Lovely portraits from Scottish photographer Niall McDiarmid, from his series Looking for Sandwell:
McDiarmid previously - Town to Town.
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Lovely portraits from Scottish photographer Niall McDiarmid, from his series Looking for Sandwell:
McDiarmid previously - Town to Town.
Posted at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Marion Post Wolcott, April 1939. "Miami Beach, Florida. Even the gas stations are on an elaborate scale, often modern in design, resembling hotels."
[Photo: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]
Update: with added lighthouse.
Posted at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
More on Gretamania, from Iain Martin in the Times (£):
The “basic problem”, Greta Thunberg told MPs and campaigners in her speech at parliament this week, “is that basically nothing is being done to halt — or even slow — climate and ecological breakdown”.
As Thunberg was explaining to fawning legislators how “basic” the situation supposedly is, Extinction Rebellion campaigners continued to block the streets, glueing themselves to public transport for headlines and demanding that democratically elected British politicians yield to their demands to scrap the existing economic system.
At the peak of Gretamania — and it was like a late 1960s hippie “happening” at Westminster when the 16-year-old campaigner arrived at Portcullis House this week — it is judged heretical to question anything the prophet says. But here goes.
Thunberg may be a well-intentioned and eloquent campaigner, a walking riposte to all those who until recently claimed that the young are apathetic, but that does not make her right. Nor does it imply any duty for policymakers to do exactly what she says: that is, to destroy the western market economy in line with her vision of the Earth being consumed soon by a ball of fire followed by floods.
Her central claim, made repeatedly, that “nothing” is being done is demonstrably false. For several decades, western governments have aimed energy policy at tackling this challenge. In Britain, emissions have fallen by 38 per cent since 1990. Indeed, an encouraging piece of news landed a few days ago that should have introduced some balance into the debate. Over Easter, Britain burnt no coal in its power production for 92 hours — the longest coal-free period since before the First World War. [...]
Thunberg and her allies reject the gradualist analysis, though, in favour of a “black and white” vision of doom unless everything changes in one go. It is mesmerising, alarmist nonsense. “The main reason for this reduction is not a consequence of climate policies,” Thunberg claimed at Westminster. The CO2 reduction was instead down to the EU, she said. “A 2001 EU directive on air quality that essentially forced the UK to close down its very old and extremely dirty coal power plants and replace them with less dirty gas power stations.”
That is bad history, as Edgerton and other academics can show. It is also a misleading statement typical of the absolutism prevalent in Green populism, with its tendency to present complex problems as having simple and immediate answers.
“I don’t like compromising because it’s either this or that,” Thunberg told The Times this week. But compromise is essential in organising society. Instead, the climate radicals demand a purifying revolution. Only the instant destruction of capitalism (and its replacement with something nicer but as yet unspecified) will save the planet, wrote one of Thunberg’s more excitable supporters.
Put to one side for a moment the reality that the destruction of global capitalism and the end of markets is an epically terrible idea. The extension of market mechanisms — private property, free enterprise, price discovery via market competition, the accumulation and deployment of capital — has been a boon for humanity, helping to improve life expectancy and lifting billions out of poverty. In the process, mankind is polluting the planet. Even on the precautionary principle it makes sense to clean up the mess and aim to leave a legacy.
Yet proportion matters. Concern for the environment should not mean we cease to think critically and calmly. Our descendants will not thank us if we wreck the economy and reverse prosperity. The panic recommended by Thunberg — and the kneejerk policy that would follow — is an irresponsible way to approach a complex problem.
Every generation thinks it's the last one. Every generation thinks the the end times are coming. It's because we don't have the wit to see how the future might unfold without us.
Yes, climate change is a problem. Yes, we knew about this before Greta Thunberg came along.
Posted at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Continuing the theme of cool black singers surrounded by hopelessly unhip white dancers and audience, here's Freda Payne sashaying out on (I think) Dutch TV in 1970:
Not always easy to look hip in hot pants, but she pulls it off. The Youtube comments are basically variations on the theme of "Phwoarr!"
A bit of a one-hit wonder with this song, to be honest, but she had a career as an actress alongside her music. Still going strong.
Posted at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Kent-based photographer Edward Thompson, from his series The Garden of England:
Featured in the 2019 Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition at Somerset House.
Posted at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
One of the Sri Lankan suicide bombers, it's claimed, studied at Kingston University. David Toube, at Quilliam, looks at the continuing radicalisation taking place at universities here:
In 2003, Asif Hanif – Britain’s first jihadist suicide bomber – murdered three people at Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv. He had attended Kingston University. This week, a second alumnus of Kingston University, Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed, committed a horrifyingly bloody massacre in Sri Lanka.
A significant number of takfiri jihadist terrorists have passed through British universities over the past couple of decades. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been a member of UCL’s student Islamic Society and its president in 2006-7 before graduating in 2008, joined al-Qaeda under the guidance of Anwar al-Awlaki and tried to bring down an American airliner in 2009 with a bomb concealed in his underpants. Kafeel Ahmed, a former president of Queen’s University Belfast’s Islamic society, tried to blow up a nightclub in London and then set fire to himself, fatally, in Glasgow Airport in 2007. Yassin Nassari, a former president of the University of Westminster’s student Islamic society, was convicted of smuggling missile blueprints into the UK in 2007. Waheed Zaman, the former president of the London Metropolitan University Islamic society, was convicted of conspiracy to murder in 2010 in a plot to place bombs on several airliners travelling from the UK to North America.
More recently, in April 2019 the BBC reported that no fewer than seven students from the University of Westminster alone had allegedly joined ISIS. [...]
In 2015, the Prime Minister noted the extremism problem at Kingston University. His words were greeted with denial and fury. Professor Julius Weinberg, who had by then become Vice Chancellor of Kingston University, demanded that the Home Office substantiated its claim. John Azah, chief executive at Kingston Race and Equalities Council, declared:
“It has never, it does not, promote any type of extremism and it works very hard to ensure that there is freedom of speech.”
The chancellor of the university, Bonnie Greer, jovially tweeted:
“Cam must be referring to my graduation ceremony speeches”
Julius Weinberg returned to the fray in February 2016, with an article in The Guardian in which he stated:
“As for the prime minister’s complaint about Kingston University, not one of the four campus meetings that he identified as dangerous involved hate speech or anything of the kind.”
He went on to make the reasonable argument that speakers should be confronted, and their ideas challenged, rather than banned. But here’s the point. At closed speaker meetings, Islamist and jihadist speakers were never put on the spot. Nobody made the case for liberal democracy and a pluralist, open society in a challenge to their call for religious tyranny.
We will likely never discover whether the seeds of Abdul Mohamed’s radicalisation were sown, in part, during his days at Kingston University. But what we can say is that the mood music that scored the belief that extreme violence and theocracy was the only solution to the world’s problems was being played, at volume, within British universities during that period.
It isn’t that nobody noticed. It was that few cared enough to act.
Posted at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Photographer Émilie Régnier in the Angolan capital:
Fatima Dala Quitumba, 2018. © Émilie Régnier
Miss Americo, 2018. © Émilie Régnier
Miss Esperança, 2018. © Émilie Régnier
Posted at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Terry Glavin says what needs to be said about the Sri Lanka bombings:
At least two of the suicide bombers had law degrees. Two were brothers from a wealthy Colombo family, one of whom attended university in the United Kingdom and earned a postgraduate degree in Australia. There were nine of them altogether, eight men and a woman. Most were “well-educated and come from (the) middle or upper-middle class,” Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s deputy defence minister, told reporters....
The atrocities they committed do not constitute some understandable if misguided act of resistance to Western imperialist hegemony. This was not an eruption of “blowback” for the trespasses of Zionists or American oil companies, as one routinely hears whenever the blood of innocents is spilled at a bus stop in Jerusalem, or on the streets of London, or at a nightclub in Paris. These were not “chickens coming home to roost,” as it was fashionable to say, over and over again, in the days and months and years following the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001....
Posted at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Teenage Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg seems to command an almost universal level of adoration from the press, and from politicians who fall over themselves to meet her. A thankfully rather more sceptical approach is taken by Paulina Neuding at Quillette:
When Greta Thunberg was 11 years old, she went two months without eating. At least, that is what a recent family memoir asks us to believe. Her heart rate and blood pressure showed signs of starvation, and she stopped speaking to anyone but her parents and younger sister, Beata. After years of depression, eating disorders, and anxiety attacks, she was eventually diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, high-functioning autism, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). She also suffers from selective mutism, a disorder related to severe anxiety which can render her unable to speak to anyone outside her closest family. When she wants to tell a climate researcher that she is planning a school strike to save the environment, she speaks through her father.
Scenes from the Heart (“Scener ur hjärtat,” 2018) recounts the events that led to Greta Thunberg’s now-famous “school strike for climate,” during which hundreds of thousands of children cut classes for a day to protest government inaction over climate change. Thunberg now strikes every Friday and spent three weeks sitting outside the Swedish Parliament at the beginning of the school year. Scenes from the Heart is written by her family—her mother, father, sister Beata, and herself—and the story is narrated by Greta’s mother, the opera soprano Malena Ernman, who was a celebrity in Europe long before her daughter’s rise to fame. Although the book is only available in Swedish for the time being, it is already being translated into numerous languages—a development that reflects the global fascination with Thunberg’s eccentric campaign. Their memoir tells the story of “a family in crisis and a planet in crisis,” and while these two narratives might appear to be entirely unrelated, Ernman and her co-authors insist they are inextricably linked. The oppression of women, minorities, and people with disabilities, we are told, is a product of the same root cause as climate change: our unsustainable way of life. The family’s private crisis and the global climate crisis, the authors implausibly argue, are simply symptoms of the same systemic disorder.
Then there's her sister....
It's all very odd. She's met the Pope, been named by Time Magazine as one of their 100 most influential people for 2019, and been compared to Jesus. There is a cult-like feel to this whole business, which - without wishing to denigrate the girl, or her message - does feel decidedly unhealthy. Jesus? More like Joan of Arc.
I do not wish to suggest that 16 year olds are necessarily too young to understand the consequences of their actions, nor that the challenges Thunberg faces make her unsuitable to take a stand on political issues, or even to lead a global movement. No one who has heard her address world leaders in impeccable English can doubt that she is intelligent and extraordinarily capable on some level. Her mother stresses that her daughter has never felt better than during her campaign to address the existential challenge posed by our changing climate, and Thunberg herself says working for the climate has helped her recover. For someone coping with the unhappiness caused by her various debilitating conditions, this is no small thing. But adults have a moral obligation to remain adults when dealing with children in the public square and not to allow themselves to get carried away by the trite sentimentality of messianic or revolutionary dreams.
Posted at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Photographer Cristina Mittermeier - featured in the Somerset House Sony exhibition. "I photographed this Lisu woman from one of the Tibetan minorities in China, as she took her pet goose for a walk in a street market in the southwestern corner of China."
Posted at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)