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ESPN Analyst US Shouldn’t ‘Criticize’ China’s Uyghur Genocide When Republicans Violate ‘Voting Rights’

ESPN guest analyst JA Adande laid cover for China’s human rights abuses of the Uyghur population by claiming that America has no room to “criticize” China because Republicans are stripping away “voting rights” of nonwhites in the US.
On Friday’s episode of Around the Horn, Adande, who’s president of the Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, pushed back against the notion that China is guilty of genocide and attacked the U.S. instead.
“I think it’s standard in sports right now- you have to have a cognitive dissonance. You need to compartmentalize,” Adande said.
“We’ve never had a more enjoyable NFL Playoffs in this country, and we’ve never had more people watching the playoffs, and yet it goes on amid the ongoing allegations against Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Football Team, and, you know, the continuous concussion concerns, and now the concerns about diversity in the allegations and questions about competitive integrity even, all of that, and yet we’re still enjoying the games,” Adande began.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" readability="4.3606557377049">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/jadande?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jadande</a> talks about reconciling watching the Beijing Winter Olympics amid China's human rights crisis <a href="https://t.co/mqkOygjBXV">pic.twitter.com/mqkOygjBXV</a>
— Around The Horn (@AroundtheHorn) <a href="https://twitter.com/AroundtheHorn/status/1489724194564751363?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 4, 2022</a></blockquote>
Adande then equated voter ID laws to genocide without evidence, claiming America has no room to criticize China over human rights abuses of Uyghurs given Republican efforts to verify voter identity in elections.
“And who are we to criticize China’s human rights records when we have ongoing attacks by the agents of the state against unarmed citizens, and we’ve got assaults on the voting rights of our people of color in various states in this country,” Adande said.
“So sports – I think it is possible, and it’s necessary more than ever to just shut everything out if you are to enjoy the actual games themselves,” he concluded.
<div class="wxEjJoKx"><a href="https://www.infowarsstore.com/survival-shield-x-3-1-oz?ims=oscuk&utm_campaign=x3hero&utm_source=Infowars+Hero&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=x3hero" target="_blank"><img src="https://api.directus.libertycdn.com/uploads/_/originals/X3-hero-385-2.jpg" /></a></div>
This comes as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) discouraged criticism of China’s human rights abuses during the Olympic Games in Beijing, <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/they-are-ruthless-pelosi-warns-us-olympians-not-to-speak-out-against-chinese-government/" target="_blank">begging lawmakers not to “incur their anger”</a> because the Chinese Communist Party is “ruthless.”
The 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing began on Friday amid COVID lockdowns in the region and US diplomatic boycotts over China’s coverup of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Viewership during the opening ceremony <a href="https://www.outkick.com/olympics-ratings-plummet-to-all-time-low-on-opening-night/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">plummeted to an all-time low</a>, garnering only 7.25 million viewers on NBC on Friday, down 55% from 2018.
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<a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/espn-analyst-us-shouldnt-criticize-chinas-uyghur-genocide-when-republicans-violate-voting-rights/Tech%20CEO%20Says%20He%20Doesn't%20Care%20About%20Chinese%20Death%20Camps,%20Alex%20Jones%20Responds" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">VIDEO: Tech CEO Says He Doesn’t Care About Chinese Death Camps, Alex Jones Responds</a>
 
 
source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/espn-analyst-us-shouldnt-criticize-chinas-uyghur-genocide-when-republicans-violate-voting-rights">https://www.infowars.com/posts/espn-analyst-us-shouldnt-criticize-chinas-uyghur-genocide-when-republicans-violate-voting-rights</a>

news ESPN Analyst US Shouldn’t ‘Criticize’ China’s Uyghur Genocide When Republicans Violate ‘Voting Rights’

ESPN guest analyst JA Adande laid cover for China’s human rights abuses of the Uyghur population by claiming that America has no room to “cr...

Is CNN Just a Demented Sex Club Masquerading As a News Network?

news Is CNN Just a Demented Sex Club Masquerading As a News Network?

Kristi Leigh breaks down how the latest CNN sex scandal is threatening to take down the fake news network. She’ll also explain how Canadia...

How to understand the recent coups in Africa

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_oWKcbQ8jdDx69ud-mzVwHfPTxE=/0x0:4000x2094/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23220488/1237975407.jpg" /></div>
Over the past eighteen months, there have been seven coups and coup attempts in African nations. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan, military leaders succeeded in seizing power; in Niger and, most recently, in Guinea-Bissau, they failed.
On Thursday, following the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/europe-africa-portugal-west-africa-guinea-bissau-15480dcb7a9cd6b407ce7651135c2d46">failed coup</a> in Guinea-Bissau earlier this week, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) convened to discuss the unrest, which ECOWAS chair Nana Akufo-Addo <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20220203-west-african-leaders-hold-summit-after-wave-of-coups-bring-turmoil-to-region">described</a> as “contagious” and a threat to the entire region.
That’s not wrong, according to Joseph Siegle, research director at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
“I think yes, the broader point is there has been a pattern after a period of relatively fewer coups,” Siegle told Vox in a phone call. “It’s reasonable to assume that there’s some copycatting going on, or the norm of militaries not being involved [in government] or seizing power has been broken.”
But while the recent spate of coups have several common characteristics and show what Siegle calls a “dispersion effect,” Joseph Sany, the vice president of the US Institute of Peace’s Africa Center, told Vox in a phone interview that he thinks referring to them as “contagious” is unhelpful.
“I hate the term ‘contagion’ because it’s a blanket term,” Sany said. “You can’t put Guinea in the same group as Mali and Burkina Faso.”
According to Sany, despite some commonalities — governments unable to provide basic services for their people, corruption, and weak state institutions — the circumstances and mechanics of the recent coups and attempts are different.
And not only does labeling recent coups as part of a “contagion” or domino effect erase these differences, he said, it also absolves the world community from helping these countries build sustainable democratic institutions going forward.
Africa’s current wave of coups began in August 2020, after former Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/19/21375138/mali-coup-president-keita-military-election">arrested at gunpoint</a> by government forces. The subsequent series of African coups share some commonalities, such as political and economic instability and weak democratic institutions, but Sany says the specific circumstances in each case are crucial to understanding what happened — and potentially, what comes next.
In Mali and Burkina Faso, Sany notes, the governments were dealing with <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/08/five-things-know-about-malis-coup">violent extremism</a> from <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/27/burkina-faso-military-coup-prompts-fears-of-further-instability">ISIS</a> and al-Qaeda affiliates in the Sahel, where between 2020 and 2021, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2022/02/04/isis-leader-killed-africa-biden/">the Intercept’s Nick Turse</a> reports, attacks by militant Islamist organizations increased 70 percent, from 1,180 to 2,005.
According to Siegle, that security threat has formed the pretext for coups in both countries. “In terms of the differences, Mali and Burkina Faso, the juntas have claimed that insecurity and an inability to deal with threats from violent extremist groups has precipitated the coups,” Siegle said. “They’re both using the same justification, and in the case of Burkina Faso, the threat is more imminent.”
But while it’s a serious concern and terror affiliates drive instability in many African nations, not every country that has undergone a recent coup is dealing with violent insurgency from terror groups.
In Guinea-Bissau, for example, the recent attempted coup is one of many since the nation gained its independence from Portugal in 1974, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/coup-fears-spike-in-guinea-bissau-as-gunfire-heard-in-capital-11643744427?mod=e2tw">Wall Street Journal’s Nicholas Bariyo writes</a>. The nation has struggled to establish democratic traditions and institutions; notably, President Umaro Sissoco Embaló — the man whom this week’s failed coup tried to oust — came to power in 2020, after a contested election which was still being reviewed by the nation’s Supreme Court when Embaló took office.
And in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/world/africa/guinea-coup.html">Guinea</a> — a separate country that borders the smaller Guinea-Bissau — last year’s successful coup came after President Alpha Condé changed the constitution and mounted a power grab that gave him a third term in office. Although he initially won a democratic election in 2010 — the first Guinean leader to do so — his power grab, combined with corruption and deep inequality, apparently provided the impetus the military needed to mount a takeover last September.
The mechanics of these takeovers are different as well; for example, Chad’s military led a “<a href="https://theconversation.com/chads-covert-coup-and-the-implications-for-democratic-governance-in-africa-159725">covert coup</a>” last year, installing the son of the deceased President Idriss Deby, himself a military commander, as the leader in violation of the constitution. The younger Deby’s government is supposed to be “transitional” — his father was Chad’s authoritarian leader for three decades — but since it abolished the constitution and dissolved the previous government and Parliament, it’s not clear where such a transition could lead.
Sudan’s coup, too, came after decades of authoritarian rule; after civil society leadership organized mass protests and <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2019/4/11/18306002/sudan-news-bashir-coup-protests-khartoum-auf">ousted former dictator Omar al-Bashir</a> in 2019, a transitional government comprising military and civilian leadership took over. That <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/8/19/20812054/sudan-power-sharing-deal-al-bashir-trial">power-sharing agreement</a> briefly set Sudan on a democratic trajectory before the military took over last year, eventually leading to civilian Prime Minister <a href="https://www.vox.com/22870160/sudan-protests-hamdok-resigned-coup-military">Abdalla Hamdok’s resignation</a> this past January.
Characterizing the coups as contagious also discounts the influence of outside powers, Sany and Siegle told Vox — primarily Russia and China, and to a lesser extent, <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/sudan/2022-02-04/americas-failure-imagination-sudan">Turkey and Gulf states like Qatar</a>. Broadly speaking, these nations don’t necessarily foment coups, but they do take advantage of instability to support regimes that allow them to exercise influence, legitimize their own antidemocratic systems, and extract resources from nations rich in diamonds, bauxite, and other valuable materials.
“It fits the mold of situations where you have an unelected, unaccountable military leader who doesn’t have a lot of political support, so make him indebted to the Russians,” Siegle said of the recent coup attempt in Guinea-Bissau. “They’ll get access to their iron ore, and [a military leader will] give them political cover. So I see them as very vulnerable to that kind of influence.”
“If you want to know where Russia will go next, look for instability,” Sany said, pointing to the situations in Mali and Burkina Faso in particular. The governments there, facing security crises due to Islamist extremism, were heavily reliant on mercenaries from the Wagner Group — a costly arrangement which further eroded the governments’ ability to provide basic services for people, creating fertile ground for the recent coups and further instability. Adding in the economic and social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as anti-French, anti-colonial sentiment, Sany said, made for “an explosive cocktail.”
“These military leaders were very savvy to take control,” he said.
That points to another commonality in the recent takeovers, Siegle told Vox. “The coup leaders themselves aren’t necessarily saying what they’re going to do differently, and I think that the similarity that we’re seeing across all the coups is these military actors, which all happen to be mid-level, colonel-level military leaders, they all seem more intent on seizing power and holding power for power’s sake,” he said. “They’re not offering some sort of reformist agenda, a security plan, somehow a return to democracy or improving government, or reducing corruption — anything along those lines.”
Despite their initial success, Sany and Siegle both told Vox, many of these coup leaders will fail in the long term because they’re not equipped to govern, and because they’re working in countries that don’t have the institutions to deliver on any promises they might make. Given that possibility, the road ahead for these nations is unclear at best.
In Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups, Naunihal Singh, a professor at the US Naval War College, points out that citizen and civil society groups can rarely influence military coups as they are happening, and the undoing of a government takeover or the transition to democracy depends either upon fractiousness within the military or the intervention of outside forces, and often a combination of the two.
And there’s good reason for the world to take notice: According to Singh, the “frequency and ubiquity” of coups means they pose a real problem for other democracies.
“Indeed,” Singh writes, “coups are responsible for roughly 75% of democratic failures, making them the single largest danger to democracy.”
That presents outside powers with a choice: work with civil society leaders and military governments to help these nations develop and strengthen institutions and a timeline for democratic transition, or exploit the chaos to gain a foothold for resource extraction and further exploitation, as Russia has done in several recent cases.
However, sanctioning these nations and isolating them, as the European Union and the US have done to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/eu-imposes-sanctions-malis-pm-coup-leaders-2022-02-04/">Malian coup leaders</a>, does nothing but harm the citizens of those countries and only pushes coup leadership away from democratic foundations, Sany said. “We are asking these nations to be like Denmark, when they don’t have the resources,” he told Vox.
According to Sany, Western countries and institutions — which have their own vested interests in the region; their own brutal, exploitative, and extractive history of colonialism in Africa; and their own strangleholds on poor nations <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/business/economy/imf-surcharges.html">in the form of debt</a> — impress upon unstable nations with undemocratic leadership the importance of the rule of law and punish them when they don’t live up to those ideals, but don’t speak to the actual needs of the people living in those nations.
Nor, he said, do they present particularly viable pathways for a transition to democracy: “By putting on blanket sanctions, you alienate and punish citizens” without addressing the root cause of the instability, Sany told Vox, precipitating further instability and potentially even further coups.
Instead, according to Sany, Western powers need to work better with these countries to look honestly at the root causes of conflict, poverty, and instability; help them build up and invest in stronger institutions; and work with civil society and military leaders to lay out a path to democratic transition. Furthermore, working with regional groups like ECOWAS and neighboring African countries to encourage cooperation and reduce isolation can be an effective way to reduce the risk of undemocratic takeovers, since peer nations can be highly influential, he said.
Without support for democratic systems, civil society, and institutions for justice and transparency, Sany warns, history will repeat itself.
“Coup breeds coup,” he said. “There will be protracted instability unless the world community gets involved.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/2/5/22919160/coup-guinea-bissau-africa-burkina-faso-sudan-why">https://www.vox.com/2022/2/5/22919160/coup-guinea-bissau-africa-burkina-faso-sudan-why</a>

vox How to understand the recent coups in Africa

Over the past eighteen months, there have been seven coups and coup attempts in African nations. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and S...

Will climate change melt the Winter Olympics?

For decades, Jeremy Jones has explored unique and pristine winter slopes around the world on his snowboard. He’s found new routes accessible only via helicopter and snowmobile, making a name for himself as a big mountain snowboarder, filmmaker, and entrepreneur. In the process, he developed a sense for subtle variations in wind, snow, ice, and water.
“The type of snowboarding I do requires me to have an incredibly intimate relationship with winter,” said Jones, who is 47. “I snowboard in the backcountry where the difference between a slope being stable and avalanching has lots of nuanced signs.”
But the ground beneath his feet started to shift, and so did his thinking. Resorts that used to have reliable snow started closing more frequently. Some mountains started getting more rain than snow as glaciers retreated up their slopes. For Jones and many fellow winter enthusiasts, climate change became impossible to ignore. “I was like, man, this problem is not going away without us doing something about it,” Jones said.
It’s not just snowboarding — climate change is already having an impact on several winter activities, including many of the outdoor sports on display at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. On average, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/02/18/803125282/how-warming-winters-are-affecting-everything">winters are warming faster than summers</a> and <a href="https://www.nps.gov/subjects/aknatureandscience/hi-latclimatechange.htm">northern latitudes are warming faster</a> than regions closer to the equator. Sports that count on outdoor snow and ice are especially vulnerable. In a warming world, precious few cities may be reliably cold with enough snow and ice to host Winter Olympics of the future.
In 2007, Jones founded the advocacy group <a href="https://protectourwinters.org/about-pow/">Protect Our Winters</a> with the aim of uniting winter sports enthusiasts in the fight against climate change. With the world’s eyes on the Winter Games, athletes-turned-advocates are hoping to channel some of that attention toward the ways climate change threatens their sports. And the group’s latest report, “<a href="https://www.lboro.ac.uk/sport/news/2022/january/how-climate-change-is-threatening-winter-olympics/">Slippery Slopes: How Climate Change is threatening the 2022 Winter Olympics</a>,” warns that without drastic action, many of the sports that thrill fans and athletes are endangered.
Warmer winters aren’t just leading to mushier snow, the authors write. The places where winter sports can be played at all are becoming fewer and farther between. That makes it harder for athletes to train and makes winter sports more expensive and exclusive, throttling the pipeline for new skiers, snowboarders, and skaters. It’s an early warning sign for the future of winter itself.
This is the first year in history that the Winter Games will have to manufacture all of its own snow. Organizers expected as much, given that Beijing has never been known for especially snowy winters. But winter sports have been increasingly reliant on artificial conditions for years. “Things have been trending in this direction for quite some time,” said <a href="https://education.gsu.edu/profile/timothy-kellison/">Timothy Kellison</a>, director of the Center for Sport and Urban policy at Georgia State University.
Artificial snow is designed in part to level the playing field and deliver consistent conditions for sports. But it’s also a sign that the ideal conditions for outdoor events like alpine skiing are getting harder to find in nature. Rising temperatures mean that more winter precipitation falls as rain rather than snow, and the snow that does fall can be less substantial.
Covering a mountain slope in synthetic powder can harm the environment and add to the already enormous costs of large-scale winter sports (the Beijing Winter Olympics reportedly cost <a href="https://www.insider.com/real-cost-of-beijing-games-10-times-chinas-reported-figure-2022-1">$3.9 billion</a>, though some estimates show the cost is much higher). Snow-making has massive energy appetite and stresses water sources. And the snow itself is a pale imitation of what falls from the sky. Artificial snow is about 30 percent ice and 70 percent air, whereas natural snow is 10 percent ice and 90 percent air. That changes the texture of the snow, creating a harder snowpack that alters how skis and snowboards slide, so courses require further grooming.
In addition, snow machines still require cold temperatures to operate. In the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, snowmaking equipment couldn’t keep up with the unusually warm weather, so organizers used <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/sochi-among-warmest-winter-olympics-host-cities">trucks and helicopters to bring in snow</a> from elsewhere.
And there’s only so much snow you can keep on the ground when temperatures get too high, regardless of where it comes from. The snow quickly softens, forms ruts, and creates a spray when athletes cut through it. That can impair visibility and lead to accidents, explained <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/geography-environmental-management/people-profiles/daniel-scott">Daniel Scott</a>, a professor of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Yet the option of artificial snow has allowed Winter Olympics organizers to select host cities that are far from ideal. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia set a record for the <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2014/02/sochi-s-average-temperature-it-was-the-warmest-winter-olympics-ever.html">highest temperature at a Winter Olympics</a>: 68 degrees Fahrenheit. That was also a problem for the Winter Paralympic Games that came after. “In Sochi, <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27307272/">[the injury rate] was six times</a> what it was in Vancouver for the Paralympians,” Scott said. “These are the best in the world, so if they’re struggling with those kinds of conditions and many of them are getting hurt by it, that should tell you something.”
The impacts of climate change stretch beyond the Games as well. As training sites deal with rising temperatures, athletes need to spend more money and time finding reliable locations. Otherwise, they arrive at the slopes less prepared. “We also see more injuries caused by the lack of practice on snow and the added pressure to perform when there is a window of opportunities,” Philippe Marquis, a two-time Winter Olympian from Canada, wrote in the “Slippery Slopes” report. “Athletes feel the urge to push their limits even if the conditions are suboptimal.”
Many candidate cities for the Winter Olympics — including past hosts — won’t be consistently cold or snowy enough to hold the games in the future. This means the pool of host cities will shrink drastically, or hosts will have to spend far more time, money, and energy to prepare for future Winter Olympics. For example, Chamonix and Innsbruck in the Alps — a mountain range that lends its name to the Olympic event of Alpine skiing — may have to be ruled out for good if greenhouse gas emissions continue spewing unchecked.
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1644109820_7214_577362" data-cdata='{"asset_id":23218058,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JhwET5lRE31i0cuk-SGvBNhXTkU=/0x0:1328x1354/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/F6Tn_8hFyVvYGX5gkxfXxACqDG0=/0x0:1328x1354/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eRN1uMuRy4lI1nqmLaNFrzh7BYs=/0x0:1328x1354/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7LGi1ke8qfeEA9xtbOthq27qqWI=/0x0:1328x1354/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RiuNAnNzXGyXPOv_pct7SDYJ3i8=/0x0:1328x1354/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KEH0Kc2W3Ua8pDT0E7wJAMnyKiA=/0x0:1328x1354/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/4XD7dTMI53PcHvBle9WwteVz9eA=/0x0:1328x1354/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/B5TLnFcKofnoljqGcRSEM7YVeQQ=/0x0:1328x1354/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fKFWkt-QzIwCotNkg7SmeNdAJIA=/0x0:1328x1354/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="Chart comparing" data-upload-width="1328" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/A74rSZqSdajVi2owur88pkdcW0w=/0x0:1328x1354/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SXCzRTUaXLIRHL3zO4cO0tB-dwA=/0x0:1328x1354/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MOtkbAUeRgLY3fgraJJfHslxqJ4=/0x0:1328x1354/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0BmIP3ZchizMAqzFUQO0x8X5LWo=/0x0:1328x1354/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tW6ltdYrTQJ_7i2JFZ8L-W2NTvc=/0x0:1328x1354/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/goKWl73mmY3ZyHtmV2aImng-hv0=/0x0:1328x1354/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CjadllOicdMwAjgjDtn5jlNVqck=/0x0:1328x1354/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qf-nZSg0wRK1lvUfYFUs2meAV6w=/0x0:1328x1354/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9_3W0Tnb_uwv0wL-bhzqOts-GJ8=/0x0:1328x1354/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Gg34VBSl0kFGB2OovKy5glAoTBg=/0x0:1328x1354/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1328x1354):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23218058/Screen_Shot_2022_02_04_at_11.17.48_AM.png 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>Potential Winter Olympics host cities may have less reliable conditions for the Games depending on different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.</figcaption>
<cite><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.sportecology.org/research" target="_blank">Slippery Slopes: How climate change is threatening the Winter Olympics</a></cite></figure>
Beyond the Olympics, winter recreation areas like <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/ski-resorts-and-climate-change/">ski resorts</a> are becoming more expensive to operate or are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/travel/global-warming-ski-resort.html">struggling to stay open</a>, increasingly making winter sports the purview of the privileged elite. By one estimate, the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378016305556">winter recreation season in the US</a> will be cut in half by 2050.
Without direct experience, fans may have a harder time getting interested in and following professional winter sports, according to Kellison. “I do think as participation goes down in these sports, there will be concerns about the [fandom] of that sport at the highest levels,” he said.
The love of winter sports poses a dilemma for some fans and athletes. “To face a future without these sports is challenging, but it’s equally challenging to wrestle with the massive environmental footprint that our sport can have, from the emissions involved in getting to the mountain, to snowmaking, and the energy involved in operating lifts and lights and all the rest,” said <a href="https://www.madeleineorr.com/">Madeline Orr</a>, founder of the Sport Ecology Group and a lecturer Loughborough University London, in an email. “That said, I have full confidence the industry and snow sports community will find ways to continue innovating on this issue and finding ways to adapt, because snow sports are central to our culture.”
For Jones, the big mountain snowboarder, climate change has made him rethink how he pursues his career. “My approach drastically changed to the point of way less travel, and no longer embracing helicopters and snowmobiles,” Jones said. He said he’s “really focusing on human power — foot-power snowboarding where I’m hiking these mountains.”
He acknowledged that in the big picture, losing places to ski, snowshoe, and snowboard are less devastating than other impacts of climate change. Rising winter temperatures are slowing the accumulation of snowpack in key watersheds, and in areas like the Sierra Nevada, that’s leading to patterns of flooding in the winter and drought in the summer. Declining snowpack is a key factor in <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/02/27/810095428/low-snowpack-in-california-mountains-may-mean-more-wildfires-this-summer">wildfire risk and recovery</a> in the Western US. Warmer winters are also fueling <a href="https://www.vox.com/22383707/allergies-2021-pollen-allergy-covid-19-climate-change-asthma">more severe allergy seasons</a>, helping disease-carrying critters spread further, and creating a mismatch between <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/109/23/9000?ijkey=51ababeaf63fc71a1899f04e299ae953a65aa275&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha">flowering plants and their pollinators</a>.
But winter sports also help create more than $800 billion in economic activity in the US, support more than 7 million jobs, and inspire millions to head outdoors into chilly weather, according to Protect Our Winters. The Winter Olympics are a prime opportunity to channel the world’s attention toward a threat and motivate people to find solutions.
“To me, it’s this opportunity to collectively come together around trying to save winter,” Jones said. “We need urgency on climate action.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22905168/beijing-winter-olympics-2022-climate-change-snow">https://www.vox.com/22905168/beijing-winter-olympics-2022-climate-change-snow</a>

vox Will climate change melt the Winter Olympics?

For decades, Jeremy Jones has explored unique and pristine winter slopes around the world on his snowboard. He’s found new routes accessible...

We tried to recreate this famous photo of a ghost

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xXI-Ir5l6kCOtvbFj84L2UfD7K8=/0x38:1920x1043/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23219284/thumb_clean.jpeg" /></div>
In the mid-1800s, the development of exciting new forms of communication, like photography and the telegraph, was considered miraculous. This technology also coincided with a new religious movement becoming popular in the US and Europe: spiritualism. Spiritualists believed that, through the use of a medium, contact with the dead was possible. During the bloody American Civil War (1861-1865), belief in spiritualism grew.
It was during this time that William Mumler, an amateur photographer in Boston, claimed he could photograph ghosts. He and his wife Hannah, herself a professional photographer and spiritualist medium, created a stir in Boston by selling these “spirit portraits,” and attracted the attention of skeptics and fellow spiritualists alike. Professional photographers in Boston investigated Mumler’s method again and again but couldn’t figure out how he did his trick.
After accusations of fraud piled up in Boston, the Mumlers relocated to New York City, then considered the photography capital of the US. Here, Mumler was quickly arrested on fraud charges, and his trial was sensationalized in New York newspapers. The prosecution even brought in circus showman P.T. Barnum to testify against Mumler. But, like the photographers in Boston, no one could unequivocally identify his method. Mumler was acquitted.
After the trial, the Mumlers’ spirit photography business boomed. They photographed prominent Americans, including Mary Todd Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison, and even took mail-in orders from people who couldn’t travel to their studio. We visited photographic process historian Mark Osterman to demonstrate how Mumler could have used two negatives, printed simultaneously with a bit of sleight of hand, to fool witnesses into believing his “ghosts” were the real thing.
Darkroom is a history and photography series that anchors each episode around a single image. Analyzing what the photo shows (or doesn’t show) provides context that helps unravel a wider story. Watch previous episodes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ8cMiYb3G5ce8J4P5j5qOEtYR94Z3DQs">here</a>.
Further reading:
You can find this video and all of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLXo7UDZvByw2ixzpQCufnA">Vox’s videos on YouTube</a>.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22918581/mumler-victorian-spirit-ghost-photography">https://www.vox.com/22918581/mumler-victorian-spirit-ghost-photography</a>

vox We tried to recreate this famous photo of a ghost

In the mid-1800s, the development of exciting new forms of communication, like photography and the telegraph, was considered miraculous. Th...

How I learned to stop wincing and appreciate Jackass

I’m Alissa Wilkinson, and this is Jackassathon.
Every Jackass stunt begins this way, an introduction to a deceptively simple task, and here was mine: Having never seen a Jackass movie, I agree to attend a nine-hour extravaganza to right the wrong. Jackass: The Movie (2002) and Jackass Number Two (2006) would screen, in glorious 35mm, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Jackass 3D (2010) would follow, in actual 3D. And then Jackass Forever would premiere, one night before its four-times-delayed theatrical release. The whole thing would be followed by a chat with head Jackasses Johnny Knoxville, who stars in the series as a kind of semi-benevolent rubber-jointed Joker, and Spike Jonze, who’s produced them all while simultaneously winning acclaim and sometimes Oscars for movies like Her, Where the Wild Things Are, and Adaptation. A banner day, a gauntlet, the kind of stunt that made my friends say things like “Oh, buddy” and “Wow.”
So on Thursday at 1 pm, fortified only by a shot of tequila and a quick snack hurriedly located between my subway stop and the museum, clad in an extra-strength mask and some comfy pants, I jacked in. Time to party.
To be alive in the world is to know the basic gist of the Jackass saga, even if it was just so you knew you didn’t want to see it. It’s right there in the name. A bunch of dudes named things like Chris and Bam and, in Jackass Forever, “Poopies” engage in truly loony activities ring-led by Knoxville that threaten life and limb. And we laugh. And so do they. No plot. No thesis. No point to make.
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<figcaption>Johnny Knoxville getting bit by a baby alligator, on purpose, in Jackass: The Movie.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount/Everett Collection</cite></figure>
But a lot of people have wanted to see it. The first film, based on the group’s short-lived but wildly popular MTV show, was shot for $5 million, then turned around and made almost $80 million at the global box office. It starts with the cast rolling down a hill in an enormous shopping cart, then getting chunks of what looks like cement shot at them from cannons before they crash into a fruit stand. The second film, with its titular scatological wink, pulled in $85 million. Jackass 3D made $171 million worldwide. As others have noted, the Jackass franchise has extended surprisingly long tendrils into American entertainment, from <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/johnny-knoxvilles-last-rodeo">the internet’s ability to make anyone a star</a> to its harnessing of <a href="https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/jackass-movie-legacy">cinematic innovation</a> toward outrageously and insistently lowbrow ends.
There’s a taxonomy of Jackass-ery, as one might discover while watching them all straight through. There are pranks, like rigging up an enormous hand to thwack your buddy unawares or tricking him into, I don’t know, getting into a limo filled with bees. There are stunts, like Knoxville’s many attempts to drive vehicles of various sorts off of ramps and into places those vehicles should not go. And then there’s just nothing-good-can-come-of-this dares: Will you jam your fist into this bear trap? Will you bungee out of this tree tethered only by your tighty-whities in pursuit of a truly wicked wedgie? Will you drink this cup of horse semen? Meanwhile, someone is seemingly always vomiting off or on camera, and the rest of the crew is laughing. It’s not like slapstick, exactly, because people really do get hurt. It’s just that they get over it and go back for more.
Mostly, it feels like being trapped at a bachelor party weekend with a bunch of good-natured 11-year-olds, which I do not mean in a bad way. The Jackass guys give off a distinct whiff, psychically but probably also literally, of a gaggle of boys in the throes of puberty who have never been so much as looked at by a girl. Left to the bliss of their own, uninhibited company, they are fascinated by the fact that they have penises, but only to figure out what weird things they can do with and to them. They slam into walls for fun; they find farts and tricks involving butts and fire hilarious; their moms are always saying, “But I just don’t understand why you would do that,” and in answer they merely shrug. There’s no reason to poop in a display toilet in a hardware store, except that — as Knoxville says a time or two — it just seemed really funny at the time.
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<figcaption>The cast of Jackass 3D in an exploding room at the end of the film.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount Pictures</cite></figure>
Of course, in Jackass: The Movie, almost all the guys are in their 20s. That was 20 years ago. So the films are documentaries about what happens when that impulse is given free but largely harmless rein, extended far into adulthood and filmed by the subjects. (The crew don’t often participate in the stunts, but they have to get mighty close to them, with occasional vomitous consequences.) Over the years there have been sobering changes — one conspicuously missing cast member in Jackass Forever is Ryan Dunn, who died in a car crash in 2011 — but for the most part, watching all four in a row is a feast of genial idiocy that documents whose body changed with fame and who got another tattoo and when they all start to go gray. It’s not unlike binge-watching the Seven Up documentary series.
I knew what I was getting myself into. As one character asks another in Jackass 3D, “What did you think was going to happen?”
What did happen: Yeah, okay, I left with a raging headache and some bright spots in my peripheral vision, and the feeling of being hungover even though that one tequila was it for the day.
But having been stewed in Jackass’s juices all day, watching guys superglue themselves to one another and then scream as they’re ripped apart, I pondered just what, in a cosmic sense, I was watching.
What Jackass isn’t is mean. With a couple of (mostly early) exceptions, it’s not the kind of humor that leans on misogyny or racism to be funny. And it isn’t trying to expose anyone for their foolishness who isn’t already exuberantly engaged in being foolish on purpose. When pranks involve people outside the group — the owner of a rental car agency, a man on the street horrified at the actions of Knoxville costumed as a “bad grandpa,” a sushi chef trying to ignore the guy taking wasabi lines up the nose across the counter from him — it’s they who are the reasonable ones, and the Jackasses who are just being idiots. We presume (and sometimes confirm) that they smoothed it all over after they got the shot. In this way, the movies feel different from the aims and goals of an adjacent property, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, which is working in a different and satirical register (more similar perhaps is the largely improvised Bad Trip, starring Forever addition Eric Andre). There’s no satire to Jackass. It is, proudly and unabashedly, itself.
That said, there’s still a reason for its existence, and that reason is not merely giant box office returns. Somewhere in the middle of Jackass Number Two, probably when cast member Steve-O was getting a fish hook stuck through his cheek so he could swim with sharks and then get reeled in by his buddy, I started thinking about the medieval Feast of Fools.
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<figcaption>There are new cast members this time, too, who have to dress up like mimes and maybe kiss a snake?</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount Pictures</cite></figure>
We don’t know a whole lot about the Feast of Fools, but the general outlines have stuck: Around the turn of the year, participants in the feast, often clergy, would appoint some kind of leader for the day — a fake bishop, a fake pope. They’d flip the clergy hierarchy, and low-ranking clergy would perform a mass that mocked the higher-ranked. It was (understandably) controversial, and the practice had all but died out by the 16th century. But it was a moment of catharsis, a way to let off steam and then let life kind of return to normal.
I found myself thinking about the fools of the feast, not because they’re a perfect analogue, but because the whole reason to watch Jackass is to participate in the mayhem. Everyone is temporarily given their Chaos Muppet hall pass; everyone is in on the joke. And what is the joke? That there are all these things you’re not supposed to do in life — slingshot yourself on a skateboard across a blow-up pool, fart into a funnel connected to your friend’s helmet, pogo-stick your buddy’s crotch, squash your genitalia flat — that most of us, frankly, would never even want to do, and never will. In the Jackass world, the rules get turned from “thou shalt nots” to “thou absolutely musts,” if just for a couple of hours.
So the dream remains, and the Jackasses get up and just do it for us. If you’ve seen a Jackass movie in a theater (and honestly, that is the One True Place for watching it), then you know that at least 50 percent of the sound effects come from the crowd. (By Jackass 3D, my whole room of fellow ’thoners was groaning merely at the appearance of a tube of superglue.) A bunch of the audience are almost certainly, like me, the kind of people who won’t even hover our fingers within a couple inches of an electrical socket, but the kind of cleansing relief of watching the weirdly pure goofballs onscreen tase one another lets us return to our own lives of seat belts and fully cooked, unregurgitated food a little lighter.
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<figcaption>Machine Gun Kelly, Johnny Knoxville, and Steve-O in Jackass Forever.</figcaption>
<cite>Sean Cliver/Paramount Pictures</cite></figure>
That they’ve caught it on tape reinforces the fool’s impulse. They are definitely doing this for themselves. But they’re doing it for us — documenting it not to simply observe human behavior but to provoke our own, to remind us that no matter how many degrees we’ve earned or how finely tuned our comedy sense is, there is something basely funny about a blindfolded guy getting kicked in the nuts by a donkey.
A whole generation of kids, probably particularly the masculine variety, learned what funny was from Jackass and went on to replicate it in their mall parking lots and dorm rooms. Jackass Forever is the first of the films to add new cast, because Knoxville and his pals are hovering around 50 these days and a lot more brittle; the new members are delighted to be in the movie we used to watch! And who can blame them? They have taken on a high, low calling: to be the fools who prostrate themselves across a pile of mousetraps or take an enormous belly flop for the camera, for us.
But whether you envy the guys onscreen or want to shake them a little, if you find yourself settled into the Jackass groove, it’s pretty hard to resist. The obvious affection between all of the guys, who beat on each other, yell at each other, and then hug it out and do it all over again. The excitement of watching guys who you know probably walked away from the stunt on their own power but also are taking it on the chin without any typical stuntman precautions. The eye-bugging realization that they are really going to go there this time; the upping of the ante; the matryoshka-style stunts where you think it’s going to be one prank and then it’s a whole bigger, badder prank. The impulse to do it, and to watch, is in its way a proudly, baldly, loopy celebration of these weird, smelly, gross, hilarious bodies we all have and the world we let them roam around in.
I stumbled into the night after Jackass Forever with aching cheeks from laughing, a sore derriere from sitting, and a little bit of gratitude to inhabit a planet with people who don’t mind being fools on purpose. Will I attempt the stunt again? Absolutely not. Did I have a blast? You bet.
Jackass Forever is playing in theaters.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22918197/jackass-forever-review-marathon">https://www.vox.com/22918197/jackass-forever-review-marathon</a>

vox How I learned to stop wincing and appreciate Jackass

I’m Alissa Wilkinson, and this is Jackassathon. Every Jackass stunt begins this way, an introduction to a deceptively simple task, and here...