Black Lives Matter: And what people here are doing about it

Black Lives Matter has spread to many countries around the world, opposition to racist statues (e.g. a slaver in England, the butcher Leopold in Belgium), peaceful protests everywhere and hostile government responses in some of them (e.g. Australia).

Taiwan now has its own Black Lives Matter movement begun last week, organized by several ex-pats from the US and other countries.  It’s amazing how much people can accomplish with no money and little time.  There was a Black Lives Matter event on Saturday night, though regrettably I couldn’t attend because of my back.  There is another larger public demonstration planned for next Saturday which I intend to attend.

These meetings and demonstrations have a new impetus because of recent events in Taiwan.  In early May, a dance troupe inexplicably did a “performance” in blackface.  And did it a second time after already knowing it was inappropriate.  More below the fold.

[Read more…]

Music Notes: Songs for Donald Trump’s birthday

Previously I’ve compared Cheetolini (Donald Trump) to Nikita Khrushchev, hoping for a bloodless coup within the US government.  Thus far, no such luck.  But he’s sounding more and more like a Tin Pot Dictator Tin Foil Hat Dictator like Ceausescu, demanding the public fawn over and praise him on his upcoming 74th birthday.

Trump Campaign’s Plea For Video Messages To Celebrate President’s Birthday Backfires

Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign put out a call on Twitter Thursday for people to film and send in videos wishing the president a happy 74th birthday, which is on June 14.

“We want to make this year President Trump’s BEST BIRTHDAY EVER,” read Trump’s campaign website, which provided a form for people to fill out and upload clips. The campaign promised to show Trump “the first 500 responses TONIGHT.”

[. . .]

my birthday is also June 14 and i invite you to send your selfie videos of you furious and screaming in your SUV to me instead

I doubt we’ll such much of that.  Pitchforks and (non-tiki) torches are more likely.

But I’ll be nice and dedicate a song to him: Trooper’s “General Hand Grenade“, recorded in 1975, back when Cheetolini was all of 29 years old (corrected).

[Read more…]

Music Notes: Birth and death notices

First this so it’s buried below more important posts to follow.

It’s been a busy week in musical notices. June 3rd marked the seventieth birthdays of two significant women in popular music.  The same day in 1950, 400km apart.

Deniece Williams is an R&B singer with four grammies and multiple #1 hits. Williams’s two biggest hits were “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late”, a 1978 duet with Johnny Mathis, and “Let’s Hear It For The Boy” in 1984.

Suzi Quatro is credited as the first woman musician (not just singer) to lead a successful mainstream rock band.  1973’s “Can The Can” was her first hit, while “Stumblin’ In” (a duet with Chris Norman of Smokie) was her only US hit.  She sold 50 million records worldwide, but is a one hit wonder in her own country (outside of Michigan).  Quatro is more famous in the US for her appearances as Leather Tuscadero on “Happy Days”.  A documentary on Quatro’s career will be released on July 1st.

Now for the sad notes….

Rupert Hine (born September 21, 1947) died of undisclosed causes on June 5th, age 72.  Hine was one of the best and most high profile record producers of the 1980s and 1990s, his work crossing many categories and many best selling albums and artists: Tina Turner, The Fixx, Rush, Stevie Nicks, Saga, Chris de Burgh, Howard Jones, Suzanne Vega, etc.   Some might describe Hine’s production as “sterile”, but his work aged well unlike a lot of 1980s producers.  His sound was clean, instruments are distinct, and he used few or no dated effects (e.g. cheap synthesizers, gated drums).

Steve Priest (February 23, 1948) of The Sweet died on June 4th of undisclosed causes.  He was the group’s bass player and sang on some songs like “Ballroom Blitz“, eventually taking over singing duties after Brian Connolly left the band. Other favourites of mine include “Action” and “Fox On The Run“.

 

Caught Out: If someone hears you, claim someone else said it

In June 2010, humanitarian ship the Rachel Corrie was bound for Gaza, Palestine, bringing medical and other supplies.  The Israeli Terrorist Force (ITF) confronted the Rachel Corrie’s crew on the radio.  The ITF falsely reported that the RC crew had said “go back to auschwitz”.  After the recording was professionally examined, the ITF and Israeli government admitted falsifying it and adding the words themselves.

I mention this because a similar story from New York has emerged today, with the lie going the other direction.  From TMZ:

NYPD Scanner: Calls for Violence Against Protesters … ‘Shoot Motherf*****s’ Heard, But Who Said It?

NYPD officers allegedly urged police to shoot and run over protesters — at least that’s what was heard over the citywide police scanner … but the question now is whether those words came from a cop or someone who stole a radio.

As protesters marched toward the 77th Precinct in Brooklyn, you could hear someone on the scanner calling in to describe the scene before another voice urges cops to, “Shoot those motherf*****s.”

Later in the evening, the scanner picked up what sounded like officers saying they were surrounded by protesters near the intersection of Albany and Dean Streets in Crown Heights. A voice on the scanner responds, “Run them over.”

Obviously, the scanner broadcasts are beyond alarming IF they really came from police officers. NYPD tells us … they’re aware of the comments and are looking into it.

TMZ independently found the radio transmissions on a website that records police scanners — so the audio is legit. However, law enforcement sources tell us … during this latest wave of civil unrest, police radios have gone missing, and there is a possibility the transmissions on the scanner did not originate from police.

Cops no longer deserve the benefit of doubt nor the presumption of innocence.  When they claim, “the radios were stolen from police cars,” it’s safe to assume they are lying and those words were spoken by cops.

 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

I’ll correct this on the weekend when I have time. I hate my memory issues.

It should also be noted that the same night June 2010 that Israel made the false accusation, ITF pirates boarded the Rachel Corrie and murdered nine crew members in cold blood, executing them with bullets fired at point blank range. No Israelis were ever brought to trial for the murder of unarmed sailors in Palestinian waters.

How many protesters in the US this week have been murdered in a similar fashion, unarmed and murdered with a shot from point blank?

Gas Chambers: ICE is HDQ Neutral Evil

As we all know, the ICE concentration camps are chambers of horrors.  ICE has (I suspect intentionally) employed sexual predators and allowed them to molest and rape children.  But they don’t see that as their problem; ICE denies any responsibility for the sexual abuses.

As of this week, they have begun poisoning the hostages and kidnapped with “HDQ Neutral”, a toxin that will cause painful and irreversible damage.  It’s dangerous and debilitating when used on adults, potentially fatal when used on children.

Did I say used on?  I’m sorry, I meant that ICE are not spraying directly on people (no doubt for “plausible deniability”).  They are spraying it on surfaces inside of buildings, while the victims are inside, forced to breathe it in aerosol form.  The instructions for HDQ Neutral specify adequate ventilation with no people around, time to allow it to disperse AND rinsing or washing it off.  (Why does the corporate media repeated use “say”?  Are they inferring the victims are all liars and ICE is telling the truth?)

Immigrant detainees say ICE is using coronavirus disinfectant sprays that cause bleeding, burns and pain

Advocacy organizations have filed complaints against Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in Florida and California, claiming that migrants being held there are suffering severe side effects from disinfectant sprays being used to combat the coronavirus.

One of the complaints was sent by Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and the advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants on May 21. That complaint, which focused on the Adelanto detention center in California, included testimonials from detainees who called in to a hotline run by Freedom for Immigrants.

“The guards have started spraying this chemical everywhere, all over everything, all the time. It causes a terrible reaction on our skin,” one of the detainees said, adding, “When I blow my nose, blood comes out. They are treating us like animals. One person fainted and was taken out, I don’t know what happened to them. There is no fresh air.”

[. . .]

Some of the detainees who called the hotline identified the chemical being sprayed at Adelanto as a disinfectant called HDQ Neutral, based on labeled bottles they saw at the facility.

Safety guidelines for HDQ Neutral issued by its manufacturer, Spartan Chemical, warn that the disinfectant is “harmful if inhaled” and that it “causes severe skin burns and serious eye damage.” The guidelines specify that HDQ Neutral should be used “only outdoors or in a well-ventilated area” and protective gear should be worn while handling the chemical.

According to the complaint about Adelanto, which is one of the country’s largest ICE detention centers, staff there are spraying HDQ Neutral “every 15-30 minutes” on surfaces throughout the housing unit, which lacks ventilation. The complaint said “at least nine” detainees have experienced severe symptoms from the spray since May 11, including blisters, rashes, bleeding, fainting, breathing difficulties, headaches, stomach pain and nausea. Multiple detainees complained of receiving inadequate care for these symptoms.

The warning labels issued by the government of Hawai’i say this about HDQ Neutral:

PRECAUTIONARY STATEMENTS

HAZARDS TO HUMANS AND DOMESTIC ANIMALS

DANGER. CORROSIVE.

Causes irreversible eye damage and skin burns. Harmful if swallowed. Do not get in eyes, on skin,or on clothing. Wear protective eyewear (goggles, face shield or safety glasses), protective clothing and protective gloves(rubber or chemical resistant). Harmful if inhaled. Wash thoroughly with soap and water after handling. Removecontaminated clothing and wash clothing before reuse.

FIRST AID

IF IN EYES: Hold eye open and rinse slowly and gently with water for 15 – 20 minutes.  Remove contact lenses, if present,after the first 5 minutes, then continue rinsing eye.

IF ON SKIN OR CLOTHING: Take off contaminated clothing. Rinse skin immediately with plenty of water for 15 – 20 minutes.

IF SWALLOWED: Call a poison control center or doctor immediately for treatment advice. Have person sip a glass of water ifable to swallow. Do not induce vomiting unless told to do so by the poison control center or doctor. Do not give anything bymouth to an unconscious person.

IF INHALED: Move person to fresh air. If person is not breathing, call 911 or an ambulance, then give artificial respiration,preferably by mouth-to-mouth, if possible.Call a poison control center or doctor for treatment advice. Have the product container or label with you when calling apoison control center or doctor or going for treatment.

NOTE TO PHYSICIAN: Probable mucosal damage may contraindicate the use of gastric lavage. Measures against circulatoryshock, respiratory depression and convulsion may be needed.

ICE, Cheetolini and the regime couldn’t be any more blatant about their intent if they were using Zyklon B.

I Wonder: Who are the real terrorists?

So Cheetolini plans to label Antifa a “terrorist group” because a few members vandalized a pigsty or two.  It sounds like another “domino theory”, another “war on drugs”, another “war on terror”: excuses to perpetrate violence for no reason other than to terrorize and demonstrate white power.

What does that make him and his government that continue to poison the water in Flint and North Dakota?  That continue to deny water to First Nations people in Arizona?  How is that not terrorism and destruction of people property, endangerment of their lives?

A burnt pigsty WON’T kill anyone once the fire goes out.  Poisoned water and intentionally starving a popuation of water definitely will kill, both now and for years to come.

Please Note: May 31 is World No Tobacco Day

As the title says, Sunday May 31 is the WHO’s World No Tobacco Day.  The theme this year is “Tobacco Breaks Your Heart”, about the damage tobacco does to organs other than the lungs.  That’s fortuitous, considering it was chosen before COVID-19 appeared and started causing strokes and other problems to people with pre-existing conditions.  The death rates for people with cancer are high, and smokers are at least twice as likely to die as non-smokers.

I wrote several posts about World No Tobacco Day on my fascistbook page.  They are public, so you should be able to view the images, read the text, and link to the news items I cited.

Banners and posters for the day

The increased health risks from COVID-19

Racism and predatory capitalism: tobacco companies and developing countries

The harm that smoking can do

Smokers are not environmentalists, no matter what they claim. Cigarette butts are made of plastic and do not biodegrade; they just break up into microfibres. Every butt thrown down a sewer goes into rivers, lakes, oceans and animal stomachs.

 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

If you consider this an acceptable image, you’re unacceptable.  Animals eat cigarette butts because they’re small and soft.  They suffer for it twice: first because they’re full of toxins, second because the animal thinks it’s full, so it ends up malnourished.

Storm drains are for STORM WATER, not for filthy and toxic cigarette butts.  Storm drains send water to rivers, lakes and oceans, and the cigarette butts thrown into them will make that same journey.

 

Twice as many LGBTQIA People smoke as in the general population, a ludicrous number caused by tobacco marketing, social ostracism, and possibly some people’s desperate need for inclusion.

Smoking isn’t just about the smokers.  Second hand smoke is proven to kill.  According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it takes 52 smokers to kill one non-smoker.  A million people die every year from smoke that they never voluntarily chose to breathe, from garbage they were assaulted with by selfish people.  Don’t be a butthead.

If there is one positive to come out of COVID-19, smokers worldwide have quit smoking by the hundreds of thousands.  Limited access to cigarettes, social distancing, quarantines, lack of income and other reasons are causing people to quit voluntarily.  With any luck, permanently.

Now if only governments around the world would do what Australia has done: charge a reasonable price for cigarettes.  Australians currenly pay AUD$40 (TWD$800, USD$26.70) for a pack – a single box of twenty cancer sticks, not an entire carton.  But it should be more.  Let them pay to cover health care costs and to clean up the environment.

A TERF Turfed: Rowling is a three time loser this week

First time: Around May 19, JK Rowling (aka TERFling, aka Scowling) retweeted a hate filled, anti-Trans post by Fred Sargeant.  He is a cis white gay male who was around and part of the elimination of Transgender and non-white people from the New York pride parades in the early 1970s.

Second time: Nicola Spurling of Vancouver (former Green Party candidate and Transgender activist) posted an innocuous comment on twitter:  “Definitely something to keep a close eye on. In recent years, Rowling has made it clear that she can no longer be trusted around children.”  Being unhinged as only a TERF can be, TERFling and her overeager lawyers threatened Spurling into silence.

TERFling has made it clear opposes internationally recognized WPATH medical care for Transgender childre.  Given that TERFling does not have a PhD in pediatrics and has given Wakefield-level quality “advice” on Transgender kids, it could hardly be called libellous for Spurling to say TERFling is a danger to the health and welfare of Transgender children.

Third time: TERFling incompetently spat profanity filled anti-Trans hate speech in the direction of a nine year old child.

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has continued her streak of endorsing anti-transgender speech, but this time the beloved writer has accidentally involved a nine-year-old girl in her prejudice.

Rowling has been retweeting children’s drawings of an upcoming character for a project she’s working on. But when she shared the girl’s sketch, she also included a line copied from an anti-transgender website that included the f-bomb and extremist rhetoric.

Did TERFling have another “senior moment”, as she calls it?  Was she tired when she wrote it?  Or was she perhaps feeling emotional after her bigotry was twice pointed out in a week?  (Those are questions, not accusations or statements.)

You Can’t Spell: “Lysol drinker” without Lysenko

The incompetence of Cheetolini’s regime is comparable to that of Nikita Khrushchev: the mass deaths, the Lysenkoism, the failed foreign policies.  The big difference between the coup in the USSR in 1964 and the US of today is that no one has the spine to do to Cheetolini what the Soviets did to Khrushchev.  No doubt Cheetolini, his cast of clowns and trumpkins would be ignorant enough to take that as a “threat of violence”.  From Politico, emphasis in the text is mine:

Bad state data hides coronavirus threat as Trump pushes reopening

Federal and state officials across the country have altered or hidden public health data crucial to tracking the coronavirus’ spread, hindering the ability to detect a surge of infections as President Donald Trump pushes the nation to reopen rapidly.

In at least a dozen states, health departments have inflated testing numbers or deflated death tallies by changing criteria for who counts as a coronavirus victim and what counts as a coronavirus test, according to reporting from POLITICO, other news outlets and the states’ own admissions. Some states have shifted the metrics for a “safe” reopening; Arizona sought to clamp down on bad news at one point by simply shuttering its pandemic modeling. About a third of the states aren’t even reporting hospital admission data — a big red flag for the resurgence of the virus.

The spotty data flow is particularly worrisome to public health officials trying to help Americans make decisions about safely venturing out. The lack of accurate and consistent Covid-19 data, coupled with the fact that the White House no longer has regular briefings where officials reinforce the need for ongoing social distancing, makes that task even harder.

New examples seem to sprout up daily. The District of Columbia this week became the latest jurisdiction to endure scrutiny, with the city using a “community spread” metric — excluding nursing homes, correctional facilities and others — as a justification for reopening the area.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds told reporters that the state will share information about outbreaks at meatpacking plants only upon request. And Georgia has only just begun to differentiate between the two types of coronavirus tests it’s been adding into its testing totals for weeks.

“All these stories about undercounts, overcounts, miscounts, are undermining our ability to deal with the pandemic,” said Irwin Redlener, a public health expert at Columbia University. The country, he said, is confronting an “unheard of level of chaos in the data, the protocols, the information.”

Originally the falsified numbers were likely to cover up the inherent racism of Cheetolini’s policy, i.e. causing the deaths of as many Black, People of Colour and poor as he could.  But now, like Khrushchev listening to Lysenko, Cheetolini and his sycophants (Birx is his Lysenko) think they can dictate reality from the white people’s house, that money will trump the disease.

In reality, he’s destroying the foundations of the entire economy and society and will end up in collapse.  But unlike the six times he went bankrupt before, there’s no one big enough to bail him out this time.  Not even the IMF or World Bank have that much.

Someone really needs to grow a spine and replicate the bloodless coup of 1964 while Cheetolini is golfing.  Compared to Cheetolini, Khrushchev was competent.

They Lied: “Marriage equality” is a sham and a shambles

In 2018, Taiwan’s supreme court’s decision that there was no argument against marriage equality and that it would have no bearing on anyone else’s rights.  The various parties in the Legislative Yuan could not come agreement on marriage legislation, so on May 19, 2019, Taiwan maggaige equality supposedly became automatic.

A year on, that claim has proven to be a farce.  There is no “equality” when some are excluded from the rights that others enjoy.  Perhaps some of the four thousand couples who married in the past year may benefit from this, but others do not and face discrimination.

If a cisgender binary foreigner wants to marry a cisgender Taiwanese national of the opposite cisgender, they can, and their marriage will be recognized and the foreigner have all the rights and privileges of marriage.

If an LGBTQIA foreigner wants to marry a Taiwanese national, that marriage will only be recognized by Taiwan if the foreigner’s own country would recognize it.  In other words, an LGBTQIA foreigner from a bigoted and repressive state cannot legally marry a Taiwanese person, not even they would face oppression, imprisonment or murder in their former country.  If Cheetolini manages to overturn rights in the US, marriages between Taiwanese and those from the US would be voided.

This is not marriage equality.  It is exclusion at best, pandering to oppressive regimes at worst especially for foreigners who have emigrated from (read: escaped) a country where their very existence was under threat.  And because their marriage is not recognized, they could be forced back against their will if their residency visa expires.  Emphasis below is mine:

LGBT groups launch petition to allow cross-national same-sex marriage

Taipei, May 9 (CNA) Scores of volunteers from LGBT groups in Taiwan embarked on a signature campaign Saturday to petition the government on laws that restrict same-sex marriage between couples from different countries, under certain circumstances.

[. . .]

The petition stems from the Act Governing the Choice of Law in Civil Matters Involving Foreign Elements that in effect excludes couples that are from countries where gay marriage is prohibited, and also in cases where one partner is from such a country.

Under that act, people from all but 28 countries in the world are excluded, the [Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights] said.

 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Rights group urges Taiwan to allow cross-national same-sex marriage

Taipei, May 17 (CNA) The Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR) and several same-sex couples on Sunday urged Taiwan’s government to allow same-sex marriages between couples from different countries.

[. . .]

“For many cross-national same-sex couples, including me and my wife, our efforts to be with our loved ones are symbolized by our old plane ticket stubs,” said Kaili Lai, a Taiwanese LGBT married to a Malaysian Tan Bee Guat.

According to Lai, she and Tan held a simple wedding in Malaysia in 2016 with the blessings of their parents.

Tan was not allowed to live in Taiwan, however because she was not a Taiwanese citizen and could not get a residence certificate because her marriage to Lai was not recognized.

They had to fly frequently between Taiwan and Malaysia to see each other, leaving Tan little choice but to enroll in a university in Taiwan as a freshmen at the age of 35 to be able to stay in Taiwan on a student visa.

But Tan is graduating next month and will have to enroll in a graduate school program to continue staying in Taiwan.

Another cross-national same-sex couple, Joyce from Taiwan and Queenie from the Philippines, are facing the same predicament — Queenie has to enroll in National Taiwan Normal University for the same purpose.

These are not the only people.  There is at least one person from Honduras and others from Latin American countries where they could face violence (physical assault, the torture of “reparative therapy”), imprisonment or murder for being LGBTQIA.

There is no justifiable reason for an exclusionary rule, especially since (as I write) Taiwan is offering refugee status to people from Hong Kong who have no personal, familial, social or legal connection to the country.

93 percent say marriage equality law has had no impact on them

Taipei, May 15 (CNA) As Taiwan approaches the one-year anniversary of its legalization of same-sex marriage on May 24, nearly 93 percent of Taiwanese say the policy has had no impact on them, according to the results of a survey released Friday.

At a press conference, Equal Love Taiwan — a coalition of five LGBT rights organizations — announced the results of an April 29-May 2 survey it conducted on the Taiwan public’s attitudes toward a range of issues affecting the LGBT community.

Music Rules: It’s Bruce Cockburn’s birthday and career anniversary

Bruce Cockburn was born May 27, 1945, seventy five years old today. He is a Canadian music legend, releasing albums since 1970 until today, fifty years into his career.  Along with being the face of Canadian folk-rock, he has been a voice of conscience for people and causes both within Canada and abroad.  He is certainly no friend or fan of the US government.

The Canadian Encyclopedia: Bruce Cockburn

Bruce Cockburn (official site)

Cockburn Project (fan site)

On the left, Cockburn circa 1983 and the album “Stealing Fire”.  On the right, an undated photo from the 2010s.

Below the fold is a selection of his songs from his earlier and most commercially succesful period (1970-1987).

[Read more…]

Pipe Dreams: 44 terabits per second

Standard internet transfer speeds are around 100 megabits per second (12.5 megabytes), which allows can allow real time viewing at a moderate quality, or buffered video at higher quality.  Australian researchers claim to have increased transfer rates to 44 terabits per second (5525000 megabytes) which is 440,000 times faster.  This would allow transfer of entire movies in one second, and they are using current internet connections to do it, not new systems.  (For comparison, a 56K dialup modem sends 7KB per second, 1 megabit DSL sends 125KB per second.)

Ultra-dense optical data transmission over standard fibre with a single chip source

Abstract

Micro-combs – optical frequency combs generated by integrated micro-cavity resonators – offer the full potential of their bulk counterparts, but in an integrated footprint. They have enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy, microwave photonics, frequency synthesis, optical ranging, quantum sources, metrology and ultrahigh capacity data transmission. Here, by using a powerful class of micro-comb called soliton crystals, we achieve ultra-high data transmission over 75 km of standard optical fibre using a single integrated chip source. We demonstrate a line rate of 44.2 Terabits s−1 using the telecommunications C-band at 1550 nm with a spectral efficiency of 10.4 bits s−1 Hz−1. Soliton crystals exhibit robust and stable generation and operation as well as a high intrinsic efficiency that, together with an extremely low soliton micro-comb spacing of 48.9 GHz enable the use of a very high coherent data modulation format (64 QAM – quadrature amplitude modulated). This work demonstrates the capability of optical micro-combs to perform in demanding and practical optical communications networks.

Although it sounds great (excuse my cynicism), it still presumes everyone has access to such technology.  Internet penetration is still low in most of the world’s poorest countries, and the networks needed are cost prohibitive.

Today, the Philippines mostly uses wifi and cable internet on Luzon.  But in the 2000s when most countries were adopting cable internet, the PI couldn’t afford it.  Many people still used dialup internet until around 2010, and DSL was and is still common in more rural areas because it piggybacks on phone networks that already exist.  It’s slower, but they didn’t have to build anything.  For much of the world, it’s still like that.  44.2 Tbit lines will only widen the disparity between the haves and have nots.

Am I saying we shouldn’t increase the potential transfer rates?  No.  I’m saying we shouldn’t dictate to other countries, “You have to go this fast or you can’t use the internet!”  The “information superhighway” shouldn’t be dictated by roadhogs and Sunday drivers.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

When quarantines were enacted two months ago, youtube and other online services lowered their bandwidth’s transmission quality.  With so many more people at home using the internet, lower bandwidth reduced throttling and increased how many users could connect at once.  It was a reasonable tradeoff to prevent the system from crashing.

So why can’t we have similar tradeoffs?  Not just now during a pandemic but all the time.  Too many websites are poorly designed and bloated, some pages containing 100-500KB of HTML, CSS and Javascripts, not counting autoloaded flash advertising or other resource hogging garbage.  If companies have the technical knowhow to built that much bloat, why don’t they know how to built “light” pages?

In 2017 during Hurricane Maria and other disasters of recent years, some companies built text-only sites both to reduce bandwidth and to prioritize vital information at a time when connections were finicky and battery (and recharging) power limited.

CNN’s “lite” website

Text NPR

Facebook mobile will work on a laptop or desktop, but avoid their phone “app”

Other websites have made light versions though some have since disappeared or were destroyed (e.g. BBC).

There are many sites that offer information on how to create full featured, low bandwidth sites:

wikimedia blog: How to design for low-bandwidth users: a conversation with members of Wikimedia’s Global Reach, Audiences, and Performance teams

oAfrica: Designing websites for low bandwidth

Smashstack: Life in the Slow Lane: Web Designs for Slow Internet Connections

Aptivate dot org: Why Design your Website for Low Bandwidth?

Aptivate lists Ten Rules for Designing for Low Bandwidth. My list would have different suggestions, but it’s a good starting point.

And while it’s a bit outdated, the Any Browser Campaign offers some good suggestions for website design.

If there’s one rule that I would tell site designers above all others: Stop acting like teenagers in 1999.  Stop designing for your favourite browser to the exclusion of all others.  If you build sites using the W3’s standard HTML5, it will work on every browser, including HTML4 and HTML3.2 browsers.

They Suffered Silently: College sports and the medical perversion

Chuck Christian played on the University of Michigan football team forty years ago under coach Bo Schembechler.  Medical checkups are common practice among “student” athletes, but what Christian didn’t know at the time was that the team’s doctor Robert Anderson (now dead) was sexually abusing him.  And hundreds of other athletes over several decades.

He thought he was getting football physicals. He was being abused.

For more than 40 years, Chuck Christian did not call himself a victim because he did not think he was one.

He was a muralist who had played tight end at Michigan. He grew up poor in Detroit but came to be a world traveler. He contracted prostate cancer and outlived his doctors’ predictions.

Then, in February, an old teammate called.

Remember Dr. Robert Anderson? The team doctor at Michigan who performed painful, unexplained rectal examinations? Someone reported him, the former teammate said, and it turns out that what he did to you, and to so many other players, was probably a crime.

“I realized that he had victimized so many of us,” Christian said in a recent interview.

Since February, when the university revealed findings of a secret, long-running investigation, hundreds of people have complained about Anderson’s conduct. As the inquiry unfolded, lawyers said it was increasingly clear that while Michigan achieved decades of success with many of the nation’s finest athletes, it also harbored a vast sexual abuse scandal.

Christian soon learned that, like him, many other athletes had quietly left the campus without recognizing that Anderson’s behavior demanded an investigation.

How much did toxic masculinity affect players’ willingness (or unwillingness) to come forward?  How many knew they were sexually abused but afraid of being viewed as “less of a man” by reporting sexual assault?  How many other predators took up jobs in sports, in positions where they wouldn’t face close scrutiny?

There will be a year without college sports.  Independent investigators should be sent into every US college and university sports program and look at their records, medical and otherwise.  Find out how many schools have allowed predators to rape and abuse with impunity for decades.

Violent and abusive “coaches” like Mike Leach, Mike Rice and Bobby Knights are bad enough, but for “schools” to allow and protect rapists like Robert Anderson, Larry Nassar and Jerry Sandusky is beyond reprehensible.

Don’t Pay To Vote: Ron Dysentery’s vote rigging failed

Sorry, I misspelt Ron DeSantis‘s name.

A corrupt Florida law was rescinded last year, finally allowing those who have finished their prison sentences to regain their vote.  Denial of voting after prison isn’t just punitive, it’s an incentive for politicians to arrest those likely to vote against them, i.e. republiclowns arresting and inprisoning the poor and non-white people.  (Speaking as a Canadian, losing your vote while in prison is an obscene idea.  Prisoners have time to be informed and motivation to vote.  Canadian prisoners vote at the same rate as the general population.)

Republiclowns like Ron Dysen…er, DeSantis couldn’t allow that to go unchallenged, so they decided to create a poll tax and claim it wasn’t a poll tax: The person released from prison would have to “reimburse the state’s legal fees” before being able to vote.  Needless to say, only the rare wealthy person who went to prison could ever afford to do that.  For those who leave prison broke (i.e. nearly all of those incarcerated) it was a yet another barrier to regaining their rights.

Thankfully, a federal judge saw the poll tax for what it was and struck it down.

Federal judge rules Florida ex-felons can vote despite fines or fees

ORLANDO, Fla. — A federal judge’s ruling Sunday opens the door for hundreds of thousands of ex-felons to be able to vote in Florida despite owing fines and fees.

Pending an appeal from Gov. Ron DeSantis, the ruling on Amendment 4 by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle in Tallahassee is potentially one the largest expansions of the voter franchise in Florida history, and it comes just months before the state could play a deciding role in the November election for president.

Hinkle ruled that a law passed by the Legislature and signed by DeSantis was unconstitutional because “the State of Florida has adopted a system under which nearly a million otherwise-eligible citizens can vote only if they pay an amount of money. … Many do not know, and some may not be able to find out, how much they must pay.”

The judge called the law a “pay-to-vote system.”

“Today’s ruling by U.S District Judge Robert Hinkle finally clears up an argument that should not have taken place,” the Florida League of Women Voters said in a statement. “The voters were clear in 2018 when more than 64% of the electorate voted in favor of Amendment 4, which restored the constitutional right to vote to ex-felons not convicted of murder and felony sexual assault. But after the passage of Amendment 4, the Florida Legislature, via SB 7066, sought to ensure that ex-felons, without the means to pay back all financial obligations, would essentially endure a lifetime ban on voting.

Such “fees” remind me of what “british commonwealth countries” have done to refugees.  People that Australia has imprisoned (instead of treating them as refugees) have been “billed” for their imprisonment (food and “rent”, is if a concrete cell were a hotel room).  Until people “pay restitution” they will be denied refugee status in the future – not just in Australia, but by any commonwealth country.