Taylor does some good work - bringing this lawsuit against Twitter is commendable - Twitter’s prohibition of free speech is a travesty given that it is functioning as a public utility; its having gotten its corporate start with US government help; its remaining dependent upon the US Government created and sponsored internet network; and public telecommunications lines. Taylor also handles with aplomb stigmatic issues of blacks and their hyper-assertive biopower, as he did in his debate with black nationalist Tariq Nasheed. Nevertheless, he yields to Jewish crypsis, infamously having said, “they look huWhite to me” ...and now that Jewish interests seek fusion with the White right, their media refers to Taylor as a “White Nationalist.”

BBC, “White nationalist Jared Taylor sues Twitter over ban”, 22 Feb 2018:

White nationalist Jared Taylor is suing Twitter after the social network banned his account as part of a crackdown on abusive content.

Mr Taylor’s lawyer says the suspension of his account is a form of censorship, accusing Twitter of discrimination.

Twitter declined to comment on the case but has previously said that its tools are “apolitical.”

Mr Taylor is head of American Renaissance, a website that champions “racial difference”.

He had his account suspended in December, with Twitter explaining that it prohibited accounts affiliated with the promotion of violence, something Mr Taylor denies applied to him.

Mr Taylor has filed his case in California, in the state Superior Court in San Francisco. He argued that Twitter violated Californian law protecting free speech in public spaces - a law that has not previously been applied to the internet.

His lawyer Noah Peters wrote online that everyone should be “terrified” about what he called Twitter censorship. “Our lawsuit is not about whether Taylor is right or wrong. It’s about whether Twitter and other technology companies have the right to ban individuals from using their services based on their perceived viewpoints and affiliations.

“Allowing Twitter to censor content is extremely troublesome given Twitter’s self-proclaimed mission to ‘give everyone the power to create and share ideas instantly, without barriers’.”

New Observer, “Who is killing the Whites Trying to Stop the African/Asian Illegal Ivory Trade?”, 8 Feb 2018:

The vicious murder of anti-elephant poaching activist Esmond Martin in Kenya last weekend is the second murder of a high-profile white anti-ivory trade activist in Africa, coming as it does only five months after the shooting assassination of Tanzanian-based Wayne Lotter.

Martin, who was stabbed to death at his home in Nairobi, Kenya, was famous for his decades-long activism to save Africa’s elephant population from the uncaring rampage of African poachers who supply the Far East with illegal ivory.

Esmond Martin and his beloved elephants.

According to statistics issued by his affiliated organization, Save the Elephants (STE), without urgent action to save their species, elephants could be gone from the wild within a single generation.

According to STE, 100,000 elephants in Africa were killed for their ivory in just three years between the years 2010 and 2012.

In 1979 there were 1.3 million elephants, but current estimates that there are just between 419,000 and 650,000 African elephants left alive—and overall, their numbers are still “catastrophically declining.

Martin, a UK national by birth, was one of STE’s most famous activists, and the world’s leading ivory trade expert. STE said in a statement that his surveys “shone a powerful spotlight on the wildlife markets around the world that are sucking ivory, rhino horn and countless other African species into their maw.

“By charting the scale of these markets and tracking fluctuations with rigour and consistency, he provided a solid foundation for action to close them down. On Friday he was in our office, excited to see the Laotian translation of his latest report into Laos’ growing trade, and eager to discuss how it could be used to greatest effect,” the statement continued.

“Conservation has lost an important figure, elephants have lost a great champion and the shock of Esmond’s death will be felt around the world.”

Wayne Lotter was a South African- wildlife conservationist who was the co-founder and president of conservation organisation the PAMS (Protected Area Management Solutions) Foundation.

Lotter’s organization was involved in funding the National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit in Tanzania which pursued a number of high-profile ivory traffickers, and regularly received death threats.

His most high-profile success was in 2015 when his intelligence work left to the the arrest of a Chinese woman, Yang Feng Glan, known as the “Queen of Ivory” who ran a $2.6m ivory smuggling ring along with a large number of Chinese nationals living in Africa.

Lotter was shot dead on August 16, 2017 while travelling in a taxi in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in what was clearly a targeted assassination.

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At Least 17 Killed After Garbage Heap Collapses in Mozambique

AP, “Mozambique Garbage Pile Collapses Amid Heavy Rainfall, Killing 17”, 19 Feb 2018:

At least 17 people were killed when the three-story trash heap came tumbling down.

At a glance:

  At least 17 people were killed when a large garbage mound collapsed amid heavy rains in Mozambique.The deadly incident occurred on the outskirts of the country’s capital city, Maputo.Heavy rainfall has been blamed for causing the three-story mound to give way.

A large garbage mound gave way during heavy rains in Mozambique’s capital city on Monday, killing at least 17 people, officials said.

A search for additional victims continued at the Hulene garbage dump on the outskirts of Maputo, and authorities feared they’d find more bodies. The huge mound rose to the height of a three-story building in a poor, densely populated area of the city, Portuguese news agency Lusa said.

Several homes were destroyed and many residents left their homes, fearing additional collapses.

“The mountains of garbage collapsed on the houses and many families were still inside these residences,” Fatima Belchoir, a national disaster official, told Lusa. Authorities are trying to help people who lost their homes, she said.

The Hulene garbage dump is the largest such facility in Maputo. People often comb through the garbage, searching for food and items to sell.

Health workers have long raised concerns about the impact of the fumes, flies and other hazards of the dump on the surrounding community. Municipal officials have previously discussed the closure of the dump.

Government in Poland and Hungary is getting a lot that is very important right.

Polish PM draws ire with claim of Jewish Holocaust ‘perpetrators’

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki sparked a storm of criticism Saturday after defending his country’s new law concerning the Holocaust, which he said had involved “Jewish perpetrators” as well as Polish.

The controversial law passed by Poland’s senate this month sets fines or a maximum three-year jail term for anyone ascribing “responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich”.

Appearing at the Munich Security Conference, Morawiecki was questioned by a journalist who told of his mother’s narrow escape from the Gestapo in Poland after learning that neighbours were planning to denounce them.

The journalist, Ronen Bergman, asked if by recounting this, “I am a criminal in your country?” It garnered a round of applause from the audience.

Morawiecki responded: “It’s not going to punishable, not going to be seen as criminal, to say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukraine and German perpetrators.”

He reiterated that the point of the law was to defend Poland’s honour by making clear that people knew “there were no Polish death camps… There were German Nazi death camps.”

“But we cannot agree with mixing perpetrators with victims, because it would be first of all an offence to all the Jews and all the Poles who suffered greatly during the Second World War.”

Related Story at MR: Fury in Israel as Poland proposes ban on referring to Nazi death camps as ‘Polish’

Washington Post, “4 things we learned from the indictment of 13 Russians in the Mueller investigation”, 16 Feb 2018:

This post has been updated.

We have the first indictment in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III that actually has to do with Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The special counsel on Friday indicted 13 Russians in connection with a large-scale troll farm effort aimed at influencing the election in violation of U.S. law.

The indictment of the Internet Research Agency comes on top of two Trump advisers having pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos — and two more being indicted on charges of alleged financial crimes that predated the campaign — Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Nobody is in custody and Russia does not extradite to the United States, but the document from the secretive Mueller investigation does shed plenty of light where there previously wasn’t any.

So what does the new indictment tell us? Here’s what we can say right away:

1. It doesn’t say the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, but doesn’t rule it out either.

Anybody looking for clues about the collusion investigation into the Trump campaign won’t find much to grab hold of. If anything, the indictment may hearten Trump allies in that it doesn’t draw a line to the campaign — which suggests there was a large-scale effort independent of any possible collusion. Perhaps that’s the real meddling effort, some folks in the White House may be telling themselves right now. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein even specified that Trump campaign officials who were contacted by the Russian nationals “did not know they were communicating with Russians.”

But that’s about as much insight as anyone can draw; we simply don’t know what else is coming down the pike, and any ties to Trump campaign officials may have been withheld from this indictment to avoid disclosing details of an ongoing investigation. The president hasn’t even been interviewed yet, so we wouldn’t expect any ties to the campaign at this juncture.

Asked whether campaign officials had knowledge of the scheme or were duped, Rosenstein chose his words carefully. “There is no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge,” Rosenstein said.

The words “in this indictment” mean Rosenstein’s comments are pretty narrow.

Update:

In a statement, Trump and the White House suggested that the announcement “further indicates that there was NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia.” Again, it doesn’t provide any direct indication.

2. It just got a lot harder for Trump to dismiss Mueller’s probe as a “witch hunt.”

At one point in the indictment, a price tag is put on the effort: $1.25 million in one month, as of September 2016. To put that in perspective, that’s as much as some entire presidential campaigns were spending monthly during the primaries. And that lends credence to the idea that this was a large-scale effort connected to the Russian government.

President Trump has often sought to downplay the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — even suggesting he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assurances that it didn’t happen. This document lays it out in extensive detail.

The argument that this is a “witch hunt,” which Trump has argued and more than 8 in 10 Republicans believe, just became much more difficult to make. And the document would seem to make pretty clear that the Mueller investigation isn’t just targeted at taking down Trump, either.

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This Vox article concludes:

What we don’t know

  The shooter’s motive

A safe bet is that the shooter’s motive was rather an incoherent motive of broad revenge against societal incoherence and therefore lack of accountability, agency and warrant that socially delimited human ecologies would otherwise afford.

VOX, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida: what we know:

At least 17 people are dead. The 19-year-old suspect is in custody.

Parents wait for news after a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Joel Auerbach

A shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, has left at least 17 people dead. Students and adults are among the victims.

A 19-year-old male suspect, Nikolas Cruz, has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Cruz, a former student at Stoneman Douglas, took an Uber to the school Wednesday afternoon. He was armed with an AR-15 rifle, law enforcement officials said, which he used to carry out his rampage. He fled the scene on foot, blending in with the rush of students pouring from the building. The massacre unfolded in less than 10 minutes, according to the timeline released by the Broward County Sheriff’s office.

“That should not happen in Parkland. It should not happen anywhere in this country,” Broward County Public Schools superintendent Robert Runcie said on Wednesday night. “We have got to find a way for this to stop.”

The investigation is still in its early stages. Details could change with more information. Here’s what we know — and don’t.

What we know

- Around 2:30 pm on Wednesday, just before class dismissal, the fire alarm went off, and shooting began. A law enforcement official told told CBS News it was believed the suspect pulled the fire alarm before the shooting rampage.

- At least 17 people were killed in the school shooting. At least 14 others were wounded, with five individuals sustaining life-threatening injuries. Teenagers and adults are among the victims, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.

- The victims we know of so far: Jaime Guttenberg, Martin Duque, Alyssa Alhadeff, Aaron Feis, Gina Montalto, Nicholas Dworet, Luke Hoyer, Carmen Schentrup, Meadow Pollack, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Cara Loughran, Helena Ramsey, Alex Schachter, Chris Hixon, Scott Beigel, and Peter Wang. The Miami Herald has the full list with photos and more information.

- The lone suspect is 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. He was taken into custody off school property about an hour after the shooting, the sheriff said.

- Cruz confessed to the shooting, according to a sheriff’s report. He’s been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.

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Her kind, anyway, since this particular woman is spoken-for. She’s an ingenious pioneer, living off the grid in the “North-West Front” ...she isn’t bad looking either.

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Judith and Holofernes, by Kehinde Wiley Credit: Twitter

“Obama portrait artist’s past work depicted black women decapitating white women”

Daily Telegraph, 13 Feb 2018:

Kehinde Wiley, the artist chosen to paint the official portrait of former US President Barack Obama, previously depicted black women decapitating white women.

Wiley, who is 39 and from New York, created the two paintings in 2012 and was inspired by the Biblical story of Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holoferne. At the time, Wiley told The New York Times that he was inspired by the classical European depictions of Bible stories by Caravaggio and Gentileschi, only he chose to depict Judith as a black woman and Holoferne as a white woman. He commented: “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing”.

The description for the work from the North Carolina Museum of Art foundation reads:

“Wiley translates this image of a courageous, powerful woman into a contemporary version that resonates with fury and righteousness.”

The portraits were part of an exhibition in which his paintings only depicted women he would scout on the street and depict in poses seen in classical European artwork. The sitter for Judith was Triesha Lowe, a stay-at-home mother whom Wiley discovered in a Brooklyn shopping centre.

       

Jon Levine@LevineJonathan

Barack Obama unveils his portrait alongside the portrait’s artist, Kehinde Wiley

That Obama artist, Kehinde Wiley, is also know for these fun paintings, which you can file under

“Imagine if this showed a TKTK “
8:54 PM - Feb 12, 2018
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Wiley’s portrait of Obama will hang in the US National Portrait Gallery. It has sparked conversation and criticism, but the sitter himself appeared pleased with his likeness, adding that Wiley’s work “challenged our conventional views of power and privilege.”