The Coming Bee-pocalypse? Collateral Damage of Mosquito Spraying
Everyone should support the humble bee. It's thought that every third bite of food we take is there because of pollination by bees. Honey, when raw and unprocessed, may even be used as a wound covering for burns and other injuries due to its antibiotic effect. Yet bees are in big trouble, and we still don't know all the reasons why. In the last decade, bee colonies are experiencing die-offs that have taken out a significant percentage of all the colonies in various areas.
Our growing concerns about the Zika, West Nile and other mosquito-borne viruses have led to the institution of mosquito control programs in many towns and cities in the U.S. One effective means of eliminating adult mosquitoes is aerial spraying with an organophosphate pesticide called Naled. Unfortunately, there's been collateral damage to many beneficial insects, including the honeybee.
A recent series of aerial sprayings in Dorchester County, South Carolina, has killed millions of bees. Although relatively short acting, Naled is lethal to bees and daytime spraying has decimated the population of these important pollinators. The chemical is not meant to be used between sunrise and sunset, when bees are out foraging. The inappropriate timing of pesticide spraying has had the effect of killing off the colonies of many Dorchester County beekeepers. Dead worker bees were found in large clumps at hive entrances—one beekeeper lost 46 hives.
Although the county claims it gave advisories of the spraying via email, many local beekeepers say they didn't receive the notice. Mosquito control is normally conducted by trucks in the county, and the aerial sprayings came as a (very bad) surprise.
In a CNN interview, one bee farm owner was quoted as saying, "when they sprayed by trucks, they told me in advance, and we talked about it so I could protect my bees....But nobody called me about the aerial spraying; nobody told me at all."
With some warning, the beekeepers could have shielded the hives and the bees' food and water.
All this is happening at a time when another pesticide used to control pests is devastating bee populations in other areas.
Death by Insecticide
Some time ago, customers at an Oregon Target store arrived to see tens of thousands of dead and dying bumblebees in the parking lot.
An investigation revealed that, the day before, a pest-control company had sprayed insecticide on surrounding trees due to an aphid infestation. Of course, bees don't read warning signs and 300 colonies were destroyed. That's a lot of lost pollinators.
The pesticide used is known as a neonicotinoid, also called a neonic. It was developed by Bayer a decade ago and differs from other pesticides, like organophosphates, in that they clear from the air a lot slower.
Many crops are treated with neonics. Once sprayed on the plant, it is absorbed by the plant's vascular system. This makes it poisonous to bugs that eat the leaves, nectar or pollen. Sometimes the soil is treated as well, with the same absorption effect that makes it deadly to pests. Unfortunately, it kills off the good insects as well.
When a Bayer neonic doesn't actually kill a bee, the poison can still damage the immune system and even affect the bee's ability to navigate. The afflicted bee becomes lost and can't find the hive. This phenomenon is sometimes known as Colony Collapse Disorder, and it appears as if the bees have magically disappeared. Although not proven to be the cause in all cases, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to implicate the pesticide as a factor.
Now, a new study indicates that neonics harm drone bees' sperm, killing close to 40 percent and causing a condition called "queen failure." A queen failure is when queen bees fail to have live offspring. A queen failure is a hive failure.
Of course, there are a lot of reasons a hive can fail. Parasites, disease and many other factors may come into play. But given the stress that our nation's bee population is already under, what will be the straw that breaks the camel's back?
To be banned, a chemical has to be proven dangerous in the U.S. Although Bayer is a German company, you might be interested to know that you can't use neonics in Germany or anywhere in the European Union. Too dangerous. In the U.S., however, neonics are widely used. And the bees pay the price.
Some areas in the U.S. are taking action. The city of Eugene, Oregon has forbidden the use of this pesticide, and others should follow. We need to encourage others to follow their lead and urge action by the federal government to ban neonicotinoids and mandate wiser use of organophosphates like Naled.
Our bees are an important natural resource, not just for beekeepers, but for farmers and for all Americans. Big agriculture's chemical branch is a powerful political force, but if an entire continent like Europe can outlaw neonics, why can't we?
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesGroundWire | September 12, 2016
This week GroundWire is produced at CILU FM, on Fort William First Nation’s Annishinabe Traditional Territory, part of the Robinson-Superior Treaty in Thunder Bay Ontario.
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Montreal incarcerated workers organizing committee and the organizing committe for detained workers issue statement of solidarity with prisoners in large coordinated strike across American prisoners on the anniversary of the Attica uprising | Lindsay Nixon, CKUT
New Study finds that students who feel safe in the classroom are more attentive and efficient in the classroom | Yafa & Gabriela, CKUT
The Community Media Advocacy Centre and the Urban Alliance on Race Relations calls on Heritage Minister, Mélanie Joly to reconsider CRTC commissioner Shoan’s dismissal and create equity within the CRTC | Gretchen King, CKUT
Court proceedings begin in Nelson, BC, after eight charges were laid against Executive Flight Centre and the Government of BC stemming from the Lemon creek fuel spill in 2013 | Catherine Fisher, CJLY narrated by Sienna Drake, CJLY
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Pride Toronto townhall hears support for demands made by Black Lives Matter during this year’s Toronto Pride |Mick Sweetman, CJRU edited by Omme-Salma Rahemtullah
Live coverage of protecting wild salmon from fish farms. Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw delegates travel aboard the sea shepherd to rally support in coastal communities | Gunargie O’Sullivan, CFRO, edited by Carly Forbes
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CIBL 101.5FM in Montreal addresses station debt by changing programming and accessing new funding. | Gretchen King, CKUT
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Contibute to the next episode! Join the Coordination Team! Contact groundwireprod (at) gmail (dot) comWhat's New: The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History
Greed and Delusion: How My Silicon Valley Start-Up Tried to Exploit a Developing World Country
As a freelance graphic designer living and working in New York City, I've seen more than my fair share of nonsensical startups: The artisan soap for men; the speed-dating reality webshow; the feminist ripoff of Snapchat. A lot of these haven't worked out, but I'm happy to go in, give it my best shot, and see what we can make happen. One of these startups ended up taking over my life for the better part of two years. Little did I know, the person running it had grand delusions of what was possible in a developing nation like Ghana—harebrained ideas rooted in a delusion of what Silicon Valley technology could allegedly do for the world.
While the media covers large-scale startup failures such as Theranos, stories like mine fall through the cracks. I wound up on the other side of the world trying to put Google Glass on solar-powered electric taxis even though the power goes out at least once a day. Many Westerners are under the Silicon Valley delusion: we want to believe the world's problems can simply be solved through the application of tech. Take Facebook bringing the internet to Africa via drones. Sure, most would say they don't think we can "Grubhub" away problems as big as unclean water with the magic of capitalist tech startups. But the startup community's "philanthropy is the future of marketing" ploy ensures that problems go unfixed as it pats itself on the back for pretending to do good.
In mid-2012 I picked up an interesting freelance design client in New York, a solar startup wanting to do business in West Africa. The company was run by a former NASA robotics expert. I was more than happy to knock out some mock-ups here and there, the money was really good, and I was happy to work with the client. I never had to meet the client, the work was all done over email, and I never had to worry about not getting paid, so it was a good gig. After I completed the project, we kept in touch, and I ended up getting another job with them later that included some traveling, to Atlanta, to London, and eventually, to Ghana.
The job was great, not only for the occasional perks, but also for the opportunity to apply my professional skills to something that would hopefully, in some small way, help improve the world. When the work you do feels meaningful, you're more loyal and dedicated to what you’re doing—and this, I later realized, encouraged the brushing aside of questions about bumps in the road, or the plausibility of proposed ideas. I felt like I was working toward a positive change in the world, putting together project proposals and branding guides and trying to figure out a real plan to get solar power to really work for places like Ghana. Sure, some of these ideas were aiming a bit high, but I was willing to put in the work to make them reality.
In early 2014, I got on a plane from JFK to Kotoka International Airport, in the lovely capital city of Accra, Ghana. I was there to do a job, get paid, maybe improve the lives of some Ghanaians, and leave—or so I was led to believe.
Once we'd settled in and got down to business, I was tasked with branding and developing a vast portfolio of projects we were trying to get off the ground, including a solar research facility with the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission and a space camp for kids. The biggest project was a woman-operated electric taxi service powered by solar energy. When these female drivers weren't taking fares, the Google Glass headsets they were wearing would be used so local consumers on their smartphones could haggle with street merchants from the comfort of their own homes. If this sounds a little confusing, it is.
This is where what I call the Silicon Valley delusion—that tech will solve all problems—comes into play. When I list all of these ambitious projects, most of which don't really have any existing equivalent in Western nations, one would safely assume that yes, there would be a lot of significant problems that would get in the way between Point A and Point B. But I quickly learned that when working for someone under the Silicon Valley delusion, there is no point in bringing these up.
I'll give you just a taste of all the problems I identified: The smartphone/Google Glass/street market shopping service would disrupt the local errand boy industry, so that might not go over too well. Also, in a city where everyone relies on mobile hotspots, how does one reliably stream video at a quality high enough to buy and sell merchandise reliably? Most of the taxi drivers in Ghana are male, so we'd have to recruit and train female drivers, even though the nearest driving school is a sham. Getting electric cars to Ghana from China ended up becoming a logistical nightmare of months of dealing with customs to try to get them out of the port—only to have half of them catch fire. Once they arrived, the Ghanaian mechanics proved to be untrained in electric cars. Oh, and we didn't even have any solar panels at the compound we were living in, so we couldn't even prove we could make this work for ourselves.
There already was solar in Great Accra, at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, an institute of the University of Ghana, and gee whiz, was that a doozy. Hearing the deputy director explain it, I started to realize how easy it was for developed nations to exploit the developing world. Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) comes in and spends all of this money setting up a solar panel installation. This gift comes with two kickers: first of all, the solar panels only work two-thirds of the time. So the other third of the time forces the facility to rely on the only electricity provider in Ghana, the Electricity Company of Ghana. Second of all, JICA didn't provide any funds for maintenance and upkeep—and maintaining solar panels in a place like Ghana is a very expensive venture. So it became obvious that this was a very good deal for JICA, which got to spend a lot of grant money and write itself a very nice paycheck, and a very bad deal for the people of Ghana. The Noguchi facility is just one example of so much of what I saw in Ghana: a country being exploited by countless outside influences.
To backpedal a minute, the Electric Company of Ghana has a monopoly on electricity for the entire country. It has a unique scam, in that it offers "prepaid" electricity via rechargeable cards and a card-swiping meter. So instead of paying a monthly bill, you simply wait until your power goes out before you recharge your prepaid meter. Of course, plenty of these meters are faulty, so they'll happily take your money, the transaction won't go through, and the Electric Company of Ghana will insist you just give them money all over again—and you can't do anything about it because they have a monopoly on the nation's electricity.
My office in Ghana was understaffed and underfunded, and our assigned task was to generate proposal letters and get meetings with potential corporate sponsors to get them funding our ideas and get them off the ground—even though we had nothing but ideas in the first place. Suddenly, that sinking feeling that this was all a sham run by someone who had no idea what they're doing started to set in. That, and the power going out on an almost daily basis left only two things to do. The open-air bar next door made it very easy to smoke and drink the long periods of idle despair away.
Trying to get things out of port was a long, arduous process of running around Accra filing paperwork and hoping we got it all sorted in time before it becomes government property and is auctioned off. Of course, you could just pay a bribe to the right person… everybody was hustling to get by. Being a white guy holding onto the back of a motorcycle driven by my black supervisor, I was often taken as someone using an illegal motorcycle taxi. So we'd be stopped by police, who, regardless of any alleged infraction, needed a bribe as well. They wore their AK-74 assault rifles under their shoulders, so you were staring down the business end of a gun for a minor roadside stop.
Regardless, we kept pushing. Dropping off letters and brochures. Requesting meetings with corporate suits and government ministers. Proposings things we didn't have the money to make happen. Things weren't going anywhere. The most memorable of these was when my boss insisted we throw in "solar roadways," an overly expensive and hard-to-maintain technological solution to generate power, in a presentation to the Deputy Minister of Transit. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the cost of maintaining roads is very high due to the climate. Tucked in at the end of every other project we were proposing, it was the only thing the Deputy Minister wanted us to pursue—better roads that also generated power—and we used enough fancy words to make it sound like a plausible ideal.
The problem is that whole "plausible" thing. While the internet clickbait machine was taken by storm by how amazing the idea sounded, anybody with a little expertise in the subject and a blog was happy to actually explain just how bad and how implausible the entire concept actually was. Therein lies the core of the mindset of the Silicon Valley delusion: all of our problems solved by grand ideas, as long as you completely ignore any of the actual flaws or obstacles standing in the way of making these expensive ideas a reality.
In a drunken haze at about 3 in the morning toward the end of my stay in Ghana, I saw everything so clearly: the company I was working for was led by someone who believed that the solution for a country like Ghana was to inject it with a bunch of expensive technological "disruptions." What goes unspoken is that this slyly implies the nation's lack of prosperity lies within the hearts of its own people, not the endless corporate interests from around the world fleecing it for all it's worth.
Tech will not save us. It will not save Africa, that massive continent everyone talks about as if it were a single country; tech it will not end poverty. The reason we talk about these things in this way is to enrich the value of corporate interests, who throw around capital not to empower the downtrodden, but to generate more capital off of the backs of the downtrodden. Until we learn to move past this mode of discourse, this collective delusion of technocratic theocracy, we are forever doomed to repeat the cycle.
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesHigh School Football Players Across the U.S. Join Kaepernick, Refuse to Stand for National Anthem
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick declared last month, explaining why he chose not to stand during the national anthem on August 26. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Since Kaepernick spoke these words, his protest has caught fire across the country, with NFL players from Miami to Seattle to Boston showing solidarity by kneeling or raising their fists in the air during the song. Meanwhile, players from other sports have joined in, with soccer star Megan Rapinoe kneeling during the national anthem, telling American Soccer Now that the gesture was “a little nod to Kaepernick and everything that he's standing for right now.”
But getting far less attention are the high school football players across the United States, who, inspired by Kaepernick, are refusing to stand during the national anthem to protest racism and inequality. Many of those leading the protests are black and brown students who have grown up with images of young people who look like them being shot and killed by police.
Coaches and most members of the South Jersey Tigers high school football team, Woodrow Wilson, knelt during the national anthem on Saturday. “I am well aware of the third verse of the national anthem which is not usually sung, and I know that the words of the song were not originally meant to include people like me," Tigers coach Preston Brown told NBC 10 on Saturday.
The third stanza states, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave." As the Intercept's Jon Schwartz pointed out, Francis Scott Key wrote those words during the war of 1812, in direct reference to U.S. slaves who fought for the British, “who accepted everyone and pledged no one would be given back to their ‘owners.’" Schwartz continues: “So when Key penned ‘No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,’ he was taking great satisfaction in the death of slaves who’d freed themselves. His perspective may have been affected by the fact he owned several slaves himself.”
The Tigers' protest is captured in the following video:
On Friday, numerous players for Watkins Mills High in Montgomery County, Maryland also kneeled during the national anthem. "We just wanted to make a statement that America is not what you think it is,” said junior quarterback Markel Grant.
Players from Maury High in Norfolk, Virginia to Auburn High in Rockford, Illinois have taken similar action. While these young people are certainly not the first to use their roles as athletes to protest racism and injustice in the United States, they are part of a fresh wave of resistance amid the ongoing movement for Black Lives Matter led by young people in cities and towns across the U.S. In some cases, individual players are making the decision to stage small protests of one or two, as in the case of Lincoln, Nebraska player Sterling Smith, highlighted in this news report.
Rodney Axson, a high school player at Brunswick High School in Ohio, reportedly decided to kneel during the national anthem after he witnessed his teammates using racial slurs to degrade opposing players. The 16-year-old says he faced severe backlash as a result, including anti-black racial epithets.
Unfortunately, Axson's case is not an isolated one. According to a local media report, the announcer for a Friday football game at McKenzie High School in Alabama's Butler County suggested that those who do not stand for the national anthem deserve to be shot. "If you don't want to stand for the national anthem, you can line up over there by the fence and let our military personnel take a few shots at you since they're taking shots for you," said the announcer, Pastor Allen Joyner of Sweet Home Baptist Church.
Mike Oppong, a player for Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Mass., says he was initially suspended for a game for refusing to stand during the national anthem, but this punishment was revoked after public outcry. He told reporters, “We are disrespected and mistreated everywhere we go on a daily basis because of our skin color, and I’m sick of it.”
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Republicans Get Sick Too—Media Hypocrisy Is off the Charts on Presidential Health Issues
After 24 hours of fulminating over Friday night’s commentary from Hillary Clinton about “baskets of deplorables” and Donald Trump’s stated willingness to start a war if someone flips an American the bird, everyone seemed more than ready for a day of national unity to commemorate 9/11. Then Clinton had a fainting spell and all hell broke loose.
The press went into full-blown breaking news mode and when tape emerged of Clinton wobbling and appearing to faint as she got into her car the cable networks and journalists on social media went with wall to wall with breathless medical speculation. They showed the video in slow motion over and over again like it was an outtake from the Zapruder film scene in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (“back and to the left, back and to the left.”) She emerged from her daughter’s home smiling and waving a few hours later (prompting hilarious right wing conspiracy theories that it must have been a body double.) But when her doctor released a statement saying she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday the press became hysterical.
At that moment they could have chosen to analyze Clinton’s pressing on with the campaign in spite of having pneumonia as an indication of her grit and dedication to the campaign. And in fairness some did. For instance, contrary to widely assumed rumor that she’d been taking it easy all month, Jeff Zeleny of CNN said that he’d covered five presidential campaign and had never seen a more brutal schedule than Clinton’s. Or the media could have taken Clinton’s doctor at her word that she is being treated and will recover nicely. Instead, they settled on their tedious narrative of righteous indignation about Clinton’s supposed pathological secretiveness in failing to inform them of her diagnosis the minute she got it. It’s all about them.
They also know very well that this febrile coverage plays into an ongoing theme of the presidential campaign: Donald Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have “the strength or the stamina” to be president. On one level, it’s a simple sexist charge against a woman candidate from a man who believes that all of life is a game of primitive dominance. But it’s more than that. Trump made the same charge against Jeb Bush during the primaries, in that case the taunt of a schoolyard bully.
And there has been yet another layer to his “strength and stamina” charge in recent weeks, leveled first by surrogates like Alex Jones, Breitbart and Drudge and taken up recently by the campaign itself, which implied that Clinton was suffering from brain damage and possibly Parkinsons disease. I wrote about this elaborate conspiracy theory a couple of weeks ago here on Salon.
Despite it being a right-wing smear, “the health issue” worked its way into the mainstream press leading to coverage of a couple of coughing fits as if they were obvious signs that she’s on death’s door and today’s events as if they show something is seriously wrong. (How pneumonia relates to the brain damage has yet to be explained.) But the truth is that coughs and throat problems are probably the most common problem a politician has. And when one personally hugs, shakes hands and gets breathed on by thousands of people in a week, getting pneumonia isn’t really all that surprising either. It’s obvious that if the Drudge smear wasn’t in full bloom, this story would have been covered differently. Instead, unable to resist the lure of the sexy tabloid lede, Politico just let it all hang out: Clinton scare shakes up the race Physical weakness caught on camera turns health conspiracy into a legitimate campaign concern.
The fact is that politicians get sick. Indeed, presidents get sick. George W. Bush fainted in the white house just sitting on a couch eating pretzels. His father famously caught the flu while he was travelling, grew faint and vomited on the Prime Minister of Japan‘s lap. Ronald Reagan was shot and had cancerous polyps removed from his colon while in office. Lyndon Johnson had gall bladder surgery and proudly showed his scar to the press corps. President Eisenhower had a heart attack and emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction. There’s no need to reiterate all of Franklin Roosevelt’s health problems, but it’s pretty clear that the right wing and the press today would find him unfit for office.
And the list of macho men who’ve fainted in public is a lot longer than you might think. This is just a sample:
General Petraeus faints at congressional hearing.
Major General James Martin fainting at a press conference back in February
Attorney General Michael Mukasy fainting in the middle of a speech in 2008.
GE CEO Jim Campbell at a Joe Biden speech in 2010.
Silvio Berlosconi, Italy’s prime minister at the time, collapsing in 2006.
Bill Daley passing out at his Commerce Secretary appointment ceremony in 1996
A 23-year-old soccer player collapsing during a live interview
A soldier fainting waiting for dignitaries to arrive
To put it simply, if you discard the inane right-wing conspiracy theories about Clinton’s alleged brain damage and Parkinson’s disease, you’ll realize that mundane ailments like coughing, fainting, pneumonia, flu etc are common among politicians and other leaders because they’re common among humans.
Despite some truly ridiculous speculation from members of the press this is unlikely to be more than a slight blip on the campaign. It’s pneumonia not a brain tumor and she will recover. But it’s almost sure that the drumbeat for her to release her full medical records for the press to paw through for juicy tidbits is going to get louder and she’ll undoubtedly end up complying. Medical privacy is not allowed for presidential candidates.
Well, unless they are named Donald Trump. While everyone is breathlessly speculating about what Clinton is hiding in her records you’d think the press would be equally curious as to why a 70-year-old billionaire’s doctor is a cartoon character who wrote the most ridiculous letter attesting to a presidential candidates fitness in American history. Does he not have a real doctor? Will the hysteria this weekend force the media to ask that question at long last? It’s actually much more suspicious than Clinton’s mundane fainting spell and bout with pneumonia.
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When Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stumbled, the Media Didn't Make Much of It
It's highly unlikely that Franklin D. Roosevelt could have hidden the fact that he could not walk from voters today. But during his presidency, it was something the general public did not understand.
"He had developed this way to throw his body with these braces locked into place, but he always had to have someone on either side of him," CBS host Bob Schieffer revealed during a "Face The Nation" panel discussion about the recent PBS documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.
"Hopefully, the public today would be much more understanding and glad to have somebody that had overcome this kind of problem," said historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
But given pundits' reactions to Hillary Clinton's stumble after an early departure from the 9/11 memorial service, that's clearly not the case.
"Sadly, I think TV crews would compete with each other [today] to see who could get the footage that showed [FDR] at his most helpless," historian Geoffrey Ward told Goodwin. "I think Fox News would've loved that flower."
FDR did fall. The year was 1936. But 80 years ago, the media, believe it or not, did nothing.
"He was coming down the aisle to give the acceptance speech. He went over to shake somebody's hand and he did fall and his braces unlocked and his speech sprawled all around him, but there was an honor code upon the press at that time not to show him that way," Goodwin explained.
"I think they not only saw the arduousness and the sacrifice and didn't write about it, but they had a much clearer idea of all the other things that were going on," filmmaker Ken Burns added.
Watch:
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesJudge Apologizes to Rape Victim for Asking Why She 'Didn't Keep Her Knees Together'
A Canadian federal judge, facing losing his job over comments he made at a rape trial, apologized to the victim for asking her why she didn’t keep knees together, reports the Daily Mail.
Speaking before the Canadian Judicial Council, Justice Robin Camp stated that he was being “rude and facetious” when he made the comment to the victim, along with telling her, “pain and sex sometimes go together.”
According to the unnamed victim, “He made me hate myself and he made me feel like I was some kind of slut,” before stating that he left her feeling that she was at fault for the 2011 assault when she was 19.
During the trial, Camp asked the woman, “Why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?” before lecturing her, “Some sex and pain sometimes go together … that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
Camp also pressed the prosecutor over what comprised consent, asking if “it required any particular words you must use like the marriage ceremony.”
According to the judge, he didn’t fully understand Canada’s sexual-assault laws which protect women from from discrimination, saying laws are different in South Africa where he spent two decades practicing law.In an effort to hang on to his job, Camp now claims that he knows better after receiving counseling from a fellow judge and a psychologist, telling the inquiry board, “I was not the good judge I thought I was. I struck the wrong tone in counsel submissions.”
“I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” he told the board.
Camp’s own daughter, who is a rape victim, called her father’s comments ”disgraceful,” but insisted that he is a changed man now.
The judge’s hearing is expected to continue on Monday with the Canadian Judicial Council then forwarding its final recommendation to the federal justice minister.
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesMichael Moore Rips Hillary's Health Detractors in a Brilliant Smackdown
Donald Trump and his surrogates have been pushing the Hillary health conspiracies for weeks. So when the Democratic nominee did fall ill, did the Trump train continue to stir the pot? You bet. According to her campaign, Hillary Clinton has been campaigning despite suffering from allergy-induced walking pneumonia. But unlike her Republican opponent Donald Trump would like voters to believe, nothing else "is going on."
Unfortunately, Clinton's stumble yesterday shortly after departing early from the September 11 memorial service in New York City prompted a new round of smear efforts. Trump supporters ripped Clinton for the episode and their commentary led Michael Moore to come to Clinton's defense.
“All [you] have to do is read the hateful comments about Hillary’s health incident today and then ask yourself, whose America do [you] want to live in?” he tweeted.
All u have to do is read the hateful comments about Hillary's health incident today & then ask yourself, whose America do u want to live in?
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) September 11, 2016Well, pneumonia. That's serious. Campaign kept it hidden Fri/Sat/Sun. No wonder the crazies get traction. Dems are pros at losing elections.
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) September 11, 2016Feel so sorry for Hillary. Watch the video of her at van. Hardly any1 helping her. Just 1 woman on her arm at 1st. Men just standing around.
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) September 11, 2016No husband, no Huma, SS looking like keystone cops & pathetic campaign hacks more concerned about blocking view of cameras than helping her.
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) September 11, 2016It should be noted that Moore is by no means a hardline Hillary Clinton supporter. While he positively portrayed the Democratic nominee in his 2007 film Sicko, he did not support her in either the 2008 or 2016 primaries.
However, Moore believes Donald Trump deeply threatens civilization, and has compared his potential presidency with the end of the dinosaurs.
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesLeonardo DiCaprio's New Film 'Before the Flood' Puts the Threats to Our Planet on Center Stage
Leonardo DiCaprio may be the star of his latest documentary, Before the Flood, but something much bigger takes center stage: Earth.
The Oscar-winning actor and longtime environmental advocate celebrated the world premiere of his climate change documentary on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival.
National Geographic explorer Enric Sala and Leonardo DiCaprio watch and listen to narwhals on an ice shelf near the North Pole. (image: TIFF via EcoWatch)
"Looking forward to sharing this documentary with everyone as we continue to act on #climatechange together," DiCaprio tweeted.
He also wrote on Instagram, "filming 'Before the Flood' was an incredible experience & today's screening of the documentary at #TIFF16 is an honor."
Awaiting premier of @LeoDiCaprio #BeforetheFlood at #TIFF16 pic.twitter.com/JeIoBwzObU
— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) September 9, 2016In the documentary, the UN Ambassador of Peace journeys around the globe to highlight the perils of a warming planet. According to TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers' review of the film, DiCaprio travels to Alberta, Canada to see its toxic tar sands. He witnesses the frequently flooded streets of Miami Beach, Florida. He visits Beijing, a city shrouded by a constant cloak of smog. DiCaprio also explores Indonesia, a country scorched by forest fires caused by unsustainable palm oil development.
The film features a roster of environmental champions as guest stars, from Tesla CEO and inventor Elon Musk, meteorologist and astronaut Piers Sellers, activist and environmentalist Sunita Narain, and President Barack Obama.
In the clip below, DiCaprio and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Enric Sala visit the North Pole to see narwhals, which the World Wildlife Fund classifies as nearly threatened. Narwhals depend on sea ice for their existence and can be directly impacted by climate change.
"I don't want to be on a planet without these animals," Sala says in the footage.
While filming #BeforeTheFlood, @LeoDiCaprio sees - and hears - Arctic narwhals. Screen the film today at #TIFF16. pic.twitter.com/IkHijLoTSk
— Nat Geo Channel (@NatGeoChannel) September 9, 2016Documentary director Fisher Stevens told Entertainment Weekly that the footage was shot during a July 2015 visit to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic.
"We visited National Geographic explorer Enric Sala who was doing a study on how much sea ice has melted in the Arctic—and we were shocked to hear that by 2040 there will be no sea ice left in the summer," Stevens said.
"For two and a half years we went on a journey to learn about the effects of climate change. How far it has gone, why there are still people denying it, and whether it is too late to do anything about it," he continued. "We're extremely proud that National Geographic is helping us bring this odyssey to the world."
Stevens was the producer of the 2009 Oscar-winning exposé, The Cove, about Taiji, Japan's infamous dolphin slaughter.
Reviewer Powers praised Before the Flood, calling the film a "rousing call to action."
"This isn't the first environmental documentary and it won't be the last. But DiCaprio's charisma makes it one of the most accessible," Powers wrote. "His passion and inquisitiveness radiate in his blunt talk and genuine curiosity."
"As it sweeps us along on its fascinating tour, Before the Flood reminds us of the beauty and diversity of our world," Powers concluded. "It also galvanizes us to do whatever it takes to save the planet—and ourselves."
Before the Flood will hit theaters in New York and Los Angeles starting October 21. The National Geographic Channel will air the documentary globally in 171 countries and 45 languages on October 30.
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesHomeland Security Chief Is Hijacking the Tragedy of 9/11 to Boost His Mass Surveillance Agenda
From the outset, federal Countering Violent Extremism programs have been rocked by accusations of human rights violations, including charges that they unfairly target Muslim communities with suspicionless surveillance and thought policing. But on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson took to the national media circuit to deliver a vigorous defense of such initiatives by stoking fear over “self-radicalized actors” on U.S. soil, even suggesting that CVE programs offer a modern-day version of Cold Ear-era ideological screenings.
In an interview from Ground Zero, Johnson was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos what he thought of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call for an ideological screening test. In August, Trump declared, “In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test. The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.”
Johnson’s reply to Trump’s comment was eyebrow-raising.
Well, we—we always look for indications—and we’ve enhanced our ability to look at this from—in social media. We always look for indications of a radical, violent bent. There were some lessons learned recently, where we believe we need to ramp up our looking at social media. We always look for indications of an extremist, violent nature, and that's what we do. And we're getting better at it every day and we're going to keep working at it.
Ideology in and of itself, however, you've got to—you've got to define that a little better. We're determined to root out violent extremism and that's what we look for.
Johnson’s statement is a direct nod to the conveyor belt theory of radicalization, rooted in the notion that “extreme” ideas are responsible for violence and terror, an assumption that can be traced back to the Cold War. This model has been debunked by scholarly consensus, and even an academic study directly supported by the Department of Homeland Security, which holds that there is no single or simple profile for a terrorist. However, the unproven theory undergirds federal surveillance programs, including recent FBI guidelines for monitoring and reporting students in public schools across the country.
In a report released earlier this year, Ben Emmerson, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, warned that countering violent extremism programs around the world are relying on discredited theories of radicalization, leading to invasive government measures that stigmatize entire religious and ethnic groups.
“On paper, most strategies to counter violent extremism are generic,” Emerson wrote. “In practice, however, they tend to target specific groups determined to be most ‘at risk’ of being drawn to violent extremism… Such an approach can be discriminatory and stigmatize various minority, ethnic, religious or indigenous groups.”
Michael German, a fellow with NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told AlterNet, “Any number of studies show that there are not reliable predictive indicators of future violence, much less extremist violence, that can be applied to the general public, yet the government remains wed to a system of profiling based on specious ‘indicators’ promulgated by the intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Too often these models use religious practice and political advocacy or ideology as proxies for violence even though scholarly studies rebut such theories, leading to thousands of investigations of innocent people and a suppression of First Amendment activity.”
Yet, Johnson presented such an approach as a key defense against profound and ever-present dangers to U.S. society, arguing, “in the current environment, where we have to deal with the prospect of a lone wolf actor or a self-radicalized actor, just saying there’s no specific credible threat doesn’t tell the whole story. And that’s why you see a lot of security out here today in New York City and in other places where we’re observing 9/11.”
Johnson then went on to argue that, in some ways, the world is a safer place now.
“George, we are safer when it comes to protecting against another 9/11-style terrorist-directed attack from overseas,” he said. “Our intelligence community, our law enforcement, has become pretty good at connecting the dots when it comes to another overseas-based terrorist-directed plot on our homeland.”
In reality, all available evidence suggests that 15 years of the U.S.-led war on terror has made the world a far more dangerous place. In a report released in March 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that the war on terror has “directly or indirectly” been responsible for killing 1.3 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since Sep. 11, 2001. The report notes that the estimate is conservative and the total number of deaths in those three countries “could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.”
According to the most recent Global Terrorism Index, released in 2015 by the Institute for Economics and Peace, “Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been over a nine-fold increase in the number of deaths from terrorism, rising from 3,329 in 2000 to 32,685 in 2014.”
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Chiefs lose Game #2 Mann Cup series tied
Tuesday’s pushback after Game #1 of the Mann Cup series was swift and decisive as the Maple Ridge Burrards rebounded from Friday’s 15-8 loss to the host Chiefs with a 13-9 win. While the Burrards seemed nervous and overwhelmed for most of the first game, the Chiefs looked in a similar condition in Game #2 as the Burrards turned it up a notch to even the series at one game apiece. The last time Maple Ridge won a national championship game was in 1977, but were full marks for Friday night’s win. The Chiefs on the other hand won the title in 2013-2014 but could not make the three-peat last season. Six Nations lost to the Peterborough Lakers in the […]
The post Chiefs lose Game #2 Mann Cup series tied appeared first on Two Row Times.
What's New: Facing Left
What's New: Upping The Anti - Number Eighteen
How the Patriot Act Normalized Xenophobia After 9/11, and Planted the Seeds for Trump's Rise
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was asleep. Never being one for early rising unless I had to, I would be asleep for at least another two hours if my mother hadn’t called to tell me to turn on the TV. Minutes after her call, my phone rang again, this time a friend bringing me news of the event. My television was on, and by then, both towers of the World Trade Center had been hit.
Confused, stunned, speechless news anchors in New York City, wide-eyed with shock, were trying to sputter together coherent sentences that would sum up what they had seen happen live on their studio monitors. The country watched in real-time as the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans was carried out, in broad daylight, by a group of men with box cutters and pilot’s licenses from flight schools in Florida. As the day went on, speculation had already begun in the media that the United States was under terrorist attack. The last event of such proportions had happened six decades earlier, on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and pushed America into entering World War II.In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order Number 9066, part of which stated: “By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.”
With the attack on Pearl Harbor fueling longstanding racism against Japanese and Japanese-American residents in the West Coast, eventually between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. born citizens, were relocated to internment camps along the Pacific coast. About 62 percent of those interned were U.S. citizens. While it was not written into 9066 that only persons of Japanese ancestry were to be targeted, the Secretary of War and the Military Commanders interpreted the order’s implicit sense of urgency as a call for the most extreme measures, and acted accordingly, in violation of the Constitution.
On October 26, 2001, George W. Bush signed into law the USA PATRIOT Act, which was short for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” In Bush’s words, the law was intended to “enhance the penalties that will fall on terrorists or anyone who helps them.” From the start, the PATRIOT Act faced its share of legal challenges. There were fears among many in legal communities around the country that it violated civil liberties and rights.
The PATRIOT Act personally affected me twice: first, when I saw a list of countries around the world that were put on a terror watch list and a second time when I received a letter to appear in person to be fingerprinted.
Among the countries on the Department of Homeland Security’s list was Bangladesh. And the list was more than just a seemingly innocuous catalog of nations: They were states where the majority of the population was Muslim, and citizens of those states who were in the United States and were not American citizens were being summoned to present themselves to be fingerprinted and entered into a database. I was still a citizen of Bangladesh at the time, and there was Bangladesh, alphabetically near the top of the watch list. As a citizen of a country billed by the DHS as a potential breeding ground of terrorists, because over 90 percent of Bangladeshis are Muslim, if I failed, or refused, to submit to the fingerprinting, it would suggest guilt or, at the very least, the existence of some nefarious secret I was trying to keep covered.
One of the first stories I covered for the paper where I was working at the time was an evening of readings of poetry, drama and various other spoken word performances bringing awareness to the growing targeting of Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim men. The PATRIOT Act was being enforced. The rule of law was being executed. Just as it had been served when I, along with thousands of others across the United States, submitted to racial profiling.
In the U.S., brown-skinned men, men of Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian descent, became the very image of the enemy. Despite the Saudi royal family’s decades-long close relationship with U.S. presidents and intelligence agencies, the name of Osama Bin Laden, one of the royal family’s many scions, meant nothing to the general American populace. Within weeks of the attacks, Osama Bin Laden became a household name across America. And after the attacks, Bin Laden’s position in U.S. foreign policy tactics in the Middle East went from key ally to Public Enemy Number One.
Four days after 9/11, a former airplane mechanic, who once worked for Boeing, murdered a man in Arizona. The victim was a Sikh man whose beard and turban meant to his killer that he was a terrorist, and the killer in his patriotic rage sought revenge.
The PATRIOT Act, like 9066, never specified whom to target, but the FBI, CIA, NSA and other local, state and federal authorities chose to go with their own interpretations, which echoed those of FDR’s Secretary of War and Military Commanders.
Following the debacle of the 2000 election and the Florida re-count fiasco that haunted it, I was attuned to the unfolding drama, but knew nothing about the former Texas governor and eventual “winner” to get excited about either way. Little did I know in 2000 that, in the light of Bush’s later perjury and illegal invasion of Iraq, getting sober, in my opinion, would remain his most commendable and noble achievement. The man I came to know as president, and whose history I slowly learned, was a spectacular failure in life, and eight years of his presidency left the country broken, the tremors of which are being felt to this day.
Bush declared his “war on terror,” calling it a crusade against the forces of evil. A Christian leader using the word “crusade” to declare war on a Muslim state had historical implications that were seemingly not on Bush’s radar. He then directed this declaration of war on Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and marshaled the powers of his office, and that of the U.S. intelligence community, to craft one of the biggest fabrications of the early 21st century, selling it wholesale to the American public, with no little amount of help from the mainstream media: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. For that reason Iraq had to be bombed, and Hussein, yet another product of U.S. foreign policy in the region, had to be removed from power.
America is now in the post-9/11 era. That has different meanings for different people, different groups. In one way or another, everyone is affected. 9/11 re-defined America; it revitalized old cycles.
A little over a year ago, the blustering, bombastic re-appearance on the national political scene of a narcissist real-estate billionaire had me, along with much of the rest of the country, laughing. The same man that had launched the so-called “birther” narrative, challenging President Obama’s American citizenship and thereby his qualification to be commander-in-chief, had, while stoking the latent racially-motivated angst of those that eventually became his “base,” declared his intent to run for the White House. And still, I, and vast numbers of Americans, kept laughing.
When Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on immigrants, Muslims and others began, they were thought to be the death-knell of his short-lived display of megalomania, his disgraceful exit, right there on national TV for the country to wave goodbye to with boos and cheers. When it didn’t happen — after he had declared Mexicans and Mexican-Americans “rapists,” slammed John McCain’s service record and POW years, ridiculed a reporter with a disability and, in November 2015, issued a statement placing a ban on all Muslim immigration and travel to the United States — the laughter stopped. Mine went out faster than a candle-flame in a hurricane.
Trump reached into a dark side of the American psyche that had been dormant. The droves of Americans that responded to his rhetoric led him all the way to the Republican nomination. And they responded to Trump the way they did not because they suddenly thought they found a “savior” — maybe so, but not entirely — but because they’re the other, extreme arm of the divide America had turned into as a result of 9/11, specifically on the shoulders of the “you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” decree George W. Bush directed at other countries.
Trump’s rise, and the revitalized xenophobia, racism and nationalist hysteria that has been nurtured by it, goes back much further than a year and a few months. The GOP has been setting this stage for him since at least 1980. The post-9/11 resurgence of xenophobic nationalism in the form of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant hostility has been the GOP nominee’s real trump card, whether he has the ability to see it or not. Fifteen years may have passed, but in many ways that decade and half was prologue to where we are now.
The insidious and demoralizing narrative unleashed by the powers that be in the aftermath of 9/11 set the stage for Donald Trump. Law-abiding people are supposed to jump to clear their names and denounce the actions of murderers just because they share with them a faith or a nationality. That is not proving devotion to America. It is allowing ignorance to determine an image I have to fit and redo every time the cycle of xenophobia and racism recur.
Dissent, instead of being lauded as a touchstone of patriotism, is being raged at as treason. The suffocating mess of toxicity that has been the 2016 election year has re-appropriated the “with us or with them” brand of patriotism cultivated by George Bush. Instead of being deeply worried about a growing militaristic image, masses of Americans are lauding, unconditionally, whatever martial stance the country is taking. And the dissenters are being demonized, while hate crimes against Muslims are on a new rise. It feels as though fifteen days haven’t passed, let alone fifteen years.
What the PATRIOT Act left undone might easily be reinstated by a new name, called the rule of law, and enforced, this time far more militantly than before. Whether it’s given the full scope of Executive Order 9066 is a matter of deep conjecture . . . not one to laugh or scoff away.
As for images, here is one I’m happy to spread around: resister, critic, dissenter.
I wasn’t guilty back then, and if required again to give my fingerprints in violation of my Constitutional and civil rights, I will refuse.
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesWhat's New: Canada's ‘dirty oil’ climate change dilemma
Alabama Pastor Tells High School Football Crowd They Should Be Shot If They Don't Stand for Anthem
An Alabama pastor, who doubles as a high school football announcer, is under fire after telling the crowd they should be shot if they didn’t stand for the national anthem.
According to Al.com, Pastor Allen Joyner of the Sweet Home Baptist Church made the announcement prior to a game at McKenzie High School, telling the attendees they should prepare to line up for execution by members of the military.
“If you don’t want to stand for the national anthem, you can line up over there by the fence and let our military personnel take a few shots at you since they’re taking shots for you,” he announced to the cheers of the crowd, according to a Facebook post — since removed — by attendee Denise Crowley-Whitfield.
Joyner’s comments were likely inspired by the actions of the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick who has stated he would not stand for the national anthem due to the treatment of African-Americans in the U.S., which has inspired others to follow suit.
Speaking for Butler County Schools, Superintendent Amy Bryan immediately denounced Joyner’s comments in a statement, saying, “Patriotism should be a part of school events but threats of shooting people who aren’t patriotic, even in jest, have no place at a school. Threats of violence are a violation of school policy and certainly not condoned by the school board.”
According to the paper, Sweet Home Baptist briefly supported Joyner’s comments on its Facebook page on Saturday before pulling the post after approximately an hour.
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesThe View from Madinah
Photo by Adhi Rachdian
In early spring, with snow still clotted thick on the ground, my grandmother dies in my parents’ home. We wash her naked body the next day in the basement morgue of the local Scarborough mosque, my hands closer to her skin than they’d ever been in life. There is a gaping hole in her throat where the cancer had eaten through to open air. I can’t remember who cleaned around the wound’s curling black edges. I can’t remember much of how her body felt that morning, except that it was very stiff; mine felt barely less so. We recite my favourite dua, the Muslim funeral prayer: allahumaghfir li haiyyaini wa maiyyatina—God, grant us your forgiveness / for the living and for the dead …
We bury her in a graveyard in Pickering, an hour east of Toronto, wrapped in a white shroud her daughters and grand-daughters twined around her. In the orthodox way, we don’t put up a gravestone, no plaque and no flowers. I send myself an email to remember her plot number. We visit often, commencing a new, far different relationship from the one we’d had through the ravages of her long, croaking dying.
My mother begins a slow, thorny grieving. Time wrinkles around her periodically heaving body. In May, she decides we will make umrah, pilgrimage, in my grandmother’s memory. My immediate family doesn’t do field trips. I can’t remember the last time that we, all seven strong, went anywhere together—we are always too busy or too dispersed.
By month’s end, we are flying to Saudi Arabia for the first time in fifteen years.
*
Twenty-four years ago, when our family first arrived in Saudi Arabia (I was born in Sri Lanka), the country was at war with Iraq. I was young then, repeating kindergarten to compensate for the ocean-wide migration. We landed in Yanbu, a highly industrialized expat-heavy petrochemical centre, then moved to Jeddah, the country’s grittier seaport commercial capital.
My parents eschewed compounds, those securely gated, miraculously green alternate realities occupied largely by wealthy white Westerners and served mostly by South Asian labourers. Instead, we grew up on hospital premises, so that my doctor mother could walk to work. Bussed between our low-rise apartment building of other doctor families from the global south and my state-run international all-girls school, the war seemed far away.
Still, the fighting found ways to impinge on my heavily regimented childhood of school and home. Sometimes I would call my aunt in Riyadh and hear bombs close by in the background. A weird normalcy hung over our conversations, a sense not so much of resignation as of suspended disbelief. I imagined stony grey rubble unfurling beside them, their building the lone monument still standing. In retelling these years, my mother describes sirens, but I do not remember them.
This was the era of the first Gulf War and the first George Bush. In response to Iraq’s 1990 occupation of Kuwait, the U.S., once supportive of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, convened the largest military alliance since World War II to fight Iraq. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid more than half of the war’s $60-billion cost, and the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division landed in the deserts of Dhahran, scarcely 400 miles from Madinah.
By then, the U.S. had long been partnering with the wealthy kingdom: during the Cold War, the U.S. had trained al-Qaeda to fight the Soviet Union, and had propagated Saudi religious schools across the world, aiming to use U.S.-funded interpretations of Islam to fight the U.S.S.R.
By my early teens, a marked shift had emerged. With rifts growing between al-Qaeda and the (rest of the) Saudi royal family over U.S. involvement in the war on Iraq, Usama bin Laden became a household name. September 11, 2001 was on the horizon.
*
As we prepare to fly out of Toronto in 2015, Saudi Arabia is bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, while simultaneously negotiating a $15-billion arms deal with Canada. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s “sunny” soon-to-be prime minister, will spend the election cycle decrying then-PM Stephen Harper for the Conservative-initiated deal, but when elected to power later that year, will himself approve the sale. The light-armoured vehicles, or LAVs, that Canada is to provide to the Saudi Arabian National Guard will reportedly be equipped with, among other things, machine guns that can fire 105mm shells or missiles.
Saudi activists will eventually manage to leak footage of the Saudi regime using LAVs to crush internal civilian dissent, especially against the country’s Shia minority. When confronted with the video, Trudeau refuses to cancel the sale: “We [Canada] are not a banana republic.”
But our departure from Canada is smooth—to my surprise and relief. My brother shares a name with someone on the no-fly list. He’s missed flights before. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare that leaves me enraged, fearful, and despondent by turns. In contrast, my brother, who was in grade school during 9/11, takes it in stride as some kind of Muslim rite of passage.
His experience is hardly unique: there are hundreds of people on this list, including babies. A post-9/11 U.S.-demanded invention, Transport Canada admitted in 2010 that it had listed at least 850 false positives—only three years into the “Passenger Protect Program.”
It’s almost impossible to get off the no-fly list: the Canadian government doesn’t have to tell you that they’ve put you on it, and if somehow you find out that you’ve been blacklisted and attempt to challenge that listing, the government doesn’t have to tell you or your lawyer what evidence they’re using against you to keep you on it. The Orwellian paradox of laws that openly parade their concealment makes it difficult to map, let alone fight, the list’s reach.
Under Trudeau, the no-fly list has been expanded through the so-called “anti-terror” bill C-51. Though the bill was introduced by Harper, Trudeau voted to make the bill an act, and has refused to heed calls for its repeal. Of the act’s myriad racisms, the list, with all the resources required to execute it in airports across the country, perhaps most visibly exemplifies racialized paranoia. But in the nearly two decades since 9/11, Canada has made such ample use of secret trials against Muslims that ultimately the mass surveillance of the no-fly list feels cynically unremarkable.
*
We land in Jeddah. Though I spent close to a decade of my childhood in this still-familiar dusty city—“the Bride of the Red Sea”—we do not linger. At the King Abdulaziz International Airport, we pile into a van and head to Madinah.
We quickly discover the A/C is broken, so we pull off the highway to grab some pop and shawarmas for the four-hour drive. We enter a sort of strip mall of low-roofed restaurants set a little ways back from the road.
If I had escaped the symbols of war during my childhood here, not so this time. Men mill around us in military uniform, also getting food. Wearing light brown camouflage and traveling in groups, the ease with which these soldiers move through the take-out joints reminds me of my birthplace, Sri Lanka.
After twenty-seven years of civil war, soldiers are as much a part of Sri Lanka’s national landscape as the flora and fauna. My memories of Sri Lanka are as much of checkpoints, soft-jawed teenage boys drooping with the weight of machine guns, and the sunburnt remains of bombed-out commuter buses, as they are of first friendships or the spider-web of familial dramas. After all, a civil war is the war at home; civil war is place imploding in on itself. In contrast, Saudi Arabia’s wars were not, thanks to its domestically relentless and now LAV-equipped autocracy, civil; they were directed elsewhere (such a young country, and so insecure, perennially fighting its neighbours). So I had grown up with Saudi Arabia serving as a foil to my first home, its relative peace counterbalancing the turmoil of the place my family comes from.
(After we return home from the pilgrimage, I talk about the trip with a friend from middle school, and she notes that Saudi Arabia now has checkpoints all over. This is a development since my family moved away in 2000. The war is starting to come home.)
Along our drive, we’re waved through a few such checkpoints. Mostly I sleep through the ride, lulled by the heat and the monotony of the view. We arrive without incident in Madinah.
*
When we lived here, we visited Makkah and Madinah often. Makkah was where the Prophet Muhammad had been born and was later exiled from; Madinah where he subsequently found refuge and later died. I had always preferred Madinah to Makkah. Officially titled Madinah tul Munawarra—City of Light—I thrilled to the idea of a city named, simply, City; it seemed so confident and cosmopolitan an understanding and demonstration of self.
For millennia, Madinah had been a city without a country, ruled by a shifting patchwork of local and global powers. By the eighteenth century, the House of Saud had emerged as the Ottoman Empire’s chief rivals for control of Madinah. In 1925, Madinah was finally brought under the rule of Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, who founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
Six years later, the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company hit oil in Dhahran. Now called Aramco, it is the world’s most valuable company, with estimates ranging from $1.25-trillion to $10-trillion USD.
Seven years later, in 1945, with the end of World War II in sight, King Abdulaziz and then-U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt met for the first time. They reached an agreement in which Saudi Arabia would supply oil to the U.S., in exchange for U.S. military protection of the Saudi regime. This agreement remains in effect: it has survived seven Saudi kings and twelve U.S. presidents.
*
We spend most of our time in Madinah in Masjid an-Nabawi, the Prophet’s Mosque. It is the world’s second-oldest mosque, and the second-holiest site in Islam. Built by the Prophet a year after his migration to Madinah, the mosque was originally about the size of an average house, with pillars of palm trunks and roofs of beaten clay and palm leaves. After his death, under a succession of caliphs, sultans, and kings, the mosque underwent a series of renovations, razings, and reconstructions, until now, at over 50,000 square metres and with a capacity of 1.6 million people, it has become one of the largest mosques in the world.
It is also one of the most opulent. The mosque is a thing of wonder, bedecked in marble floors, cream columns, dizzyingly tall doors and archways. Qurans, hardcover and green-backed, are stacked in gold shelving. Gold chandeliers hang from the ceilings, and every pillar has lamps hung in each of its four corners, each pillar inscribed with the name of God.
A marquee outside declares that photography is prohibited, a decree belied by how liberally the mosque is peppered with security cameras, curving out from behind the pillars, positioned high above our heads.
Female security guards check our bags as we enter. Planted at every door, they rifle quickly through our belongings, flip flops and books and water bottles, before waving us in. The search, short as it is, only ever lasting a few seconds, is long enough nonetheless to bottleneck entry. The guards are quick-sighted, and generally effective at spotting women with bags, but the brevity of their search renders the whole process questionable. No one is entirely sure what they’re looking for and they never say, as they prod incredulously my small pillow.1
Inside, the carpets—thousands and thousands of square feet of them—are thickly embossed with the Saudi state emblem, a palm tree emerging from the crossing of two swords. I can’t remember if the carpets were always designed like this, but it feels now like a deeper obscenity than the wealth on display within the mosque, or the five-star hotels and expensive malls that crowd in on its courtyards.
Today, these carpets feel subtly militaristic, this encroachment of state power into the house of God, this laying claim to the spirituality performed here, the countless palms and foreheads pressed in prayer against this symbol of state conquest.
*
It’s too full indoors, so at 4 a.m. on a Thursday, my mother, sister, and I are praying on plastic-sheeted walkways in the mosque’s courtyard. My mother wants to attempt the ziyarah, a visit to the rawdah, the Prophet’s grave. The ziyarah has strictly enforced women’s hours; it is otherwise open to men. Being no less desirous of visiting the grave than men, this constriction has resulted in the women’s ziyarah being a full-on scrimmage. We’ve arrived for the women’s sunrise hours.
As we wait for the gates to the gravesite open, the female guards begin organizing the hundreds of women assembled around us into groups.
The racial logic of their ordering quickly becomes apparent. Following some unspoken rule, Arabs are typically allowed entry first, South Asians last. All the guards, irrespective of whether or not they understand that we speak English, point us in the direction of the India/Pakistan grouping, where another guard is lecturing the group in what sounds like Urdu or Hindi.
My mother asks where the gates are, and is ignored, until one guard asks where we are from. Given pervasive racism in Saudi Arabia against Sri Lankans, my mother says Canada, and then, into the blank stare that follows, America. The guard nods vigorously, and point us back to India/Pakistan.
Eventually we settle among some Indonesians. Even if she could understand the guards, my mother neither needs nor wants the lectures being imposed on the pilgrims. She quietly manoeuvres through the guards’ racial obsessions, trying to get us as close as possible to the grave so that we can enter quickly when the gates open.
Over the course of our trip, my family discusses often this disconnect between the mosque as a place of faith and the state as a mechanism of racialized profit and regulation. The crassness on display, mere feet from the Prophet’s grave, feels like yet more proof of this tension. There’s little point raging about it here, it’d be like beating a wall, though a woman close by is in fact telling off security for precisely this. My mother just sits, bides her time, absorbed in prayer. When jetlag rears, we nap briefly. Otherwise, there is too much to see to be bored.
A woman in a sparkly niqab bears down on us, an elderly matriarch on her arm. She asks the guard beside us if there are (in this order) groups for English, Tamil, or Malayalam speakers. After first hopefully pointing out Urdu/India/Pakistan, the guard says no. The city—and indeed the whole country—is in fact full of Tamil speakers, many of them migrant workers hailing from Sri Lanka, whose GDP rests heavily on the housemaids and labourers it exports here. But in the mosque’s policed attempts at language accommodation, the most impoverished of its worshippers and custodians do not register. The two women leave.
It becomes evident that we have seated ourselves in the Arab section. A guard comes up to the edge of our motley group and attempts to dislodge the Indonesian women beside us. They are reading the Quran and ignore her wholly. Her pitch grows increasingly frustrated and quick. Eventually, she wins and they disappear, perhaps to their prescribed spot in the mosque ecology. They are soon replaced by a troop of worshippers robed in electric blue. Behind me, there is a group speaking Telugu. I pick out a few words that mimic Tamil, chief among them “palli,” which in Tamil means mosque.
A flock of women in deep brown chadors swoops by us; the backs of their scarves are imprinted with the address of a tour group in Niger. Sometimes it’s the accoutrements that distinguish the tour groups: fluorescent yellow backpacks here, baby blue headscarves there, green messenger bags, orange lanyards, thick winter scarves the shade of the Toronto Blue Jays logo.
Southeast Asians are by far the easiest to spot, each tour group marked by their particular choice in fabric—huge purple flowers for one group, orange and green forest foliage for another—cut at the wearer’s pleasure into long dresses, tunics, sarongs, pant suits. In each group there is always one noncompliant member: among the purple floral is a woman dressed in a solid and beautifully complementary block of violet. I wonder idly about the cost of coordinating outfits like this, how much work it must entail. I like to imagine the odd one out as the group’s poorest planner. I sympathize.
It is not clear if anyone is listening to the guards on the loudspeakers, who carry on anyway. I exchange smiles with a twelve-year-old in jeans. As the hour for the gate opening nears, women begin to stand up, and an expectant lean ripples through the crowd.
We are let into the rawdah, and the women’s bodies push up tight against each other, everyone’s fleshy parts part of a larger thrust towards the dead. Arms reach out and clasp me as they pass by, bracing themselves against me or pushing me out of the way, as the case may be. There is no compunction in touch. My brothers later describe strolling through the gravesite during the much longer men’s hours.
Meanwhile, the guards are still yelling, “India Pakistan.”
I leave Madinah praying I never hear “idhar aao,” Hindi for “come here,” again. The patience with which the immigrant cleaners and pilgrims put up with the mosque’s daily, inept, and deeply entrenched racisms seems indicative of the Muslim cognitive dissonance on which Saudi Arabia relies: the holiness of this place exists in a different dimension than the profanity so openly on display. Everything that is beautiful about this place seems also laced with disrespect for both the sacred and the human. It falls to the individual pilgrim to carve out worship from the cacophony of ugliness.
*
On July 4, 2016, the day before Eid, a year after our pilgrimage, a string of bombs goes off across Saudi Arabia: one near the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, wounding two security officers; the next a suicide bomb near Masjid an-Nabawi, killing four officers; and the third outside a Shia mosque in Qatif. In Jeddah, the government arrests a thirty-five-year-old Pakistani migrant worker.
As one of the Middle East’s biggest regional powers, Saudi Arabia is a member of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS. When Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen in March 2015, it claimed it did so to protect Yemen from Iran and the world from ISIS, echoing U.S. justifications for its invasion of Afghanistan. It also proudly noted that “U.K. military personnel are providing assistance in targeting and its legal aspects.”
By February 2016, at least 8,000 Yemenis had died, at least sixty percent of them killed by Saudi air strikes. Much of Yemen is on the brink of famine.
In this light, it’s not surprising that Madinah was attacked. It is terrifying and reprehensible, and in the magnitude of the symbolic breach, staggering—but it is not surprising.
What makes a war our war? The Iraq Wars. Are wars named only after the home team? The War on Afghanistan. Is its name the measure of who is doing the killing and who the dying? The War on Terror. If the dead die far from where we can see, are we still at war? The War of Terror.
Our pilgrimage was hemmed on both sides by carnage. At once a site of faith and war, this feels like a central tension in being Muslim in the era of the nation-state. Across the world, we are tied to cities we love in countries we fear.
This article originally appeared on Hazlitt.net.
6 Totally Absurd Things Super-Rich People Do With Their Money
It's probably been true ever since one caveman envied his buddy's collection of firewood, but envy and material competition seem embedded in the DNA of those who amass wealth to the point of absurdity. But fancy cars and multiple residences just aren't doing it for them anymore, and the billionaires of the world seem to compete to find more outlandish, obnoxious and just plain ridiculous ways to spend their vast sums of cash. Why buy a house when you can buy a whole town? Why buy a publication when you can shut one down that offends you?
Read on for some of the more egregrious examples of profligate spending in the last few years.
1. $15.3 million gold and diamond iPhone.
iPhone users still recovering from the heart attack of spending $600 for a phone may want to sit down for this one. A British jeweler named Stuart Hughes out-blinged everyone with his creation, made of 24-karat gold, a 26-carat black diamond and 600 precious stones. According to an article on mobile phone news site GSMArena, it took the designer nine weeks to build and was bought by a Chinese businessman who owns the black diamond that now acts as his home button.
3d Pictures/Shutterstock
2. $2.5 million for Albert, Texas.
What was your last eBay purchase? A limited-edition pair of sneakers? Perhaps a Star Wars collectible action figure? That's cool. An entire town is cooler. In 2007, an insurance broker named Bobby Cave bought the four-person,13-acre town in the Texas hill country. The price tag was $216,000. Presumably worn out from owning an entire town, Cave put the town up for sale on eBay for $2.5 million, which a lucky anonymous person with too much money on their hands scooped up. Unfortunately, that deal also fell through, and in 2009, according to the town's website, it was bought by "the Easley family," likely for much less than $2.5 million.
By Renelibrary/Wikimedia Commons
3. $1.5 million offer for Ian McKellen to officiate at your wedding. As Gandalf.
Sometimes, no amount of tech money can buy an actor's dignity. Such was the case with Ian McKellen, who turned down Napster and Facebook billionnaire Sean Parker's $1.5 million offer to officiate at Parker's wedding to singer Alexandra Lena. As McKellen explained in an interview with the Daily Mail, "I was offered one-and-a-half million dollars to marry a very famous couple in California, which I would perhaps have considered doing but I had to go dressed as Gandalf. So I said, I am sorry, Gandalf doesn’t do weddings."
Justin Sewell/Flickr Creative Commons
4. $328,000 for a pigeon in China.
My own relationship with pigeons can best be described as a Cold War. No one's using any weapons (and I'm not planning on starting a space race anytime soon), but they know what they did. Chinese shipping magnate Hu Zhen Yu doesn't share my feelings. He doesn't share them so much that in 2012 he paid $328,000 for a fancy Dutch breed called Dolce Vita, according to Business Insider. So far it's the most anyone has ever paid for a pigeon, which Yu plans to use for racing.
ocusedcapture/Flickr Creative Commons
5. Tens of billions for the city of Astana, Kazahkstan's answer to Dubai.
When it comes to crazy purchases, dictators excel. Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazahkstan's president (for life), was bored with Almaty, Kazakhstan's capital until 1997. So he built a new capital from scratch, a pet project in the middle of the steppe where as Yevgeny Zhovtis, the director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, explained to the Atlantic, "there is nothing there to protect the city from wind or weather...It's too hot in the summer, and too cold in the winter." But what's natural protection when you have artificial trees glowing at night, and Louis Armstrong piped in from bushes? In addition to singing bushes, Nazarbayev went ahead and enlisted famous architects and engineers to build his mirage of a city, full of incongruous futuristic buildings. Among these are Khan Shatyr, a Norman Foster shopping mall that CNN says, "doubles as the world's largest tent," and a tower CNN compared to a lollipop. There's also an artificial beach with sand imported from the Maldives. We'd expect nothing less than the man who claims to have won the 2015 election with 97.7% of the vote.
ppl/Shutterstock.com
6. $645.8 million on luxury goods for North Korea's Kim Jong-un.
When you've grown up the son of a dictator with a taste for the good life while starving your own people, the pressure to do better has got to be intense. Kim Jong-un's father, Kim Jong-il, was already a high roller, spending $300 million a year on his pet indulgences, which according to Time included golfing, a personal sushi chef, Chinese melon, cognac, Uzbek caviar and Danish pork. A 2014 U.N. report reveals that the son has truly eclipsed the father in the luxury goods department (jury still out on torturing citizens, amassing nuclear weapons), spending some $645 million on flashy cars, three dozen pianos, high-end recording equipment, and Dennis Rodman.
Attila JANDI / Shutterstock.com
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