Music mandate ended in Fredricton, Burmese junta shuts down Soros, lots more: Links 1, March 18, 2021

1. The Military regime of Burma is not all bad:

The military regime has seized control of the bank accounts of billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation (OSF) in Myanmar and announced that it will take legal action against the foundation, which is accused of violating restrictions on the activities of such organizations.

On Monday, military-controlled MRTV announced that the military had issued arrest warrants for 11 staff members of OSF Myanmar, including its head and deputy head, on suspicion of giving financial support to the civil disobedience movement against the military junta.

The regime also claimed that the world’s largest private funder for justice, democratic governance and human rights had failed to obtain approval from the Central Bank of Myanmar (CBM)’s Foreign Exchange Management Department for a deposit of US$5 million (7.04 billion kyats) with the Small and Medium Enterprise Development Bank (SMED) in Myanmar in 2018.

2. Fredericton school’s decision to drop music requirement after Grade 9 shocks supporters

Former teacher, students want FHS to keep arts tradition that helped it stand out from other high schools.

A growing chorus of voices is decrying a decision by Fredericton High School to stop requiring students to take music or art after Grade 9.

Students in Grade 10 will no longer have to take any art or music courses to complement the mandatory ones, such as mathematics, English and science.

It’s a break from a long tradition at the school, and Don Bossé, a former music teacher, said he wants to see the decision reversed.

“When I heard about it, I was devastated,” said Bossé, who served as the school’s music director for 24 years, and head of its fine arts department for 22 of those before retiring in 2018.

“You know, we had a great, great art and music program at FHS for many years, and this is the beginning of the erosion of a, you know, a model program.”

[…]

Fredericton High School principal Stephanie Underhill Tomilson declined an interview for this story.

In an emailed statement, Underhill Tomilson said “the direction FHS has taken is aligned with the provincial 9/10 Companion Document, supports greater student choice, and allows students to pursue their passions.”

The article does not say why they felt Music should be optional. Below, a completely unrelated video about music in French schools:

3. Reminder: Ontario has decided it will take another 3 weeks of lockdowns to crush any businesses still managing to keep going up to now.

My husband is a physician. Our whole lives, we have had different politics. We were equally appalled by these draconian lockdowns. Their damage should have been foreseen. And he will prolly make me delete this, because docs are still being silenced. https://t.co/RUvyct6ksH

— Dr. Kristen ?? (@DrKristenW) March 18, 2021

More doctors weigh in:

Thread web????https://t.co/FVCSCUi7ol pic.twitter.com/7HtnyJj0i6

— Dr. Thomas Binder, MD (@Thomas_Binder) March 18, 2021

4. Norwegian experts say deadly blood clots were caused by the AstraZeneca covid vaccine

“The reason for the condition of our patients has been found”, chief physician and professor Pål Andre Holme announced to Norwegian national newspaper VG today.

He has lead the work to find out why three health workers under the age of 50 were hospitalized with serious blood clots and low levels of blood platelets after having taken the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine. One of the health workers died on Monday.

The experts have worked on a theory that it was in fact the vaccine which triggered and unexpected and powerful immune response – a theory they now believe they have confirmed.

“Our theory that this is a powerful immune response which most likely was caused by the vaccine has been found. In collaboration with experts in the field from the University Hospital of North Norway HF, we have found specific antibodies against blood platelets that can cause these reactions, and which we know from other fields of medicine, but then with medical drugs as the cause of the reaction”, the chief physician explains to VG.

5. EVERY day on this site in the Reader’s Links there is a mention of the need to return to Samizdat. The old underground Soviet method of passing information to bypass state censors. This is becoming increasingly important as broadcast media increasingly becomes enemy propaganda, especially in Canada, and social media is judo-enemy-propaganda which seeks to exhaust the truth by suppression while amplifying the narrative to create the illusion of agreement out of what is actually consensus, or an imposed narrative.

And now this:

Blocking is Back: Why Internet Blocking is the Next Big Canadian Policy Battle

In early 2018, Bell led a consortium of companies and organizations arguing for the creation of a new website blocking system in Canada. Complete with a new anti-piracy agency and CRTC stamp of approval, the vision was to create a new system to mandate site blocking across ISPs in Canada. Canadians challenged the so-called FairPlay proposal and the CRTC rejected the Bell application on jurisdictional grounds. Since that time, the Canadian courts have been dealing with site blocking requests (the Federal Court of Appeal is soon set to hear arguments on the issue) and the Canadian copyright review conducted by the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology decided against recommending the creation of a new administrative system for site blocking.

While the CRTC site blocking application may have been settled, the blocking issue is about to hit the spotlight once again in Canada, only this time it involves multiple initiatives across several substantive areas. In addition to the case at the Federal Court of Appeal, the copyright related website blocking seems likely to be the subject of a public consultation this summer as the ISED and Canadian Heritage copyright departments continue to dismiss the results of Canada’s most extensive copyright consultation in a decade. The department release on the deeply flawed copyright term extension consultation (now extended until the end of month) included a reference to a follow-up consultation on a “modern framework for online intermediaries.” That is thinly-veiled code for a website blocking system, particularly given that the online intermediary issue was just modernized during the last copyright reform process in 2012. In other words, the lobbyist pressure for website blocking continues and the departments are sadly all-too-eager to comply.

I don’t know if a VPN will circumnavigate around this, but as everyone should be using one anyway to hide their traffic, those who do not have one really must knuckle down and make the effort to find one and get it up and running 24/7. Nord seems to be a good one and easy to use, and offers a lot of server locations so you can place your computer anywhere in the world more or less and defeat geo-blocking that way.

Thank you M., ML., Richard, Corny Conny, EW., Chris Jones, Sassy, and all who contributed to this site, and our mutual causes today.

An important interview with the man who was protesting the state mutilation and sterilization of Children under the imaginary rubric of “transgender” when several jacobins from ANTIFA approached him and broke his arm, I hope should be public tomorrow. Its an important interview. I hope all will watch.

This is 3 layers. It would look more like it with footage of someone stumbling across the lawn mumbling through a mask for real, and green screening the mics over it for a total of 2 layers.