Getting it twisted…
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John Kerry fears Russia-Ukraine war will distract from climate change
President Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, warned that Russia’s war against Ukraine could distract the world from the climate change crisis and produce “massive emissions” that will negatively impact the globe.
“I’m concerned about Ukraine because of the people of Ukraine and because of the principles that are at risk, in terms of international law and trying to change boundaries of international law by force,” Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, said in an interview Monday on BBC Arabic, MEMRI reported Wednesday. “I thought we lived in a world that had said no to that kind of activity. And I hope diplomacy will win.”
Chinese State Media Accidentally Releases Censorship Rules On Russia–Ukraine Coverage
A quickly-deleted social media post – released to the public apparently by accident – provides a rare glimpse of how the CCP’s messaging on the escalating Ukraine–Russia tension is channeled to the masses.
Horizon News, a video news network under state-run Beijing News, on Feb. 22 instructed staff to avoid posting any Ukraine-related content on China’s Twitter-like Weibo that may come across as unfavorable to Russia or pro-Western.
“Let me review your draft before you first put it out,” stated the Weibo post, which has since been removed. Commentaries, it added, must be “carefully selected and controlled,” while topic selections should follow the lead of People’s Daily, Xinhua, and CCTV—three of the country’s foremost Party mouthpieces.
“Whoever publishes them will be held responsible,” the post stated, noting that each post should be monitored for at least two days.
Although China is well-known for its tight restrictions on press freedom, the post provides a rare, if small, revelation into the workings of Chinese media machinery and the inner anxieties of the regime as politically fraught international developments unfold.
While deepening ties with Moscow, Beijing is also cautious to avoid blowback by being seen as directly supporting a unilateral move to seize sovereignty of another nation—given the regime’s own designs in absorbing self-ruled Taiwan.
9,000-year-old ritual complex found in Jordan desert
Archaeologists deep in the Jordanian desert have discovered a 9,000-year-old ritualistic complex near what is thought to be the earliest known large human-built structure worldwide.
The Stone Age shrine site, excavated last year, was used by gazelle hunters and features carved stone figures, an altar and a miniature model of a large-scale hunting trap.
The giant game traps the model represents — so-called “desert kites” — were made of long walls that converge to corral running gazelles into enclosures or holes for slaughter.
Similar structures of two or more stone walls, some several kilometres (miles) long, have been found in deserts across Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and Kazakhstan.
The Neolithic-era ritual site was discovered inside a larger campsite last October by a joint French-Jordanian team called the South Eastern Badia Archaeological Project.
The nearby desert kites in Jibal al-Khashabiyeh are “the earliest large-scale human built structures worldwide known to date,” said a statement by the SEBA Project.
It hailed the “spectacular and unprecedented discovery” of the ritualistic site, believed to date to about 7000 BC.
It featured two steles with anthropomorphic features, the taller one 1.12 metres high, other artefacts including animal figurines, flints, and some 150 arranged marine fossils.
The wider, decade-old research project aims to study “the first pastoral nomadic societies, as well as the evolution of specialised subsistence strategies”.
The desert kites suggest “extremely sophisticated mass hunting strategies, unexpected in such an early timeframe,” said the project’s statement.
Just doin’ my job…
Teacher Spying Is Instilling Surveillance Culture Into Students
For the teachers, it began in October at the California Teachers Association’s 2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference. Lori Caldeira and Kelly Baraki explained how they identified potential new members of UBU, the school’s club of LGBTQ supporters. “When we were doing our virtual learning—we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing schoolwork,” Caldeira said. “One of them was Googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus.”
Whatever you think of LGBTQ issues, the fact that a teacher can remotely track what students do online should give you pause. This was not a case of a teacher reviewing the browser history on a classroom computer after school. As Caldeira said, albeit with her tongue in cheek, they were stalking the kids. (The title of Caldeira and Baraki’s presentation declared that it was about running such clubs “in conservative communities.” Needless to say, conservative teachers can snoop on kids’ online activities too.)
The Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas, California, where Caldeira is employed (and is currently on leave, following the uproar over the story), uses GoGuardian, a standard software tool for monitoring what students do during Zoom classes. GoGuardian, which promotes itself as powering “digital learning environments where every student can thrive,” is being used in about 30,000 schools.
H.L. Mencken on public school…
Texas Middle School Teacher Caught on Video: ‘Those Conservative Christian People, They Need to Die. They Need to Get COVID and Die’
A Texas middle school teacher was allegedly caught telling two other women that “conservative Christians” needed to “get COVID and die” because of their political opposition to coronavirus mandates, which she says has “impacted” the “rest of [her] life.”
Radio host Dana Loesch reported that a “Colleyville Middle School teacher identified by school parents as Lisa Grimes” was captured making the remarks and that the video was “provided by a family of the school who asked to not be identified at this time.”
“We have a political system that will not allow us to [inaudible] so we’re vaccinating like the flu, which is, you know, get the flu vaccine if you want, but you can’t — don’t ‘tread on me,’” the woman in the video states.
“But it’s too late. It would have had to have been immediate. If we had done it immediately, it’d already be gone. That’s what’s frustrating. The rest of my life is impacted because of politics? Because of conservative Christian crap? I’m telling you, those conservative Christian people, they need to die. They need to get COVID and die.”
If you’ve done nothing wrong…
FBI’s Operation to Infiltrate Right-Wing Extremist Groups Lies at Center of Transparency Lawsuit
An FBI right-wing infiltration operation tangled in allegations of witness tampering, evidence suppression, and connections to the Oklahoma City bombing has been exposed through one man’s unprecedented Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. government.
And the case isn’t over yet.
Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue’s 2006 FOIA lawsuit against the FBI and CIA for Oklahoma City bombing records is indeed still an open matter, having been sealed and litigated behind closed doors since 2015 over witness tampering allegations.
Trentadue’s case is unprecedented, according to Judicial Watch. It’s rare for a FOIA case to go to trial and even rarer for one to entail allegations as serious as witness tampering, according to Judicial Watch senior investigator Sean Dunagan.
“We’re one of the largest FOIA litigants in this country, and we’ve never been involved in anything that involves that degree of alleged misconduct by the [FBI],” Dunagan said. “It’s astounding.”
Trentadue declined to comment on the sealed aspects of the case, including when the litigation might conclude. However, he did agree to an interview about the events leading up to 2015. He also provided The Epoch Times with access to a trove of court documents, transcripts, and other records that show details about the federal government’s domestic counterterrorism operations.
His records describe an FBI program known as Patriot Conspiracy (PATCON)—a secret operation to infiltrate right-wing and domestic extremist groups.
PATCON has been in the public record for years, described in detail by historian Wendy Painting’s 2016 doctoral thesis-turned-book “Aberration in the Heartland of the Real.” But PATCON has received little media attention outside of the late journalist Will Grigg. Other journalists have attempted to cover PATCON, only to run into censorship issues.
The reasons for the alleged attempts to suppress PATCON are clear, according to Trentadue.
“The FBI’s real objective in PATCON had been to infiltrate and to incite these fringe groups to violence,” he said.
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