Mountain Dreamers
It doesn’t take much to get arrested these days… even just “being a reporter” is a crime. We know this happens regularly in Russia and China, but now it is happening in UK, USA and France.
maybe you know some arrested in France this week? Hmm.
This has now been deleted from twitter, but see what the police can do with unbridled power and stupidity. Social distancing is a crime to be arrested for.
Brig, Soren and Reidar- We have spoken about “Emergent Behavior” many times… you see it with flocks of birds, schools of fish and bees. It is so cool to watch, and this video shows how you can model it with an algorithm. Please try out on your computer. It is really simple. I wish I could sit next to you and help your program it. Love Papa.
This is so coool…. love you.
Brig, Soren & Reidar-
Dis-obey for the sake of Good. It is your duty to Dis-obey when you must. Do no collaborate with Evil. Gandhi is a hero for dis-obeying the state, and prison in a non-violent way.
You MUST protest evil, or you become evil yourself.
I have a moral duty NOT to comply with your mother’s evil behavior. I must protest, and protect you from evil. It is a moral obligation.
Irony of Irony- You (me) can be sentenced in France to jail without a trial or any evidence. Liberty in France is Already Dead.
And today these new French laws on Social Media you do not even have the liberty to speak out in France. Free Speech is not compatible with Hate Speech laws. It is simply impossible. When the government gets to decide what you can say- even compel you to say certain words. You are silenced.
When free speech dies…. millions will die and civilization dies. History is very clear on this point.
published by WSJ- Fair Use
By Sam SchechnerUpdated May 13, 2020 4:57 pm ET
PARIS—France is empowering regulators to slap large fines on social-media companies that fail to remove postings deemed hateful, one of the most aggressive measures yet in a broad wave of rules aimed at forcing tech companies to more tightly police their services.
France’s National Assembly passed a law Wednesday that threatens fines of up to €1.25 million ($1.36 million) against companies that fail to remove “manifestly illicit” hate-speech posts—such as incitement to racial hatred or anti-Semitism—within 24 hours of being notified.
The law also gives the country’s audiovisual regulator the right to audit companies’ systems for removing such content and to fine them up to 4% of their global annual revenue in case of serious and repeated violations. The measure takes effect on July 1.
Tech-company lobbyists and free-speech advocates have criticized the law, arguing that it would push large social-media platforms to remove a great number of controversial posts using automated tools, rather than risk incurring potentially astronomical fines. French opposition parties had delayed passage of the law, citing the risk of “pre-emptive censorship” by tech giants.
“Fighting the spread of hate on the internet is certainly necessary, but it must not happen at the expense of our freedom of expression,” Constance Le Grip, a representative of the conservative Les Republicains party, said before her party voted against the measure.
A signature effort of French President Emmanuel Macron, the government has promoted the law, first proposed last year, as part of a broad effort to reset the balance for how much responsibility tech companies should assume for illegal or harmful activity that happens on their platforms.
Decades-old laws on the books in the U.S. and in Europe have since the 1990s shielded tech companies from much liability for what their users do on their platforms. But in the past couple of years, tech platforms have been blamed for doing too little to stop—or even facilitating the spread—of scourges including terrorist propaganda, electoral disinformation, cyberbullying and sex trafficking. Activists and policy makers have pushed to give companies a bigger financial incentive to police their services.
“We can no longer afford to rely on the goodwill of platforms and their voluntary promises,” Cédric O, France’s junior minister for digital affairs, said during parliamentary debate before Wednesday’s vote. “This is the first brick in a new paradigm of platform regulation.”
The French law is one of several that have been passed or are under consideration on the topic. Later this year, the European Union’s executive arm is expected to propose what it calls a Digital Services Act, which would update—and perhaps abolish—liability protections from its old e-commerce directive. The U.K. is pursuing a related idea with legislation on what it calls Online Harms, which would create a “duty of care” for tech companies to take measures to prevent a gamut of illegal or potentially harmful content from being published on their platforms, or face fines.
Germany in 2018 implemented a law similar to the French one, threatening fines of up to €50 million for companies that systematically fail to remove several types of content deemed hateful within 24 hours. Last year, German officials issued a €2 million fine to Facebook Inc. under the law.
Companies like Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Twitter Inc. have responded to growing pressure with big investments in content moderators and artificial-intelligence tools to comb their services for content that violates their own or national standards. But they have also emphasized the need to protect speech on their platforms, too.
On Wednesday, Facebook said that it would work closely with French regulators on implementation of the law, adding, “Regulation is important in helping combat this type of content.”
Facebook also has said it would spend $130 million to create an independent appeals board to adjudicate disputes over what content should or shouldn’t be removed. Facebook named the first 20 members of the body earlier this month.
Twitter on Wednesday said in response to the French law that it shares a “commitment to build a safer internet and tackle illegal online hate speech, while continuing to protect the Open Internet.”
France’s approach has shifted somewhat over time. In the fall of 2018, Mr. Macron announced a pilot project to embed French regulators within Facebook to cooperatively work on the best way to limit hate-speech postings without trampling on free speech.
But one French official who was involved with the pilot project said at the time that Facebook had given the regulators little access to how it made decisions. The government eventually backed a law that included the threat of fines for failing to remove posts.
Passage of the new French law came a day after the announcement of a proposed settlement of a U.S. lawsuit against Facebook that also centered on its handling of problematic content.
The agreement addresses a class-action complaint originally filed in September 2018 claiming that content moderators for the internet giant suffered psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder after they were required to review offensive and disturbing videos and images.
Under the agreement, which covers former employees and contractors in four states and must be approved by a judge, Facebook agreed to pay up to $52 million, from which each moderator can receive $1,000 that is intended for medical costs. Those diagnosed with certain conditions can be eligible for more money.
Facebook, without admitting wrongdoing, also agreed to implement changes to its moderation practices including on-site coaching and enhanced controls for moderators over how imagery is displayed, according to a settlement filing in state superior court in San Mateo, Calif.
Write to Sam Schechner at [email protected]
The chemistry of Peppers. Science can be so cool. Love Papa.
Cheetahs… oh I dream of being so fast
Erin Pizzey founded the first women’s shelter in the world. She is foremost advocate on Domestic Violence.
Watch her describe Child Murder, caused by an alienating parent. Brig, Soren and Reidar – I am so sorry I could not protect you from this.
Brig, Soren and Reidar- Please watch this great movie by Tof. This is the childhood I provided you. So sorry it was stolen from you.
— I love you Papa — You will survive this internment. Stay strong.
SWEDISH PHOTOGRAPHER Daniel Rönnbäck was standing in the tramline of Chamonix’s Aiguille du Midi with the late Andreas Fransson when he first saw Christophe “Tof” Henry. It was 2012 and Fransson nodded toward the third-generation Chamoniard, whose black mop of hair wisped across his tanned cheeks, and said to Rönnbäck, “That kid is the next generation of steep skiing. He’s the fastest skier in Chamonix.”
But you wouldn’t need a steep skiing legend like Fransson whispering in your ear to notice Henry’s swagger. The way he cuts to the front of the tramline with baggy bibs hanging off his broad 6-foot-3-inch frame resembles a high school basketball star waltzing in late to class. Or perhaps you’ve seen POV videos of him straightlining sheets of blue ice on 50-degree test-piece lines before launching onto variable snow and cranking GS turns on an exposed hanging glacier.
Around the Chamonix Valley, where he has lived for all of his 33 years, Henry is known to skip entrance rappels above classic lines like the narrow Col du Plan couloir or the highly coveted Mallory-Porter, a route that plunges 5,000 vertical feet below the Aiguille du Midi cable car. He skis no-fall zones like he’s freeriding inbounds and does so on high avalanche days in bad weather with low visibility. And just in case you’re unsure if Henry is a big deal, he’s ready to let you know. “I ski top of Mallory in May last year with nine turns,” he says loud enough for anyone on the street to hear it. “No fucking hop turns!”
SITTING OUTSIDE THE Elevation 1904 bar just off Chamonix’s main square on an April afternoon in baggy jeans and two hoodies, Henry was drinking like he skis—fast and without hesitation. I asked if he ever brings a guide along to handle his photographers or film crews. “I don’t need a guide,” he says. “I’m better than guide. They ask me where is the good snow.”
When pressed on what he’s trying to accomplish in his ski career, it might be the easiest question he’s ever answered. “My goal is to ski all the hugest lines you can in Cham in different way and style: fast and big,” he says, his thumping pulse visible in his jugular vein.
Despite all of the impassioned chest beating, his connection to the peaks is a source of vitality that calls him on a near-daily pilgrimage. Skirting the thin line between dialed and loose is precisely where Henry feels centered and free. Yet down on the valley floor, his world is weighted with personal woes and an unsettled family dynamic threatening to knock him off-balance.
After an hour or two of throwing back beers, recounting his favorite ski lines and dreaming of summer van-life to ski first descents in the Chilean Andes, Henry spotted a blonde rascal with a red bandana around his neck running by on the sidewalk. “Jules!” Henry called out to his 6-year-old son, who kept on running, babysitter in tow. When the boy passed again, Henry swooped the kicking child up into his lap. The boy squirmed out of his grasp and ran off. For the first time all day, Henry’s enduring smile gave way to a troubled face. “Sometimes he doesn’t want to spend time,” he says softly with a long, sad drag on his cigarette.
Henry grew up skiing from the age of 2 in Chamonix. His parents were working-class weekend warriors at best, not deeply embedded in the mountain culture so often romanticized in the birthplace of alpinism. He had an unremarkable childhood and a subdued personality until he was 15. That’s when he started skiing with fellow Chamoniard Aurélien Ducroz, an eventual two-time Freeride World Champion skier.
“We would freeride together, learning how to use the big wide ski,” Henry says. “This was the new revolution.” Having such unmatched access to big vertical and long seasons breeds rapid progression in Chamonix, if the motivation is there. And it was, so much so that Henry was too busy skiing to finish high school. By age 20, he was skiing faster than most locals on open freeride terrain, working as a ski instructor and finding summer labor jobs clearing trees and building a zip line and ropes courses—anything to keep him outdoors.
In 2014, tragedy struck the Henry family, when his mother, Francoise, died of leukemia. Soon thereafter, a Christmas dinner ended early after an argument erupted between Henry and his father. The two have not spoken or seen each other since. That left just a few close friends at his wedding in April 2016. A little more than a year later, Henry’s wife took Jules, who they had when she was 22 and Henry was 27, and left, for the second time, with another man. Henry, meanwhile, was skiing in Chile for two months. That July, he posted a video on Instagram of him skiing a couloir barely wide enough for his skis with the caption: [sic] “No more mum no more dad no more love from my wife, missing my son, fortunatly the passion is here and save me…”
When he returned home to face the music last September, he was a wreck, living out of his 2005 Volkswagen Transporter van piled with 25 pairs of skis, and only seeing Jules once a week. His younger sister, Caroline, who had the hard task of breaking the news to Henry about his wife’s “extra conjugal man,” was worried about him. “Tof wanted to stay at the bar and drink, and I was worried if he’d go to the mountain and maybe not worry about the risk as much,” she says as smoke ribbons swirl from her cigarette on the patio of the Chamonix café where she works one of two jobs. “He thinks he knows everything, but Mother Nature is stronger than him and I am scared that sometimes he forget it. But I know when he feels bad, the skiing and the mountains are his medicine, his therapy.”
Indeed, the day after they buried their mother in the same Chamonix cemetery where centuries of legendary alpinists lay, Henry was skiing off the Midi. But when Henry talks about skiing, it sounds more like a drug than therapy. “I’m so stoked in the mountains, I always want more,” he says. “It make you crazy. I get down and I just want more, more, more.”
At 18 years old, Henry started skiing with Pierfrancesco “Pif” Diliberto, the monoskiing founder of TKB Films. Nathan Wallace, an American ski mountaineer who has called Chamonix home for more than two decades and another of Henry’s mentors, remembers Henry didn’t have a backpack or avalanche equipment while filming with Diliberto. “Just a helmet, and he was straightlining crazy avalanche zones,” says Wallace. “We wouldn’t even ski with him.”
Henry certainly earned his early reputation for quasi-reckless skiing, and although he still hasn’t done much to dispel it, Chamonix is a difficult place to find someone on a high enough horse to call another skier out for being dangerous. An estimated 100 people die each year in the Mont Blanc range alone. Diliberto relents the fact that almost half of his friends have died in the mountains. “We are a full hard drive of bad stories,” he says. Henry tends to shirk off any conversations veering toward the topic of death in the mountains.
But perhaps skiing almost every day, including 50 laps on the classic Cosmiques Couloir and the Glacier Rond in one season alone, really does provide Henry with an intimate knowledge of how the daily weather conditions affect the snow, where the pockets of instability sit, and when it’s best to outrun his own slough by straightlining a face. “Sometimes I see Tof ski and think what he’s doing is a bit stupid,” says Julien “Pica” Herry, a local UIAGM mountain guide and professional steep snowboarder. “But on the other hand, speed is a definite advantage… Some places have a slab or crevasse.”
Save for hitting a tree in Japan in 2015 and suffering serious internal injuries, Henry has a pretty good safety record. “People think I am just crazy and go, but everything is calculated,” he says. And that’s the side of him that Instagram followers and après bar flies don’t see.
AFTER A FEW DAYS OF FRESH SNOW in mid-April, the forecast popped blue on a Saturday morning. All the lines would be refilled with just a few fresh tracks ready to be had on the north face of the Midi. On the phone the night before, Henry declared that he would be the first one at the top of the Col du Plan the next morning, opening up the line before running off to teach a morning ski school lesson, which he still does to supplement his income from sponsors.
Indeed, as the first public bin rose into the blue shadow of the north face at 8:03 a.m., an all-black figure was putting smooth turns on the open face above an exposed serac before traversing skier’s right and disappearing into the tight chute. But the skier was not Henry; it was Wallace. Henry had pulled the plug when we he woke up that morning and felt his head was off. “Back in the day, he would have just gone to thrash it,” says Wallace.
Back at Henry’s tiny apartment, amidst skis crowded into every corner of the room (the smallest is the Armada Invictus at 108mm underfoot), Henry plays videos of himself roped up, intentionally releasing slabs by ski-cutting a wind-loaded slope with two belayers, to show what kind of precautions he takes.
He claims his appropriation of risk has shifted in the past few years. Instead of throwing himself off of massive jumps or pulling some freeride tricks on medium-sized cliff drops, he’s pushing his limits on steep lines where even a minor mistake means certain death. “I really like it and I’m doing good, I think this is the way to go,” he says. “I’m not trying to be the best pro skier or mountaineer, I just want to make the most experience out of my good feelings. I’m not thinking about the result, just my passion.”
Last spring, Henry showed up hungover and in a crabby mood to ski the technical Pain du Sucre after making the first ski descent on the Triolet the day before. Once on slope, though, he switched over to focused leadership, setting the skin track and giving encouraging tips to a filmer struggling to make kick turns on the slushy approach. At the summit, Henry dropped in first, painting powerful, arcing turns on the face as if it weren’t perched directly above a sheer 300-foot cliff band. It was another mega classic that rarely gets skied, but later that night at dinner, Henry again shifted the conversation to family.
“It’s hard to combine the passion and family,” he says. “You can’t be both top of ski and top of family life.” For someone who won’t speak with his father, rarely visits his ailing grandmother, and interacts with his nearby sister more on Instagram and WhatsApp than in person, he professes a strong love for family values. He sees his son once or twice a week when he’s not traveling or filming. “The only way for me to do it is to do what I love and try to see him as much in person,” says Henry, whose desire to provide for his son is another force driving him to the top of his game.
He told a story about meeting a 60-year-old American man with no wife, no kids. “But I have the ski!” the man said. Henry was dumbfounded. “Imagine finish like this,” he says. “So bad. He is missing so much.”
Toward the end of the meal, he lit up describing the day Jules skied the Vallée Blanche at the age of 5. “He loves to make the ‘smoking turn’ rooster tail like Dad.” When asked if he’ll let Jules ski the Mallory, a serious look fell across his face. “I’m gonna tell him it’s a bad drug.”
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This story originally appeared in the October 2018 (47.2) issue of POWDER. To have great stories like this delivered right to your door, in print, subscribe here.
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Watch the documentary of Tof Henry, called Born In Chamonix, directed by Daniel Rönnbäck released 11/26/18:
Brig, Soren and Reidar- Be skeptical of the media and authorities who repeatedly warned you that Coronavirus is nothing to worry about, and less fatal that the flu.– Remember the repetition- “don’t wear a mask!”- This was narrative all through January and February.
This was a malevolent lie by authorities for months, and not a “simple mistake”, or misunderstanding. They did not have the courage to face a clear and present danger.
It was intentional deception by the media. Twitter, Youtube and Facebook banned all the people who simply said it is NOT the flu in Jan, Feb and early March. Banning and censorship is the response of people who do not have the courage to face facts and evidence. Beware of people who ban and censor others. They are weak.. Then the evidence became overwhelming….
When the evidence became overwhelming that Coronavirus is much worse than that Flu, … do the media and authorities apologize for their misinformation and careless killing of people? Nope.
Follow the data, believe in yourself, and be skeptical of authorities. They do not care about your health. Be skeptical of other authorities in your life. They are malevolent, and do not have your health or best interests at heart. Beware of them.
Here is the latest data from Spain. Feb/Mar 2020 death even exceed the next highest death year during WW2. Play the animation below,it is worth watching, Data informs much better than censorship authorities. Embrace free speech.
I could watch this all day. There is nothing more beautiful than nature in motion. No human creation can match it. Incredible