Category Archives: New Utopia

Seeing the community come together this holiday season hiking on trails or strolling through retail centers with family and friends is especially rewarding knowing that 50 years ago next week, Irvine formally incorporated as a city.

That historic moment, on December 28, 1971, made it possible for the new City of Irvine and Irvine Company to fulfill the Master Plans vision of balanced and responsible growth while preserving 60% of the Irvine Ranch as open space.

It isnt every day a reporter gets a chance to observe the birth of a new city, the Daily Pilots George Leidal wrote at the time. Somehow the past few weeks have led me to feel like Ive just been assigned to cover, via time capsule, the sailing of the Mayflower.

Unlike any other in history, Leidal predicted, Irvine may indeed set the standard for a new city.

And it has. Today, Irvine ranks nationally as the best place to live for its parks, safety, fiscal strength and schools, all surrounding a world-class university.

In recognition of this, the Los Angeles Times recently published At 50, New City of Irvine is Evergreen, describing Irvines Master Plan as a Blueprint for a Green Utopia that, decade-after-decade, has created a diverse and sustainable city with a tremendous quality of life.

As 2022 approaches, we look forward to seeing you on the trails and throughout our community as we cover the people, places and experiences that make Irvine such a wonderful place to live, work and play.

Happy Holidays!

The Irvine Standard

Originally posted here:

Congratulations, Irvine, on a golden anniversary - Irvine Standard

By casting the fight against critical race theory (CRT) and general wokeness as an existential struggle for Americas soul, Gov. Ron DeSantisRon DeSantisBiden resists shutdowns as omicron threat rises Sunday shows preview: COVID-19 cases surge amid omicron wave Will or should Kamala Harris become the Spiro Agnew of 2022? MORE (R-Fla.) has made a grab for the reins of a movement that awaits a political leader.

Sure, Virginias Gov.-elect, Glenn YoungkinGlenn YoungkinLiberals disappointed after Biden's first year Photos of the Week: Tornado aftermath, Medal of Honor and soaring superheroes Governors grapple with vaccine mandates ahead of midterms MORE, won on the strength of his vow to fight CRTs inroads in the Old Dominion, and that is to his credit. But parents pushed him into it; DeSantis has been far more proactive and comprehensive in fighting CRT and wokeness.

At a recent rally, DeSantis took aim at the totalizing threat of cultural transformation:

I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and our institutions, DeSantissaid, adding that a cultural Marxism of which CRT is a prime example, is designed to tear at the fabric of our society and our culture and things that really weve taken for granted.

We have the responsibility to stand for the truth, for what is right, DeSantis told the crowd. We also have to protect our people and our kids from some very pernicious ideologies that are trying to be forced upon them all across the country.

According to A.G. Gancarski, a Floridapolitics.com reporter who covered the rally, the governor said the proposal wouldfollow the state board of educations statement supporting the teaching of the Declaration of Independence, and give parents a private right of action to sue districts that implement CRTs bigotry in the classroom.

The parents know best whats going on, and theyre in the best position to do it, DeSantis said, adding that his proposed legislation would defund schools that hire CRT consultants and would prohibit the use of discrimination in school employee trainings. The new law would also allow employees to sue companies that imposed CRT trainings because they are a form of workplace harassment.

The legislation that will be the vehicle for DeSantiss fight against CRT, the Stop W.O.K.E Act, is still being written, and the details will matter. If it includes book-banning language, it will invite the type of attack in the courts (and the court of public opinion) that other state efforts have attracted. That would be a mistake.

But it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The Florida proposal gets to the heart of the matter that we are facing: Critical race theory is not really an effort to give students a fuller picture of Americas history, warts and all. Its an attempt to destroy Americas identity as a nation constantly striving to live up to the promise of freedom and opportunity, and replace it with an alternative story.

The recognized godfather of CRT, Harvards Derrick Bell, was very clear about the transforming goals of CRT. As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it, he wrote in 1995. CRT posits that Americas reigning ideology is white supremacy and that racism in America is systemic, structural and institutional. So, according to this belief, the system itself, the institutions and the structures must be undermined from within.

How the resulting void would be filled is more difficult to ascertain. We know that many of CRTs main architects are Marxists, Marxist sympathizers or critics of capitalism. But Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves were not entirely clear about the ensuing mechanics once capitalism was eliminated. They advocated for the abolition of private property, the family, the free exchange of goods, the nation-state and God himself. But aside from correctly prognosticating that violence would be a must, or that the government would need to make despotic inroads once it actually started taking peoples property away, they were not fulsome with specifics.

All Marx and Engels promised was an earthly utopia, a materialist one. What the practitioners of their ideology have given the world since the first Marxist Revolution triumphed, in Russia in 1917, has been very heavy on despotic inroads and very light on utopian outcomes.

DeSantis, the governor of a state in which many residents are the descendants of victims of communism, or suffered under it themselves, has grasped what is at stake. His movement to grab the leadership of the movement confronting all that makes perfect sense.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at TheHeritageFoundation. His latest book is BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.

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Taking aim at critical race theory, Ron DeSantis grabs reins of the conservative movement | TheHill - The Hill

Alex (Philippine Velge) and Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) Ian Watson/HBO Max

This week, Station Eleven continues with two new episodes, Rosenkranz and Gildenstern Arent Dead and The Severn City Airport. Paired together, these chapters expand Station Eleven in every direction, introducing us to more characters from the present day and tracing the consequences of their actions 20 years down the road. The miniseries continues to navigate a vast emotional spectrum, somehow everywhere at once without losing its center. The key question these two episodes seem to be posing is: How much of the past do you want in your future?

In Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Arent Dead, the Traveling Symphony returns to Pingtree, an old touring stop where their former director Gil (David Cross, Arrested Development) has settled down. Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) is still shaken by her recent encounter with the mysterious stranger who has attempted to lure her young friend Alex (Philippine Velge) away from the Symphony and, somehow, spouts quotations from the graphic novel Station Eleven. (Kirsten believes she possesses the books only copy.) At Pinetree, she learns that her suspicions about the stranger were well-founded he arrived in town weeks earlier and somehow convinced all of its children to leave with him. He calls himself the Prophet, and he preaches that only post-pans, people born after the pandemic, are free from the corruption of the past and they must leave their families behind. His philosophy seems to be torn directly from the pages of Station Eleven.

As in the previous Year 20 episode, A Hawk from a Handsaw, terror and tragedy serve mostly as bookends to the episode while the meat of the text is dedicated to family drama. Kirsten struggles to protect Alex, her surrogate younger sister, from a dangerous influence, which forces her to flash back to her own contentious relationship with accidental guardian Jeevan during the first year of the flu. Troupe member Wendy (Deborah Cox, First Wives Club) has rewritten Hamlet in the vernacular of the 1990s grunge scene, which Conductor Sara hastily adopts in order to prove the Symphonys relevance to Gil, her former partner. While some of the cast is aghast at the very idea of rewriting the Bard, the production is a hit. Coincidentally, the new staging casts Alex in the leading role for a change, reinforcing her desire to break from the Symphonys cautious routine and set out on her own.

The Prophet tells his followers that there is no before. Its another cryptic phrase cribbed from Station Eleven, whose allure draws the young away from those still haunted by a past they can barely fathom. One can easily imagine why someone would choose to start over rather than carry on the traditions of a dead world. But whatever his means, the episodes chilling finale demonstrates the Prophet is capable of acts of unspeakable evil. The ending of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Arent Dead is by far the darkest moment in the series to date, and its hard to imagine how the Year 20 storyline can recover its hopefulness. Nevertheless, the execution of this episode is absolutely sterling, owed to the deft direction of TV veteran Helen Shaver and writer Nick Cuses delicate management of tone. Despite this grisly twist, Station Eleven still hasnt ventured into misery porn territory.

It helps that this weeks other episode, The Severn City Airport, is the series lightest yet. In this story, former actor Clark Thompson (David Wilmot, The Letter for the King) and about a hundred others become stranded at a Michigan airport terminal as the deadly flu pandemic runs rampant seemingly everywhere else on Earth. By some statistical miracle, no one at the Severn City Airport has brought the disease with them, and after grieving the loss of any loved ones not present, the survivors begin building a new ad-hoc society. Thompson finds purpose here, and charges himself with preserving the best of whats left of the fallen world. The Severn City Airport doesnt forgo suspense and horror elements altogether, but the episode offers a hint of farce as counterbalance.

Like Miranda, the lead of last weeks Hurricane, most of this episodes central characters are tied to the late actor Arthur Leander. Clark was his closest friend and the executor of his will. Arthurs ex-wife Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald, Succession) and young son Tyler (Julian Obradors) arrived at Severn City on the same flight as Clark, redirected en route to Arthurs Chicago funeral. Together with former security guard Miles (Milton Barnes, Utopia Falls), they form a new leading council for the airport, but Tyler isnt entirely onboard with their plans to remain cloistered inside and build a temple to the lost world. Here we can see the beginning of the tug-of-war between past and future that will define the next generation, reverberating all the way into the events of Year 20 and the story of the Traveling Symphony.

When the reality of his situation reaches him, Clark mutters a bit of King Lear to himself: The worst is not, so long as we can say This is the worst. Having a character speak a storys thesis statement aloud (using Shakespeare, no less) could easily play as heavy-handed, but on Station Eleven it resonates as more than a trite aphorism. Here is a line from a play written 400 years ago, by a man who survived a plague of his own. If this piece of the past is worth saving, then surely its not the only one.

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The World of Station Eleven Continues to Expand - Observer

The web3 seems to be the great Internet revolution, with the permission of the Metaverse. Although not even the great gurus of technology are very clear about what it means

Artificial intelligence, metaverse, blockchain, NFT, cryptocurrencies We are initiating one of the most important technological changes in history, although nobody knows very well how important it will be, and how far it will take us.

These days Elon musk Hes been raving about the metaverse, basically because hes an enemy of Mark Zuckerberg. He does not like to wear virtual or augmented reality glasses, but it seems to him very normal that we all implant a chip in our brain

As Business Insider tells us, Elon Musk has been talking about Web3 on Twitter these days. And has joined the conversation company founder Jack Dorsey, who stopped being CEO of Twitter a few weeks ago.

Chromebooks are very simple to use laptops based on the Chrome browser and widely used in academic environments such as schools or institutes.

The two tech gurus get along very well: they share their eccentricism, and their passion for cryptocurrencies. Its one of the reasons why Elon Musk is always on Twitter, and not in other social networks.

A couple of days ago Elon Musk started a debate on Web3 or Web 3.0, which already has more than 5,000 responses.

He started the talk by uploading a famous video of Bill Gates in 1995, it is where he is ridiculed in an interview, for saying that the Internet was the future:

Elon Musk implies that just as they laughed at Bill Gates when he said 25 years ago that the Internet was the future, they also laugh now at those who say that the Web3, the blockchain are the future.

But, What is Web3?

We can consider the early years of the Internet as the web 1.0: a collection of web pages and services that only worked in one direction: users used those services online, and thats it.

The web 2.0 It is the evolution of the Internet where users can personalize these services, create their own, and collaborate with other people on online projects. Something like the collaborative internet.

The next thing will be Web 3.0 or web3, but no one is yet very clear about what it is.

Some speak of the Web 3.0 as an Internet where you access the network without a browser, through multiple devices: wearables, Internet of Things, household appliances, cars, etc.

But Elon Musk calls Web3 to something else: a new decentralized and ownerless Internet, managed by the blockchain. That is, the equivalent of cryptocurrencies, but applied to the management of the Internet.

Can you imagine a video game where you can become a millionaire just by playing? It is possible with NFT games, but all that glitters is not gold

A network in which governments and large corporations such as Google, Amazon, or Facebook, they dont control the data, but are in the power of the users themselves, protected and managed by the blockchain.

In the same thread Elon Musk acknowledges that it is not real yet and wonders what it will be like in 10, 20 or 30 years.

A day later he tried again with another tweet: Has anyone seen Web3? I cant find it.

Answered him Twitter founder Jack Dorsey himself with a coded message: Its somewhere between A and Z:

He was actually referring to TOndreessen Horowitz, one of Facebooks investors, who has shown interest in the Web3.

The founder of Twitter explains in another post that a decentralized website can never escape investors, which always end up keeping everything.

The web3 is a centralized entity with another label , he concludes A response that the defenders of the decentralized Internet have not liked, who claim that he is wrong.

Will cryptocurrencies and blockchain be able to take control of money and the internet from banks, governments, corporations and investors?

It is, surely, the greatest utopia in the entire history of mankind

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What is Web3, the new Internet that confuses Elon Musk and the founder of Twitter | Technology - Central Valley Business Journal

The Golden Globes might have avoided scrutiny if it hadn't made one glaring mistake: It slobbered over "Emily in Paris."

According to a scathing report from the Los Angeles Times, voters were flown into France and pampered on set. They subsequently gave two major nominations to the series, which was panned by many critics, including me.

That, along with the lack of Black representation in its membership, led to NBC dropping coverage of the 2022 award ceremonies and for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to do a major overhaul.

But then something even weirder happened. The more prestigious Academy of Arts & Sciences granted the sitcom an Emmy nomination for outstanding comedy series.

Did I miss something? No. But after watching the entire second season, now streaming on Netflix, I have a better understanding of why certain viewers fell in love.

For those who have avoided the show, a quick recap: Emily (Lily Collins) is a marketing executive who makes the temporary move to France in hopes of fattening up her resume and landing a promotion back home in Chicago.

She winds up spending most of her time abroad wriggling out of one mess after another. It's like Lucy Ricardo's European vacation but without the physical shtick.

"Ever since I moved to Paris, my life has been chaotic and dramatic and complicated," Emily says in one of the new episodes.

For viewers who prefer "The Bachelor" to Marvel movies, this is the ultimate in fantasy TV.

Emily gets to choose among three suitors: an aristocrat who can afford first-class accommodations for a weekend getaway in Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera, a gourmet chef and a hottie who looks like the dude from "Bridgerton."

Her wardrobe, which boasts more colors than a bag of Skittles, wouldn't fit into Carrie Bradshaw's closet. Emily snags front-row seats at both fashion shows and male strip clubs. Workdays seem to revolve around martini lunches.

Her best friends are the daughter of one of China's richest tycoons and the heir to a Champagne company. In an upcoming scene, one of those friends ends up singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" aboard a yacht. In another, our hero tools by the Louvre in a Vespa. Ooh la la.

To make the trip even more luxurious, everyone around her seems perfectly willing to speak English.

If you're not swooning, you're not the audience for "Emily." You're also not creator Darren Starr's target audience. As he did with "Melrose Place" and "Sex and the City," Starr has built a Utopia for those who would rather go on high-end shopping sprees than fight alongside the Avengers. The Hollywood elite are not immune to this catnip.

There are some fun twists in the new episodes.

Kate Walsh ("Private Practice") makes a great nemesis when she enters as an executive determined to shake up the French branch of her company. There's also an amusing battle between fashion designers that could have been lifted from "America's Next Top Model."

Collins is seven kinds of adorable, although I can't help wondering what a more adept comic actor like Zooey Deschanel would have done with the role.

But let the "Emily" fans have their fun. Let's just not pretend the show is anything more than candy corn masquerading as a macaron.

See more here:

Why so many people love the terrible 'Emily in Paris' - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Whether youre a working professional or not, you must have imagined a utopian scenario where you get paid for doing nothing. A cherry on top would be several promotions and salary hikes. Utopia indeed, right? Well, a man was living this utopian life for not one but five years. Heres his story. A Reddit user shared his darkest work secret on the platform and claimed how he was able to keep a data entry job for five years and had to invest the minimum in keeping it. The user got a night-shift data entry job in 2015, where he had to enter details of an order and load it into the companys system. After his training, he figured out that the job could be done with AutoHotkey, an open-source code that works around software automation. The user approached a freelance coder and paid him to design a software that could do all the work that was required to be done by him at the company. It cost me a two-month salary, he wrote.

He added, I just had to input how many orders I want to process per hour. Since day one, I was working from home because the company did not want to pay for transportation or cleaning during the graveyard shift. And this is where the utopia started.

For the first two years of his job, he hardly spent more than five minutes keeping a check on the code and finding out things that the program was unable to do. For the rest of his day, the user spent his time going out for movies, sleeping, or hanging out.

For the adept job the code was doing, he even got a few promotions. I was doing such a remarkable job, I was offered new positions during day time that I would reject stating Im a very introverted person that enjoys this type of position, the user wrote. His colleagues even tried to match his order entering quota but were trumped by the code as the user used to change the quota from, say, 8 to 9, and then from 9 to 11.

As the saying goes, All good things must come to an end, his utopian job, too, ended. The company apparently developed new software that could do the data entry job without any human interference. It was then that the company sent the user a severance package and was told to keep the laptop and other equipment that the company gave him.

Interestingly, in 2017, the user did recommend the company to use the code he got designed by the freelancer, but his regional manager did not pay heed to his suggestions, and said that he was busy dealing with important stuff and that the user should keep doing the good work.

The user, in the end, said, I never talked about that with anybody in real life, not even my family, even my wife wasnt sure what my job was about. Now that it is over, there you go, my darkest work secret.

Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here.

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This Man Got Promotions, Salary Hikes After Doing Nothing for Five Years - News18

December 23, 2021

December 23, 2021

2021 was full of surprises: The Capitol riot was a bit of a shock; COVID-19variants sprung up left and right; and, perhaps strangest of all, sperm was all over the papers.

That's because the pandemic caused a serious shortage in the market for sperm.Many people have put off having children while COVID runs its course. But among those with male infertility or no male partner,the luxury of working remotely, and the means to pay for some sperm, the pandemic offered a golden opportunity to make dreams of a family a reality. But just as demand skyrocketed, donations fell, and in the resulting shortage, women turned instead to unregulated Facebook groups with nameslike "Sperm Donation USA."The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Esquire all ran features on this growing underground world of sperm philanthropy.

The picture that emerged should give the feminists among us a lot to mull. Artificial insemination by donors is part of a range of assisted reproduction tools that allow people to have children outside the bounds of a heterosexual relationship between two fertile people. It opens up procreative possibilities not only for couples struggling with infertility, but also for women who, for whatever reason, aren't in a committed relationship, as well as lesbian and gay couples.

In other words, sperm donation issupposed to liberate people from traditional gender roles. But the recent spotlight on informal donationpracticessuggests it often does exactly the opposite.

The informal market for sperm differs from its more clinical counterpart. Traditional sperm banks usually keep the personal information of the donor private, at least until the child turns 18. But in the world of Facebook sperm sharing, donors and donees seek each other out, firstonline, then in person.

"Like online dating, the matchmaking kicks off with a direct message from either party expressing interest, before an offline get-to-know-you," wrote Tonya Russell in The Atlantic. And the vetting goes in both directions: Understandably, many donors want assurance that the person raising their biological child has the meansand temperamentto raise them well.

This produces a variety of unconventional arrangements. Some donors, Russell reported, refuse to donate "artificially" and arrange meet-ups to donate the old-fashioned way. In many cases, donors maintainsome sort ofrelationship with the children they sire, or at least hope their children will reach out to them in the future, establishing them as what researcher Nicole Bergen refers to as an "estranged patriarch."

"I have this vision of me being in my 50s and 60s, and I have a large dinner table, and I'm inviting all my donor kids to join me for dinner to tell me their stories, their journeys," one popular 30-year-old donor told The New York Times.

Arguably the most famous of these estranged-patriarchs-in-the-making is Ari Nagel, who has fathered nearly 100 children through word-of-mouth sperm donation. Nagel is a strange figure who stays in loose contact with many of the women he's impregnated, as well as with their children. PerEsquire's sweeping profile, the women are friendly with each other, referring to each other's children as nieces and nephews and to themselves as "Ari's baby mamas."

To his offspring, Nagel plays a kind of distant father figure, swooping in for trips to the park while he's in town to catch another woman's fertile window. He reminds me a little of Stiva Oblonsky from Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,a charming father of six who flits in and out of his childrens' lives but is otherwise entirely unencumbered by their needs, socializing and drinking and philandering as he pleases.

And that similarity is revealing: The novel is set in imperial Russia in the 1800s, a country still under the feudal system. Central characters have a serious discussion about whether women ought to be educated. It is not a feminist utopia and maybe sperm donation patriarchy isn't either.

After all,the arrangement Nagel has with his baby mamas is arguably not just regressive butantediluvian. The imbalance of parental responsibility ismore extreme than any 1950s gender stereotype. Nagel gets to enjoy casual relationships with dozens of children, and his "baby mamas" do literally all of the work of providing for their wellbeing.

Even if we step back from an extreme example like Nagel, the population of people raising children afterassisted reproduction is overwhelmingly feminine. There's no reliable data on exactly how many children are conceived by donor sperm each year, but according to the Timesreport, sperm banks report about 20 percent of their clients are heterosexual couples, while the rest are gay women or single moms by choice.

The population of men who adopt children or have them through surrogacy doesn't come close to counterbalancing this distribution which makes sense, as even a $1000 vial of sperm is much less expensive than a $30,000 adoption or $100,000 surrogacy. That's part of why the vast majority of same-sex couples raising children are female, as are thevast majority of single parents, whether they're single by choice or not.

All told, artificial means of becoming parents seem to be upholding, rather than dismantling, a gendered division of aggregate reproductive labor.

Whether or notthat matters to youwill depend not only on whether you care about gender equality, but what your vision of gender equality looks like. Does achieving parity in domestic labor matter? What about parity in reproduction, insofar as that's possible? Or should women pursue reproduction, including reproduction without male responsibility, guided by what they personally want instead of loyalty to some abstract principle of equality?

Feminism doesn't have a single answer to any of these questions, nor can I answer them here.Some feminists, like Robyn Rowland, fear the commodification of reproductionas a threat to women's self-determination over their bodies, even going so far as to say that women struggling with infertility should forgo the use of these technologies for the sake of women "as a social group." Others, such as Rosalind Petchesky, countered that, far from being imposed on women, reproductive technology is "a critical tool of reproductive freedom."Shulamith Firestone also saw liberation in reproductive technology, but,believing childbearing was the root cause of women's societal oppression, arguedtrue equality would only be achievedif it was used tofree women from their biologically-imposed reproductive burden.

Whatever else comes out of the sperm donation boom within the COVID baby bust, it may be some clarity on these points. This year and into the next, unknown thousands of babies whose conception began in the comment threads of "Sperm Donation USA" will be born. And, two decades hence, they'll be uniquely positioned to tell us: Is the new estranged patriarch any less oppressive than the old?

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Is sperm donation good for feminism? - The Week Magazine

New Zealand is an enigma. It belongs to the rich Global North yet its near the east-southern tip of the globe! Its a Western country yet its to the easternmost part of this earth!

Its a sovereign nation.or is it? Under the tutelage of the Queen of England, its a monarchy, right? Well, wrong! Its a Realm comprising a number of islands. The difference, search me!

Whatever oddities, however, whod believe that its a country where a man can be hired by ten people to take their Covi-19 jabs and he actually comfortably tucks them in, in a single day?

Thats exactly what happened early this December. The man went to ten different vaccination centres as ten peoples jab-taker for hire. About the effect on him, opinions are divided. And whether his sponsors will be identified, thats for the birds.

Now, consider that New Zealand is one of the most organised of Western governments. And that its widely praised for a very low infection rate. With a population of 5 million, it has reported 12,500 infections and just 46 deaths, this far.

But with this incident, only one as it may be, isnt the reliability of its statistics thrown into question? Can its claim of 89% of residents being fully vaccinated be relied upon?

In Rwanda we may laugh but maybe it can happen to us, too, although I cannot imagine how.

Here, itd mean the man belongs to Isibo, the smallest administrative unit. Since its composed of not more than 20 households, its residents more or less know one another. If they dont, the Isibo head knows most of them or, if not all, knows someone who knows that whom she/he doesnt.

Which means any recalcitrant member of the unit whos likely to accept multiple punctures in his body on behalf of others for pay will have been known even before embarking on their enterprise!

In this age of advanced technology, moreover, the whole Isibo membership will have a social media platform where they exchange all titbits of information. Which means therell be no escape for that rogue member of their unit and none for those jab-dodgers.

With these sub-villages, villages, cells, sectors, districts, provinces up to the central government working as if in what Id call unending inter-cyclic motion, I see no escape route for rascals.

Besides, in a society where, however rich, you can freely borrow something you miss from a neighbour and vice versa, you are family and will fight any wrong together. Where, before the Covid-19 pandemic, you met in church, Umuganda, Ubudehe, et al, at all levels of interaction, none can play such tricks on society undetected even for a few hours.

Is this country a Utopia? Far from it. Rwanda has its own share of miscreants, conmen/women, thieves, robbers, corrupt elements and embezzlers in government and in institutions. Everywhere there are different unsavoury characters alright, but this country is not ranked among the cleanest, most orderly, least corrupt, etc., for nothing.

Those wayward elements, be they at local or national level, in government or in institutions, civil society or the private sector, wherever, all must be accountable; the citizenry is watching.

The citizens are watching because government has earned their trust. They know the effort it puts in working with them to save their earnings, to spend it thriftily, to live in a safe atmosphere, to realise progress, to do everything transparently and together to work for their common good.

Thats how strong leadership comes in: never tire in inculcating into fellow citizens the ethos of one for all, all for one. And this ethos necessarily demands and creates strong institutions, which must be safeguarded.

So, a fig for the man who came breathing fire for Africa to ditch strong men or else.

Well, the else didnt see light of day because we knew that the strong institutions he advocated for are built by strong men and strong women. The latter whom he could not remember to mention because a Ms President seems to be an alien concept in USA, thus far.

But I beg your indulgence, for I digress.

My laboured effort is in the service of expressing how people whove worked hard to build their brand of democracy, not the do-what-you-will democracy constantly being shoved down our throats, do not allow any malfeasance, of whatever type and however minor.

In the name of transparency also, every shot-taker must be properly identified.

Our democracy doesnt mean freedom to abuse anybody/thing. It doesnt mean going on rampage breaking things or getting unearned rights destined for others.

We may have religious and other zealots who may reject vaccination but, for that, if you are likely to put someone else in danger when you catch the virus, youll not escape the long arm of the law. Ibid if you take more than your due share of shots and deprive others of theirs.

Taxpayers money has been expended to buy vaccines for such a number of citizens. That exact number must get their allotted jabs, not sink into one mans shoulder. Un point un trait!

Read more from the original source:

Taking ten Covid-19 jabs for pay? The long arm of the law awaits thee - The New Times

Mackenzie Davis in HBO's adaptation of Station Eleven.

In early 2020, before the lockdown, before the coronavirus even had a name, the passengers and crew aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess began a two-week quarantine off the coast of Japan. I remember telling a friend the world was starting to feel like Station Eleven. Life imitating art.

One of the most memorable and haunting images of Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 speculative novel Station Eleven is not a cruise ship but an airplane. An airplane meeting tarmac, slowing to a stop and sitting dormant without opening its doors or releasing its passengers, sealing the infection inside. It is Schrdinger's airplane, its passengers already ghosts before they die.

Now, in late 2021, the wildly popular before-times novel is an after-times HBO Max original limited series. Instead of COVID-19, Station Eleven's world is devastated by the Georgia Flu. Its story of collapse and rebirth returns to find an audience that may well be too weary to turn to dystopian speculation for entertainment. Because now Station Eleven reminds me of the early pandemic: grocery hoarding, overrun emergency rooms, face masks. Art imitating life.

Entertain your brain with the coolest news from streaming to superheroes, memes to video games.

The first death we see is not from the flu: Movie star Arthur Leander (Gael Garca Bernal) is playing the titular role in a stage production of King Lear. Child actor Kirsten Raymonde (Matilda Lawler, played as an adult by Mackenzie Davis) watches Arthur succumb to a heart attack while audience member Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) interrupts the show to perform CPR. Arthur dies on stage. Soon, almost everyone in the theater will be dead, too.

The fictional plague is both more deadly and more contagious than COVID-19, killing some 99% of the earth's population in a matter of weeks. Those who survive become unwitting actors on a post-apocalyptic stage where there are no doctors, no countries, no supply chain, no internet, no celebrities, a world where luck and fate pick who lives or dies, and children learn to kill or be killed.

Matilda Lawler as young Kirsten.

"I remember damage," Kirsten repeats 20 years later, quoting a comic book called Station Eleven that was given to her by Arthur before his death. Kirsten has improbably survived the pandemic and joined The Traveling Symphony, a roving Shakespeare troupe, spreading art and culture from the before times to a Great Lakes region that is now dotted with small settlements of survivors coexisting in relative harmony, but with an ever-thrumming baseline of danger.

The plot unfurls across not only timelines but characters, and Kirsten's comic book is the portkey that reveals the tangled web we weave -- the six degrees of separation, the missed connections, the "what a small world!" coincidences. The world of Station Eleven is small, the ensemble cast like that of a late-career Garry Marshall film. We jump from the before to the during to the after; between Kirsten and Jeevan and Arthur; and also Arthur's first wife Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), his second wife Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald), their son Tyler (Julian Obradors), and his good friend Clark (David Wilmot). We see how this interconnectivity both creates and dismantles civilization. It is this same connectedness that allows a virus to proliferate, after all.

One of the most unsettling of the COVID-era catchphrases is "new normal." And while the screen adaptation of Station Eleven concerns itself more with the immediate aftermath of the collapse than the novel does, it is still primarily a story of rebuilding normalcy. Not only do people continue to perform Shakespeare in the after-times, but they fall in love, they give birth, they go swimming, they read comic books and they curate museums. Strangers become family. Stranded airport denizens become a community. The world is as different between Year 20 and Year One as it was between Year One and "pre-pan."

In this way, Station Eleven depicts not the end of the world -- not a before and after -- so much as the inflection point of general systems collapse, a theory that posits more of a cyclical pattern, a waxing and waning of societal complexity throughout history. (Sally Rooney's 2021 novel Beautiful World, Where Are You also references this theory.) Our infrastructure is tenuous in its complexity, a fact we've grappled with in real life amid supply chain disruptions and the coining of "essential worker." So it is somewhat comforting to look at collapse through the lens of business as usual.

A contemporary soundtrack does the heavy lifting for the series' point about continuity, and every recognizable song is a reminder that this unfamiliar world isn't as far removed as we'd like it to be. Unlike the novel, in which Kirsten's memories of Year One have been lost, Davis's Kirsten remembers so vividly that she essentially lives in both timelines at once, even returning to the early collapse and conversing with her younger self in a fever dream. Her performances are animated by her grief, and the series seems to say that art is not just a consolation prize, but a gift. Perhaps Station Eleven is not even dystopian then, but a somber grasp at utopia.

The project of any book-to-screen adaptation is to recapture the magic of the original using the tools of the new medium. And showrunner Patrick Somerville (of Netflix's Maniac) achieves this goal deftly, bringing to life some of Mandel's most indelible images -- the ghost plane, the horse-drawn pickup trucks, the failure of the electrical grid -- while amplifying some of the book's quieter moments. The adaptation turns Jeevan and Kirsten's chance encounter into the series' emotional hinge, a revision that seems so fitting I had to double-check it wasn't in the source material.

Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler as Jeevan and young Kirsten in Station Eleven.

The biggest change in HBO's adaptation is the treatment of the prophet (Daniel Zovatto), whose simple villainy in the novel fuels the plot and provides the stakes in Year 20. Here, his "there is no before" belief system is more enigmatic and empathetic and thus, frankly, more interesting. This version of the prophet is understandably more attractive to Kirsten, too, battling with the preservationist ideology behind the Museum of Civilization. Even post-collapse, human culture finds its footing astride the conservative and the radical, and the prophet reminds me of the burn-it-all-down, can't-go-back-to-normal rhetoric of our current pandemic, where systemic inequality is finally foregrounded in the cultural conversation.

Still, the miniseries is quieter than a lot of viewers will expect, given the premise and genre, and by complicating the prophet, the story loses much of its momentum. Tonally, moments of lightheartedness feel dissonant and even cringey, like the message of hope is a pill the actors couldn't quite swallow. Perhaps the adaptation would have felt different if it had arrived earlier within our own pandemic, but of course it was the pandemic that delayed filming.

The Traveling Symphony's mantra is "Because survival is insufficient." As a piece of culture in a post-COVID world, the HBO miniseries has taken up this mantra itself, a reminder of dystopian fiction's raison d'etre. It is why everyone started streaming Contagion and reading Camus last year. Even when the bubonic plague shuttered Shakespeare's Globe Theater, the show went on. Art has its own survival instinct.

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Review: Station Eleven's HBO adaptation came at a weird, but good, time - CNET

It looks as if Travis Scottcould be moving forward with the rollout for his upcoming album, Utopia.

Over the weekend, eagle-eyed fans noticed that the Houston rhymer changed his Instagram account bio with the word UTOPIA in all caps. Previously, Travis quietly removed the word from his bio following the deadly events at the 2021 Astroworld Festival at NRG Park in Houston on Nov. 5.

Whether this is an announcement that Travis is resuming his rollout for the project is unclear.

XXL has reached out to Travis Scotts reps for confirmation.

Before the Astroworld calamity, Travis had been teasing fans about his Utopia project since the beginning of this year.

In the Spring 2021 issue of i-D magazine, Travis revealed small tidbits of what to expect on the album.

"I never tell people this, and Im probably going to keep it a secret still, but Im working with some new people and Im just trying to expand the sound, he told the publication. Ive been making beats again, rapping on my own beats, just putting everything together and trying to grow it really. Thats been one of the most fun things about working on this album. Im evolving, collaborating with new people, delivering a whole new sound, a whole new range."

Fast forward to November, just a day before his headlining set at Astroworld, La Flame released two singles, Escape Plan and Mafia, which the latter song features an uncredited cameo from J. Cole.

However, a dark cloud still looms over Trav in the wake of the Astroworld fatalities. According to a medical examiner's report that XXL obtained last Thursday (Dec. 16), the official cause of death for the 10 victims was listed as "compression asphyxia." The report further explained that the crowd surge at the festival caused the victims' lungs to be crushed, ultimately resulting in suffocation.

Only one of the victims had an additional cause of death, which is described as a combination of cocaine, methamphetamine and ethanol. All 10 of the manner of deaths are labeled as accidental, with the victims' ages ranging from nine to 27 years old.

A criminal investigation into the mass casualty event is still ongoing.

On top of that, Travis faces billions of dollars in lawsuits filed against him and other parties for their alleged gross negligence, which Trav has recently filed documents to have them thrown out.

In an interview with television and radio personality Charlamagne Tha God, a remorseful Travis said that he wishes he could heal all those who were impacted by the tragedy.

"Fans come to the show and have a good experience. And I have a responsibility to figure out what happened here," he stated. "I have a responsibility to figure out a solution and hopefully this takes a first step into us as artists having that insight of what's going on. And the professionals to kind of surround and figure out more intelwhether it's tech, whether it's more of a response, whatever the problem is, to figure out that. [And] in the future, move forward in concert safety and make sure it never happens again."

Check out Travis Scotts updated IG bio below.

La Flame's fan base is ready to rage at a moment's notice.

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Travis Scott Appears to Confirm New Album Utopia Is Still Coming After Astroworld Tragedy - XXLMAG.COM