Terry Sanderson on Facebook from the Sunday Times, a story by Andrew Gilligan and Sian Griffiths:

The ringleaders of the “Trojan Horse” plot to impose conservative Islamic values on state schools in Birmingham are back in teaching, despite being banned from the classroom, an investigation by The Sunday Times has established.

Tahir Alam and Razwan Faraz are running informal classes — Faraz in a different city and under a false name.

…

An official report found Alam and Faraz were at the centre of “co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained action” to introduce an “intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos” into schools in the city, with girls and boys separated, “un-Islamic subjects” such as evolution reduced or removed, and secular head teachers bullied from their jobs.

Faraz, deputy head of one of the Trojan Horse schools and the brother of a convicted terrorist, was a key figure in the “Park View brotherhood” of teachers, a group on the messaging tool WhatsApp who expressed grossly bigoted and extremist views. Faraz described gay people as “satanic” and “animals”, and said women’s place was “in the kitchen . . . a perpetual role serving men”.

More.

Abigail Rockwell, granddaughter of the illustrator Norman Rockwell, points out the presence and positioning of a painting by the latter in the meeting between Obama and Donnie from Queens.

It’s the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty.

A painting by Norman Rockwell was moved in the Oval Office for the first meeting between President Obama and Mr. Trump so it would hang over Mr. Trump’s shoulder. In the painting the torch of the Statue of Liberty is being repaired by five men, one of whom is an African-American. All of them are precariously roped to her flame.

Who moved the painting and why? It is clearly too small for that space; a larger landscape painting had hung there previously. Originally the Rockwell painting was displayed to the right of President Obama’s desk and the expansive window, over a Frederick Remington sculpture, The Bronco Buster.

What is the meaning of this gesture? Most of my grandfather Norman Rockwell’s paintings are about tolerance, unity and the inherent goodness and resilience of the human spirit. The reflection of that vision and the profound presence of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the bust below, by African-American sculptor Charles Alston, speak volumes without saying a word. Perhaps they are able to say what Obama could not in these circumstances of necessary protocol.

Whoever moved it must have done it with Obama’s knowledge and permission, if not on his instructions. I doubt people can just go in there and switch stuff around without his say-so.

Rockwell “snuck” in the man in the bright red shirt (which draws attention to him) with noticeably darker skin. My grandfather occasionally did this to skirt The Saturday Evening Post’s policy of only painting people of ethnicity in subservient roles to whites.

Its what? I have to say, I froze in surprise when I read that. How incredibly creepy and awful.

And here they are working together to repair our Lady’s torch. My grandfather left out the rest of liberty to focus on her strong arm outstretched to the sky, proclaiming the light of freedom to everyone, especially immigrants. The ornate protective fence around the flame is the painting’s most delicate detail.

Nicely done.

It’s alarmingly warm in the Arctic this year. I suppose Donald Trump and his friends think that’s nice, the polar bears and caribou can get in some sunbathing, but everyone else realizes it could mean disaster a lot sooner than expected.

The Arctic is experiencing extraordinarily hot sea surface and air temperatures, which are stopping ice forming and could lead to record lows of sea ice at the north pole next year, according to scientists.

Danish and US researchers monitoring satellites and Arctic weather stations are surprised and alarmed by air temperatures peaking at what they say is an unheard-of 20C higher than normal for the time of year. In addition, sea temperatures averaging nearly 4C higher than usual in October and November.

…

Sea ice, which forms and melts each year, has declined more than 30% in the past 25 years. This week it has been at the lowest extent ever recorded for late November. According to the US government’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre, (NSIDC), around 2m square kilometres less ice has formed since September than average. The level is far below the same period in 2012, when sea ice went on to record its lowest ever annual level.

And it’s not just some random thing; it’s a loop.

Rasmus Tonboe, a sea ice remote sensing expert at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen, said: “Sea surface temperatures in the Kara and Barents seas are much warmer than usual. That makes it very difficult for sea ice to freeze.

“When we have large areas of open water, it also raises air temperatures, and it has been up to 10/15C warmer. Six months ago the sea ice was breaking up unusually early. This made more open water and allowed the sunlight to be absorbed, which is why the Arctic is warmer this year,” he said.

“What we are seeing is both surprising and alarming. This is faster than the models. It is alarming because it has consequences.”

And the things it’s doing will make it all worse next year, and that will have consequences. It could trigger tipping points.

Arctic scientists have warned that the increasingly rapid melting of the ice cap risks triggering 19 “tipping points” in the region that could have catastrophic consequences around the globe.

The Arctic Resilience Report found that the effects of Arctic warming could be felt as far away as the Indian Ocean, in a stark warning that changes in the region could cause uncontrollable climate change at a global level.

Temperatures in the Arctic are currently about 20C above what would be expected for the time of year, which scientists describe as “off the charts”. Sea ice is at the lowest extent ever recorded for the time of year.

“The warning signals are getting louder,” said Marcus Carson of the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the lead authors of the report. “[These developments] also make the potential for triggering [tipping points] and feedback loops much larger.”

It’s pretty terrifying.

In the Arctic, the tipping points identified in the new report, published on Friday, include: growth in vegetation on tundra, which replaces reflective snow and ice with darker vegetation, thus absorbing more heat; higher releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the tundra as it warms; shifts in snow distribution that warm the ocean, resulting in altered climate patterns as far away as Asia, where the monsoon could be effected; and the collapse of some key Arctic fisheries, with knock-on effects on ocean ecosystems around the globe.

The globe with seven billion people who don’t know how to deal with a hotting up planet.

Aides to the US president-elect, Donald Trump, this week unveiled plans to remove the budget for climate change science currently used by Nasa and other US federal agencies for projects such as examining Arctic changes, and to spend it instead on space exploration.

“That would be a huge mistake,” said Carson, noting that much more research needs to be done on polar tipping points before we can understand the true dangers, let alone hope to tackle them. “It would be like ripping out the aeroplane’s cockpit instruments while you are in mid-flight.”

He added: “These are very serious problems, very serious changes are happening, but they are still poorly understood. We need more research to understand them. A lot of the major science is done by the US.”

Which is only fair since the US also does a lot of the major carbon emitting. But now that the ignoramus in chief is planning to axe a lot of that major science…I guess we’ll just watch in silence while it all goes to hell.

Scientists have speculated for some years that so-called feedback mechanisms – by which the warming of one area or type of landscape has knock-on effects for whole ecosystems – could suddenly take hold and change the dynamics of Arctic ice melting from a relatively slow to a fast-moving phenomenon with unpredictable and potentially irreversible consequences for global warming. For instance, when sea ice shrinks it leaves areas of dark ocean that absorb more heat than the reflective ice, which in turn causes further shrinkage, and so on in a spiral.

We’re breaking it.

It’s the age of hate speech.

More than 50,000 abusive and offensive tweets were sent celebrating Labour MP Jo Cox’s murder and lauding her killer, Thomas Mair, as a “hero” or “patriot” in the month following her death, prompting calls for the government to do more to tackle hate speech online.

According to researchers on the social media site, the tweets were sent from at least 25,000 individuals and have been interpreted by hate crime campaigners as a sign of an emboldened extreme rightwing support base.

And that was before the election of Trump and his elevation of Stephen Bannon and Breitbart.

Academics examined more than 53,000 tweets sent over the month after the MP’s murder and found that among the top 20 words used to describe Mair and Jo Cox were the terms “hero”, “patriot”, “white power”, “rapists” and “traitor”.

The findings come ahead of a government report into integration that claims the concept has broadly failed in the UK and that extremists from both the far right and Islamists have been allowed to gain too much traction.

There’s that confusion again – the idea that Islamists are separate from the far right. Islamists are very far right. Theocracy is about as far right as it’s possible to get.

The report into cyber hate speech linked to the murder of Cox, authored by Imran Awan of Birmingham City University, and Irene Zempi of Nottingham Trent University, to be published on Monday, uncovered several key themes.

…

According to the report’s authors, online hate speech and offences committed on the street were linked with online perpetrators emboldened by “trigger” events like the EU referendum.

People who spend hours every day working themselves into a froth of hatred are going to end up likely to do more than type words on Twitter and Facebook.

The National Network of Abortion Funds has joined the hot new trend to refuse ever to mention the set of people formerly known as “women.” This seems perverse in an organization whose issue is abortion.

From their About page:

MISSION

THE NATIONAL NETWORK OF ABORTION FUNDS BUILDS POWER WITH MEMBERS TO REMOVE FINANCIAL AND LOGISTICAL BARRIERS TO ABORTION ACCESS BY CENTERING PEOPLE WHO HAVE ABORTIONS AND ORGANIZING AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF RACIAL, ECONOMIC, AND REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE.

VISION
WE ENVISION A WORLD WHERE EVERY REPRODUCTIVE DECISION, INCLUDING ABORTION, TAKES PLACE IN THRIVING COMMUNITIES THAT ARE SAFE, PEACEFUL, AND AFFORDABLE. WE ENVISION A WORLD WHERE ALL PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER AND RESOURCES TO CARE FOR AND AFFIRM THEIR BODIES, IDENTITIES, AND HEALTH FOR THEMSELVES AND THEIR FAMILIES—IN ALL AREAS OF THEIR LIVES.

VALUES

Intersectionality
NNAF recognizes the connections between systems of oppression. A comprehensive vision of justice for our communities must involve working towards economic, racial, gender, and reproductive justice.

Autonomy
Every person has the non-negotiable human right to determine whether, when, and how to create family. People deserve unrestricted access to the rights, information, and resources to care for themselves and their families.

Collective Power
NNAF is determined to build a base of shared power from the ground while standing alongside other movements in solidarity. People who are most directly and disproportionately impacted by structural barriers are the best architects of solutions that center their voices, experiences, and leadership.

Compassion
NNAF advocates for a reduction of shame and an increase in compassion for people as they navigate life. Reproductive coercion, burdens, and barriers to reproductive healthcare are all forms of violence.

I have yet to find a single appearance of the word “women.”

This is not ok. No other oppressed group would stand for this, or be expected to stand for it. It’s only women who are expected to put up with being dropped from discussions and groups even on their own issues. It’s so unbelievably insulting and yet people who yap about “intersectionality” and “centering” go ahead and erase women.

From Atheist & Agnostic Alliance Pakistan on Facebook:

Two men, Riffat Aziz and Hameed Kamran, have recently been arrested by the Rawalakot Police in Poonch district of Azad Kashmir, and accused of spreading religious antipathy and disrupting social order by questioning Islam on social media.

Ali Camus has more:

Two men, Riffat Aziz and Hameed Kamran, have recently been arrested by the Rawalakot Police in Poonch district of Azad Kashmir, and accused of spreading religious antipathy and disrupting social order by questioning Islam on social media.

Kamran has been accused of commenting controversial stuff on social media on religion [source]. Riffat Aziz has been accused of distributing pamphlets to mosques filled with questions towards Muslims [source]. Muslims should ask themselves, should it be illegal to ask questions that can put you out of your comfort zone?

Especially questions about a demanding, all-pervasive religion that tells you what to do in all aspects of your life?

A rally has been conducted by the students of the University of Poonch, in Azad Kashmir. Asking government to silence anyone who questions or critic religion.

Theocrats on parade.

The IHEU posted on Facebook:

Mohamed Cheikh Ould M’kheitir is awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on whether he should be putting to death for writing a single online article – about how religion is used to justify slavery in his home country, Mauritania. The death sentence has already been upheld by the appeals court on the basis that he was an “apostate”. We are one of the few organizations campaigning on this case (we’re quoted several times in the article at the link). We’re trying to get other organizations involved and to put civil society pressure on the government. Please if you can, support our work here.

The International Business Times has the story:

Mauritania’s authorities face increasing calls for a young blogger, Mohamed Cheikh Ould M’khaitir, to be executed following his death sentence for “apostasy”. With just a month to go before the court seals his fate, can international pressure help to save his life?

In a case that has shaken the nation, the young Mauritanian blogger and engineer was sentenced to death for apostasy in December 2014 over the publication a year earlier of an article entitled “Religion, Religiosity and Craftsmen” on the Aqlam Horra news website. Islamic organisations in mainly Muslim Mauritania said that the article constituted an “insult” to Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.

Imams, scholars, political parties and members of the public called for his execution. However, human rights groups now believe that the country’s growing religious right is using M’khaitir’s case as a political tool as militancy grows in the nation of 3.6 million people.

I do so desperately wish human beings would stop thinking that putative insults to religions and “prophets” matter more than harms to people. It doesn’t matter if someone “insults” a religion or a “prophet.” If religions are true they can take care of themselves, and it they’re not they deserve to be insulted. What matters is how we treat actual people here and now.

According to Bob Churchill, spokesman for the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), the likeliest explanation for the delay is that the court was wary about the security situation outside of the courtroom.

The campaigner believes that the authorities, which have portrayed themselves as a committed ally in the fight against the regional jihadi threat, face increasing pressure from Mauritania’s growing religious right, which is calling for the blogger’s execution.

“If they [the court] were going to accept his repentance, and ultimately release him, delaying an answer may have posed security threats if the news had gone through the crowd, which would have been very angry if the court had agreed to accept the repentance,” he said.

He added: “This isn’t like a spontaneous mob. These are organised radical Islamist groups trying to create trouble and trying to show their power. The majority have not read M’khaitir’s piece – it is a very political gesture. He is scapegoated.”

The scapegoating and the organizing wouldn’t work if there weren’t all this nonsense talked about insulting religions and prophets.

Campaigners have highlighted the similar case of Bangladesh where, amid growing tension between Bangladeshi secularists and Islamist radicals since 2013, the religious right started making excessive demands and was blamed for attacks on bloggers and atheist writers. At the time, IHEU urged the Bangladeshi government to avoid giving into these demands.

“Now we see radical groups murdering people with impunity. It may seem to the government that in the short-term it’s in their best interests to give in to people’s ‘religious’ demands [that M’khaitir is convicted]. But if they do, the fundamentalists will only be emboldened and the demands escalate. And that is true regardless of the international community,” Churchill explained.

Thin end of the wedge. Camel’s nose under the tent. Give an inch and they’ll take a mile. All that.

In a joint open letter to the Mauritanian president on 11 November 2015, campaigners Freedom Now, PEN America, Reporters Without Borders and Committee to Protect Journalists said this:

“Regardless of the court’s ruling, we ask you to instruct your government to ensure his physical safety inside and outside prison. Since his imprisonment two years ago, preachers have called for his death, according to press reports. Those who have spoken out on his behalf have themselves been labelled as infidels and received violent threats, according to news accounts.

In April 2014 you told reporters that you did not believe Mohamed was aware of the seriousness of what he had written. In this spirit, we ask you to acknowledge his repentance and ensure his safe release from prison.”

Please do.

The rate of hospitalization for malnutrition has tripled in the UK over the past decade, the Guardian reports.

Official figures reveal that people with malnutrition accounted for 184,528 hospital bed days last year, a huge rise on 65,048 in 2006-07. The sharp increase is adding to the pressures on hospitals, which are already struggling with record levels of overcrowding.

Critics have said the upward trend is a result of rising poverty, deep cutbacks in recent years to meals on wheels services for the elderly, and inadequate social care support, especially for older people.

Also known as Tory governments.

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, unearthed the figures in a response to a recent parliamentary question submitted to the health minister Nicola Blackwood.

“These figures paint a grim picture of Britain under the Conservatives,” he said. “Real poverty is causing vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, to go hungry and undernourished so much so that they end up in hospital.”

Their own fault for being old and poor? Is that the Conservatives’ view?

Freedom of information requests submitted to local councils in England early last year by the then shadow care minister Liz Kendall found that 220,000 fewer people were receiving meals on wheels in late 2014 than in 2010, a fall of 63%.

Research by the National Association of Care Catering found that only 48% of local councils still provided meals on wheels, compared to 66% in 2014. Only 17% of councils in the north-west of England still do so, and 91% of providers expect the provision to fall further in the next year.

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

More on the Russian meddling, from a couple of days before the election.

A range of activities speaks to a Russian connection: the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign officials, hacks surrounding voter rolls and possibly election machines, Putin’s overt praise for Trump, and the curious Kremlin connections of Trump campaign operatives Paul Manafort and Carter Page.

But most observers are missing the point. Russia is helping Trump’s campaign, yes, but it is not doing so solely or even necessarily with the goal of placing him in the Oval Office. Rather, these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy. Unfortunately, that effort is going very well indeed.

Yep. That happened.

The United States and its European allies have always placed state-to-state relations at the forefront of their international strategies. The Soviet system’s effort to undermine those relations during the Cold War, updated now by modern Russia, were known as “active measures.”

A June 1992 U.S. Information Agency report on the strategy explained:

It was often very difficult for Westerners to comprehend this fundamentally different Soviet approach to international relations and, as a result, the centrality to the Soviets (now Russians) of active measures operations was gravely underappreciated.

Active measures employ a three-pronged approach that attempts to shape foreign policy by directing influence in the following ways: state-to-people, people-to-people, and state-to-state. More often than not, active measures sidestep traditional diplomacy and normal state-to-state relationships. The Russian government today employs the state-to-people and people-to-people approaches on social media and the internet, directly engaging U.S. and European audiences ripe for an anti-American message, including the alt-right and more traditional right-wing and fascist parties. It also targets left-wing audiences, but currently at a lower tempo.

So for all we know, we’ve all been helping them.

Until recently, Western governments focused on state-to-state negotiations with Putin’s regime largely missed Russian state-to-people social media approaches. Russia’s social media campaigns seek five complementary objectives to strengthen Russia’s position over Western democracies:

• Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance;
• Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures;
• Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions;
• Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations;
• Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the lines between fact and fiction

In sum, these influence efforts weaken Russia’s enemies without the use of force.

It all sounds a little bit Hollywood, a little bit tinfoil hat…but it also sounds somewhat plausible. That version of social media sounds painfully familiar.

Are we all just pieces in someone else’s game?

From

The AP reports:

An outdoor sculpture by Swedish artist Lars Vilks has partly burned down in a fire that police are investigating as a possible arson.

Vilks is best known for a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad that enraged many Muslims in 2007 and sparked death threats from extremists.

Correction: a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad that some Muslims used as a pretext to get in a rage and make death threats.

Authorities said Thursday that a fire destroyed parts of another of his works called “Nimis,” a seaside sculpture he made of driftwood in a nature reserve in southern Sweden.

Emergency services spokesman Mattias Johansson told Swedish broadcaster SVT that about one-fifth of the artwork had burned down.

Vilks, who lives in a secret location with police protection, told newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet that arsonists have tried to set fire to “Nimis” before and that he considers it “a brutal form of art criticism.”

Lars posted on Facebook an hour ago:

Det har ju brunnit på Nimis. Faktiskt tredje gången. Blir ett konstverk bättre av en brand? Troligen. I varje fall var det den här delen som gick åt, “Vindarnas torn”.

Combining Facebook’s translation with Google’s and putting them both into English, I get

They’ve burned Nimis. Actually the third time. Is a work of art improved by fire? Probably. In each case it was this part that went, “Windy Tower.”

I like Lars’s tower better than that  other one.

Fake news also played a role in electing Trump. (Wikileaks – Russian hacks – Comey – fake news. It’s almost as if there’s a pattern here.)

Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

“The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction,” Coler says.

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

“What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened,” Coler says.

You’ll never believe what happened next.

During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. “It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they’re about to get served,” Coler says. “It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election.”

Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.

Fabulous. Trump types gobble up fake news, and liberals reject it – so we get the fake news party instead of the no fake news party. Lying and credulity combine to take over. Genius.

Coler’s company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won’t say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.

And he makes a lot of money from it. So much for infiltrating the alt-right.

And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn’t give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.

However, Coler insists this is not about money. It’s about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was “correct.”

Coler says he has tried to shine a light on the problem of fake news. He has spoken to the media about it. But those organizations didn’t know who he actually was. He gave them a fake name: Allen Montgomery.

Coler, a registered Democrat, says he has no regrets about his fake news empire. He doesn’t think fake news swayed the election.

“There are many factors as to why Trump won that don’t involve fake news,” he says. “As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage.”

But most of that “baggage” is based on lies. And I don’t see how he can be confident that fake news didn’t sway (or contribute to swaying) the election when he said himself there’s a “big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat.” It was a close election, to put it mildly, so his confidence seems both foolish and self-serving. He probably did help throw the election to Trump, the asshole.