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Published on January 25th, 2017 | by Joshua S Hill

January 25th, 2017 by Joshua S Hill

Donald Trump has put to rest any doubts that he would be a terrible President for the US environment this week, by freezing all EPA grant funding programs and literally censoring the agency and its employees, declaring environmentalism out of control, and reviving the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines.

So, that bodes well

In a meeting Tuesday with automotive executives, Donald Trump informed them that he will halt unnecessary environmental regulations, making it easier for General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler to build plants in the United States.

In doing so, Donald Trump informed the executives that I am, to a large extent, an environmentalist. I believe in it, but its out of control.

It has also been reported that Donald Trumps administration has imposed a freeze on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), halting all its grant programs which provide critical funding for research, development of former industrial sites, and air quality monitoring, among other things.

The freeze is almost certainly one-of-a-kind, and sources inside the EPA have expressed their surprise and shock at the move.

As of the moment, it is unclear whether the freeze is indefinite or temporary, however one source quoted byThe Huffington Post said that a review of all grants would be completed by Friday.

Numerous reports have also revealed that the Trump administration has clamped down on the free exchange of information from several agencies, including the EPA, Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Specifically,The Huffington Post received the following memo which explains the draconian measures that have suddenly been implemented:

I just returned from a briefing for Communication Directors where the following information was provided. These restrictions are effective immediately and will remain in place until further direction is received from the new Administrations Beach Team. Please review this material and share with all appropriate individuals in your organization. If anyone on your staff receives a press inquiry of any kind, it must be referred to me so I can coordinate with the appropriate individuals in OPA.

I will provide updates to this information as soon as I receive it.

The EPA is also scrambling to save its climate change page from its website, after being ordered to remove the climate change page entirely.If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear, one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who also informed Reuters that some of the EPAs employees had begun trying to save some of the information housed on its website, while also trying to convince the Trump administration to preserve at least parts of the website.

Further censorship action has been revealed as the Badlands National Park Twitter account found itself the source of plenty of attention. The National Park Service Twitter account had already been briefly suspended following its publication of accurate information regarding the size of this years Inauguration crowd. On Tuesday, the Badlands National Park Twitter account posted several Tweets reporting scientifically accurate information, which have since been taken down.

Unsurprisingly, this bevy of censorship has not gone unnoticed.

These actions will stem the free flow of information and have a chilling effect on staff in these agencies, said Sam Adams, US Director, World Resources Institute. This flies in the face of effective policymaking which requires an open exchange of ideas, supported by the best science and evidence available. Curtailing communications from these agencies will hinder their ability to provide clean air and water and protect peoples health across the country. The administration should lift these bans as soon as possible and ensure that the role of science is respected within our government agencies.

Finally, to top off a surreal day, President Trump signed executive orders which would begin a renegotiating process of the highly disputed Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines.

This is with regard to the construction of the Keystone pipeline, something thats been in dispute and its subject to renegotiation by us, said Donald Trump as he signed the executive orders. Were going to renegotiate some of the terms and if theyd like, well see if we can get that pipeline built.

So that bodes well

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Tags: Badlands National Park, censorship, Dakota, Dakota Access, Donald Trump, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, keystone, Keystone XL, trump, united states, US

Joshua S Hill I'm a Christian, a nerd, a geek, and I believe that we're pretty quickly directing planet-Earth into hell in a handbasket! I also write for Fantasy Book Review (.co.uk), and can be found writing articles for a variety of other sites. Check me out at about.me for more.

Excerpt from:
Trump's War On Environment Begins Anew With Censorship, Halting EPA Funding, & Revitalizing Keystone XL ... - CleanTechnica

Less than three months into his new post as culture and Islamic guidance minister, Reza Salehi Amiri boasted about banning ten films from entering the Tehran Fajr International Film Festival, in line with the policies of the supreme leader, on January 19, 2017.

For the first time, we cut out films with feminist and inappropriate themes and supported 30 films made by young directors about the sacred defense (Iran-Iraq War), he said during a meeting with Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, a senior Qom-based theologian.

Amiri did not name the films, but the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has learned that they included productions by directors who focused in part on controversial topics like the hijab, which the Islamic Republic forces all women to cover their hair with in public, and domestic violence.

Some directors who had their films banned have responded angrily to the ban by decrying the governments repeated interference with their artistic process.

I will no longer make any films where women are wearing headscarves in a private space or in front of strangers, saidveteran Iranian director Kianoush Ayari, via a statement on his website on January 8, after learning that his latest film, Kanape (Canopy), was rejected even after he tried to pacify censors by showing four actresses wearing wigs to avoid religious objections to their shaved heads.

Im in this situation because of my commitment to realism, he added.

Tahmineh Milani, one of Irans leading female directors, also blamed the censors.

The truth is that my film deals with the subject of domestic violence, which is very important to me and my husband, and thats why it was not accepted by the festivals selection committee, she wrote on her Instagram page.Thats the only reason.

I hope when its released in cinemas, it will help reduce domestic violence, she added. We believe it deserved to be supported, but that didnt happen.

Salehi took over the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in November 2016 after the resignation of his predecessor, Ali Jannati, who fought many political battles with hardline conservatives over censorship and cultural issues.

Excerpt from:
Prominent Iranian Directors Decry Censorship After Minister Bans Films From Tehran Fajr Festival - International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran

French authorities ordered the blockage or removal of more than 2,700 websites in 2016, Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux said Tuesday, a spike in censorship that some critics in the tech industry fear will do little to snuff out extremist content online.

Le Roux told a cybersecurity conference in the northern French city of Lille that his government has requested blocks for 834 websites and that 1,929 more be pulled from search engines' results as part of the fight against "child pornographic and terrorist content."

"To face an extremely serious terror threat, we've given ourselves unprecedented means to reinforce the efficacy of our actions," he said, also pointing to reinforced online policing units and new forensic laboratories for analyzing digital evidence.

Le Roux didn't provide a breakdown or other details but the website censorship numbers represent a sharp increase over the figures tracked by France's online privacy watchdog, known by its French acronym CNIL. In April, CNIL reported that 312 sites were blocked and 855 de-listing requests were made in France between March 11, 2015, and Feb. 29, 2016.

French authorities can block sites without a judge's order under a 2011 law that was brought into effect in after jihadist attacks killed 17 people at a satirical magazine and a kosher supermarket in January 2015. The first blockage was reported two months later.

Some in the audience were skeptical that yanking search results or blocking sites in France would work at all.

Octave Klaba, who founded OVH, one of Europe's top internet hosting providers, said the expanding censorship regime amounted to political posturing given the global nature of the internet.

"I understand it, but it's useless," Klaba told The Associated Press after Le Roux's speech. "I come from tech. I know how it works."

Raphael Satter can be reached at: http://raphaelsatter.com

Read the original here:
French Internet Censorship Rose Sharply in 2016 - ABC News - ABC News

Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 12:45 p.m.

Details from Mythological Time by Sun Xun (2016)

Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Censorship can look at lot different depending on your vantage point. To observers in the West, the policies of the Chinese government the routine harassment of journalists and activists, the suppression of internet access, the wholesale erasure of certain words and events from the nation's history are abhorrent. The fact that the country's most internationally celebrated contemporary artist is Ai Weiwei, whose years-long house arrest galvanized the art world, is a case in point. But within China's borders, life continues, if not flourishes: Facebook can be accessed with simple VPN software, and political discourse carries on, with prohibited words replaced by puns to circumvent the restrictive firewall.

The nine newly commissioned works featured in "Tales of Our Time" at the Guggenheim highlight this contradiction of context. The Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese artists in the show all set out to redraw and complicate the narrative of China, which, in the case of Guggenheim's audience, is one that has been perceived from the West. The title of the show comes from a book by Lu Xun, a renowned Chinese writer whose work can be read as a symbol for China's fast-changing political landscape at the turn of the twentieth century: ancient myths and fables recast for a modern audience. Perhaps inspired by Lu, the China on display in the Guggenheim is one that emerges through history, however revisionist, and what we make of it.

Taxi, by Taiwanese artist Chia-En Jao, illustrates this strategy. The video installation follows Jao's conversations with Taipei cabbies as they drive him to historically fraught sites in the city: the Presidential Office; the Grand Hotel; the former home of Lin Yi-hsiung, a leader of the democratization movement whose mother and daughters were murdered while under 24-hour police surveillance. As one driver regales his passenger with details from the incident, his conversation drifts to his own loose recollections from 1980. None of the segments show the destination or much else of the route, and conversations are interrupted by a phone call from a mistress or chatter about weekend hobbies. What's important is not the real historical site, but the personal narratives it has spawned and intersected.

Kan Xuan, a Chinese artist who has studied in the Netherlands, also uses the personal to frame the historical. For Ku? L Er, which means "to circle the land" in Northern Chinese colloquial speech, Kan documented sites of 1,010 ancient cities. Many settlements have been eroded beyond recognition, with the frame of Kan's camera being the only visible border left. Kan's hand-drawn maps of the sites are projected nearby, blurring the lines between the real and remembered and highlighting the disorienting quality one's personal narratives bring to experience.

Not all works in the show are as nuanced. At the time of my visit, packs of visitors were swarming around Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's installation, trying to take photos of an industrial machine engaged in the Sisyphean task of squeegeeing up a blood-like substance that is constantly seeping back to its original place. Sun and Peng's beautiful, dancing machine and its senseless task is thought-provoking, though the "blood" can't help but remind of the painful yet familiar tale of the Chinese lives that have been sacrificed for the country's breakneck pace of progress.

Zhou Taos Land of the Throat (2016)

Courtesy the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Collection

In recent years, the Guggenheim has been expanding and diversifying its offerings of Chinese art. Its 2014 exhibition "Wang Jianwei: Time Temple," for example, was the Beijing-based artist's first solo show in America. Though Wang's work has been part of the Chinese avant-garde since the 1980s, his performances, installations, and new-media pieces have never chimed with the commercialism that lifted much Chinese art to fame on the international circuit. The driving force behind this effort is the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation, whose $10 million donation sponsored a series of shows including "Tales of Our Time" and a forthcoming exhibition in 2017 titled "Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World." One can't help but wonder how a Hong Kong foundation understands the notion of Chinese territory, or whether this reimagining of Chinese history is more readily staged in an American museum than a Chinese one.

Xiaoyu Weng, the Robert H.N. Ho associate curator who organized the show, tells me that Chinese censorship of artists is an "urban myth": "It's a very voyeuristic perception from the West, that artists in China would not have freedom to say what they want to say." For Weng, the exact aim of this exhibition is to challenge these established perceptions of Chinese art. In putting the show together, she looked for artists who are not simply market-driven, nor producing work that is only dominated by politics, despite their addressing of sociopolitical issues. The fact that many of them have spent time abroad helps to unmask a myth of another kind: that Chinese art develops in isolation from international discourses.

According to Weng, "Tales" offers only a glimpse at the deeper debates taking place in China. "There's actually a constant discussion ongoing among Chinese intellectuals about what defines modern China," she explains. "If you really go into China, you can go much deeper into the topics brought up in this exhibition." In its best moments, the show presents voices from the inside without resorting to over-translation. The joy, and challenge, of this exhibition seems to lie precisely in the tension between what is experienced inside China and what is seen from the West. In that respect, the show's success is twofold: how its international stage can shape the artists' place in Chinese discourse, and how its stories can challenge what the American audience thinks it has seen.

Tales of Our Time Through March 10 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1071 Fifth Avenue guggenheim.org

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Chinese Artists Confront Censorship, Memory, and History at the Guggenheim - Village Voice

Mashable

Trump nominee pledges to shield NOAA climate scientists from intimidation, censorship Mashable SEATTLE Climate scientists throughout the federal government are fearing an onslaught of budget cuts and censorship policies from the President Donald Trump administration, with sweeping changes expected governing how climate science is funded ... and more »

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Trump nominee pledges to shield NOAA climate scientists from intimidation, censorship - Mashable