It was a not-so-super Sunday in more ways than one:
The only sack was that his new commercial didn’t make it to air.
Related:
"Just as the United States seems to have emerged from the worst of a surge in coronavirus cases that ravaged the country for months and peaked after Americans crowded indoors for the winter holidays, public health officials are concerned about another potential superspreader date: Super Bowl Sunday. January was the country’s deadliest month so far in the pandemic, according to a New York Times database. Experts worry that football fans gathering on Sunday in Tampa, Fla., for the championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, or at watch parties across the country, could set back the nascent progress of recent weeks. The daily reports of new cases and deaths remain high but have fallen somewhat. The N.F.L. has offered President Biden all 30 of its stadiums for use as mass vaccination sites. Officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser for Covid-19, have warned Americans against gathering for Super Bowl parties with people from other households, especially in places without ideal ventilation. While health experts worry about a rise in cases after the game, some said they don’t anticipate anything as deadly as the post-holiday wave that peaked in January. That is because Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to spur more domestic travel than the Super Bowl does, said Dr. Catherine Oldenburg, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Still, even parties pose a threat, said Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. Bergstrom said he was also concerned about the more than 20,000 people who are expected to attend the game in person at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa — about one-third of the stadium’s usual capacity. “Any time you get 25,000 people together yelling and screaming during a pandemic, you’re going to have transmission,” Bergstrom said....."
If January was the deadliest month so far, then the lockdowns, masks, and distancing have failed!
Of course, we all know they are padding the death statistics as everyone who dies now died of CV.
I'll bet Patriots fans are sick this morning.
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The Globe was of the idea that you need to be reeducated:
"Inside the race to develop a vaccine for our other pandemic: Hate; A little-noticed group of government-funded researchers is developing a clever inoculation against the disinformation and violence threatening American democracy" by David Scharfenberg Globe Staff, February 5, 2021
The coronavirus vaccine rollout, however chaotic, has been cause for optimism; we can all hope that COVID-19 will soon lose its power, but it’s hard to be sanguine about the course of our other pandemic: hate. The storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a shocking display of extremism’s reach, and the far right has only ratcheted up the online chatter since, with militants swapping bomb-making recipes and calling for guerrilla warfare against the government, but accepting the surge in violence, and the disinformation that fuels it, is not an option; together, they amount to the single greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.
I hate doing this, and am sick of the BS.
We need to develop another vaccine — a vaccine against hate, and while that may sound far-fetched, a little-noticed group of government-funded researchers is working on it right now.
The vaccine they’re developing wouldn’t be a typical one. It wouldn’t be loaded into a syringe and squeezed out of a needle, but it would be injected into our digital bloodstream — a clever inoculation against the sickly rage that’s closing in on us from the fringes.
There is reason to be skeptical of its efficacy — reason to doubt that anything, really, can stanch such a virulent disease, but it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. The early trials, after all, are quite promising.
If it looks like communi$t cen$orship, $mells like communi$T cen$orship, and walk like communi$T cen$orship, well....
The birth of an idea
Our story begins about a century ago with an Irish Catholic kid from New York City named William McGuire.
He was born into a blue-collar family; some of his first memories were of accompanying his father, a milkman, on horse-and-wagon deliveries to Harlem, but he got a jolt of possibility when a priest pulled him aside in high school to scold him for some mischief-making: “McGuire,” he said, “I expect it from them, but not from you.” The priests had given him some sort of intelligence test, and apparently, he’d done quite well.
After World War II, McGuire went to college on the GI Bill and earned a doctorate in psychology at Yale University, and in the decades that followed, he emerged as one of the world’s leading authorities on the science of persuasion.
He studied not just how to convince others, but how to resist persuasion, and it was here that he made his most enduring mark.
“Inoculation theory,” developed with researcher Demetrios Papageorgis in the 1960s, used medical vaccination as its model.
I think I am going to vomit because these sickos are fucking psychopathically and pathologically evil.
In laboratory experiments, McGuire presented subjects with truisms like “Everyone should brush his teeth after every meal if at all possible” and “Most forms of mental illness are not contagious,” and then he confronted them with arguments against those truisms.
Strong arguments could shake the beliefs of study participants, but if they faced a weak version of the arguments — akin to a vaccination with a weakened strain of the flu — their defenses went up, they rallied with counterarguments, and they were much less likely to be swayed by these challenges to the truth.
Other researchers quickly latched onto inoculation theory, and over the last 60 years, McGuire’s findings have been replicated in field after field. Psychological vaccines have proved effective in advertising campaigns and political debates, in shoring up attitudes around medical testing on animals and guarding against adolescent smoking.
One insight, developed along the way, is that warning subjects of a coming attack — “People just like you have been vulnerable to the arguments you’re about to hear” — can be especially effective in building up defenses.
No one, after all, likes to be a sucker.
Yup, and I am one every day when I make the trek to purcha$e.
Inoculating against extremism
Can these same techniques be used to stave off the growing threat of radicalization?
Caleb Cain, for one, doesn’t need much convincing. “I know that inoculation works,” he says, “because the far right inoculated me.”
Cain was a sharp kid, but he had his struggles.
He dropped out of community college after a few semesters and wound up in a dead-end job at a furniture warehouse.
He was frustrated. Angry, and no one seemed to care.
“George Bush is over there blowing up people, Obama ain’t doing jack for anybody,” he says. “The system is completely corrupt. Nobody will listen to me, I can’t go to school, I can’t get health care, I can’t do anything. . . . I can’t even get a frickin’ date, because of how screwed up the society is, and you just start to fester and boil.”
He was looking for answers. For some validation, and he found it on YouTube, where a cast of alt-right outrage kings pinned the blame for his troubles — for the troubles of an entire generation of emasculated young men — on someone else, and just a few days ago, Cain and some collaborators — including a couple of former far-righters — launched an online enterprise that aims to push back against extremism using inoculation, among other methods.
The government, by all accounts, has gotten considerably smarter at countering violent extremism, or CVE, since then — in part by engaging with researchers like Kurt Braddock, a professor of communication at American and faculty fellow at American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab, or PERIL, who is exploring the potential of inoculation theory in this field.
We are all in peril, for the government now see the citizens it is supposed to serve as terrorists.
In a 2019 study titled “Vaccinating Against Hate,” Braddock tested the idea on an online panel of American adults skewed toward the under-35 demographic most prone to terrorist recruitment.
Most participants received an inoculation message at the outset of the experiment: They were told that they might encounter a message from a “political extremist group” and that messages from this group had been used to “recruit thousands of people to its cause — people just like you.”
Subjects were then presented with an adapted manifesto from the Weather Underground, a violent left-wing group active in the 1960s and 1970s, or the neo-Nazi National Alliance, with the name of the organization scrubbed from the message. Those who had been inoculated were substantially more likely to argue against the manifesto and to distrust the extremists behind it than a control group that had not been inoculated.
I don't trust either of them because they inevitably turn out to be government straw men and setups to achieve some other purpose, one that we can clearly see, because government needs enemies; otherwise, there is no need for them so they must create them, be they actual instigators or complete fiction.
Now the Department of Homeland Security has given Braddock and Georgia State psychology professor John Horgan a $570,000 grant to go a step further — road testing inoculation against new bits of disinformation actually percolating on the Internet.
Who needs the Internet?
Just pick up a new$paper somewhere.
This summer, Braddock and Horgan will convene an international group of 25 to 30 experts on violent extremism — professors, intelligence officials, and former extremists.
The panel will share predictions on an ongoing basis about what might emerge as the next QAnon, the hoax that attracted millions of adherents with its tales of satanist pedophiles in the upper reaches of power and helped fuel the attack on the Capitol.
Like I said, they are a straw man selling hopium.
Then, aided by Google, the researchers will identify a region of the country where searches for right-wing extremist material run high, use a survey company to screen for people in that region who are open to extremism, and have a narrator deliver an inoculation message to the test subjects via video — followed by a watered-down version of the emerging disinformation.
If the experiment succeeds, Braddock says, the hope is that government or advocacy groups might deploy the strategy at scale — identifying emerging trends and using targeted inoculation to choke off radicalization and violence.
How exactly the inoculation messages would be broadcast is an open question, but Braddock says he could imagine partnerships with big Internet companies that have already shown themselves willing to redirect users interested in extremist content.
One possibility: a 30-second advertisement appearing before a YouTube video — particularly a video edging into disinformation. Braddock says the inoculation would be most effective if it utilized a popular Internet form: a whiteboard explanation of how a particular piece of disinformation works, for instance, or a funny “Daily Show”-style refutation of extremist propaganda.
“Whatever is in the online zeitgeist,” he says.
In time, Braddock says, there may be a way to automate some of the process. He and several collaborators are seeking funding to develop an online tool that would scan social networks for disinformation — likely by identifying key words, sussing out the bots that are often used to spread propaganda, and homing in on the influencers at the center of emerging campaigns.
Oh, so A.I. will decide who is an "extremist," etc!
Try arguing with that!
Offline, he says, inoculation could be part of a broader media literacy curriculum in schools — inoculating students against extremism on both the left and the right to allay any concerns about political favoritism, and while the aim of this kind of widespread inoculation would be to curb the most worrisome kinds of extremism, it might also have the effect of tamping down some of the broader conspiratorial thinking that’s poisoning American democracy.
Haven't the kids been brainwashed enough own Marxi$m?
The skeptics
Braddock’s inoculation research is attracting substantial interest across the field of countering violent extremism.
“Honestly, it’s at the cutting edge,” says Ross Frenett, co-founder of Moonshot CVE, a tech-savvy research and consulting outfit with offices in London and Washington, D.C.
“If you can prove your 10,000 viewers have a marked decrease in propensity to consume extremist material,” he says, “then all of a sudden that’s something which is rigorous and can scale,” but there is reason for skepticism. Inoculation campaigns could get lost in the fast-moving stream of online chatter, and extremists will do all they can to mock and marginalize them.
Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty & National Security Program, points to a larger concern. Counter-messaging of any kind is inherently limited, she says, because it doesn’t address the legitimate grievances that underlie so much extremism.
“You can say the political violence at the Capitol was the result of the ‘big lie,’ and there’s definitely a huge amount of that,” she says, “but there are actual political and economic grievances that lead people to Trump.”
That argument gets no quarrel from Braddock. Counter-messaging strategies, however well calibrated, will not suppress violent extremism by themselves, he says.
He also allows that a preventive strategy like inoculation can only do so much to tame a right-wing militancy that’s already gripped a small but substantial share of the American population. An effective approach to de-radicalization is important, too.
One might imagine that inoculation theory would have little to say about rehabilitating extremists. Until recently, it’s been about preventing problems, not curing them. That’s what “inoculation” means, but an emerging approach with a curious name, “therapeutic inoculation,” has shown promise in a number of other fields — shifting the attitudes of those skeptical of climate science, for instance, and Braddock is intrigued by its potential in the realm of countering violent extremism.
Yeah, CV, climate, and the domestic tyranny related to "terrorism" are all part and parcel to the Great Re$et that is being carried out before your eyes as you are locked down indefinitely and forever.
He says he’s not sure exactly what a therapeutic message would look like in practice but “it’s important to communicate to your target that they’ve been tricked, that they’ve been had.”
It's on your back!
Braddock wants to round out the idea and apply the sort of rigor he’s insisted upon with standard inoculation, and if he can show it works, “that’s a game changer,” he says.
It will mean that inoculation not only can prevent people from going down the rabbit hole but “can drag them out of the rabbit hole altogether.”
I give you the link if you would like to go there.
I'm sure there will be a backlash, and that is what they are counting on even if they have to manufacture it like that staged and scripted event at the Capitol.
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This next item left me in ghastly silence:
"In Afghanistan, a booming kidney trade preys on the poor" by Adam Nossiter and Najim Rahim New York Times, February 6, 2021
HERAT, Afghanistan — Amid the bustle of beggars and patients outside the crowded hospital here, there are sellers and buyers, casting wary eyes at one another: The poor, seeking cash for their vital organs, and the gravely ill or their surrogates, looking to buy.
The illegal kidney business is booming in the western city of Herat, fueled by sprawling slums, the surrounding land’s poverty and unending war, an entrepreneurial hospital that advertises itself as the country’s first kidney transplantation center, and officials and doctors who turn a blind eye to organ trafficking.
They have done that with CV-19, too.
What is with those numbers, btw, since they are so prolific in the lexicon of everyday existence?
In Afghanistan, as in most countries, the sale and purchase of organs is illegal, and so is the implanting of purchased organs by physicians, but the practice remains a worldwide problem, particularly when it comes to kidneys, since most donors can live with just one.
“These people, they need the money,” said Ahmed Zain Faqiri, a teacher seeking a kidney for his gravely ill father outside Loqman Hakim Hospital.
He was eyed uneasily by a strapping young farmer, Haleem Ahmad, 21, who had heard of the kidney market and was looking to sell after his harvest had failed.
The consequences will be grim for him. For the impoverished kidney sellers who recover in frigid, unlit Herat apartments of peeling paint and concrete floors, temporarily delivered from crushing debt but too weak to work, in pain and unable to afford medication, the deal is a portal to new misery. In one such dwelling recently, a half-sack of flour and a modest container of rice was the only food for a family with eight children.
One can't help but wonder why this story appears now when we were supposedly on our way out under the last guy.
Guess we must stay now under the new guy to prevent such horrors, huh?
Wait a minute, there is such horror because of the invasion and 20-year occupation.
For Loqman Hakim Hospital, transplants are big business. Officials boast it has performed more than 1,000 kidney transplants in five years, drawing in patients from all over Afghanistan and the global Afghan diaspora. It offers them bargain-basement operations at one-twentieth the cost of such procedures in the United States, in a city with a seemingly unending supply of fresh organs.
Asked if the hospital made good money from the operations, Masood Ghafoori, a senior finance manager, said: “You could say that.”
The hospital handles the removal, transplant and initial recovery of both patients, without asking questions. Sellers say their hospital fees are covered by the buyers, and after a few days in the recovery ward, they are sent home.
How the organ recipient gets the donor to agree to the procedure is not the hospital’s concern, the doctors say.
“It’s not our business,” said Dr. Farid Ahmad Ejaz, a hospital physician whose business card reads “Founder of Kidney Transplantation in Afghanistan” in English.
Ejaz at first contended that more than a dozen impoverished Herat residents were lying when they told The Times of selling their kidneys for cash. Later, he conceded that “maybe” they were not. Interviews with other health officials here followed the same arc: initial denials, followed by grudging acknowledgment.
“In Afghanistan everything has a value, except human life,” said Dr. Mahdi Hadid, a member of Herat’s provincial council.
Accounts of organ selling date to the 1980s in India, according to the United Nations, and today the practice accounts for roughly 10% of all global transplants. Iran, less than 80 miles from Herat, is the only country where selling kidneys is not illegal, as long as the parties are Iranian.
“There’s always a gap between international guidelines and what governments do in practice,” said Asif Efrat, a faculty member at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a university in Israel, pointing out that Afghanistan is a new player compared to the countries where the organ trade is most prolific: China, Pakistan, and the Philippines. “The current international consensus is on the side of prohibiting, but governments have incentives not to follow it."
That's very interesting because they left out the worldwide organ-harvesting rings in Israel that was reported and then dispatched down the rabbit hole, and here is something interesting regarding the hope that is Israel.
Then there was the movie made about the Balkan black market, but the Globe couldn't see that from the shore (quiet about China, though).
They are even operating in South Africa via Latin America, where "journalists" have been jailed and threatened.
The whole affair reminds one of the uncovered issues in the pre$$, from the sex trafficking rings they advertise and support to depleted uranium use and adverse reactions and deaths from the vaccines they incessantly push.
The moral scruples that keep the business underground elsewhere are hardly evident in Herat. Ejaz and health officials point to poverty’s harsh logic.
“The people of Afghanistan sell their sons and daughters for money. How can you compare that to selling kidneys?” he asked. “We have to do this because someone is dying.”
Ejaz seemed unfazed when shown the business card of a kidney “broker,” saying, “In Afghanistan you find business cards for people to assassinate others.”
On the fourth floor of the hospital, three out of four patients in recovery said they had bought their kidneys.
“I feel fine now,” said Gulabuddin, a 36-year-old imam and kidney recipient from Kabul. “No pain at all.”
He said he had paid about $3,500 for his kidney, bought from a “complete stranger,” with an $80 commission to the broker. He got a good deal: Kidneys can cost as much as $4,500.
“If there is consent, Islam has no problem with it,” Gulabuddin said.
Dr. Abdul Hakim Tamanna, Herat province’s public health director, acknowledged the rise of the kidney black market in Afghanistan but said there was little the government could do.
“Unfortunately, this is common in poor countries,” he said. “There’s a lack of rule of law, and a lack of regulation surrounding this process.”
Deep inside the warren of sandy streets in Herat’s slums, Mir Gul Ataye, 28, regrets every second of his decision to sell his kidney. A construction worker who had earned up to $5 a day before his operation in November, he is now unable to lift more than 10 pounds, and barely that.
“I’m in pain, and weak,” he said. “I’ve been sick, and I can’t control my pee.”
Four children huddled in front of him on the concrete floor in the bare unlit room. He said he supports 13 family members in all and had accumulated some $4,000 of debt.
“It was difficult, but I had no choice. Nobody wants to give up a part of his body to someone else,” he said. “It was very shameful for me.”
For his kidney, Ataye received $3,800. That was barely three months ago. He is still in debt, unable to pay his rent or his electricity bill.
He said he feels “sadness, desperation, anger and loneliness.” One night he was in such severe pain, he banged his head against the wall and fractured his skull.
Others around Herat cited similar reasons for selling a kidney: outstanding debt, sick parents, a marriage that would otherwise have been unaffordable.
“My father would have died if we had not sold,” said Jamila Jamshidi, 25, sitting on the floor across from her brother, Omid, 18, in a frigid apartment near the city’s edge.
Both had sold their kidneys — she, five years ago, and he, one year ago — and both were weak and in pain.
At a mud-walled camp just outside Herat, a vortex of sun, wind and dust filled with war refugees from other provinces, Mohammed Zaman, a tribal elder in a white turban, spoke of the irresistible attraction of Loqman Hakim’s kidney operation. More than 20 from his village, now chased from their homes, had sold their kidneys.
“My people are hungry. We don’t have land. We can’t be shopkeepers. We’ve got no money,” he said. “I can’t stop it.”
At a local restaurant, five brothers spoke of being forced off their land in Badghis province by constant Taliban attacks. In Herat, all had sold their kidneys. The youngest was 18, the oldest 32.
“We had no choice,” said Abdul Samir, one of the brothers. “We were forced to sell. Otherwise, we would not have sold a fingernail.”
Afghanistan’s poverty rate was expected to reach over 70% in 2020, according to the World Bank, and the country remains largely dependent on foreign aid; domestic revenues finance only about half the government budget. Without any substantive public safety net, health care is just another opportunity to exploit the country’s most vulnerable.
What one can not help but notice is what is NOT in the ARTCILE.
There was NO MENTION of CV-19!!!
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"Fear grips Myanmar with military back in charge" by Hannah Beech New York Times, February 6, 2021
The question for them -- and Americans -- is to fight or hide, and I'm told before they die completely, they have to protest.
The red balloons rose over an anxious city. They floated by the hundreds above the golden spire of Sule Pagoda in Yangon, the commercial capital of Myanmar, and drifted over an avenue where, more than a dozen years ago, soldiers shot citizens marching peacefully for democracy.
The balloons hovering over Yangon were released by activists, expressing their hope that the elected leaders detained in a military coup d’état would be free again. The color — later pink, after red balloons sold out — symbolized the National League for Democracy party, which had, until Monday, led the civilian government with Aung San Suu Kyi at its head.
By Saturday, balloons were not enough, and the familiar footfall of protesters resounded in the city. As armed police officers stood behind riot shields, marchers called for “democracy to rise, military dictatorship to fall” and sang protest anthems that once brought prison sentences.
Looks like an INSURRECTION to me.
With the generals’ abrupt seizure of power, the people of Myanmar are again in the military’s cross hairs — and increasingly shut off from the world. Although the putsch, led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief, was itself bloodless, the military has resorted to familiar tactics in the days since: dozens of arrests, beatings by mysterious thugs, telecommunications outages and, this time, social media bans targeting Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. An entire class of people — poets, painters, reporters and rap artists among them — has gone into hiding.
Yeah, so?
Nothing wrong with that in the U.S., according to the pre$$.
As officers from Special Branch, the fearsome intelligence service, knocked on doors, the muscle memory of living under nearly a half-century of direct military rule — glance left, glance right, don’t linger anywhere too long — had people resorting to both camouflage and cunning. The reflexes may have been rusty, but they kicked in quickly during this new, uncertain era of terror.
Get ready, America, it is coming your way!
The balloons and marches were among hundreds of acts of defiance by a populace whose DNA is as encoded with resistance as with vigilance. Each day brings growing street dissent, as well as moments of civil disobedience that are as subtle as they are powerful, with people testing the limits of what can be done and said.
I guess there is good re$i$tance and bad resistance then.
On Saturday, thousands of people in hard hats and face masks marched in Yangon, in the largest rallies since the coup, but the world could not watch. Live social-media feeds of the protests were abruptly shut off as mobile internet and then broadband services were disrupted across the country, just as they had been during the coup.
Look at them now throwing around the word coup!!
At least it tells you what is the agenda!
Also on Saturday, in Mandalay, convoys of hundreds of cars and motorcycles paraded through the city at night, honking their support for the protest movement. Soldiers and police officers stood with their weapons drawn.
They did that for Trump here.
Since the coup, cities across Myanmar have resounded with the din of clanging pots, pans, gongs and empty water jugs, a traditional send-off for the devil, which, in this case, wears army green.
The generals have been busy this past week. More than 130 officials and lawmakers were detained in the early hours of the putsch, along with 14 civil society figures, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a group whose focus is on Myanmar’s political detainees.
“I will keep doing this until the dwarf Min Aung Hlaing dies,” said Daw Marlar, a participant in the protests. “I will fight until I die.”
On an offshore natural gas platform, workers in orange jumpsuits brandished red ribbons in support of the National League for Democracy. More than 500 instructors at the University of Yangon wanted to join the campaign, too, but activists had prepared only 200 ribbons. Doctors posed with three fingers raised in a rebellious gesture from the “Hunger Games” films. The entire staff at the Ministry of Welfare resigned.
A daughter was born to Dr. Si Thu Kyaw, a surgeon at Mandalay General Hospital, on Monday, the day of the coup. The 34-year-old doctor greeted his newborn and then led a civil disobedience campaign among medical workers.
“We passed through life in fear under the military junta but we won’t let it happen to the next generation,” he said. “We don’t fear the military. We don’t fear their weapons. If we acquiesce, it’s like we are in the morgue. We need to fight back.”
The generals may have held Myanmar in their grip for nearly 50 years, but they take over a country that has changed remarkably in the last decade. In 2007 in downtown Yangon, blood seeped unseen into the burgundy robes of Buddhist monks who had been shot by soldiers in yet another crushed protest movement. Discarded flip-flops hinted at panicked feet fleeing bullets. The nation was then mostly unplugged, mobile phone cards available only to those who could pay $3,000. News circulated in whispers in tea shops.
Today, on the same streets, there are skyscrapers and shopping malls, billboards for iPhones and cafes suited for Instagram. It often feels like the whole of Myanmar is on Facebook. Shortly after the Ministry of Transport and Communications blocked the social media site, the use of virtual private networks to circumvent the ban went up 6,700%, according to a tech research firm. Bans of Twitter and Instagram followed.
By Friday, the civil disobedience campaign had harnessed the energy of students and even a few soldiers. Satirical memes and protest art have proliferated. A national association representing the interests of nats and weizzas, the various spirits and wizards that are believed to reside in the country, said it would cast spells on the coup-plotters. The organization had come into existence after Monday’s military takeover.
Hunched over the light of their phones, some young people remain defiant. The panda-eyed generation, as they call themselves, mount vigils night after night. On Facebook, a grandson of a former junta leader, retired Senior Gen. Than Shwe, posted a sticker of bouncing teddy bear bottoms in support of someone decrying the coup. “Stay strong,” he also posted, along with heart and muscled-arm emojis. “You will never walk alone.”
Tens of thousands of people “liked” Facebook campaigns to boycott a beer company and a mobile phone operator that are part of the military’s immense business empire. Another embargo is targeting a member of the military’s new Cabinet who owns gold and diamond shops.
The hashtag #savemyanmar has attracted tens of millions of supporters, and even Rihanna, the pop singer, sent her prayers to the country’s citizens, but if the resistance has grown sharper and more sophisticated, the military still flexes its strength. On Thursday night, 21 people who banged pots and pans in Mandalay were picked up by the police. Activists and reporters found themselves tailed once again. The generals may have handed some power to the National League for Democracy in 2015, after the party won elections in a landslide, but they did not dismantle the vast security apparatus that caged the country for decades.
That's the paragraph where the print ended, and what is missing from this article?
Any reference to.... (drum roll, please).... not only CV-19 but CHINA!
In last November’s elections, the National League for Democracy won an even more decisive mandate, but the army, whose proxy party did terribly, asserted that the election was marred by fraud.
It hasn’t helped that even during the years of hybrid military-civilian governance, the number of political prisoners grew larger than during the previous era of transitional military rule. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners says that before the coup, more than 700 people were either in prison or facing trial for crimes of conscience.
The army, which has vowed to rule for at least a year with a 15-member State Administrative Council reporting to Hlaing, has shown that it will use any legal pretext to lock people up.
On Wednesday, a court document surfaced confirming that Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who spent 15 years under house arrest, had been charged with an arcane infraction stemming from walkie-talkies and other imported equipment found at her villa in Naypyitaw, the capital. President Win Myint, who was also detained on Monday, faces a separate charge for breaching coronavirus regulations by greeting supporters during the election campaign last year.
Maybe she can escape by swimming away.
The charges against the two civilian leaders might seem absurd, but they could put each in prison for up to three years, a reminder that Myanmar can be run like a penal state. In 2016, a poet who wrote about having a tattoo of a former president on his penis was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for online defamation. During the years of direct military rule, critics of the army were locked up for, among other charges, holding foreign currency and riding a motorcycle backward.
Interesting, since the "freest" country on Earth has the most people under incarceration.
Monday’s coup was staged before dawn, when the roosters had not yet crowed and the monks had not set forth, barefoot, for their morning alms. As dusk has fallen each night after the army takeover, the national mood has grown distressed. Who will be taken tonight?
With little information leaking out about the fates of those still detained — some have been released and placed on house arrest — people are once again relying on “mouth radio,” as waves of rumors are called.
“We know it’s very risky to protest on the streets but we need to do it,” said Ko Ye Win Aung, one protest organizer. “We can’t let democracy go backward.”
If there is one constant in the history of the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar’s military is known, it is a willingness to shed blood. The military crushed protests tens of thousands strong in 1988 and 2007. When Suu Kyi was between stints of house arrest in 2003, generals sent goons after her convoy, killing dozens, and in the nation’s frontier lands, the Tatmadaw has killed, raped and burned. A frenzy of violence against the Rohingya, culminating in an exodus of the Muslim minority in 2017, was carried out with genocidal intent, according to United Nations investigators.
First mention of Rohingya as well.
As protests grow, some are worried that a bloody crackdown is inevitable. Tun Shein, a trishaw driver, said he had peeled off a photograph of Suu Kyi from his vehicle. “She will still be in my heart forever,” he said.
On Thursday, Win Htein, an elder of the National League for Democracy, sat at his home waiting for his arrest. A former army captain who joined the opposition movement and became one of Suu Kyi’s closest advisers, Win Htein spent about 20 years in prison. He read international economic treatises while in the notorious Insein Prison and wrote love letters to his wife.
When he was released in 2010, the same year as Suu Kyi, he joked that he was “out for now” and poked fun at others in the National League for Democracy who had served shorter sentences. Win Htein became a lawmaker in the civilian government.
Around midnight, in the shadows between Thursday and Friday, soldiers and men from Special Branch came for him. Now 79 years old, Win Htein was charged with sedition for criticizing the coup.
“I’ll be back in,” Win Htein said hours earlier, a shorthand for detention, “but don’t worry. My heart is free.”
Mine will be when I die.
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Chile is hot:
"Public buildings set ablaze in Chile after police shoot street juggler" by Mike Ives and Pascale Bonnefoy New York Times, February 6, 2021
SANTIAGO, Chile — Demonstrators angered by the fatal police shooting of a popular street juggler set several public buildings ablaze in southern Chile on Friday night, leaving a city of almost 34,000 people practically without public services.
Ten public offices in the city of Panguipulli burned to the ground, including the municipal government building, the post office, the civil registry, a local court and a water management company, authorities said.
A police officer has been detained in the shooting, the head of the regional homicide unit, Rodrigo Morales, said Saturday, adding that investigators were gathering video evidence from witnesses. The officer was not publicly identified and did not appear Saturday at a court hearing, where he was represented by a lawyer.
The shooting took place after the juggler, identified as Francisco Martínez, did not comply with a police officer’s request to provide identification as he performed at a busy intersection in the center of Panguipulli, a popular lakeside community, witnesses said.
An argument followed, during which the officer pulled out his gun and fired at least two shots at Martínez’s feet, witnesses told reporters. Videos taken by witnesses, which spread widely on social media, show the juggler jumping to avoid the shots then running toward the officer with his props in the air. The officer then shot him in the chest, witnesses said, and he died at the scene.
Police officers described the shooting as an act of self-defense, saying Martínez was threatening the officer with a machetelike weapon. Witnesses interviewed by news media Friday night said it was a tin sword, a prop for his juggling show.
In interviews with several media outlets, Panguipulli’s mayor, Rodrigo Valdivia, described Martínez, 25, as a quiet, respectful young man who was well known in town because he had lived on the streets on and off for several years, performing for its many tourists and using the municipal shelter and food kitchen during the winter.
Valdivia, in a hastily called news conference by the destroyed municipal building, placed responsibility on the police for the shooting, saying they had not followed protocol in a routine ID check.
Time to defund their police.
He also blamed police for the fires, saying they had “entrenched themselves” in their own quarters and left other government buildings unprotected. Since protesters were unable to attack the police station, Valdivia said, they turned to other government symbols.
Confrontations between protesters and police were later reported in the capital, Santiago, hundreds of miles north of Panguipulli. People across Santiago expressed anger over the shooting by banging on pots and pans, a ritual for airing public discontent known in Latin America as a cacerolazo, roughly translated as “casseroling.”
The undersecretary of the interior, Juan Francisco Galli, traveled to Panguipulli on Saturday. Speaking from the police station, he said that police use their weapons only as a last resort or in self-defense. “We regret something like this that is unexpected in a police procedure, that a person dies and the carabineros had to use their weapons,” he said.
Still, some Twitter users posted footage of the blazes in Panguipulli with the hashtag, “He didn’t die, they assassinated him.” Others called for changes in police procedures. “It happened in broad daylight in a moment of complete peace and without any threat to public safety,” Chilean writer and literary critic Pedro Gandolfo wrote on Twitter about the shooting of the street artist. “A shameful act with a tragic result.”
Police misconduct came under scrutiny in Chile after mass protests in 2019 over economic concerns, which often devolved into violence and were met with police brutality. The Public Prosecutor’s Office received more than 8,000 reports of human rights violations, including hundreds of complaints of permanent eye damage from rubber bullets.
Last November, the director of the national police, Gen. Mario Rozas, resigned after officers raided a juvenile center and shot two children in Talcahuano, in southern Chile. A month earlier, an officer pushed a teenager off a bridge during a protest in Santiago, abandoning him seriously wounded in a river bed.
The abuse led to sweeping calls to reform the national police force, which was never significantly reformed after the dictatorship led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet ended in 1990. Human rights groups and analysts called for more oversight of the force’s budget, training and other measures that would effectively bring it under civilian control.
He's the guy the U.S helped put in power via coup -- on September 11, no less!
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Now for the horror of Haiti:
"Haiti braces for unrest as president refuses to step down" by Harold Isaac, Andre Paultre and Maria Abi-Habib New York Times, February 7, 2021
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The poor now target the poor in Haiti. Many fear leaving their homes, buying groceries, or paying a bus fare, acts that can draw the attention of gangs out to kidnap anyone with cash, no matter how little.
Many schools shut their doors this month, not over COVID-19, but to protect students and teachers against a kidnapping-for-ransom epidemic that began haunting the nation a year ago. No one is spared: not nuns, priests or the children of struggling street vendors. Students now organize fund-raisers to collect ransoms to free classmates.
Their hardship may only worsen as Haiti hurtles toward a constitutional crisis. The opposition is demanding that President Jovenel Moïse step down Sunday in a political showdown likely only to deepen the country’s paralysis and unrest.
After years enduring hunger, poverty, and daily power cuts, Haitians say their country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, is in the worst state it has ever seen, with the government unable to provide the most basic services.
Haiti is “on the verge of explosion,” a collection of the country’s Episcopal bishops said in a statement last weekend.
Moïse’s five-year presidential term ends Sunday, which is why the opposition is demanding that he step down, but the president is refusing to vacate office before February 2022, arguing that an interim government occupied the first year of his five-year term.
Aren't you glad we are not Haiti?
On Friday, the US government weighed in, an important opinion for many Haitians, who often look to their larger neighbor for guidance on the direction the political winds are blowing.
A State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, supported Moïse’s argument that his term ends next February and added that only then “a new elected president should succeed President Moïse,” but Price also sent a warning to Moïse about delaying elections and ruling by decree.
“The Haitian people deserve the opportunity to elect their leaders and restore Haiti’s democratic institutions,” Price added.
Why, when the American people are denied that?
The feeling I'm getting, be it Myanmar, Chile, or Haiti, is that the covert regime change efforts are on overdrive.
Moïse has led by presidential decree since last year, after suspending two-thirds of the Senate, the entire lower Chamber of Deputies, and every mayor throughout the country. Haiti now has only 11 elected officials in office to represent its 11 million people, with Moïse having refused to hold any elections over the last four years.
We call them Executive Orders.
Moïse is seeking to expand his presidential powers in the coming months by changing the country’s constitution. A referendum on the new constitution is set for April, and the opposition fears the vote will not be free or fair and will only embolden his budding authoritarian tendencies, assertions that Moïse denies.
The opposition hopes to tap into the discontent of the millions of unemployed Haitians — more than 60 percent of the country lives in poverty — to fuel the protests, which in the past have often turned violent and shut down large parts of the country.
It's the same with the children here -- and $3,600 per child is not going to alleviate child poverty!
That's CRUMBS and we know Wall $treet will be getting the bulk of the $1.9 trillion.
Although the president has never been weaker — holed up inside the presidential palace, he is unable to move freely even in the capital — observers say he has a good chance of staying on the job. A weak and feeble opposition is plagued by infighting and cannot agree on how to remove Moïse from power or whom to replace him with.
Like Biden in the White House.
The political uncertainty has sowed feelings of dread, with fears that street demonstrations in coming days will turn violent and that a refusal by Moïse to leave office will plunge the country into a long period of unrest.
Aren't you glad we avoided that?
Zamor, a 57-year-old driver who would give only his middle name because of fears of retribution, said his daughter was snatched off the street in Port-au-Prince, the capital, last month. He now keeps his three children at home and prevents them from attending school.
“People need to have confidence in the state,” Zamor said, adding the government “is filled with kidnappers and gang members.”
Just like Afghanistan (and the U.S. What do you think is the DCF?!).
Before the kidnapping epidemic, Haitians could listen to music with their neighbors on the street, play dominoes, go to the beach, and commiserate with friends and neighbors about their economic despair, but now the fear of being abducted pervades the streets, hindering routine daily activities.
“The regime has delegated power to the bandits,” said Pierre Espérance, 57, a leading human rights activist. “The country is now gangsterized. What we are living is worse than during the dictatorship,” he said, referring to the brutal autocratic rule of the Duvalier family that lasted nearly 30 years, until 1986.
He was our guy!
Haitians suspect that the proliferation of gangs over the last two years has been supported by Moïse to stifle any dissent.
At first, the gangs targeted opposition neighborhoods and attacked protests demanding better living conditions, but the gangs may have grown too big to be tamed and now seem to operate everywhere.
In December, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Moïse’s close allies — including the former director general of the interior ministry — for providing political protection and weapons to gangs that targeted opposition areas.
The sanctions highlighted a five-day attack last May that terrorized neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince. The Treasury Department said that gang members, with the cover and support of government officials, raped women and set houses on fire.
The government denies providing support to any gangs.....
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At least there isn't any snow down there, and this landed as quietly as a snowflake:
"California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office on Saturday issued revised guidelines for indoor church services after the Supreme Court lifted the state’s ban on indoor worship during the coronavirus pandemic, but left in place restrictions on singing and chanting. In the most significant legal victory against California’s COVID-19 health orders, the high court issued rulings late Friday in two cases where churches argued the restrictions violated their religious liberty. The justices said for now California can’t continue with a ban on indoor church services, but it can limit attendance to 25% of a building’s capacity and restrict singing and chanting inside. California had put the ban in place because the virus is more easily transmitted indoors and singing releases tiny droplets that can carry the disease. Newsom’s office said those measures were imposed to protect worshippers from getting infected. “We will continue to enforce the restrictions the Supreme Court left in place and, after reviewing the decision, we will issue revised guidelines for worship services to continue to protect the lives of Californians,” the governor’s press secretary, Daniel Lopez, said in a statement. The justices were acting on emergency requests to halt the restrictions from South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista and Pasadena-based Harvest Rock Church and Harvest International Ministry, which has more than 160 churches across the state. “You can go to your house of worship, as of now! You can go back to church, we’re excited about that,” Pastor Art Hodges of the South Bay United Pentecostal Church told KNSD-TV. The church has defied state orders since last May by holding service indoors while following COVID-19 safety protocols, Hodges said. He said he was thankful to hold services on Sunday “without any pressure or threat or concern” and the court’s action follows a decision in a case from New York late last year in which the justices split 5-4 in barring the state from enforcing certain limits on attendance at churches and synagogues. Shortly after, the justices told a federal court to reexamine California’s restrictions in light of the ruling. With few exceptions, California’s COVID-19 restrictions have been largely upheld, but a number of lawsuits, such as one seeking to allow outdoor dining, are still in the courts......"
Thank God for the Supreme Court.
Related:
A member of the National Guard injected a man with the coronavirus vaccine in the parking lot of Six Flags on Saturday in Bowie, Maryland (Sarah Silbiger/Getty)
I went very quiet when I saw that photo.
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"It was the company her father started and she then led. Employees were like family. Now, she had to let them go" by Katie Johnston Globe Staff, February 6, 2021
WHITINSVILLE — Amy Yag Sondrup’s stomach was in knots. She had spent a week going over org charts, circling the names of employees she could afford to keep. For three terrible months since COVID-19 blossomed into a global crisis early last year, she had held on while her business was being decimated. Now, in May, she had an agonizing task ahead of her.
The pandemic’s damage to businesses large and small was overwhelming and everywhere, but this was personal. It was her company, the one she had devoted her life to, the one her father had founded and built and then passed on to her.
The 175 people who worked for her — sales executives, carpenters, designers, accountants — were family. Some she had known all her life — or, as those people sometimes said when they saw her, lowering a hand toward the floor, since she was “this big.” Their labor had given her a privileged life. She felt a duty to support them, but her company, Access TCA, sat directly in the pandemic’s destructive path. It catered to a niche in the marketing world — designing and building elaborate, interactive exhibits that biotech and pharmaceutical companies use at trade shows. It was a thriving industry, until the virus transformed large indoor gatherings into potentially deadly superspreader events. Almost overnight, Access’s livelihood evaporated.
Like so many others, so who is she friends with at the Globe?
Sondrup found ways in those early months to keep paying employees, telling them and herself that the pandemic would subside and business would rebound, but now, on this Monday morning, with money running out and no end to the pandemic in sight, there were no more options. In a few hours, she had to face her employees in a company-wide Zoom meeting and deliver the news: All but a few dozen of them would be furloughed.
She poured herself a cup of coffee, with French vanilla creamer, and ate a bowl of Crispix. Then she went into the room in her North Providence home she had recently converted to an office and opened her laptop. After a video call with department heads and another with the finance team, it was time. Sondrup hit the “launch meeting” button and watched the frames appear on her screen.
Her employees looked back at her from kitchen tables, living rooms, and basements, wearing sweatpants, drinking coffee, holding children in their laps.
Sondrup tried to comfort herself: They were well aware of the state of their industry. They knew the government loan now paying their salaries was about to run out. Surely, they knew the reason she had gathered them; still, as she took a breath to speak, she knew that for some of them, hearing the words out loud might be devastating — and it might also be for her.
When the meeting was over, Sondrup felt shaky and slightly nauseous. Then relieved that it was over. She was glad to be alone. She made herself a sandwich, watched some Food Network, and took a nap.
When she woke, she wrote down the names of employees and their skills on brightly-colored sticky notes and started moving them around on the wall, imagining a company that would survive and one day thrive again.
She would hire back the people she lost. She had to find a way.
* * *
Sondrup’s entire life was bound up in the company. Her father launched it the year she was born, in 1984, in a massive 19th-century textile machine shop in Whitinsville, a village in the Central Massachusetts town of Northbridge that was once a mecca of American industrial development. As a 5-year-old, she sometimes went to work with her father and fashioned an office for herself in a phone booth, punching numbers into an adding machine and imagining she was in charge.
In time, Sondrup was doing real work for the company, wiping down booths at convention centers and putting labels on newsletters. Later, she worked summers as a receptionist. Sometimes she came in on weekends to hang out in the graphics department, just for fun.
Sondrup was the oldest of three children and grew up knowing her father wanted her to take over the business, but then came college, and she ran the other way. She moved to Salt Lake City to study history, a long-time passion; she was fascinated by the impact major events had on societies and the people who lived in them. After getting her master’s degree, she stayed to teach at a small liberal arts college.
Then, when she was 25, she got a phone call from her father’s longtime chief financial officer. It was time to come back, the executive said. Her father wanted to start handing over the reins. She put it in terms Sondrup could not refuse: You owe it to your family.
Sondrup’s father, Mike Yag, asked her to try it for a year. If she didn’t like it, he said, she could go get her PhD, but when Sondrup walked back through the door at Access, she knew she was where she was meant to be.
Over the next five years, the boss’s daughter rose swiftly through the ranks; then, after a shakeup of senior management, she was in charge. She carried on some of her father’s traditions — Doughnut Day on the last Friday of the month and summer picnics at the lake — and created a few of her own, including Christmas parties at the bowling alley with nachos and beer. Her father remains CEO and chairman but is no longer involved in day-to-day operations.
As a woman and someone under 50, Sondrup, now 36, is an anomaly among her peers in the trade-show industry. She’s 5-foot-3 and famous around the building for her high heels. She has more than 200 pairs at home; a sign on her office door features a pair of sky-high Louboutins, and there’s always a bottle of whiskey on hand for anyone having a bad day.
Encouraging alcoholism to drown troubles?
After taking over, she quickly found success and rose in importance in the industry. Between 2017 and 2019, she grew the company’s revenue 35 percent and added about 60 employees. In 2020, she was selected president of the industry’s trade group, the Experiential Designers and Producers Association, the youngest ever to hold the position and the first to hold it for two terms.
Access TCA’s longest-serving employees — some of whom she worked side by side with, cutting and painting letters in the shop to prepare for the company’s biggest show of the year — told Sondrup they were proud of her, like fond aunts and uncles.
Then, in late February of 2020, the virus came.
Sondrup was in Düsseldorf, Germany, at the massive international retail trade fair EuroShop. The coronavirus until then had been mostly a distant concern, centered halfway around the world. But now, it was rapidly spreading in Europe, and cases were showing up in the United States. Before long, trade show exhibitors started pulling the plug. Trucks delivering exhibits were turned around. Booths were dismantled.
Design and construction work at companies like Access TCA soon came to a halt. At Access, layoffs and furloughs started within weeks: 22 people on March 12, then 20 staffers in Las Vegas, the nation’s capital city of trade shows, effectively putting the Vegas office into hibernation. Several smaller rounds followed. Each time, Sondrup thought she had cut her staff to the core. But then her finance manager would tell her she had to go deeper if she wanted to keep the company alive.
On the morning of April 3, Sondrup and her HR team went to the mammoth shop and warehouse where exhibits were built and stored, an almost 200,000 square-foot area at the far end of the building. The 50 shop workers knew why she was there.
Sondrup felt defeated as she stood on the worn concrete floor in front of a carpenter’s bench, an American flag and posters of retired employees hanging from the rafters nearby.
We’re initiating a relatively large-scale furlough, she told them, choking up as she spoke. We have to act swiftly if we’re going to survive.
The crew was quiet. Heat blew down from the ceiling ducts in gusts.
Rick Colarusso, an Access carpenter for 18 years, hugged her and told her he loved her. We’ll be back, he said.
By noon, the shop was empty.
* * *
Help came shortly in the form of a $2.9 million federal Paycheck Protection Program loan. Almost everyone went back on the payroll: designers who dreamed up high-tech exhibits, carpenters who built them, warehouse workers who crated and shipped them, client services staff who traveled with them all over the world.
It was enough to pay everyone through spring. By then, Sondrup thought, the world might almost be back to normal, or close enough, at least, for work to resume, but as the weeks ticked by and restrictions showed few signs of lifting, Sondrup’s hopes dimmed. In mid-May, with the loan money nearly gone, she called the company-wide Zoom meeting to announce the gut-wrenching decisions she’d made.
She looked into the faces watching her from her computer screen and cut to the chase.
Look, here’s what we know, she said. We know there are no live shows on the calendar for the rest of the year. And that means we’re going to have to do another furlough.
One hundred and twenty-five of her 175 employees would be let go.
She called it a furlough because she didn’t want it to be, didn’t believe it to be, permanent.
I’m doing this, she told them, so there’s a company to bring you back to, but there was no telling when or how her business would return. Before the pandemic hit last year, Access TCA had been on track to bring in an all-time high of $75 million in revenue. The revised figure after massive cancellations — and a pivot to virtual exhibits — turned out to be closer to $17 million. And 2021? No one knew. Some small shows are in the works for later this year, but industry experts say the big international expos that could revive a company like Sondrup’s aren’t likely to be back to full steam for another two years.
* * *
The 50 employees who remain on the job, people Sondrup calls “Swiss army” workers because they can perform multiple duties, are now largely consolidated on the third floor in one corner of the giant, otherwise mostly deserted complex. Many of them work reduced hours, making half or a quarter of their usual pay.
Sondrup couldn’t bear walking past all the empty desks outside her office on the first floor, so she asked three employees to move her desk— a massive steel welding table her father had topped with glass — to be closer to the others.
She keeps tabs on some of the employees she had to let go, particularly the ones in need. She put a number of them on the payroll at minimal hours, allowing their families to remain on the company’s health insurance on Access’s dime.
On company-wide Zoom calls every other Monday, she assures them she can right the ship, but there are some days when she just can’t — can’t be strong, can’t tell everyone it’s going to be OK.
She frets about what seem to her to be haphazard restrictions that allow shopping malls to remain open but cut off trade shows and similar corporate events. By one industry estimate, 50,000 people in Massachusetts’ business events workforce have been laid off and $250 million a month is being drained from the state’s economy. A nationwide study found that nearly 40 percent of business-events companies are at risk of going under.
Oh, she is figuring out the $cam, too?!
The emotional exhaustion has driven Sondrup to take naps for the first time in her adult life. On stressful days, she drives 45 minutes to visit her young nieces and momentarily forget her troubles while they play with Barbies or watch “Moana.”
Sondrup believes the tide could finally be turning. Several clients have asked Access to build booths for shows in late summer, boosting several employees back up to full time, and a second PPP loan is awaiting approval, but she often thinks of the Zoom call she held back in May, when she announced the layoffs and saw the hurt and fear in her employees’ eyes up close. There were husbands and wives who were now both unemployed; fathers and sons. Sondrup had locked eyes with one woman who had been at the company for 20 years. Sondrup used to sell her Girl Scout cookies and take candy off her desk. Now Sondrup was telling her that her livelihood, at least for now, was gone.....
Related:
"The People’s Republik will not reopen" by Lucas Phillips Globe Correspondent, February 7, 2021
The People’s Republik, a popular Cambridge bar for more than two decades, has joined the growing list of beloved local gathering spots that will not reopen after a pandemic closure, its owner said Sunday.
“We had a good run,” Robert Blair, 59, said.
The watering hole had been able to open during the pandemic because it is also a restaurant, but what was announced as a temporary closure in December will be permanent, he said.
The establishment follows two other Central Square mainstays that have closed: the Cantab Lounge and Field Pub.
With the pandemic wearing on — and with sales down and bills piling up — Blair informed his staff a week ago that they would begin clearing out the place, he said.
Although it initially opened with no name, the establishment quickly collected many Soviet-inspired decorations and a loyal following.
World Series wins, terrorist attacks — the memories are many, said Blair, who grew up in Dublin and was a longtime bartender at the nearby Plough and Stars before opening The People’s Republik, his voice breaking with emotion.
The longtime staff and regulars had become so close that they attended weddings and funerals together — some even married one another, Blair said. “We’re literally a family.”
Turning 60 this month, Blair said he plans to retire and help baby-sit his grandchildren. But he will miss the community ethos of The People’s Republik, he said.....
How ironic that the People’s Republik closed as the state and country go full Communi$t.
