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It’s Now Offensive to Listen to Long Dead Russian Composers

The Cardiff Philharmonic in Wales canceled a concert scheduled for tonight which was to feature Russian composer Tchaikovsky.

Although he has been dead for 129 years, two of his featured pieces celebrate Russian military victories. The 1812 Overture celebrates Russia’s defeat of Napoleon’s invading army, and Marche Slave commemorates Russia’s involvement in the Serbian-Ottoman War.

The orchestra’s director said they “were also made aware at the time that the title ‘Little Russian’ of Symphony No. 2 was deemed offensive to Ukrainians.”

Meanwhile in Canada, a living Russian pianist, Alexander Malofeev, was canceled just for being Russian.

The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal canceled three performances by the young pianist scheduled for last week.

It said, “Considering the serious impact on the civilian population of Ukraine caused by the Russian invasion… OSM feels that it would be inappropriate to receive Mr. Malofeev this week.”

The baby-faced 20 year old even denounced Russia’s invasion, despite the risk to his family still in Russia.

Apparently just being Russian, whether 129 years dead or barely an adult, makes you guilty of Putin’s crimes.

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Click here to read about Tchaikovsky and here for Malofeev.

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The U.S. Is Mindlessly Marching Toward War With Russia

The day after Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky addressed Congress, the American press was understandably filled with paeans to his courage and leadership, his clarity of purpose and firm resolve in the face of mortal danger. As Bari Weiss noted in a thoughtful response to the speech, Zelensky knows what he’s fighting for, and he stands as an inspiring counterexample of things we hope for in our own political leaders, but do not have.

But there is something else behind this celebration of Zelensky. His speech, after all, was a rather straightforward request for the United States and our North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to intervene on behalf of Ukraine. “In the darkest time for our country, for the whole of Europe, I call on you to do more,” he said, invoking Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

He backed off, a little, from his repeated pleas for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and instead pressed for fighter jets and long-range surface-to-air missile systems — military aid of a kind that would be unprecedented, and would arguably bring the United States and NATO right up to and possibly over the line of belligerence. 

Zelensky can’t really be faulted for wanting to draw the West into this war. He is trying to save his people, who are in desperate straits. But our leaders have a responsibility not to be pulled into the conflict, however unpopular that might be in the current media environment.

Instead, we’re seeing just the opposite: the emergence of a bipartisan, establishment consensus in Washington that the United States and NATO must ratchet up military aid to Ukraine, right now, without even trying to articulate an overarching strategy, what the off-ramps might be, or what an end-state to the conflict might look like.

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Biden’s New COVID Coordinator Wants Vaccine Passports, Claims ‘We Aren’t Anywhere Near the End of This Pandemic’.

President Joe Biden’s new COVID-19 Coordinator – Dr. Ashish Jha – has vigorously advocated for “vaccine passports” and other hardline measures including mandated vaccines for air travel, despite also defending left-wing protests as “essential”.

Dr. Jha, who will be replacing Jeff Zients and his deputy Natalie Quillian next month, is the current Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health who has also praised Anthony Fauci as his personal “role model.”

A frequent guest on mainstream media programming, Dr. Jha has routinely used his platform to demand the introduction of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports in America, while insisting “we are not anywhere near the end of this pandemic” in a February 2022 interview.

In an April 28th, 2021 op-ed for The Economist, Dr. Jha outlined his “case for vaccine certificates to beat COVID-19.”

“Vaccine certificates are needed so everyone’s full participation in society can be restored,” he summarized while insisting criticism that the policy represents an “infringement on personal freedom” as “nonsense.”

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IARPA Project Aims to Identify People from Drones by More Than Just Their Face

The intelligence community’s key research arm recently moved to develop biometric software systems that can identify people’s entire bodies from long ranges in challenging conditions.  

Through this newly unveiled multi-year research effort—called the Biometric Recognition & Identification at Altitude and Range or BRIAR program—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is working with teams from multiple companies and universities to pave the way for next-level recognition technology.

“There’s such a diversity of technical challenges that are trying to be addressed. This is tackling a problem that’s important for the government and for national security—but I think is underrepresented in the academic research because it’s not a topic focus area,” IARPA Program Manager Dr. Lars Ericson told Nextgov on Wednesday. “You need to have government involvement to stimulate the data, and the research, and the evaluations in this topic area. So, I think that there’s a lot of potential for broad benefits to biometrics and computer vision, while also driving towards this very important government mission capability.”

Ericson’s background is in physics, as well as biometrics applications and technologies. He oversees IARPA’s biometrics portfolio of research efforts.

As one of the latest programs to kick off, BRIAR’s ultimate aim, according to a broad agency announcement released last year to underpin this work, is to “deliver an end-to-end [whole-body] biometric system capable of accurate and reliable verification, recognition and identification of persons from elevated platforms and at distances out to 1,000 meters, across a range of challenging capture conditions.”

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CDC Removes 24 Percent of Child COVID-19 Deaths, Thousands of Others

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of deaths it had listed in those under 18 years old.

The health agency quietly made the change on its data tracker website on March 15.

“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” the CDC says on the site.

The CDC relies on states and other jurisdictions to report COVID-19 deaths and acknowledges on its website that the data is not complete.

But the statistics are often cited by doctors and others when pushing for COVID-19 vaccination, including figures who believe virtually all children should be vaccinated. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, cited the tracker’s death total in November 2021 while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5- to 11-years-old.

Before the change, the CDC listed 1,755 children as dying from COVID-19 along with approximately 851,000 others, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has been tracking the updates.

The update saw the CDC cut 416 deaths among children and over 71,000 elsewhere, arriving at a total of just under 780,000.

The agency declined to provide a comment by deadline.

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Orwell Was Right

The ideal citizen of Orwell’s Oceania bubbled with rage a mile wide and a millimeter deep and could forget in an instant passions that may have consumed him or her for years. We just did this, with a pandemic that had the country steaming with indignation until it was quietly declared over the moment Putin rolled over Ukraine’s borders. We switched from “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” to “Putin’s price hikes” in a snap. National outrage moved a few lobes over with zero fuss, and now we hate new people; instead of “anti-vax Barbie,” we’re barring Russian and Belarussian kids from the Paralympics.

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? – 1984

A heartbeat ago politicians and pundits all over were denouncing Canadian trucker protests over reports of swastikas. “Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This was despite the fact that even Snopes concluded the photographed “swastikas” weren’t expressions of neo-Nazi sentiment, but protesters comparing Justin Trudeau’s government to Nazis.

Now the swastika in the Ukrainian context has been un-banned by Facebook, you can buy Azov Battalion mugs and t-shirts on Amazon, and we have headlines like “Are there really neo-Nazis fighting for Ukraine? Well, yes — but it’s a long story.” In an effort to argue that Putin is worse than Hitler, we have people like Atlantic Council senior fellow Anders Aslund saying “Hitler had more arguments for his attack on Poland,” and former U.S. Ambassador and Stanford professor Michael McFaul saying on live TV that Hitler “didn’t kill ethnic Germans, German-speaking people.”

This isn’t to say the Russian propaganda about “deNazifying” Ukraine should be taken seriously, but it’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly our conventional wisdom changes its stance even toward something like neo-Nazism — an absolute one day, an Amazon impulse buy the next.

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Russia’s RT television network can no longer be legally broadcast on Canadian screens, CRTC rules

Canada’s federal broadcast regulator has ruled that RT, a Kremlin-controlled network, can no longer legally be carried on Canadian television screens.

“Freedom of speech and a range of perspectives are a necessary part of our democracy. However, it is a privilege and not a right to be broadcast in Canada,” the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission wrote in its decision on Wednesday.

The CRTC statement added that the regulator is “concerned with programming from a foreign country that seeks to undermine the sovereignty of another country, demean Canadians of a particular ethnic background and undermine democratic institutions within Canada.”

The decision came after an expedited hearing into whether the English-language channel and its French service, RT France, should be allowed on Canadian TV screens, following Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

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‘Everyone Is Trans’: Washington Post Floats Bizarre Defense Of Biologically Male Swimmer

The Washington Post shared a “perspective” piece about transgender collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas — who is still biologically male and has spent the NCAA women’s swimming season smashing records and dominating the scoreboards — and declared in the opening sentence, “Everyone is trans.”

The article, written by columnist Sally Jenkins, opens with the following paragraph:

Hate to tell you, but in a way, everyone is trans. As writer T Cooper observed, all of us in life’s competitive arena are on the way to become someone profoundly different than than we were, and keeping score is just a way to track the arc of a person from youth to prime to past it. If you subtract the aim of becomingness from competition just because you’re afraid of a Lia Thomas and make it strictly about the chance to win a prize, then you might as well go to an amusement park and shoot a squirt gun at a clown face because it will have about as much meaning.

Jenkins goes on to argue that the science regarding whether or not biological males have a physical advantage over biological females “remains unsettled” — despite the fact that Thomas has spent the last season effectively blowing biologically female competitors out of the water after years of being unable to crack the top 400 in men’s competition.

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