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Three incidents of police brutality spark outrage across US - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/06/19/poli-j19.html

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Three incidents of police brutality spark outrage across US
By Jessica Goldstein
19 June 2019

Three incidents of police brutality in the United States over the past month have sparked public outrage. Each incident exposes the systematic brutality that workers in all areas of the US suffer at the hands of police on a daily basis

#violence_policière

Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows | Erin McCormick, Charlotte Simmonds, Jessica Glenza and Katharine Gammon
►https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills

Consumers’ efforts to be eco-friendly go to waste as many communities find themselves with nowhere to send their refuse Where does your plastic go? Revealing America’s dirty secret Source: The Guardian

How New York could respond to the taxi medallion lending crisis | CSNY
▻https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/infrastructure/how-new-york-could-respond-to-taxi-medallion-lending-crisis.html

Experts and lawmakers weigh in on easing the pain of burdened medallion owners and preventing predatory lending in the future.
By ANNIE MCDONOUGH
MAY 22, 2019

After a two-part New York Times investigation into predatory lending practices for taxi medallions delineated how industry leaders and government agencies participated in, encouraged or ignored risky lending, calls for action sprang forth – sometimes from the very same officials or agencies that had been asleep at the switch.

Various deceptive or exploitative lending practices contributed to the rise and precipitous fall of taxi medallions in New York City. Medallions worth $200,000 in 2002 rose to more than $1 million in 2014, before crashing to less than $200,000. The bubble was inflated by loans made without down payments, requirements that loans had to be paid back in three years or extended with inflated interest rates, and interest-only loans that required borrowers to forfeit legal rights and give up much of their income. Borrowers – typically low-income, immigrant drivers – were left in the lurch when the bubble burst, an event that the taxi industry has long blamed primarily on the rise of app-based ride hail services like Uber and Lyft. While the rise of app-based ride hail did contribute to the now-ailing taxi industry, the revelations in the Times show government officials – including the Taxi and Limousine Commission which acted as a “cheerleader” for medallion sales – ignored the warning signs.

Since Sunday, when the first Times story was published, New York Attorney General Letitia James has announced an inquiry into the business and lending practices that “may have created” the crisis, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a joint probe by the TLC, Department of Finance and Department of Consumer Affairs into the brokers who helped arrange the loans, Sen. Chuck Schumer called for an investigation into the credit unions involved in the lending, and members of the New York City Council and state Legislature, and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, have called for hearings and legislation to resolve the issue.

The various proposals raised thus far are unlikely to fully address the damage caused to many medallion owners, some experts say. The Times investigation found that since 2016, more than 950 taxi drivers have filed for bankruptcy, with thousands more still suffering under the crippling loans. This is combined with a string of taxi and other professional drivers who have committed suicide in the past year and a half.

Some of the solutions offered have focused on preventing the kind of reckless lending practices exhibited for taxi medallions. Stringer called on state lawmakers to close a loophole that allows lenders to classify their loans as business deals – as opposed to consumer loans, which have more protections for borrowers. A bill introduced last week by state Sen. Jessica Ramos would also establish a program to assist medallion owners who are unable to obtain financing, refinancing or restructuring of an existing loan through a loan loss reserve. State Sen. James Sanders and Assemblyman Kenneth Zebrowski, who chair the state Legislature’s committees on banks, declined to comment.

But classifying loans for medallions as consumer loans might not be appropriate, said Bruce Schaller, a transportation expert and former deputy commissioner at the New York City Department of Transportation. “I think the difficult question with the individual drivers is that they are in business, they are planning to make money off of their increase in medallion prices. Should they have the same protections as someone who is taking out a mortgage on a house, who is presumed to be very vulnerable?” he asked. “That may well be the case, but (drivers) are also in a business in a way that the prospective homeowner isn’t.”

The TLC told the Times that it is the responsibility of bank examiners to control lending practices, while the state Department of Financial Services said that it supervised some of the banks involved, but often deferred to federal inspectors. “The TLC is gravely concerned that unsound lending practices have hurt taxi drivers and has raised these concerns publicly,” Acting Commissioner Bill Heinzen said in an emailed statement. “Banks and credit unions are regulated by federal agencies that have substantial oversight powers that the TLC does not have. The TLC has taken steps within our regulatory power to help owners and drivers by easing regulatory burdens and working with City Council to limit the number of for-hire vehicles on the road. We have pushed banks to restructure loan balances and payment amounts to reflect actual trip revenue.”

Seth Stein, a spokesman for de Blasio, also mentioned interest in preventing risky lending practices. “We are deeply concerned about predatory lending in the medallion business,” Stein wrote in an email. “While TLC has no direct regulatory oversight over lenders – that is squarely under the purview of federal regulators – we continue to look for every means of helping owners and drivers make ends meet. We’ve discontinued medallion sales, secured a cap on app-based for-hire-vehicles, and we strongly urge federal regulators to do more as well.”

But remedies at the federal level may not be realistic, according to David King, a professor of urban planning at Arizona State University, with a speciality in transportation and land use planning. “There doesn’t seem to be any appetite for what would be reasonable lending standards. Reasonable standards that would include verifiable collateral or values that were based on something other than made-up dollar amounts,” King said, adding that he doesn’t see those changes being made under the current administration. “The housing bubble of 11 years ago, I think that was a sufficiently national concern that has inspired some movement from Washington. Whereas I think something like an asset bubble in New York, just like an asset bubble in one region, isn’t going to be enough to spur federal legislation.”

Schaller said that while lending regulation fixes could be beneficial for preventing this kind of crisis in other industries, there’s action that can be taken now by the city to alleviate some pain. “The real question is, if the city now decides that they were part of the fraud, then they should refund the money,” he said. “It’s one thing to close a loophole, it’s another thing to decide that you need to make restitution.”

City Councilman Mark Levine, who has been working on legislation along those lines for nearly a year, agreed that the city needs to take responsibility. “There has been a lot of attention to the whole industry of lenders and brokers who push these loans on the drivers in ways that were not transparent and really deceived them, and may very well constitute some sort of legal fraud,” he said. “But the city itself also bears responsibility for this, because we were selling medallions with the goal of bringing in revenue to the city and we were promoting them and pumping them up in ways that I think masks the true risks that drivers were taking on. And, most egregiously, we had a round of sales in 2014 when it was abundantly clear that we were headed for a price drop, because by that point app-based competitors had emerged and there were other challenges.”

Levine’s vision for immediately helping those drivers still suffering under unsustainable loans would involve the city acquiring the loans from lenders who either cannot or will not be flexible with borrowers, and then forgiving the debts. Though the bill hasn’t been introduced yet, the idea is to partially finance the buy-back by placing a surcharge on app-based ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft. Levine’s office is still working on confirming that the City Council would have the authority to levy that kind of surcharge. If it doesn’t, they would encourage that action be taken in Albany.

But, as the Times’ investigation into the issue has revealed, much of the damage to drivers and medallion owners has already been done – including to the hundreds of medallion owners who have declared bankruptcy. “If someone paid $800,000 for a medallion loan and paid part of that off, and has had their house repossessed, now Mark Levine is saying, ‘well, we’ll just refund whatever’s left dangling out there,’” Schaller said. “If I were on the losing end of that bargain, I’d say I want my $800,000 back.”

The idea of a buy-back, Levine admitted, is not a perfect solution, but it’s one he said can help the thousands of medallion owners stuck right now. “It would not address that kind of horrible, horrible hardship,” he said, referring to those owners who have forfeited assets and sustained other losses.

If there’s any upside to the stories relayed in the Times about medallion owners financially devastated by bad loans and the failing taxi industry, it may be that it’s a call to action – even if it’s coming too late for some. “It’s had a dramatic impact on the interest in the Council about finding solutions,” Levine said of the heavy punch packed by the Times’ investigation. “It gives new impetus to this effort, which is good, because it’s complicated, and it’s going to require a political push to make it happen. The revelations in this article made that more likely.”

Annie McDonough is a tech and policy reporter at City & State.

#USA #New_York #Taxi #Betrug #Ausbeutung

De l’âge de Pierre aux micropuces : comment de minuscules outils peuvent avoir fait de nous des humains : la technologie de la miniaturisation nous distingue des autres primates.

Les anthropologues ont longtemps fait le cas que l’élaboration d’outils est l’un des comportements clés qui séparaient nos ancêtres humains d’autres primates. Un nouveau document, cependant, fait valoir que ce n’était pas la fabrication d’outils qui a mis les homininés à part -c’était la miniaturisation des outils.

Tout comme les minuscules transistors ont transformé les télécommunications il y a quelques décennies, nos ancêtres de l’âge de pierre ont ressenti l’envie de fabriquer des outils minuscules. "C’est un besoin auquel nous avons été éternellement confrontés et qui a conduit notre évolution." dit Justin Pargeter, un anthropologue à l’Université Emory et auteur principal de l’article. "La miniaturisation est la chose que nous faisons. "

La revue l’anthropologie évolutive publie le document—le premier aperçu complet de la miniaturisation des outils préhistoriques. Elle propose que la miniaturisation soit une tendance centrale dans les technologies de l’Homininé qui remonte à au moins 2,6 millions ans.

« Lorsque d’autres singes utilisaient des outils en pierre, ils ont choisi de les garder sous la forme de leur grande taille et sont restés dans les forêts où ils ont évolué, » dit le co-auteur John Shea, professeur d’anthropologie à l’université Stony Brook. "Les homininés ont choisi de les miniaturiser et sont allés partout, transformant des habitats autrement hostiles pour répondre à nos besoins changeants. "

L’article montre la façon dont les flocons de pierre de moins d’un pouce de longueur—utilisé pour percer, couper et gratter- sont ressortis dans les dossiers archéologiques pour des sites sur tous les continents (...).

Ces petits flocons de pierre,(...) étaient comme les lames de rasoir jetables ou des trombones d’aujourd’hui -omniprésent, facile à faire et facilement remplacés.

Il identifie trois points de flexion pour la miniaturisation dans l’évolution de l’Homininé. Le premier pic s’est produit il y a environ 2 millions années, entraîné par la dépendance croissante de nos ancêtres aux flocons de pierre à la place des ongles et des dents pour les tâches de découpe, de tranchage et de perçage. Un deuxième pic a eu lieu quelque temps après 100 000 ans avec le développement d’armes à grande vitesse, comme l’arc et la flèche [il y a sûrement une erreur ici car l’arc est apparu vers 12000BP] , qui nécessitaient des inserts en pierre légères. Un troisième pic de miniaturisation s’est produit il y a environ 17 000 ans. La dernière ère glaciaire se terminait, forçant certains humains à s’adapter aux changements climatiques rapides, à l’élévation des niveaux de la mer et à l’accroissement des densités de population. Ces changements ont accru la nécessité de conserver les ressources, y compris les roches et les minéraux nécessaires pour fabriquer des outils.

(...)

From Stone Age chips to microchips : How tiny tools may have made us human : The technology of miniaturization set hominins apart from other primates — ScienceDaily

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Manuel Will, Christian Tryon, Matthew Shaw, Eleanor M. L. Scerri, Kathryn Ranhorn, Justin Pargeter, Jessica McNeil, Alex Mackay, Alice Leplongeon, Huw S. Groucutt, Katja Douze, Alison S. Brooks. Comparative analysis of Middle Stone Age artifacts in Africa (CoMSAfrica). Evolutionary Anthropology : Issues, News, and Reviews, 2019 ; DOI : 10.1002/evan.21772

#Préhistoire #Paléolithique #outils #industrie_microlithique #Anthropologie #2MaBP

indiedrome du 30 avril
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/indiedrome/indiedrome-du-30-avril

Henrik Monkey Norstebo / Daniel Lercher / Julie Rokseth: Inside Elements

« Off The Coast » (Sofa)

Voin Oruwu: Acid Clavi 2010

« Etudes From A Starship » (Kvitnu)

Rian Treanor: B2

« Ataxia » (Planet Mu)

Audrey Chen: Heavy In The Hand (extract)

« Runt Vigor » (Karl)

Belphegorz: Radioactivity

« S/T » (Closer)

Jessica Sligter & Wilber Bulsink: C

« Untitled #2 (The Mute) » (Gaudeamus/Unsounds)

Felix Kubin: Max Brand Studie IV

« S/T » (VIS)

▻http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/indiedrome/indiedrome-du-30-avril_06593__1.mp3

#034 Strange Fruits 100% musique
▻http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/strange-fruits/-034-strange-fruits-100-musique

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Playlist :

Elder Ones : Dance Of The Subaltern (From Untruth - Northern Spy Records - 2019)

Jessica Jones Quartet : Moxie (Moxie - - 2014)

Ronin Arkestra : Redeye Reprisal (First Meeting - Albert’s Favourites - 2019)

Joachim Caffonette Trio : A Mawda ( Vers L’Azur Noir - Neu Klang - 2019)

Afro Blue Persuasion : Cuban Fantasy (Live at Haight Levels Vol. 2, 1967 - Tramp Records - 2019)

Nubya Garcia : Lost Kingdoms (Nubya’s 5ive - Jazz Re:freshed - 2017)

Goran Kajfes Tropiques : Traces Left Behind (INto The Wild - Headspin - 2019)

MDC III : Sandman (Dreamhatcher - De Werf Records - 2019)

DKV Trio & Joe Mc Phee : Impressions Of Knox : Variations on a theme by Joe Mc Phee (Disk 4, The Sugar Malpe, Milwuakee The Fire Each Time - 2019 - Not Two Records)

Jonathan Finalayson : (...)

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Les #gilets_jaunes vus de New York...

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Driving was already expensive in France when in January 2018 the government of President Emmanuel Macron imposed a tax that raised the price of diesel fuel by 7.6 centimes per liter and of gasoline by 3.8 centimes (about 9 and 4 cents, respectively); further increases were planned for January 2019. The taxes were an attempt to cut carbon emissions and honor the president’s lofty promise to “Make Our Planet Great Again.”

Priscillia Ludosky, then a thirty-two-year-old bank employee from the Seine-et-Marne department outside Paris, had no choice but to drive into the city for work every day, and the cost of her commute was mounting. “When you pay regularly for something, it really adds up fast, and the increase was enormous,” she told me recently. “There are lots of things I don’t like. But on that I pushed.” In late May 2018, she created a petition on Change.org entitled Pour une Baisse des Prix du Carburant à la Pompe! (For a reduction of fuel prices at the pump!)

Over the summer Ludosky’s petition—which acknowledged the “entirely honorable” aim of reducing pollution while offering six alternative policy suggestions, including subsidizing electric cars and encouraging employers to allow remote work—got little attention. In the fall she tried again, convincing a radio host in Seine-et-Marne to interview her if the petition garnered 1,500 signatures. She posted that challenge on her Facebook page, and the signatures arrived in less than twenty-four hours. A local news site then shared the petition on its own Facebook page, and it went viral, eventually being signed by over 1.2 million people.

Éric Drouet, a thirty-three-year-old truck driver and anti-Macron militant also from Seine-et-Marne, created a Facebook event for a nationwide blockade of roads on November 17 to protest the high fuel prices. Around the same time, a fifty-one-year-old self-employed hypnotherapist named Jacline Mouraud recorded herself addressing Macron for four minutes and thirty-eight seconds and posted the video on Facebook. “You have persecuted drivers since the day you took office,” she said. “This will continue for how long?” Mouraud’s invective was viewed over six million times, and the gilets jaunes—the yellow vests, named for the high-visibility vests that French drivers are required to keep in their cars and to wear in case of emergency—were born.

Even in a country where protest is a cherished ritual of public life, the violence and vitriol of the gilets jaunes movement have stunned the government. Almost immediately it outgrew the issue of the carbon taxes and the financial burden on car-reliant French people outside major cities. In a series of Saturday demonstrations that began in mid-November and have continued for three months, a previously dormant anger has erupted. Demonstrators have beaten police officers, thrown acid in the faces of journalists, and threatened the lives of government officials. There has been violence on both sides, and the European Parliament has condemned French authorities for using “flash-ball guns” against protesters, maiming and even blinding more than a few in the crowds. But the gilets jaunes have a flair for cinematic destruction. In late November they damaged parts of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; in early January they commandeered a forklift and rammed through the heavy doors of the ministry of state—the only time in the history of the Fifth Republic that a sitting minister had to be evacuated from a government building.

The gilets jaunes are more than a protest. This is a modern-day jacquerie, an emotional wildfire stoked in the provinces and directed against Paris and, most of all, the elite. French history since 1789 can be seen as a sequence of anti-elite movements, yet the gilets jaunes have no real precedent. Unlike the Paris Commune of 1871, this is a proletarian struggle devoid of utopian aspirations. Unlike the Poujadist movement of the mid-1950s—a confederation of shopkeepers likewise opposed to the “Americanization” of a “thieving and inhuman” state and similarly attracted to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—the gilets jaunes include shopkeepers seemingly content to destroy shop windows. There is an aspect of carnival here: a delight in the subversion of norms, a deliberate embrace of the grotesque.

Many have said that the gilets jaunes are merely another “populist movement,” although the term is now so broad that it is nearly meaningless. Comparisons have been made to the Britain of Brexit, the United States of Donald Trump, and especially the Italy of Cinque Stelle. But the crucial difference is that the gilets jaunes are apolitical, and militantly so. They have no official platform, no leadership hierarchy, and no reliable communications. Everyone can speak for the movement, and yet no one can. When a small faction within it fielded a list of candidates for the upcoming European parliamentary elections in May, their sharpest opposition came from within: to many gilets jaunes, the ten who had put their names forward—among them a nurse, a truck driver, and an accountant—were traitors to the cause, having dared to replicate the elite that the rest of the movement disdains.

Concessions from the government have had little effect. Under mounting pressure, Macron was forced to abandon the carbon tax planned for 2019 in a solemn televised address in mid-December. He also launched the so-called grand débat, a three-month tour of rural France designed to give him a better grasp of the concerns of ordinary people. In some of these sessions, Macron has endured more than six hours of bitter criticisms from angry provincial mayors. But these gestures have quelled neither the protests nor the anger of those who remain in the movement. Performance is the point. During the early “acts,” as the weekly demonstrations are known, members refused to meet with French prime minister Édouard Philippe, on the grounds that he would not allow the encounter to be televised, and that sentiment has persisted. Perhaps the most telling thing about the gilets jaunes is the vest they wear: a symbol of car ownership, but more fundamentally a material demand to be seen.

Inequality in France is less extreme than in the United States and Britain, but it is increasing. Among wealthy Western countries, the postwar French state—l’État-providence—is something of a marvel. France’s health and education systems remain almost entirely free while ranking among the best in the world. In 2017 the country’s ratio of tax revenue to gross domestic product was 46.2 percent, according to statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—the highest redistribution level of any OECD country and a ratio that allows the state to fight poverty through a generous social protection system. Of that 46.2 percent, the French government allocated approximately 28 percent for social services.

“The French social model is so integrated that it almost seems a natural, preexisting condition,” Alexis Spire, a sociologist of inequality at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, told me recently. A number of the gilets jaunes I met said that despite the taxes they pay, they do not feel they benefit from any social services, since they live far from urban centers. But anyone who has ever received housing assistance, a free prescription, or sixteen weeks of paid maternity leave has benefited from the social protection system. The effect of redistribution is often invisible.

And yet the rich in France have gotten much richer. Between 1983 and 2015, the vast majority of incomes in France rose by less than one percent per year, while the richest one percent of the population saw their incomes rise by 100 percent after taxes. According to World Bank statistics, the richest 20 percent now earns nearly five times as much as the bottom 20 percent. This represents a stark shift from the Trente Glorieuses, France’s thirty-year economic boom after World War II. As the economist Thomas Piketty has pointed out, between 1950 and 1983, most French incomes rose steadily by approximately 4 percent per year; the nation’s top incomes rose by only one percent.

What has become painfully visible, however, is the extent of the country’s geographical fractures. Paris has always been the undisputed center of politics, culture, and commerce, but France was once also a country that cherished and protected its vibrant provincial life. This was la France profonde, a clichéd but genuinely existing France of tranquil stone villages and local boulangeries with lines around the block on Sundays. “Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance,” goes the beloved song by the crooner Charles Trenet. “Mon village, au clocher aux maisons sages.” These days, the maisons sages are vacant, and the country boulangeries are closed.

The story is familiar: the arrival of large multinational megastores on the outskirts of provincial French towns and cities has threatened, and in many cases asphyxiated, local businesses.1 In the once-bustling centers of towns like Avignon, Agen, Calais, and Périgueux, there is now an eerie quiet: windows are often boarded up, and fewer and fewer people are to be found. This is the world evoked with a melancholy beauty in Nicolas Mathieu’s novel Leurs enfants après eux, which won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, in 2018.

The expansion since the 1980s of France’s high-speed rail network has meant that the country’s major cities are all well connected to Paris. But there are many small towns where the future never arrived, where abandoned nineteenth-century train stations are now merely places for teenagers to make out, monuments of the way things used to be. In these towns, cars are the only way people can get to work. I met a fifty-five-year-old truck and taxi driver named Marco Pavan in the Franche-Comté in late November. What he told me then—about how carbon taxes can seem like sneers from the Parisian elite—has stayed with me. “Ask a Parisian—for him none of this is an issue, because he doesn’t need a car,” Pavan said. “There’s no bus or train to take us anywhere. We have to have a car.” I cited that remark in a Washington Post story I filed from Besançon; in the online comments section, many attacked the movement for what they saw as a backward anti-environmentalism—missing his point.

Few have written as extensively as the French geographer Christophe Guilluy on la France périphérique, a term he popularized that refers both to the people and the regions left behind by an increasingly globalized economy. Since 2010, when he published Fractures françaises, Guilluy has been investigating the myths and realities of what he calls “the trompe l’oeil of a peaceful, moderate, and consensual society.” He is one of a number of left-wing French intellectuals—among them the novelist Michel Houellebecq, the historian Georges Bensoussan, and the essayist Michel Onfray—who in recent years have argued that their beloved patrie has drifted into inexorable decline, a classic critique of the French right since 1789. But Guilluy’s decline narrative is different: he is not as concerned as the others with Islamist extremism or “decadence” broadly conceived. For him, France’s decline is structural, the result of having become a place where “the social question disappears.”

Guilluy, born in Montreuil in 1964, is something of a rarity among well-known French intellectuals: he is a product of the Paris suburbs, not of France’s storied grandes écoles. And it is clear that much of his critique is personal. As a child, Guilluy, whose family then lived in the working-class Paris neighborhood of Belleville, was forcibly relocated for a brief period to the heavily immigrant suburb of La Courneuve when their building was slated to be demolished in the midst of Paris’s urban transformation. “I saw gentrification firsthand,” he told Le Figaro in 2017. “For the natives—the natives being just as much the white worker as the young immigrant—what provoked the most problems was not the arrival of Magrebis, but that of the bobos.”

This has long been Guilluy’s battle cry, and he has focused his intellectual energy on attacking what he sees as the hypocrisy of the bobos, or bourgeois bohemians. His public debut was a short 2001 column in Libération applying that term, coined by the columnist David Brooks, to French social life. What was happening in major urban centers across the country, he wrote then, was a “ghettoization by the top of society” that excluded people like his own family.

Guilluy crystallized that argument in a 2014 book that won him the ear of the Élysée Palace and regular appearances on French radio. This was La France périphérique: comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires, in which he contended that since the mid-1980s, France’s working classes have been pushed out of the major cities to rural communities—a situation that was a ticking time bomb—partly as a result of rising prices. He advanced that view further in 2016 with La Crépuscule de la France d’en haut—now translated into English as Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France—a pithy screed against France’s bobo elite and what he sees as its shameless embrace of a “neoliberal,” “Americanized society” and a hollow, feel-good creed of multicultural tolerance. In 2018, one month before the rise of the gilets jaunes, he published No Society, whose title comes from Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 comment that “there is no such thing as society.”

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In Guilluy’s view, an immigrant working class has taken the place of the “native” working class in the banlieues on the outskirts of major cities. This native class, he argues, has been scattered throughout the country and become an “unnoticed presence” that France’s elite has “made to disappear from public consciousness” in order to consolidate its grip on power. Cities are now the exclusive preserve of the elites and their servants, and what Guilluy means by “no society” is that the visible signs of class conflict in urban daily life have vanished. This is his trompe l’oeil: rich, insulated Parisians have convinced themselves that everything is fine, while those who might say otherwise are nowhere near. “The simmering discontent of rural France has never really been taken seriously,” he writes in Twilight of the Elites.

Since November, much of the French press has declared that Guilluy essentially predicted the rise of the gilets jaunes. They seem, after all, a fulfillment of his prophecy about “the betrayal of the people” by the elites, even if he is always elusive about who exactly “the people” are. While critiques from the movement have remained a confused cloud of social media invective, Guilluy has served as its de facto interpreter.

No Society puts into words what many in the gilets jaunes have either struggled or refused to articulate. This is the hazy middle ground between warning and threat: “The populist wave coursing through the western world is only the visible part of a soft power emanating from the working classes that will force the elites to rejoin the real movement of society or else to disappear.”

For now, however, there is just one member of the elite whom the gilets jaunes wish would disappear, and calls for his violent overthrow continue even as the movement’s momentum subsides.

An intense and deeply personal hatred of Macron is the only unifying cry among the gilets jaunes. Eighteen months before the uprising began, this was the man who captured the world’s imagination and who, after populist victories in Britain and the United States, had promised a French “Third Way.” Yet the Macronian romance is already over, both at home and abroad.

To some extent, the French always turn against their presidents, but the anger Macron elicits is unique. This is less because of any particular policy than because of his demeanor and, most of all, his language. “Mr. Macron always refused to respond to us,” Muriel Gautherin, fifty-three, a podiatrist who lives in the Paris suburbs, told me at a December march on the Champs-Élysées. “It’s he who insults us, and he who should respond.” When I asked her what she found most distasteful about the French president, her answer was simple: “His words.”

She has a point. Among Macron’s earliest actions as president was to shave five euros off the monthly stipends of France’s Aide personalisée au logement (APL), the country’s housing assistance program. Around the same time, he slashed France’s wealth tax on those with a net worth of at least €1.3 million—a holdover from the Mitterand era.

Macron came to office with a record of unrelentingly insulting the poor. In 2014, when he was France’s economic minister, he responded to the firing of nine hundred employees (most of them women) from a Breton slaughterhouse by noting that some were “mostly illiterate.” In 2016 he was caught on camera in a heated dispute with a labor activist in the Hérault. When the activist gestured to Macron’s €1,600 suit as a symbol of his privilege, the minister said, “The best way to afford a suit is to work.” In 2018 he told a young, unemployed gardener that he could find a new job if he merely “crossed the street.”

Yet nothing quite compares to the statement Macron made in inaugurating Station F, a startup incubator in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, housed in a converted rail depot. It is a cavernous consulate for Silicon Valley, a soaring glass campus open to all those with “big ideas” who can also pay €195 a month for a desk and can fill out an application in fluent English. (“We won’t consider any other language,” the organization’s website says.) Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have offices in it, and in a city of terrible coffee, the espresso is predictably fabulous. In June 2017 Macron delivered a speech there. “A train station,” he said, referring to the structure’s origins, “it’s a place where we encounter those who are succeeding and those who are nothing.”

This was the moment when a large percentage of the French public learned that in the eyes of their president, they had no value. “Ceux qui ne sont rien” is a phrase that has lingered and festered. To don the yellow vest is thus to declare not only that one has value but also that one exists.

On the whole, the gilets jaunes are not the poorest members of French society, which is not surprising. As Tocqueville remarked, revolutions are fueled not by those who suffer the most, but by those whose economic status has been improving and who then experience a sudden and unexpected fall. So it seems with the gilets jaunes: most live above the poverty line but come from the precarious ranks of the lower middle class, a group that aspires to middle-class stability and seeks to secure it through palliative consumption: certain clothing brands, the latest iPhone, the newest television.

In mid-December Le Monde profiled a young couple in the movement from Sens in north-central France, identified only as Arnaud and Jessica. Both twenty-six, they and their four children live in a housing project on the €2,700 per month that Arnaud earns as a truck driver, including more than €1,000 in government assistance. According to statistics from France’s Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insée), this income places them right at the poverty line for a family of this size, and possibly even slightly below it. But the expenses Arnaud and Jessica told Le Monde they struggled to pay included karate lessons for their oldest son and pet supplies for their dog. Jessica, who does not work, told Le Monde, “Children are so mean to each other if they wear lesser brands. I don’t want their friends to make fun of them.” She said she had traveled to Paris for gilet jaune protests on three separate weekends—journeys that presumably cost her money.

Readers of Le Monde—many of them educated, affluent, and pro-Macron—were quick to attack Arnaud and Jessica. But the sniping missed their point, which was that they felt a seemingly inescapable sense of humiliation, fearing ridicule everywhere from the Élysée Palace to their children’s school. They were explaining something profound about the gilets jaunes: the degree to which the movement is fueled by unfulfilled expectations. For many demonstrators, life is simply not as they believed it would be, or as they feel they deserve. There is an aspect of entitlement to the gilets jaunes, who are also protesting what the French call déclassement, the increasing elusiveness of the middle-class dream in a society in which economic growth has not kept pace with population increase. This entitlement appears to have alienated the gilets jaunes from immigrants and people of color, who are largely absent from their ranks and whose condition is often materially worse.2 “It’s not people who don’t have hope anymore, who don’t have a place to live, or who don’t have a job,” Rokhaya Diallo, a French activist for racial equality, told me recently, describing the movement. “It’s just that status they’re trying to preserve.”

The gilets jaunes have no substantive ideas: resentment does not an ideology make. They remain a combustible vacuum, and extremist agitators on the far right and the far left have sought to capitalize on their anger. Both Marine Le Pen of the recently renamed Rassemblement National and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the left-wing La France Insoumise have tried hard to channel the movement’s grassroots energy into their own political parties, but the gilets jaunes have so far resisted these entreaties. The gilets jaunes also found themselves at the center of a diplomatic spat: in early February Italy’s deputy prime minister, Luigi Di Maio, met with two of their members on the outskirts of Paris in a jab at Macron. Two days later, France withdrew its ambassador to Rome for the first time since 1940, but the gilets jaunes have not attempted to exploit this attention for their own political gain. Instead there was infighting—a Twitter war over who had the right to represent the cause abroad and who did not.

The intellectual void at the heart of an amorphous movement can easily fill with the hatred of an “other.” That may already be happening to the gilets jaunes. Although a careful analysis by Le Monde concluded that race and immigration were not major concerns in the two hundred most frequently shared messages on gilet jaune Facebook pages between the beginning of the movement and January 22, a number of gilets jaunes have been recorded on camera making anti-Semitic gestures, insulting a Holocaust survivor on the Paris metro, and saying that journalists “work for the Jews.” Importantly, the gilets jaunes have never collectively denounced any of these anti-Semitic incidents—a silence perhaps inevitable for a movement that eschews organization of any kind. Likewise, a thorough study conducted by the Paris-based Fondation Jean Jaurès has shown the extent to which conspiracy theories are popular in the movement: 59 percent of those surveyed who had participated in a gilet jaune demonstration said they believed that France’s political elites were encouraging immigration in order to replace them, and 50 percent said they believed in a global “Zionist” conspiracy.

Members of the movement are often quick to point out that the gilets jaunes are not motivated by identity politics, and yet anyone who has visited one of their demonstrations is confronted with an undeniable reality. Far too much attention has been paid to the symbolism of the yellow vests and far too little to the fact that the vast majority of those who wear them are lower-middle-class whites. In what is perhaps the most ethnically diverse society in Western Europe, can the gilets jaunes truly be said to represent “the people,” as the members of the movement often claim? Priscillia Ludosky, arguably the first gilet jaune, is a black woman. “It’s complicated, that question,” she told me. “I have no response.”

The gilets jaunes are also distinctly a minority of the French population: in a country of 67 million, as many as 282,000 have demonstrated on a single day, and that figure has consistently fallen with each passing week, down to 41,500 during “Act 14” of the protest on February 16. On two different weekends in November and December, other marches in Paris—one for women’s rights, the other against climate change—drew far bigger crowds than the gilets jaunes did. But the concerns of this minority are treated as universal by politicians, the press, and even the movement’s sharpest critics. Especially after Trump and Brexit, lower-middle-class and working-class whites command public attention even when they have no clear message.

French citizens of color have been protesting social inequality for years without receiving any such respect. In 2005 the killing of two minority youths by French police in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois ignited a string of violent uprisings against police brutality, but the government declared an official state of emergency instead of launching a grand débat. In 2009, the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique saw a huge strike against the high cost of living—a forty-four-day uprising that also targeted fuel prices and demanded an increase to the minimum wage. In 2017 an almost identical protest occurred in French Guiana, another French overseas department, where residents demonstrated against household goods that were as much as 12 percent more expensive than they were in mainland France, despite a lower minimum wage. The French government was slow to respond in both of these instances, while the concerns of the gilets jaunes have resulted in a personal apology from the president and a slew of concessions.

Guilluy, whose analysis of la France périphérique ultimately fails to grapple significantly with France’s decidedly peripheral overseas territories, does not shy away from the question of identity. He sees a racial element to the frustrations of la France périphérique, but he does not see this as a problem. Some of the most frustrating moments in his work come when he acknowledges but refuses to interrogate white working-class behavior that seems to be racially motivated. “Public housing in outlying communities is now a last resort for workers hoping to be able to go on living near the major cities,” he writes in Twilight of the Elites, describing the recent astronomic rise in France’s urban real estate prices. “These projects, mostly occupied by immigrant renters, are avoided by white French-born workers. Barring some utterly unforeseeable turn of events, their expulsion from the largest urban centers will be irreversible.” It would not diminish Guilluy’s broader point about la France périphérique if he acknowledged that victims of structural changes can also be intolerant.

Guilluy also regularly recycles anxieties over immigration, often from controversial theorists such as Michèle Tribalat, who is associated with the idea of le grand remplacement, the alleged “great replacement” of France’s white population by immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. In making his case about “the demographic revolution in process,” Guilluy has been accused of inflating his statistics. France, he wrote in Fractures françaises, “welcomes a little less than 200,000 legal foreigners every year.” But these claims were attacked by Patrick Weil, a leading French historian of immigration, who noted in his book Le sens de la République (2015) that Guilluy failed to consider that a large number of those 200,000 are temporary workers, students who come and go, and others of “irregular” status. Guilluy has not responded to these criticisms, and in any case his rhetoric has since grown more radical. In No Society he writes, “Multiculturalism is, intrinsically, a feeble ideology that divides and weakens.”

Whether the gilets jaunes will eventually come to agree with him is a crucial question. Like Guilluy, they are responding to real social conditions. But if, following Guilluy’s lead, they ultimately resort to the language of race and ethnicity to explain their suffering, they will have chosen to become a different movement altogether, one in which addressing inequality was never quite the point. In some ways, they have already crossed that line.

On the afternoon of Saturday, February 16, the prominent French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut got out of a taxi on the Boulevard Montparnasse. A crowd of gilets jaunes noticed him and began hurling anti-Semitic insults. The scene, recorded on video, was chilling: in the center of Paris, under a cloudless sky, a mob of visibly angry men surrounded a man they knew to be Jewish, called him a “dirty Zionist,” and told him, “go back to Tel Aviv.”

Finkielkraut’s parents were Polish refugees from the Holocaust. He was born in Paris in 1949 and has become a fixture in French cultural life, a prolific author, a host of a popular weekly broadcast on France Culture, and a member of the Académie Française, the country’s most elite literary institution. In the words of Macron, who immediately responded to the attack, he “is not only an eminent man of letters but the symbol of what the Republic affords us all.” The irony is that Finkielkraut—another former leftist who believes that France has plunged into inexorable decline and ignored the dangers of multiculturalism—was one of the only Parisian intellectuals who had supported the gilets jaunes from the beginning.

I spoke to Finkielkraut after the attack, and he explained that the gilets jaunes had seemed to him the evidence of something authentic. “I saw an invisible France, neglected and forgotten,” he said. “Wearing fluorescent yellow vests in order to be visible—of being a ‘somewhere’ as opposed to an ‘anywhere,’ as Goodhart has said—seemed to me an absolutely legitimate critique.” The British journalist David Goodhart, popular these days in French right-wing circles, is the author of The Road to Somewhere (2017), which sees populist anger as the inevitable response to the widening gulf between those “rooted” in a particular place and cosmopolitans at home anywhere. “France is not a ‘start-up nation,’” Finkielkraut told me. “It can’t be reduced to that.”

Finkielkraut said that the attack was a sign that the reasonable critiques orginally made by the gilets jaunes had vanished, and that they had no real future. “I think the movement is in the process of degradation. It’s no longer a social movement but a sect that has closed in on itself, whose discourse is no longer rational.”

Although the Paris prosecutor has opened an investigation into his attackers, Finkielkraut has not pressed charges. He told me that the episode, as violent as it was, did not necessarily suggest that all those who had worn yellow vests in recent months were anti-Semites or extremists. “Those who insulted me were not the nurses, the shopkeepers, or the small business owners,” he said, noting that he doubted he would have experienced the same prejudice at the roundabouts, the traffic circles across the country where gilets jaunes protesters gathered every Saturday. In a sense, these were the essence of the movement, which was an inchoate mobilization against many things, but perhaps none so much as loneliness. The roundabouts quickly became impromptu piazzas and a means, however small, of reclaiming a spirit of community that disappeared long ago in so many French towns and villages.

In Paris, where the remaining gilets jaunes have now focused most of their energy, the weekly protests have become little more than a despicable theater filled with scenes like the attack on Finkielkraut. There is no convincing evidence that those still wearing yellow vests are troubled by the presence of bigotry in their ranks. What is more, many gilets jaunes now seem to believe that pointing out such prejudice is somehow to become part of a government-backed conspiracy to turn public opinion against them.

Consider, for instance, a February 19 communiqué released in response to the attack on Finkielkraut from La France en Colère, one of the movement’s main online bulletins. “For many days, the government and its friends in the national media seem to have found a new technique for destabilizing public opinion and discrediting the Gilets Jaunes movement,” it begins. “We denounce the accusations and the manipulations put in place by this government adept at fake news.” But this is all the communiqué denounces; it does not address the anti-Semitic violence to which Finkielkraut was subjected, nor does it apologize to a national figure who had defended the movement when few others of his prominence dared to do the same.

A month after our last conversation, I called Priscillia Ludosky back, to see if she had any reaction to the recent turn of events in the movement her petition had launched. She was only interested in discussing what she called the French government’s “systematic abuse to manipulate public opinion.” She also believes that a government-media conspiracy will stop at nothing to smear the cause. “If there was one person who ever said something homophobic, it was on the front page of every newspaper,” she told me.

In the days after the attack, Finkielkraut lamented not so much the grim details of what had happened but the squandered potential of a moment that has increasingly descended into paranoid feverishness. As he told me: “This was a beautiful opportunity to reflect on who we are that’s been completely ruined.”

▻https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/21/low-visibility-france-gilet-jaunes

Everipedia Culture Roundup #10 : #hustle Hard
▻https://hackernoon.com/everipedia-culture-roundup-10-hustle-hard-b2f46ab92a41?source=rss----3a8

A graphic representation of hustlingThe hustle, the grind, whatever you call it, we live in a time where people like to show that they are hard at work, but are they doing anything? A friend of mine once said to me “People lie, Numbers don’t” and when it’s all said and done, it’s the results that matter. People like E-commerce Guru Scott Hilse who went through adversity before he found his flow and established a six-figure Shopify store quite simply has the track record that shows his success. Producer Lil Texas has been part of the EDM scene for several years now and is finally hitting his stride bringing his signature ‘Texcore’ hardstyle sound to the masses. Instagram juggernaut Jessica Bartlett has cultivated her influencer persona on the platform and uses her experience and expertise to (...)

#tech-hustle-hard #tech #hustle-hard #everipedia-partnership

Exclusive: OxyContin Maker Purdue Pharma Exploring Bankruptcy - Sources | Investing News | US News
▻https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2019-03-04/exclusive-oxycontin-maker-purdue-pharma-exploring-bankruptcy-sources
▻https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/a731fff/2147483647/thumbnail/970x647/quality/85/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcom-usnews-beam-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2F36%2F18d09dd2aa95

By Mike Spector, Jessica DiNapoli and Nate Raymond

(Reuters) - OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP is exploring filing for bankruptcy to address potentially significant liabilities from roughly 2,000 lawsuits alleging the drugmaker contributed to the deadly opioid crisis sweeping the United States, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

The potential move shows how Purdue and its wealthy owners, the Sackler family, are under pressure to respond to mounting litigation accusing the company of misleading doctors and patients about risks associated with prolonged use of its prescription opioids.

Purdue denies the allegations, arguing that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved labels for its opioids carried warnings about the risk of abuse and misuse associated with the pain treatments.

Filing for Chapter 11 protection would halt the lawsuits and allow Purdue to negotiate legal claims with plaintiffs under the supervision of a U.S. bankruptcy judge, the sources said.

Shares of Endo International Plc and Insys Therapeutics Inc, two companies that like Purdue have been named in lawsuits related to the U.S. opioid epidemic, closed down 17 percent and more than 2 percent, respectively, on Monday.

More than 1,600 lawsuits accusing Purdue and other opioid manufacturers of using deceptive practices to push addictive drugs that led to fatal overdoses are consolidated in an Ohio federal court. Purdue has held discussions to resolve the litigation with plaintiffs’ lawyers, who have often compared the cases to widespread lawsuits against the tobacco industry that resulted in a $246 billion settlement in 1998.

“We will oppose any attempt to avoid our claims, and will continue to vigorously and aggressively pursue our claims against Purdue and the Sackler family,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said. Connecticut has a case against Purdue and the Sacklers.

BANKRUPTCY FILING NOT CERTAIN

A Purdue bankruptcy filing is not certain, the sources said. The Stamford, Connecticut-based company has not made any final decisions and could instead continue fighting the lawsuits, they said.

“As a privately-held company, it has been Purdue Pharma’s longstanding policy not to comment on our financial or legal strategy,” Purdue said in a statement.

“We are, however, committed to ensuring that our business remains strong and sustainable. We have ample liquidity and remain committed to meeting our obligations to the patients who benefit from our medicines, our suppliers and other business partners.”

Purdue faces a May trial in a case brought by Oklahoma’s attorney general that, like others, accuses the company of contributing to a wave of fatal overdoses by flooding the market with highly addictive opioids while falsely claiming the drugs were safe.

Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump also said he would like to sue drug companies over the nation’s opioid crisis.

Opioids, including prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl, were involved in 47,600 overdose deaths in 2017, a sixfold increase from 1999, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Purdue hired law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP for restructuring advice, Reuters reported in August, fueling concerns among litigants, including Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter, that the company might seek bankruptcy protection before the trial.

Companies facing widespread lawsuits sometimes seek bankruptcy protection to address liabilities in one court even when their financial condition is not dire. California utility PG&E Corp filed for bankruptcy earlier this year after deadly wildfires raised the prospect of large legal bills even though its stock remained worth billions of dollars.

DECEPTIVE MARKETING

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey in June became the first attorney general to sue not just Purdue but Sackler family members. Records in her case, which Purdue has asked a judge to dismiss, accused Sackler family members of directing deceptive marketing of opioids for years while enriching themselves to the tune of $4.2 billion.

Some other states have since also sued the Sacklers. The Sacklers are currently discussing creating a nonprofit backed by family financial contributions to combat addiction and drug abuse, a person familiar with their deliberations said.

The drugmaker downplayed the possibility of a bankruptcy filing in a Feb. 22 court filing in the Oklahoma case. “Purdue is still here - ready, willing and eager to prove in this Court that the State’s claims are baseless,” the company said in court papers.

Sales of OxyContin and other opioids have fallen amid public concern about their addictive nature, and as restrictions on opioid prescribing have been enacted. OxyContin generated $1.74 billion in sales in 2017, down from $2.6 billion five years earlier, according to the most recent data compiled by Symphony Health Solutions.

Purdue Chief Executive Officer Craig Landau has cut hundreds of jobs, stopped marketing opioids to physicians and moved the company toward developing medications for sleep disorders and cancer since taking the helm in 2017.

In July, Purdue appointed a new board chairman, Steve Miller, a restructuring veteran who previously held leadership positions at troubled companies including auto-parts giant Delphi and the once-teetering insurer American International Group Inc.

Mortimer D.A. Sackler no longer sits on Purdue’s board, according to a filing the company made with the Connecticut secretary of state late Monday.

The Oklahoma case and other lawsuits seek damages from Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies accused of fueling the opioid crisis. In addition to lawsuits consolidated in an Ohio federal court, more than 300 cases are pending in state courts, and dozens of state attorneys general have sued manufacturers, including Purdue.

Settlement discussions have not yet resulted in a deal.

Purdue and three executives in 2007 pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the misbranding of OxyContin and agreed to pay a total of $634.5 million in penalties, according to court records.

(Reporting by Mike Spector and Jessica DiNapoli in New York and Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Copyright 2019 Thomson Reuters.

#Opioides #Sackler #Bankruptcy

Palestine Underground, super documentaire d’une demi heure de Jessica Kelly, sur la scène underground en Palestine (48 et 67), la musique électro, techno, rap etc., entre autres avec Sama (2018)
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-R8S7QwO1g

Et, à propos de Sama :

SAMA : « On venait de Ramallah, Bethléem, Jéricho, Gaza »
Eric Carpentier, So Foot, le 15 janvier 2019
▻https://www.sofoot.com/sama-on-venait-de-ramallah-bethleem-jericho-gaza-464836.html

Figure centrale de la nouvelle scène électronique palestinienne, SAMA’ fait bouger les têtes et les lignes de la techno. Mais ce qu’elle préfère, c’est encore le football. La preuve : elle a fait partie de la première équipe nationale féminine de Palestine. Entretien avec une pionnière.

Il y a vraiment de la politique dans le football, ça va main dans la main dès qu’on parle d’équipes nationales. Surtout dans le cas palestinien. Il y a deux ans environ, l’Arabie saoudite ne voulait pas venir jouer en Palestine, ils nous ont demandé d’aller jouer en Jordanie. Il y avait toute une discussion autour de ça. Alors qu’on voulait juste jouer au foot ! Donc il y a cet aspect-là, mais aussi l’aspect collectif, communautaire du football. Ça crée une atmosphère, tu peux voir des gens d’horizons différents se réunir. Et ça, déjà, c’est politique. Il y a cette idée d’aller au combat ensemble.

Sama - The Beating Wound (2014)
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlrmsNtVYfw

#Palestine #Sama #Muqataa #Musique #Musique_et_politique #Underground #Electro #Techno #Rap #Rave #Football

Tiens, je me demande si je ne vais pas faire appel à l’intelligence collective du Facebook bio (expression dont je tiens à vous dire qu’elle est reprise, telle quelle, dans une thèse très sérieuse, à laquelle je ne comprends pas tout, et qui étudie le Désordre avec un niveau de détail tel que je pense que je vais bientôt pouvoir confier le mot de passe ftp et le relai à son auteur).

Pour un roman en cours d’écriture, j’aimerais trouver un équivalent, une féminisation correcte du mot avatar, la locution dans laquelle ce mot prendrait place, ce serait : « Jessica et toutes ses avatars ». Pour le moment j’ai mis avatares (ce qui va déjà être une paire de manches à faire passer au travers des différentes strates de la correction, mais si on n’essaie pas on n’arrive à rien).

Et pour le même roman j’aimerais disposer d’un équivalent plus féminin au concept de la filiation, quelque chose qui resterait de la filiation mais qui serait plus du côté de la sororité. Le personnage féminin du roman s’appelle Jessica, elle est contrebassiste et elle est la digne héritière de Joëlle Léandre et c’est cependant une filiation qu’elle refuse (ma contrebassiste est un peu anarchiste et tatillonne à propos de la notion d’héritage). Et c’est vraiment cette notion de filiation que je veux mettre ici.

Alors chères amies et amis, si vous avez des idées pour mes avatares et ma filiation féminine…

FREQ #19: The Writing’s On the Wall for Jessica Pabón-Colón
▻https://feministfrequency.com/2018/12/28/freq-19-the-writings-on-the-wall-for-jessica-pabon-colon

 Each issue of the FREQ #Newsletter brings you an #Interview with a fascinating, inspiring, talented woman we think you should know more about. In our latest issue, we talk to pioneering interdisciplinary Latina scholar and activist, Dr. Jessica Pabón-Colón. Her recent book, Graffiti Grrlz: Performing #feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora is a towering yet accessible work of scholarship on global feminism, urban culture, and the history of graffiti writing. […]

#art #Music

https://femfreq2.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/JessicaP_900x450.png

Je vois régulièrement passer des trucs pseudo-scientifiques mélangeant quantique, médecine, spiritualité… Je cherche des liens autour de ce sujet. Si vous en avez d’autres…

La page wikipédia dédiée :
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticisme_quantique

Une retranscription d’une conférence de 2006 au Québec :
▻https://www.sceptiques.qc.ca/activites/conferences/Mai-2006

#physique_quantique #mysticisme #pseudo-science #médecine_alternative

« Gilets jaunes » : Arnaud et Jessica, la vie à l’euro près

Ces parents de quatre enfants sont à découvert dès le 15 du mois. Ils racontent leur sentiment de déclassement, et pourquoi ils continuent de lutter au sein du mouvement.

Par Faustine Vincent
Publié le 15 décembre 2018 à 09h20

Arnaud, 26 ans, cariste et « gilet jaune », chez lui à Sens (Yonne), le 11 décembre. Benjamin Girette / Hans Lucas pour " Le Monde"
Arnaud est capable de citer de tête le montant de chaque dépense du foyer à l’euro près. Dans sa famille, installée dans un appartement HLM à Sens (Yonne), c’est lui qui fait les comptes. Or, depuis deux ou trois ans, ils ont beau faire attention, « à partir du 15 du mois, on est à découvert », explique ce cariste dans l’aéronautique de 26 ans. Leur vie s’est comme rétrécie. Le jeune homme, au visage paisible et juvénile, nous reçoit chez eux ce mardi 11 décembre. Sa compagne, Jessica, 26 ans elle aussi, a la mine fatiguée et les cheveux en bataille après avoir passé la nuit sur un rond-point avec d’autres « gilets jaunes ». Le couple se relaie depuis trois semaines pour participer au mouvement, jonglant entre leurs quatre enfants et les horaires décalés d’Arnaud. Les annonces d’Emmanuel Macron, la veille, n’ont pas entamé leur détermination. « C’était… comment il disait, déjà ? Ah oui, de la poudre de perlimpinpin. Pour mon pouvoir d’achat, c’est toujours le néant », lance le père de famille.

Il finit de changer la couche du dernier-né, puis détaille les comptes autour de la table du salon, aux murs nus et abîmés. Son salaire de 1 493 euros, sur lequel vit toute la famille, ne leur permet plus de faire face aux dépenses courantes. Et ce, malgré les 914 euros d’allocations familiales, les 100 euros d’aide personnalisée au logement (APL) et les 180 euros de la prestation d’accueil du jeune enfant (Paje). « Il y a trois ans, pourtant, on s’en sortait, se souvient-il. Moi je regarde les prix ; entre avant et maintenant, ça n’a rien à voir. »

Leur loyer est resté stable, à 506,74 euros, mais l’électricité est passée de 30 à 49 euros par mois en deux ans. Leur forfait téléphonique a lui aussi augmenté depuis l’expiration des promotions, bondissant de 5 à 36 euros par mois pour elle, et de 20 à 42 euros pour lui. « Ça fait un énorme trou dans le budget », s’inquiète Jessica. Même les croquettes de leur chien sont plus chères qu’avant, selon elle. « Ça fait polémique, on en parle beaucoup avec les “gilets jaunes” sur Facebook. » La prime d’activité d’Arnaud a, quant à elle, chuté de 225 à 163 euros depuis qu’il est passé, en septembre, de l’intérim à un CDD. Au final, « il va falloir qu’on revoie tout notre budget », soupire la jeune mère au foyer, qui a arrêté ses petits boulots à la naissance des enfants pour éviter des frais de garde trop élevés.

« Marre d’être pauvre »
Le couple vérifie en permanence le tableau de leur banque en ligne pour faire les comptes mais rien n’y fait, les graphiques passent immanquablement du vert au rouge. Pour s’en sortir, il doit multiplier les astuces. A Lidl, Jessica traque les promotions de viande, achetée par lot de 5 kg puis congelée. Pour les œufs, ils ont un bon plan : le frère d’Arnaud, qui possède des poules, lui en vend à prix cassé, 2 euros les trente. « C’est 2 euros de gagné. C’est bête, mais ça fait deux kilos de pâtes, de riz, ou des gâteaux », calcule Arnaud. Avec tout ça, ils parviennent tant bien que mal à maintenir leur budget mensuel de nourriture autour de 400 euros.

Quand les fins de mois sont trop difficiles, ils s’arrangent comme ils peuvent. Le père de Jessica lui glisse parfois un billet de 20 euros. En dehors de la famille, d’autres se montrent également compréhensifs. Le président de l’association de karaté du quartier a accepté de leur faire un échéancier afin qu’ils puissent payer les 120 euros de frais d’inscription pour leur fils aîné. « Il me reste encore 40 euros à donner, précise Jessica. Ce mois-ci je ne pourrai pas, mais le mois prochain, oui. » L’école de conduite où elle a passé son permis a elle aussi accepté un versement progressif, 300 euros par mois, 2 200 euros en tout après son premier échec à l’examen. Une somme colossale pour le couple, mais il n’avait pas le choix : le crédit à 1 euro par jour, dont il avait vu la publicité partout, lui a été refusé. « On dépassait le plafond », explique la jeune femme. La famille n’a pas de voiture pour autant : la banque a refusé de leur faire crédit, cette fois parce qu’ils « vivent trop à découvert ». Ils ont essayé auprès d’autres banques, mais comme ils n’ont pas de CDI, aucune n’a accepté.

Les travaux qu’ils espéraient faire dans l’appartement attendront. Les visites chez le dentiste aussi. Jessica doit faire des soins importants, mais elle a dû renoncer face au prix, 800 euros pour les six dents de devant. Une fortune, d’autant qu’ils ne peuvent pas bénéficier de la couverture maladie universelle (CMU) car ils dépassent le plafond… de 10 euros. Coquette, Jessica a aussi fait une croix sur les rouges à lèvres et les produits pour les cheveux qu’elle aimait s’offrir au supermarché. Son dernier luxe ? « Un pull à 10 euros chez le Chinois », rougit-elle.

La priorité, ce sont les enfants. Cette année, il a fallu renoncer au calendrier de l’Avent et au McDo plus d’une fois par mois, malgré leurs demandes pressantes, mais au moins ils ont pu continuer à leur acheter des vêtements de marque. Question pratique, d’abord, ça dure plus longtemps. Question de dignité, surtout. « Les enfants sont tellement méchants entre eux s’ils ont des sous-marques. J’ai pas envie que leurs copains se moquent, explique Jessica. Et puis, c’est mieux pour l’image. » Le mois dernier, la remarque de son fils de 7 ans lui a fait un coup au cœur. « Il m’a dit qu’il en avait marre d’être pauvre », dit-elle avec un sourire gêné. Le petit garçon sait que sa mère va à Paris tous les samedis depuis trois semaines. « Il chante même les chansons d’Emmanuel Macron, s’amuse son père. Ça fait “Oh oh, Emmanuel Macron, oh, tête de con, on vient te chercher chez toi”. La vidéo a fait pas mal de vues sur Facebook. »

Arnaud et Jessica, qui se mobilisent pour la première fois, avaient voté Hollande en 2012, puis s’étaient abstenus en 2017. Ils ne rejettent pas les impôts, qu’ils jugent « utiles ». Ils se soucient aussi de l’écologie, et ne sont pas des violents. Mais ils ne supportent plus « de payer pour des politiciens qui ne nous représentent pas, qui se permettent de dormir à l’Assemblée pendant le vote des lois, alors que nous, ce serait direct une mise à pied, et qui parlent d’écologie tout en prenant l’avion », enrage Arnaud. Sur le rond-point, la veille, Jessica est passée pour la première fois à un mode d’action plus virulent. Samedi 15 décembre, ils seront tous les deux à Paris, dans la foule des « gilets jaunes ». Et ils crieront de nouveau le message qu’ils sont venus porter et que le pouvoir n’a, à leurs yeux, toujours pas compris.

Faustine Vincent (Envoyée spéciale à Sens (Yonne))

#giletsjaunes #gilets_jaunes

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/12/15/gilets-jaunes-arnaud-et-jessica-la-vie-a-l-euro-pres_5397995_823448.html

Arnaud, Jessica, Faustine, et les lecteurs du Monde | Daniel Schneidermann
►https://www.arretsurimages.net/chroniques/le-matinaute/arnaud-jessica-faustine-et-les-lecteurs-du-monde

Armée de ces édifiantes leçons de vie, Faustine Vincent est allée faire réagir une sociologue et un spécialiste des inégalités. “Ceux qui sont choqués sont issus des classes supérieures [surreprésentées parmi les lecteurs du Monde]. Cela relève d’une haine sociale et d’un mépris de classe” estime Louis Maurin, directeur de l’Observatoire des inégalités. Quant à Arnaud et Jessica, « ils appartiennent à une catégorie de plus en plus identifiée : les classes moyennes fragiles, explique Jeanne Lazarus. Ils cherchent à s’accrocher au mode de vie de la classe moyenne : être bien habillé, avoir une part de plaisirs, ne pas être uniquement dans la contrainte. » Or, ce que leur renvoient les commentaires, c’est qu’ils ne devraient pas s’autoriser ces “petits plaisirs”. “C’est très violent, socialement. C’est une façon (...)

Pourquoi le quotidien d’un couple de « gilets jaunes » dérange des lecteurs
►https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2018/12/20/pourquoi-le-quotidien-d-un-couple-de-gilets-jaunes-derange-une-partie-des-le

https://img.lemde.fr/2018/12/18/17/0/4474/2234/1440/720/60/0/1b89e6c_5923565-01-06.jpg

Dès la parution de l’article du Monde, ce fut un déferlement. Le portrait d’Arnaud et Jessica, un couple de jeunes parents mobilisés dans le mouvement des « gilets jaunes » et témoignant de leurs fins de mois difficiles, a suscité plus de 1 000 commentaires sur le site du Monde, et des centaines d’autres sur Twitter et Facebook.

Une écrasante majorité d’entre eux expriment une grande hostilité à l’égard du mode de vie de cette famille, installée dans l’Yonne. Tout leur est reproché : le fait qu’ils aient quatre enfants à 26 ans, qu’ils touchent 914 euros d’allocations familiales, que la mère ne travaille pas – même si c’est pour éviter des frais de garde trop élevés –, le montant de leurs forfaits téléphoniques, le fait qu’ils aillent au McDo, qu’ils achètent des vêtements de marque à leurs enfants, et même qu’ils aient un chien.

« Ceux qui sont choqués sont issus des classes supérieures. Cela relève d’une haine sociale et d’un mépris de classe », Louis Maurin

La virulence des commentaires sur Internet n’est ni une nouveauté ni représentative de l’ensemble de la population. Pour autant, le déluge d’attaques dont le couple fait l’objet interroge. Pourquoi tant d’hostilité ?

Je regarde régulièrement les commentaires, sur les sites, ou dans les fils twitter. C’est souvent tellement effrayant sur la haine de classe des riches, de ceux qui se croient "dominants", qui savent mieux que tout le monde ce qu’il faut faire. Un exemple ici, bien analysé.

Ces commentaires sont un reflet de la société, et des expression de pouvoir et de la lutte de classe dans ce qu’elle est vraiment l’expression des "classes dominantes".

Soyons clairs : la haine des dominants envers les pauvres est largement supérieure à celle que les pauvres exercent contre le système. Une telle asymétrie pose réellement des problèmes. Mais c’est le milliardaire Warren Buffet qui avait expliqué" cela au mieux : "La lutte de classe, bien sûr qu’elle existe... d’ailleurs, nous l’avons gagnée".

#Gilets_jaunes #Commentaires

Pourquoi le quotidien d’un couple de « gilets jaunes » dérange des lecteurs, Faustine Vincent
►https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2018/12/20/pourquoi-le-quotidien-d-un-couple-de-gilets-jaunes-derange-une-partie-des-le

Le portrait, dans « Le Monde », de jeunes parents mobilisés dans le mouvement a suscité un déluge de commentaires désobligeants à leur égard.

Dès la parution de l’article du Monde, ce fut un déferlement. Le portrait d’Arnaud et Jessica, un couple de jeunes parents mobilisés dans le mouvement des « #gilets_jaunes » et témoignant de leurs fins de mois difficiles, a suscité plus de 1 000 commentaires sur le site du Monde, et des centaines d’autres sur Twitter et Facebook.
Une écrasante majorité d’entre eux expriment une grande hostilité à l’égard du mode de vie de cette famille, installée dans l’Yonne. Tout leur est reproché : le fait qu’ils aient quatre enfants à 26 ans, qu’ils touchent 914 euros d’#allocations familiales, que la mère ne travaille pas – même si c’est pour éviter des frais de garde trop élevés –, le montant de leurs forfaits téléphoniques, le fait qu’ils aillent au McDo, qu’ils achètent des vêtements de marque à leurs enfants, et même qu’ils aient un chien.

« Ceux qui sont choqués sont issus des classes supérieures. Cela relève d’une haine sociale et d’un mépris de classe », Louis Maurin
La virulence des commentaires sur Internet n’est ni une nouveauté ni représentative de l’ensemble de la population. Pour autant, le déluge d’attaques dont le couple fait l’objet interroge. Pourquoi tant d’hostilité ? « Si l’article était paru dans la presse locale, cela n’aurait pas suscité de réaction, car c’est ce que les gens vivent. Il décrit simplement le quotidien d’une famille #populaire, observe Louis Maurin, directeur de l’Observatoire des inégalités. Ceux qui sont choqués sont issus des classes supérieures [surreprésentées parmi les lecteurs du Monde]. Cela relève d’une haine sociale et d’un mépris de classe », estime-t-il. Parmi les commentateurs figurent également des partisans d’Emmanuel Macron. L’un d’eux affirme ainsi que « rien ne démontre que la politique menée par [le président] et son gouvernement leur ait enlevé un centime de pouvoir d’achat ».

« Ils ne savent pas gérer leur budget »

Beaucoup ont sorti leur calculatrice pour se pencher sur les comptes du jeune couple, en additionnant le salaire d’Arnaud (1 493 euros) et les aides dont il bénéficie, moins les dépenses figurant dans l’article – lequel ne se voulait pas exhaustif et ne mentionnait donc pas certains frais comme la cantine des enfants, les transports en commun, la mutuelle, la redevance télé, l’abonnement à Internet, etc. Or, une fois le calcul fait, les lecteurs sont formels, « ils ne savent pas gérer leur budget ».

#allocataires #revenu #travailleurs_pauvres

L’apocalypse en jaune fluo - Le Monolecte
►https://blog.monolecte.fr/2018/12/18/lapocalypse-en-jaune-fluo

https://blog.monolecte.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/45326379135_5a079a8d68_k-1030x686.jpg

C’est une véritable apocalypse en jaune fluo qui a déferlé sur la France et qui a résisté, jour après jour, semaine après semaine, au froid, au découragement, à la violence, à la haine et quelque part, aussi, à la tentation du pire et du chaos. C’est une apocalypse au sens premier du terme : la révélation !

Parce que c’est cela qui s’est réellement passé et que plus rien ne pourra effacer : ce qui était invisible est devenu visible, ce qui était nié s’est imposé à tous, ce qui était caché a été exposé de manière irrévocable.

#gilets_jaunes #démocratie #confiscation_démocratique

Casual Connect acquired by Greenlit Content
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-12-07-casual-connect-acquired-by-greenlit-content

Event founder Jessica Tams joins #Media network with events team

Je suis allé voir le #film Suspiria (2018) de Luca Guadagnino, avec Dakota Johnson et Tilda Swinton
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY6QKRl56Ok

C’est évidemment le remake du Suspiria de Dario Argento (écrit avec Daria Nicolodi), de 1977 (avec Jessica Harper).

Généralement je ne vais pas voir les remakes des classiques de l’horreur. J’ai l’impression que ça donne soit des copies plan par plan mais avec des effets numériques tape à l’œil, soit des outrances gore. Mais là, un remake de Dario Argento, j’avais envie de voir.

Hé ben c’est pas mal du tout. Il y a une ambiance pesante tout le long, on est relativement surpris par les évolutions de la trame, et les actrices sont épatantes. Évidemment, Tilda Swinton (qui, je le découvre en regardant la fiche IMDB en sortant de la salle, joue aussi le vieux monsieur, ainsi que la mère Markos), pour te foutre les chocottes, tu peux pas te rater. (Je vois que Dakota Johnson et Tilda Swinton étaient déjà dans A Bigger Splash (2015) du même Luca Guadagnino. Pas encore vu.)

C’est largement de l’horreur d’ambiance, mais fais gaffe quand même : le premier meurtre est long et pénible, et il y a quelques effets gore. Un peu comme Hérédité (2018) : de l’ambiance, mais quand c’est horrible, c’est horrible…

Plutôt bonne idée d’ajouter des éléments de cadre historique à Berlin, avec la bande à Baader, des évocations de la guerre… c’est pas vraiment lourd, et ça donne un peu de fond à un scénario un peu con-con sinon (c’est des histoires de sabbat de sorcières, à la base).

Musique de Thom Yorke (Radiohead). Ouaip. Et un cameo de Jessica Harper. Ouaip aussi.

(En revanche, la programmation du Gaumont à Montpellier, je comprends pas : le film ne passe qu’une fois par jour, à 21h50.)

Les vidéos de la conférence #Information+ 2018 sont en ligne

▻https://vimeo.com/302828789

>> si vous voulez voir et écouter Sandra Rendgen (sur Minard), Sol Kawage (sur al couleur), Jessica Bellamy (sur l’utilisation de la visualisation de données pour le peuple), Fernanda Viégas (sur la visualisation du #machine_learning et de ses biais), Valentina D’Efilippo (sur les cartes du monde tracées de tête), Nadieh Bremer (sur le projet “Bussed Out”), ou encore Catherine D’Ignazio (#data_feminism) … et bien d’autres…

▻https://vimeo.com/informationplus

Projet de mon prochain patriarche sur l’or.
Patriarche n°8 - El Dorado
à partir de cette image

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Bernhard_otto_holterman_with_630lb_gold_from_Hill_End.jpg

"Bernard Otto Holtermann and the world’s largest “nugget” of gold, North Sydney, ca. 1874-1876 / montage photograph by American and Australasian Photographic Company" The “nugget” was found in Hill End, New South Wales by German prospector, Bernhard Otto Holtermannon 19th October 1872. More than half of the 630 lbs weight was pure gold, at that time having the value of 12,000 pounds ($24,000). Today, with gold worth say $1400 per ounce, the value today would be over $10 million. Three photographs were used to create this image of Holtermann, (supposedly holding the worlds’ largest accumulation of rock and gold ever brought to the surface in one piece). He was posed in the studio with his hand on a headclamp, the nugget was inserted and both placed on a photograph of the verandah of his mansion, built from the proceeds of his goldmine.[1]

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Fiche wikipédia sur la montagne d’or
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagne_d%27or_(mine)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Bento_Rodrigues%2C_Mariana%2C_Minas_Gerais_%2822526418164%29.jpg

Projet Montagne d’or en Guyane : après la mine de Lefa en Guinée, Nordgold peut-il faire mieux ? - Outre-mer la 1ère
▻https://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/pojet-montagne-guyane-apres-mine-lefa-guinee-nordgold-peut-il-fa

https://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/sites/regions_outremer/files/styles/top_big/public/assets/images/2018/10/15/63c7831585e8678765ec8a58bcfe758d-891390.jpg?itok=4Q-vra2k

L’Etat doit se prononcer sur la réalisation de ce projet avant la fin de l’année. François de Rugy, le ministre de la Transition écologique a été interrogé à plusieurs reprises par la presse à ce sujet. Il a déclaré sur France Inter que « le projet ne pouvait pas être mené tel qu’il avait été envisagé ». A l’Assemblée nationale, le ministre a été plus loin en ajoutant « qu’il fallait le revoir de fond en comble ».

Nordgold en Guinée
En attendant la décision de l’Etat, deux journalistes du Monde et de France Inter se sont intéressés aux activités en Guinée du groupe russe Nordgold censé se charger de l’exploitation de la Montagne d’or en Guyane.

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Le projet de Montagne d’or en Guyane va être revu pour obtenir le feu vert de l’Etat

Cette mine d’or, qui serait la plus grande jamais construite sur le territoire français, provoque l’hostilité d’une partie de la population.

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2018/09/07/montagne-d-or-nordgold-pret-a-revoir-son-projet-pour-obtenir-le-feu-vert-de-

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Guyane française : la traque des orpailleurs clandestins
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRtFvKlC43w

Cayenne : le nouveau far west français
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SebdJ9FN-mc

Chasseur de chercheur, l’or de Guyane
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5geIRZZPWSc

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Controverses géopolitiques 1A - Projet de la montagne d’or en Guyane
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qEeddqdPNA

Mines en Guyane : le projet Montagne d’or "inacceptable" pour les autochtones
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5XaI65Hn-Y

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mine d’or en Australie

https://smiffy2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/super-pit-1-1280x768.jpg

The ‘Super Pit’ is Australia’s largest open cut gold mine. It is 3.5 km long, 1.5 km wide and 350 m deep, and is large enough to be seen from space. It produces around 28 tonnes of gold per year, and they estimate it won’t reach the end of its life until 2021.

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Mine de Yanacocha (Pérou)
La plus grande mine d’or à ciel ouvert d’Amérique du sud

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/OperacionesYanacocha.jpg

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Cartographie

Schéma structural de la Guyane française( C. Delor , 2004 )

http://gisguyane.brgm.fr/images/geologie/struc_guyane.gif http://www.jump-voyage.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Carte-Guyane.png

▻http://sphaera.cartographie.ird.fr/images/telechargement/00756.pdf

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Vers la structuration d’une filière aurifère « durable » ? Etude du cas de la Guyane française
Jessica Oder

L’objectif de cet article est de se demander si la filière aurifère légale en Guyane française peut servir les objectifs du développement durable. En effet, cette filière est en proie à des difficultés : alors que les cours de l’or sont en constante augmentation, le nombre d’opérateurs miniers diminue constamment, depuis près de sept ans. Ce paradoxe aurifère guyanais trouve ses origines dans la volonté étatique française d’organiser la filière et d’en faire un exemple en matière de « durabilité », volonté clairement exprimée à la suite du Grenelle de l’Environnement. Principalement élaboré à partir d’entretiens semi-directifs et d’archives, l’article a notamment cherché à analyser les principaux éléments de cette structuration, le schéma départemental d’orientation minière (SDOM), en cours d’adoption, et plusieurs initiatives destinées à améliorer les pratiques des opérateurs miniers qui sont majoritairement des artisans. Toutefois, cette évolution révèle des antagonismes entre les parties prenantes (collectivités territoriales, services de l’État, opérateurs miniers et environnementalistes). Ces derniers ont fait surface lors de l’affaire du Camp Caïman, impliquant la multinationale Iamgold, et pendant le processus d’élaboration du SDOM lui-même. Des problématiques connexes telles que les revendications locales de gestion de la ressource aurifère, mais aussi et surtout l’orpaillage illégal, dressent des perspectives d’avenir plutôt incertaines pour la filière aurifère.

https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/12587/img-1-small580.jpg https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/12587/img-2.jpg https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/12587/img-3.jpg https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/12587/img-8.jpg https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/12587/img-10-small580.jpg

▻https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/12587

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#mad_meg #or

In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing ? | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is-seeing-still-believing

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bdc8daca965f9460b7f78b0/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/181112_r33195.jpg

In a media environment saturated with fake news, such technology has disturbing implications. Last fall, an anonymous Redditor with the username Deepfakes released a software tool kit that allows anyone to make synthetic videos in which a neural network substitutes one person’s face for another’s, while keeping their expressions consistent. Along with the kit, the user posted pornographic videos, now known as “deepfakes,” that appear to feature various Hollywood actresses. (The software is complex but comprehensible: “Let’s say for example we’re perving on some innocent girl named Jessica,” one tutorial reads. “The folders you create would be: ‘jessica; jessica_faces; porn; porn_faces; model; output.’ ”) Around the same time, “Synthesizing Obama,” a paper published by a research group at the University of Washington, showed that a neural network could create believable videos in which the former President appeared to be saying words that were really spoken by someone else. In a video voiced by Jordan Peele, Obama seems to say that “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit,” and warns that “how we move forward in the age of information” will determine “whether we become some kind of fucked-up dystopia.”

“People have been doing synthesis for a long time, with different tools,” he said. He rattled off various milestones in the history of image manipulation: the transposition, in a famous photograph from the eighteen-sixties, of Abraham Lincoln’s head onto the body of the slavery advocate John C. Calhoun; the mass alteration of photographs in Stalin’s Russia, designed to purge his enemies from the history books; the convenient realignment of the pyramids on the cover of National Geographic, in 1982; the composite photograph of John Kerry and Jane Fonda standing together at an anti-Vietnam demonstration, which incensed many voters after the Times credulously reprinted it, in 2004, above a story about Kerry’s antiwar activities.

“In the past, anybody could buy Photoshop. But to really use it well you had to be highly skilled,” Farid said. “Now the technology is democratizing.” It used to be safe to assume that ordinary people were incapable of complex image manipulations. Farid recalled a case—a bitter divorce—in which a wife had presented the court with a video of her husband at a café table, his hand reaching out to caress another woman’s. The husband insisted it was fake. “I noticed that there was a reflection of his hand in the surface of the table,” Farid said, “and getting the geometry exactly right would’ve been really hard.” Now convincing synthetic images and videos were becoming easier to make.

The acceleration of home computing has converged with another trend: the mass uploading of photographs and videos to the Web. Later, when I sat down with Efros in his office, he explained that, even in the early two-thousands, computer graphics had been “data-starved”: although 3-D modellers were capable of creating photorealistic scenes, their cities, interiors, and mountainscapes felt empty and lifeless. True realism, Efros said, requires “data, data, data” about “the gunk, the dirt, the complexity of the world,” which is best gathered by accident, through the recording of ordinary life.

Today, researchers have access to systems like ImageNet, a site run by computer scientists at Stanford and Princeton which brings together fourteen million photographs of ordinary places and objects, most of them casual snapshots posted to Flickr, eBay, and other Web sites. Initially, these images were sorted into categories (carrousels, subwoofers, paper clips, parking meters, chests of drawers) by tens of thousands of workers hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Then, in 2012, researchers at the University of Toronto succeeded in building neural networks capable of categorizing ImageNet’s images automatically; their dramatic success helped set off today’s neural-networking boom. In recent years, YouTube has become an unofficial ImageNet for video. Efros’s lab has overcome the site’s “platform bias”—its preference for cats and pop stars—by developing a neural network that mines, from “life style” videos such as “My Spring Morning Routine” and “My Rustic, Cozy Living Room,” clips of people opening packages, peering into fridges, drying off with towels, brushing their teeth. This vast archive of the uninteresting has made a new level of synthetic realism possible.

In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a program in Media Forensics, or MediFor, focussed on the threat that synthetic media poses to national security. Matt Turek, the program’s manager, ticked off possible manipulations when we spoke: “Objects that are cut and pasted into images. The removal of objects from a scene. Faces that might be swapped. Audio that is inconsistent with the video. Images that appear to be taken at a certain time and place but weren’t.” He went on, “What I think we’ll see, in a couple of years, is the synthesis of events that didn’t happen. Multiple images and videos taken from different perspectives will be constructed in such a way that they look like they come from different cameras. It could be something nation-state driven, trying to sway political or military action. It could come from a small, low-resource group. Potentially, it could come from an individual.”

As with today’s text-based fake news, the problem is double-edged. Having been deceived by a fake video, one begins to wonder whether many real videos are fake. Eventually, skepticism becomes a strategy in itself. In 2016, when the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, Donald Trump acknowledged its accuracy while dismissing his statements as “locker-room talk.” Now Trump suggests to associates that “we don’t think that was my voice.”

“The larger danger is plausible deniability,” Farid told me. It’s here that the comparison with counterfeiting breaks down. No cashier opens up the register hoping to find counterfeit bills. In politics, however, it’s often in our interest not to believe what we are seeing.

As alarming as synthetic media may be, it may be more alarming that we arrived at our current crises of misinformation—Russian election hacking; genocidal propaganda in Myanmar; instant-message-driven mob violence in India—without it. Social media was enough to do the job, by turning ordinary people into media manipulators who will say (or share) anything to win an argument. The main effect of synthetic media may be to close off an escape route from the social-media bubble. In 2014, video of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner helped start the Black Lives Matter movement; footage of the football player Ray Rice assaulting his fiancée catalyzed a reckoning with domestic violence in the National Football League. It seemed as though video evidence, by turning us all into eyewitnesses, might provide a path out of polarization and toward reality. With the advent of synthetic media, all that changes. Body cameras may still capture what really happened, but the aesthetic of the body camera—its claim to authenticity—is also a vector for misinformation. “Eyewitness video” becomes an oxymoron. The path toward reality begins to wash away.

#Fake_news #Image #Synthèse

Quelques aventures des cagoules

La vérité sur un mouvement terroriste (un de plus !) qui fait trembler l’État
ou comment devenir anarcho-autonome en 4 leçons

Par Jessica Gould

▻http://jefklak.org/quelques-aventures-des-cagoules

Cette BD est née il y a une douzaine d’années dans un squat, quelque part en banlieue parisienne. L’idée était de jouer sur l’autodérision, de porter sur le mouvement social auquel nous appartenions ce regard grinçant que nous portions sur le monde. Bref, de pouvoir se moquer de certains travers d’un milieu « libertaire » en jouant sur ses contradictions, ses conflits, ses postures parfois… Mais il ne s’est jamais agi de régler des comptes. Au contraire. Il était bien question de mettre en déroute cette figure caricaturale que le discours de l’État et les médias tentaient de nous coller à la peau sous le nom d’« anarcho-autonome » ou d’« ultra-gauche », nouvel avatar d’un ennemi intérieur fantasmé.Peu de temps après, aux paroles suivirent les actes, puisque plusieurs affaires pour « organisation terroriste » se succédèrent, condamnant certain·es de nos proches à plus d’un an de prison pour quelques faits dérisoires. Le numéro 2 des Cagoules « Spécial répression » n’a jamais vu le jour, étant donné que la « répression », justement, nous étions en train de la vivre de plein fouet. Et quand les loups sont lâchés, il peut arriver de manquer d’humour (mais heureusement, cela n’est que passager)

Cette bande dessinée est issue du deuxième numéro de la revue Jef klak, « Bout d’ficelle », encore disponible en librairie.

Télécharger la BD en PDF, ce qui permettra une meilleure lecture !

▻http://jefklak.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Cagoules_JefKlak.pdf

http://jefklak.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Une_Cagoules_Klak.jpg

The Growth of Sinclair’s Conservative Media Empire | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/the-growth-of-sinclairs-conservative-media-empire

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bbe3918879c932d31ea7b06/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/181022_r33045.jpg

Sinclair is the largest owner of television stations in the United States, with a hundred and ninety-two stations in eighty-nine markets. It reaches thirty-nine per cent of American viewers. The company’s executive chairman, David D. Smith, is a conservative whose views combine a suspicion of government, an aversion to political correctness, and strong libertarian leanings. Smith, who is sixty-eight, has a thick neck, deep under-eye bags, and a head of silvery hair. He is an enthusiast of fine food and has owned farm-to-table restaurants in Harbor East, an upscale neighborhood in Baltimore. An ardent supporter of Donald Trump, he has not been shy about using his stations to advance his political ideology. Sinclair employees say that the company orders them to air biased political segments produced by the corporate news division, including editorials by the conservative commentator Mark Hyman, and that it feeds interviewers questions intended to favor Republicans.

In some cases, anchors have been compelled to read from scripts prepared by Sinclair. In April, 2018, dozens of newscasters across the country parroted Trump’s invectives about “fake news,” saying, “Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” In response, Dan Rather, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” wrote, on Twitter, “News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn’t journalism. It’s propaganda. It’s Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.”

It’s unclear whether Sinclair is attempting to influence the politics of its viewers or simply appealing to positions that viewers may already have—or both. Andrew Schwartzman, a telecommunications lecturer at Georgetown Law School, told me, “I don’t know where their personal philosophy ends and their business goals begin. They’re not the Koch brothers, but they reflect a deep-seated conservatism and generations of libertarian philosophy that also happen to help their business.”

Sinclair has even greater ambitions for expansion. In May, 2017, the company announced a proposed $3.9-billion merger between Sinclair and Tribune Media Company, which owns forty-two television stations. The merger would make Sinclair far larger than any other broadcaster in the country, with stations beaming into seventy per cent of American households. The proposal alarmed regulatory and free-speech experts. Michael Copps, a former official at the Federal Communications Commission, told me, “One of the goals of the First Amendment is to make sure the American people have the news and information they need to make intelligent decisions about our democracy, and I think we’re pretty close to a situation where the population lacks the ability to do that. That’s the whole premise of self-government.” He went on, “There are a lot of problems facing our country, but I don’t know one as important as this. When you start dismantling our news-and-information infrastructure, that’s poison to self-government and poison to democracy.”

In subsequent years, Smith took measures to deepen Sinclair’s influence among policymakers, apparently recognizing that the company’s profits were dependent upon regulatory decisions made in Washington. One of Smith’s first notable forays into politics was his support for Robert Ehrlich, Jr., a Republican congressman who represented Maryland from 1995 until 2003. Sinclair became a top donor to Ehrlich and, in 2001, Ehrlich sent the first of several letters on Sinclair’s behalf to Michael Powell, who had recently become the chair of the F.C.C. The commission was investigating a request from Sinclair to buy a new group of stations, and Ehrlich protested the “unnecessary delays on pending applications.” The F.C.C.’s assistant general counsel responded that Ehrlich’s communication had violated procedural rules. Ehrlich sent another message, alleging that the delays were politically motivated and threatening to “call for a congressional investigation into this matter.” He added, “Knowing that you have served as Chairman for a few short months, we would prefer to give you an opportunity to address these concerns.” The proposed acquisitions were approved.

A former general-assignment reporter at the station, Jonathan Beaton, told me, “Almost immediately, I could tell it was a very corrupt culture, where you knew from top down there were certain stories you weren’t going to cover. They wanted you to keep your head down and not upset the fruit basket. I’m a Republican, and I was still appalled by what I saw at Sinclair.” Beaton characterized the man-on-the-street segments as “Don’t forget to grab some random poor soul on the street and shove a microphone in their face and talk about what the Democrats have done wrong.” He said that reporters generally complied because of an atmosphere of “intimidation and fear.”

After Trump’s victory, it looked as though Sinclair’s investment in the candidate would pay off. In January, 2017, Trump appointed Ajit Pai, a vocal proponent of media deregulation, to be the chair of the F.C.C. Pai, formerly an associate general counsel at Verizon and an aide to Senators Jeff Sessions and Sam Brownback, was exactly the sort of commission head that Sinclair had been hoping for. He believed that competition from technology companies such as Google had made many government restrictions on traditional media irrelevant—an argument that echoed Smith’s views on ownership caps and other regulations. Sinclair executives quickly tried to cultivate a relationship with Pai; shortly after the election, he addressed a gathering of Sinclair managers at the Four Seasons in Baltimore. He also met with David Smith and Sinclair’s C.E.O., Christopher Ripley, the day before Trump’s Inauguration.

It’s not unusual for business executives to meet with the chair of the F.C.C., but Pai soon announced a series of policy changes that seemed designed to help Sinclair. The first was the reinstatement of the ultrahigh-frequency discount, an arcane rule that digital technology had rendered obsolete. The move served no practical purpose, but it freed Sinclair to acquire many more stations without bumping up against the national cap.

The F.C.C. soon made other regulatory modifications that were helpful to Sinclair. It eliminated a rule requiring television stations to maintain at least one local studio in licensed markets, essentially legitimatizing Sinclair’s centralized news model. Perhaps most perniciously, Pai took steps toward approving a new broadcast-transmission standard called Next Gen TV, which would require all consumers in the U.S. to purchase new televisions or converter devices. A subsidiary of Sinclair owns six patents necessary for the new standard, which could mean billions of dollars in earnings for the company. Jessica Rosenworcel, the sole Democratic commissioner at the F.C.C., told me, “It’s striking that all of our media policy decisions seem almost custom-built for this one company. Something is wrong.” Rosenworcel acknowledged that many F.C.C. policies need to be modernized, but, she said, “broadcasting is unique. It uses the public airwaves, it’s a public trust.” She added, “I don’t think those ideas are retrograde. They are values we should sustain.”

The F.C.C. and the D.O.J. both warned Sinclair about the dummy divestitures, insisting that the company find independent owners in ten problematic markets. According to a lawsuit later filed by Tribune, instead of taking steps to appease regulators, Sinclair executives “antagonized DOJ and FCC staff” by acting “confrontational” and “belittling.” The company offered to make sales in only four of the markets, and told the Justice Department that it would have to litigate for any further concessions. One Sinclair lawyer told government representatives, “Sue me.” There was no tactical reason for Sinclair to take such a combative and self-sabotaging stance. Instead, the episode seemed to reflect how Trump’s own corruption and conflicts of interest have filtered into the business community. One industry expert who followed the proceedings closely told me that the company clearly “felt that, with the President behind them, why would the commission deny them anything?

Then, in April, the Web site Deadspin edited the broadcasts of Sinclair anchors reciting the script about fake news into one terrifying montage, with a tapestry of anchors in different cities speaking in unison. The video ignited public outrage, and Trump tweeted a defense of Sinclair, calling it “far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.” (In a statement, a spokesperson for Sinclair said, “This message was not presented as news and was not intended to be political—there was no mention of President Trump, political parties, policy issues, etc. It was a business objective centered on attracting more viewers.”)

#Médias #Concentration #Dérégulation #Etats-Unis #Sinclair