officials through members of civil society to the security sector, local elected officials and residents, have staged themselves against the backdrop of the territory that had been fenced against the “invaders”. They thereby invest the political space concerned with closing this territory,against political opponents who are considered to be in favor of its remaining open, and of welcoming migrants. The latter range from players in transborder trade to religious humanitarian and migrant rights NGOs. Border security is therefore at the core of the political and media project of portraying immigration in problematic and warlike terms. Beyond controlling migrants, the issue above all orbits around reassuring the citizenry and various political players positioning themselves within society-structuring debates.
Why Demand “Fences”?

First and foremost, Arizona’s pro-fence players package transborder mobility as a variety of forms of violence, deriving from interpretation, speculation and—to reprise their terms—fantasies of “invasion”. In their rhetoric, the violence in Mexico has crossed the border. This spillover thesis is based on the experience of ranchers of the Cochise County on the border, who have faced property degradations since the end of the 1990s as a result of migrants and smugglers crossing their lands. In January 2013, the representative of the Arizona Cattlemen Association struck an alarmist tone: “Our people are on the frontline and the rural areas of our border are unsecured10”. The murder of an Association member in March 2010 was cited as evidence, swiftly attributed to what was dubbed an “illegal alien11”.

“Border security also reflects domestic political stakes.”

Based on their personal experiences of border migration, the pro-fence camp has taken up a common discursive register concerning the national stakes tied to such mobility. As Republican State Senator Gail Griffin explains, they express a desire to restore public order over the national territory, against the “chaos” provoked by these violent intrusions:

“People in larger communities away from the border don’t see it as we do on the border but the drugs that are coming in though my backyard are ending up in everybody’s community in the State of Arizona and in this country. So it’s just not a local issue, or a county issue or a state issue, it’s a national issue 12.”

In their view, the threat is as much to public order as it is to national identity. These fears denote a preoccupation with the Hispanization of society and cultural shifts affecting a nation that they define as being “Anglo-Saxon”. When the Build the Border Fence fundraising drive was launched on July 27, 2011, for example, Representative Steve Smith pronounced himself “horrified” by a development that he called “Press 2 for Spanish” in telephone calls. He also condemned the lack of integration on the part of Mexican migrants:

“If you don’t like this country with you, you wanna bring your language with you, your gangfare with you, stay where you were! Or face the consequences. But don’t make me change because you don’t want to13.”

Finally, border security also reflects domestic political stakes. It is a variable in the political balance of power with the federal government to influence decisions on immigration policy. Arizona elected representatives condemn the federal government’s inefficiency and lay claim to migration decision-making powers at the state-level. The “fence” is also portrayed a being a common sense “popular” project against reticent decision-making elites.
“Fences”—or Virtual Surveillance?

Control of the border is already disconnected from the border territory itself, and virtual and tactical technologies are prioritized in order to manage entry to the US. “Fences” appear archaic compared to new surveillance technologies that enable remote control. In the 2000s, the “virtualization” of border control was favored by the Bush and Obama administrations. Since 2001-2002, it has been embedded in the strategic concept of “Smart Borders” within the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This aims to filter authorized migration through programs that grant expedited- and preregistered-entry to US ports of entry, and through the generalization of biometric technologies. This strategy also rests upon integrating leading-edge technologies, such as the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) program that was in place from 2006 to 2011. At the time, the border area (including South-West Arizona) acquired watchtowers equipped with cameras and radar. Fences are, moreover, costly—and the financial and human costs of the construction, guarding and upkeep of these fences raise doubts over the benefits of such infrastructure. These doubts are expressed at security-technology fairs, where security professionals and industrialists gather14. There, the “fence” is ultimately understood as being a marginal control technology.

Regardless, pro-fence activism in Arizona grants a key role to those military and police who help legitimate the recourse to “fences”. In particular, they draw on such models of securitization as the California border, that has been gradually been sealed since 1991, as well as, since 2006-07, the triple-barrier of Yuma, in South-West Arizona. Sheriff Paul Babeu, an ex-military National Guardsman who erected the “fences” in Yuma, assesses that they provide a tactical bonus for Border Patrol agents in smuggling centers, urban areas and flatlands15. Mainly, Arizona security professionals articulate their defense of the “fence” within the pursuit of personal political agendas, such as Republican sheriffs who are both security and political professionals.

Attacking the Federal Government for Failure to Protect

The spread of the pro-fence narrative largely rests upon widely-covered events designed to symbolize the process of militarization and to call for federal intervention. The materiality of “fences” elicits easy media coverage. The pro-fence camp are well aware of this, and regularly stage this materiality. During such public events as the 4thof July national holiday, they erect fake wooden fences on which they encourage participants to write “Secure the Border”. These pro-fence political players also seek out media coverage for their public statements.

“Republicans consecrate Arizona as their laboratory for immigration and border security policy.”

Such media as Fox News follow their activities to the extent of turning pro-fence events into a regular series. On August 25, 2011, on the Fox News program On The Record, presenter Greta Van Susteren invited Republican Representative Steve Smith and publicized the fundraising drive using visuals drawn from the initiative’s website 16. The presenter framed the interview by gauging that Arizona parliamentarians had “got a grip on things to get the White House’s attention”. At no point was Steve Smith really challenged on the true cost of the fence, nor on opposition to the project. This co-production between the channel’s conservative editorial line and the pro-fence narrative enables the border area to be presented as a warzone, and amplifies the critique of the federal government.

This staging of the debate complements lobbying to set up direct contact with federal decision-makers, as well as legal actions to pressure them. Pro-barrier activists in Arizona thus set out plans to secure the border, which they try to spread among Arizona authorities and federal elected officials-17. Sheriff Paul Babeu, for instance, took part in consultations on border security conducted by Senator John McCain and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. By passing repressive immigration laws and mobilizing Arizona legal advisors to defend these laws when they are challenged in court, Republicans consecrate Arizona as their laboratory for immigration and border security policy.
Twists and Turns of “Build The Wall”

Portraying transborder mobility as a “problem” on the local and, especially, the national levels; Legitimizing a security-based response by promoting the “fence” as only solution; And accusing the federal government of failing to protect its citizens. These are the three pillars of “The Fence”, the performance by pro-fence activists in the early 2010s. These moves have enabled making militarization of the border and the “Build The Wall” trope banal. Its elements are present in the current state of the discourse, when Donald Trump resorts to aggressive rhetoric towards migrants, touts his “Wall” as the solution, and stages photo-ops alongside prototypes of the wall—and when he accuses both Congress and California of refusing to secure the border. The issue here has little to do with the undocumented, or with the variables governing Central American migration. It has far more to do with point-scoring against political opponents, and with political positioning within debates that cleave US society.

https://www.noria-research.com/app/uploads/2018/08/DSCN1635.jpg

signalé par @reka

Des polices pour détecter la contrefaçon
Jeanne Corriveau - 8 août 2018 - Le Devoir _
▻https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/533921/des-polices-pour-detecter-la-contrefacon

Les polices de caractères ont souvent une histoire étonnante, dans laquelle s’entremêlent enjeux graphiques, économiques et sociopolitiques. Cinquième texte d’une série estivale consacrée à ce sujet.

Le commun des mortels ne prête pas toujours attention aux caractères typographiques avec lesquels les textes qu’il lit sont composés. Dans certains cas, toutefois, le choix d’une police de caractères peut avoir des conséquences politiques insoupçonnées. C’est ainsi qu’au cours des dernières années, les polices Calibri et Times New Roman se sont retrouvées au coeur de polémiques concernant la contrefaçon de documents.

En 2016, embourbés dans une affaire de corruption à la suite de la publication des Panama Papers, Nawaz Sharif, alors premier ministre du Pakistan, et sa fille Maryam avaient remis à la justice des documents en preuve dans une tentative pour se disculper. Parmi ces documents figurait une déclaration faite par Maryam Sharif prétendument signée en février 2006.

https://media1.ledevoir.com/images_galerie/pt_645376_492523/image.jpg

Or, ont découvert les enquêteurs, la déclaration était composée en Calibri, une police de caractères qui n’a été distribuée commercialement par #microsoft qu’en 2007, ce qui laisse croire que le document a été contrefait. Calibri allait-elle faire tomber le premier ministre ?

En entrevue au journal pakistanais Dawn, le bureau du designer Lucas de Groot, qui a conçu la police Calibri pour Microsoft, a précisé qu’une version bêta de Calibri était disponible en 2006, mais que celle-ci était destinée aux programmeurs et aux « freaks » de technologie. Il paraissait donc « très peu probable » que quelqu’un ait pu utiliser cette police pour des documents officiels.

Condamné à 10 ans de prison pour corruption, Nawaz Sharif a finalement pris le chemin du pénitencier au début du mois de juillet dernier. De son côté, sa fille a reçu une sentence de sept ans de prison.

Le « Rathergate »
La police Times New Roman a elle aussi été mêlée à une controverse politique. En 2004, le journaliste #Dan_Rather, de l’émission 60 minutes, diffusée sur #CBS, avait présenté en ondes des documents qui semblaient démontrer que le président américain George W. Bush avait pu bénéficier d’un traitement de faveur pour être affecté à la Garde nationale du Texas dans les années 1970 et, du même coup, échapper à la guerre du #Vietnam. Il s’agissait de rapports internes du colonel Jerry Killian, mort en 1984, qui dirigeait l’escadron de la Garde du Texas.

La veuve du colonel Killian, de même que plusieurs blogueurs et médias ont mis en doute l’authenticité du document, relevant diverses incongruités, dont l’utilisation de fontes dites proportionnelles, par opposition à celles de taille fixe, ainsi que la présence des caractères « th » mis en exposant dans « 111 th » ou « 147 th ». Les machines à écrire des années 1970 étaient-elles en mesure de produire de telles fontes ? Selon divers experts, le document en question semblait plutôt avoir été réalisé par ordinateur avec la police Times New Roman, offerte avec le logiciel Word de Microsoft. L’affaire a embarrassé CBS.

Dan Rather a par la suite présenté ses excuses et quitté ses fonctions.

L’univers numérique
Calibri et Times New Roman ont deux points en commun : non seulement se sont-elles retrouvées au centre de controverses, mais elles ont toutes deux été lancées dans l’univers numérique comme police par défaut dans le logiciel Word de Microsoft, la Calibri ayant délogé son aînée en 2007. Mais alors que la Calibri a à peine 10 ans d’âge, la création de la Times New Roman remonte à 1931.

https://media2.ledevoir.com/images_galerie/pt_645377_492524/image.jpg

Cette police de caractères avait été commandée auprès du typographe Stanley Morison par le quotidien britannique Times. Stanley Morison fit appel à l’artiste Victor Lardent, qui dessina cette police de caractères. Inspirée des fontes Plantin et Perpetua, la police Times New Roman, dotée d’empattements, est étroite, ce qui permet de corder plus de mots dans une ligne. Un avantage pour les journaux. Elle est aussi vantée pour sa lisibilité.

Conçue pour la presse écrite et largement utilisée dans l’édition, la police Times New Roman a connu une seconde vie dans l’espace numérique. Mais une telle gloire a ses revers. Surexposée et omniprésente, elle rappelle à certains leurs travaux scolaires. D’autres diront qu’elle est fade, sans émotion et qu’elle dénote la paresse de l’auteur qui ne se serait pas donné la peine de chercher une autre police plus originale et plus proche de sa personnalité.

Jamais à la mode
Le designer graphique Denis Dulude reconnaît que la police Times New Roman n’est guère prisée par les professionnels de la typographie et du graphisme. « Elle est un peu mal-aimée. À l’époque où elle est arrivée, elle venait dans la boîte. Beaucoup de gens l’avaient utilisée pour faire des lettres et des logos qui n’étaient pas nécessairement faits par des designers graphiques. Elle n’a jamais été à la mode. Pour cette raison, on a peut-être été un peu frileux avec cette police. »

Denis Dulude a toutefois osé utiliser Times New Roman pour un projet de catalogue de photos. Or, il y a mis sa touche personnelle en retirant de tous les « S » majuscules l’empattement du bas. « Je me la suis appropriée en faisant ma propre version. J’ai aussi brisé un peu l’espacement entre les lettres pour qu’elle soit un peu plus maladroite et saccadée. C’est la seule façon que j’ai trouvée pour être à l’aise avec cette police », admet-il.

#Panama_Papers #typographie #Calibri #Times_New_Roman #Pakistan #Imprimerie #Police de #Caractère #Histoire #médias #art #typographique #mise_en_page #Lay_out

Le meilleur album de tous les temps. Pas un morceau, pas une note, pas un mot d’Aretha n’est en trop ici.

I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
Aretha Franklin, mars 1967
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Never_Loved_a_Man_the_Way_I_Love_You

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tKKsqI919g

1. Respect (chanson écrite par Otis Redding) - 0:00
2. Drown in my own tears (chanson popularisée par Ray Charles) - 2:27
3. I never loved a man (the way I love you) (chanson écrite pour l’occasion par Ronnie Shannon) - 6:34
4. Soul serenade (chanson écrite par King Curtis, saxophoniste du groupe et chef d’orchestre en tournée) - 9:26
5. Don’t let me lose this dream (chanson écrite par Aretha et son mari) - 12:05
6. Baby, baby, baby (chanson écrite par Aretha et sa soeur) - 14:28
7. Dr. Feelgood (Love is a serious business) (chanson écrite par Aretha et son mari) - 17:22
8. Good times (chanson écrite par Sam Cooke) - 20:45
9. Do right woman, do right man (chanson écrite pour l’occasion par Dan Penn et Chips Moman, leur premier grand succès) - 22:55
10. Save me (chanson écrite par Aretha et sa soeur, et King Curtis) - 26:11
11. A change is gonna come (chanson écrite par Sam Cooke) - 28:32

Le disque, son premier pour la marque Atlantic, devait être enregistré aux studios FAME de Muscle Shoals, Alabama en janvier 1967, avec Aretha Franklin au chant et au piano et les musiciens locaux, c’était l’idée de Jerry Wexler, le producteur.

Le premier jour, seule la chanson titre fut enregistrée et, en fin de soirée, un trompettiste blanc (Ken Laxton) fit une remarque raciste. Exigeant des excuses et ne trouvant pas de solution satisfaisante, Aretha Franklin annula la session et rentra à New-York.

Le disque fut donc terminé à New-York, mais avec les musiciens (sauf Laxton, bien sûr) d’Alabama que Wexler fit venir sans le dire à Rick Hall, le directeur des studios FAME.

On y retrouve les influences majeures d’Aretha Franklin : Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, mais aussi un hommage à la jeune star montante du sud des Etats-Unis, Otis Redding. On y trouve aussi 4 titres co-écrits par Aretha elle-même.

De retour à Muscle Shoals, et avec l’aide de Wexler, les musiciens ouvrirent leur propre studio d’enregistrement, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio...

#Aretha_Franklin #Musique #Soul

Si vous lisez ces jours-ci des biographies d’Aretha Franklin, souvent truffées d’erreurs, vous y verrez souvent allusion à cette « fameuse » interview dans Time Magazine en 1968. Il y a longtemps de cela, j’ai acheté une version de ce magazine et j’ai traduit l’interview en français ici :

LADY SOUL : SINGING IT LIKE IT IS
Time Magazine, le 28 Juin 1968
▻http://www.otisredding.fr/time_magazine.htm

http://www.otisredding.fr/time_m1.jpg

Pour le même site web (consacré principalement à #Otis_Redding), j’avais aussi fait cette comparaison des versions d’Otis Redding et d’Aretha Franklin de la chanson Respect :
▻http://www.otisredding.fr/otis_blue.htm#RESPECT

Otis Redding reconnaissait lui-même que la version d’Aretha Franklin était supérieure à la sienne. Il le dit dans le concert à Monterey en juin 1967. Et puis finalement il copie la version d’Aretha dans une émission à la télévision la veille sa mort (émission Upbeat de Don Webster, Cleveland, 9 décembre 1967) :
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9dBHWTejiU

En 2009, j’avais écrit un petit article dans Siné Hebdo sur la filiation entre Aretha Franklin, Esther Phillips et Dinah Washington :

Aretha, Esther et Dinah
Dror, Siné Hebdo, le 21 janvier 2009
▻https://entrelesoreilles.blogspot.com/2009/01/sin-hebdo-20-aretha-esther-et-dinah.html

J’ai vu Aretha Franklin en concert trois fois (1995, 2008 et 2014). Trop jeune pour l’avoir vu à sa meilleur époque, j’ai le souvenir de concerts inégaux, mais aussi que LE moment fabuleux du concert était lorsqu’elle se mettait au piano et revenait à la base de la musique et de l’émotion :

Bridge Over Troubled Water (15 novembre 2011)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_4GJwriRnM

Alors on pouvait se croire projeté en arrière en 1971 au Fillmore West :

Bridge Over Troubled Water (7 mars 1971)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6FnXjqrIuU

La troisième fois que j’ai vu Aretha Franklin en concert, c’était à Montréal en juillet 2014. J’avais alors écrit cet article :

Aretha Franklin à Montréal 2014
Dror, Entre Les Oreilles, le 5 juillet 2014
▻https://entrelesoreilles.blogspot.com/2014/07/elo176-aretha-franklin-montreal.html

Et il reste qui dans les musicien.ne.s de Soul ? Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Carla Thomas, Valerie Simpson, Shirley Brown, Millie Jackson, Mavis Staples, Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick, Betty Wright, Candi Staton, Roberta Flack, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Sam Moore, Clarence Carter, Eddie Floyd, William Bell, Ronald Isley, Jerry Butler, Eddie Levert, Latimore, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Larry Graham, George Benson, Joe Simon, Lloyd Price...

#Aretha_Franklin #Musique #Soul #Entre_Les_Oreilles #Siné_Hebdo #Shameless_autopromo

Aretha Franklin, respect éternel
▻http://next.liberation.fr/culture/2018/08/16/aretha-franklin-respect-eternel_1672542?xtor=rss-450

Desert Air Will Give Us Water - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/desert-air-will-give-us-water

http://static.nautil.us/14854_70522cd467f1001ad2c2d009707f61d9.jpg

A partial solution to the problem of punishing droughts may be to snatch water from the air, Dune-style.Photograph by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center / FlickrLast year, after a punishing four-year drought, California lifted emergency water-scarcity measures in all but four counties. Residents could sigh in relief but not without resignation. “This drought emergency is over, but the next drought could be around the corner,” California Governor Jerry Brown said at the time. “Conservation must remain a way of life.”He’s right. In April, a study in Nature Climate Change, based on climate model simulations, concluded that a 25 percent to 100 percent “increase in extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events is projected” for the rest of this century, “despite only modest changes in mean (...)

What’s Not Included in Facebook’s ’Download Your Data’
▻https://www.wired.com/story/whats-not-included-in-facebooks-download-your-data

When members of Congress asked Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month who owns Facebook users’ personal data, the Facebook CEO had a convenient response. Eight times during his testimony, he cited a feature called “Download Your Data,” to show that Facebook users really are in control. “Yes, Congressman. We have a ‘download your information’ tool. We’ve had it for years,” Zuckerberg told US representative Jerry McNerney (D-California). “You can go to it in your settings and download all of the content (...)

#Facebook #données #BigData #historique

Trump’s sending troops to the border to take on 200 kids and parents

According to President Donald Trump, the mightiest, richest country in the world is under a threat so huge and scary that it will require the deployment of military forces — as many as 2,000 to 4.000, Trump said Thursday — along its 2,000-mile southern border. The danger consists of a ragtag caravan formed by several hundred impoverished people, many of them children from tiny Central American nations. Yes, the time has come to protect America from marauding youngsters and their parents.

▻https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/05/opinions/trump-has-no-shame-on-immigration-fernandez-kelly-opinion/index.html?sr=twCNN040518trump-has-no-shame-on-immigration-fernandez-ke
#Trump #frontières #armée #militarisation_des_frontières #USA #Etats-Unis

Mexical-Calimex et la 2ème Guerre Civile
▻http://www.dedefensa.org/article/mexical-calimex-et-la-2eme-guerre-civile

Mexical-Calimex et la 2ème Guerre Civile

La guerre est-elle déclarée entre le “centre” fédéral de Washington D.C. avec l’administration Trump et l’État de la Californie, connue également comme l’on sait comme la “république de Californie” ? Le 7 mars, l’Attorney General fédéral (AG, ministre de la Justice), Jeff Session, déclarait la politique dite “du-sanctuaire” du Gouverneur de la Californie Jerry Brown, « irrationnelle, déloyale et inconstitutionnelle », en même temps qu’il lançait ou envisageait de lancer certaines procédures judiciaires contre l’État de Californie et certaines villes de cet État, notamment Oakland, San Francisco, etc., pour non-respect des lois fédérales sur l’immigration. En réponse, le gouverneur Brown a estimé que l’AG Sessions « lançait une politique pour faire régner la terreur [dont la (...)

A propos de John Perry Barlow, Seenthis, The Grateful Dead et The WELL
►https://www.well.com
▻https://ia801502.us.archive.org/14/items/grateful_dead-2018/grateful_dead.jpeg?cnt=0
En réponse à ►https://seenthis.net/messages/667401 d’ @arno

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Aujourd’hui les manifestes ne sont guere d’intérêt pour les jeunes. C’est la la conclusion que j’ai tiré de la rencontre avec des étudiants de la création multimedia à qui j’ai eu l’honneur d’enseigner les systèmes de publication sur internet. Du côté des militants politiques c’est pareil en ce qui concerne le choix et la maîtrise des logiciels pour leur publications.

Nous, nous sommes les enfants du mariage entre les idées libertaires et les révolutions européennes à l’ère digitale. Nous avons grandi à une époque extraordinaire quand se croisaient le monde ancien et l’ère digitale post-communiste. Nous avons assisté et participé à ses guerres analogues, à ses luttes des classes, nous avons adopté ses modèles de liberté antagonistes et ses musiques bruyantes. Nous avons bâti les premières marches de l’échelle digitale avec JPB et ses amis. Nous avons connu l’époque quand l’internet consistait dans une centaine de serveurs nationaux et quelques milliers dans le reste du monde. C’était notre internet. Les admins étaient nos copains qui restaient au téléphone avec nous pendant des heures quand il fallait implémenter un changement de config important. Tout était encore à faire et il n’y avait que nous qui pouvaient le faire.

Aujourd’hui #Seenthis est notre The WELL que nous utilison pour créer notre internet à nous. Voilà l’héritage de JPB.

Bon, après ce discours il est temps d’écouter un des derniers concerts des Grateful Dead avec Jerry Garcia.

Grateful Dead - The Spectrum - 3-17-95 - Full Show
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9iJ21xbYqc

The WELL
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL

The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL, is one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. As of June 2012, it had 2,693 members.

Home > The WELL
►https://www.well.com

Why is conversation so treasured on The WELL? Why did members of this community band together to buy the site in 2012? Check out the story of The WELL.

The Internet Age Began on August 9, 1995
►http://www.litkicks.com/AugustNine

Two separate things happened on August 9, 1995, both by chance emerging from Northern California though they had little else in common. The first was a scheduled event: the initial public offering (IPO) by Netscape, a startup tech firm designed to make software to power the Internet.
...
I remember walking through the hallway at work that morning, probably heading for a coffee refill, when I saw a clump of co-workers and magazine editors talking anxiously. I thought they were talking about the Netscape IPO, but they weren’t. “Jerry Garcia died,” one of the editors said to me. “We need to replace the front page and get a new headline up, stat.”

Jerry Garcia. This one hit home.
...
Nobody said “going viral” yet by the summer of 1995, but that’s exactly what Jerry Garcia’s death did, and it was pretty much the biggest anything had gone viral anywhere up to this point.
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The Grateful Dead’s influence on the evolving culture of the Internet has always been a godsend, and still is. When music-sharing became a way of life with the advent of Napster a few years later, and when online publishers began to give content away for free, many smart observers realized that the Grateful Dead (who had always allowed fans to freely create and share concert recordings) were the greatest success model in the world for a profitable long-term business cycle based on peer-to-peer sharing. The positive and peaceful philosophy the band had always stood for seemed to fit the Internet’s optimistic emerging culture as well.

John Perry Barlow, Internet Pioneer, 1947-2018 | Electronic Frontier Foundation
►https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/john-perry-barlow-internet-pioneer-1947-2018

Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: "I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ’turn-key totalitarianism.’”

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace | Electronic Frontier Foundation
►https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

by John Perry Barlow, Davos, Switzerland, February 8, 1996

John Perry Barlow
▻https://archive.org/search.php?query=John%20Perry%20Barlow

The Grateful Dead
▻https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22Grateful%20Dead%22

Jerry Garcia Band
▻https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Jerry+Garcia+Band%22

#internet #musique

@stevesalaita: "Jerry Seinfeld took his kids to play war games with the IDF. So cute, right? Now imagine the reaction if, say, Bella Hadid posed with the PFLP or DJ Khaled (brandishing a machine gun) hung out with Hamas."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTG9Vs6W4AE-PCa.jpg

Jerry Seinfeld and family visit anti-terror fantasy camp in West Bank - Israel News
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.833724

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his family visited the Caliber 3 Israeli Counter Terror and Security Academy during their visit in Israel, revealed Caliber 3 in a Facebook post on Monday.

“Finally we are allowed to tell you!! The legendary Jerry Seinfeld and his family were at (sic) Caliber 3 during their visit to Israel last week, they came to us for shooting training with displays of combat, Krav Maga, assault dogs and lots of Zionism. It was great,” said the post.