US nears deal to use Pakistan’s airspace to conduct operations in Afghanistan: Report


A F-15 jet from the Florida Air National Guard's 125th Fighter Wing practices maneuvers before the Hyundai Air and Sea Show on May 28, 2021 in Miami Beach, Florida. (AFP)

Tuqa Khalid, Al Arabiya English
Published: 23 October ,2021: 

The US is nearing a formal agreement with Pakistan to use its airspace to conduct military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, CNN reported on Saturday.

Pakistan reportedly expressed a desire to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the US in exchange for assistance with its own counterterrorism efforts and help in managing its relationship with India, sources told CNN.

The report comes as the US scrambles to ensure it can conduct counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan against ISIS and other terrorist groups, after the US withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in August, ending more than 20 years of American presence in the country.

The Taliban have threatened the US last month with “negative consequence” if Washington did not stop flying drones over Afghanistan.

Since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan on August 15, ISIS has ramped up its attacks in the country, targeting Taliban members and Afghan citizens with several bombings.

The Taliban has tried to downplay the threat of ISIS, claiming it wasn’t a major danger. The group also refused to cooperate with the US to contain extremist groups in Afghanistan.

The US believes that terrorist groups can easily reconstitute in Afghanistan under Taliban rules and is concerned the country will become a terrorism haven and a launching pad for international attacks.

The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley said in September there is a “real possibility” that al-Qaeda or ISIS could reconstitute in Afghanistan under Taliban rule within the next six to 36 months.

A Florida Anarchist Will Spend Years in Prison for Online Posts Prompted by Jan. 6 Riot

Daniel Baker’s calls for armed defense against possible far-right attacks led to a much harsher sentence than that facing most insurrectionists.

Natasha Lennard

THE INTERCEPT

October 16 2021, 

With the U.S. Capitol building seen in the background, a sign on a bus shelter asks the public for information about people involved in the Capitol insurrection, January 19, 2021.
Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images


ON TUESDAY, a Florida judge sentenced Daniel Baker, an anti-fascist activist, to 44 months in federal prison for social media posts that called for armed defense against possible far-right attacks on the state’s Capitol in the wake of the January 6 riots. Baker, a 34-year-old yoga teacher and emergency medical technician trainee, had no previous criminal convictions and has already been held for 10 months of harsh pretrial detention, including seven months in solitary confinement. He never brought a weapon near a government building; he amassed no armed anti-fascist forces; he made no threats on a single individual.

Baker will, nonetheless, face considerably more prison time than most January 6 defendants, including those who crossed state lines, small arsenals in tow, with the aim of overturning a presidential election.

It goes without saying that a United States federal court is no place to appeal to ethical grounds for militant anti-fascist resistance. Yet Baker, while prone to hyperbolic and sometimes paranoid rhetoric, was certainly not alone in fearing that there could be January 6-style events in statehouses nationwide ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration and that local police could hardly be trusted as a bulwark. The Federal Bureau of Investigations warned of the potential for armed protests at state capitols. Florida is home to over 60 far-right, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi groups recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and there are well-reported links between Florida police departments and far-right militiae.

If there are moral arguments for physically confronting fascists — and I believe there are — they would have been of scant relevance in Baker’s case: zero such confrontations took place or appeared on the horizon, and no far-right mobs amassed at the Florida Capitol around Biden’s inauguration. This should have been a straightforward First Amendment case, with Baker’s online speech, albeit bellicose, judged as constitutionally protected. Instead, the formerly unhoused veteran has been made a victim of government efforts to draw false equivalences between fascistic far-right forces and the anti-fascists who would see them opposed.

“The overall message people will get from this is that online speech calling for militant antifascist action will send you to prison for much longer than actually taking militant action with fascists.”

“The American government has chosen to side with white supremacists, except when their own bureaucracy forces them to prosecute the most blatant offenders, albeit gently,” Baker told me in an email from prison. “They criticized me for supporting Black Lives Matter, Feminist Liberation ideologies, Global Revolutionary movements and direct democracy. … The government has made its stance clear throughout my hearings.”

During his sentencing hearing on Tuesday, Baker’s attorney highlighted the case of a Georgia man who drove to Washington, D.C., with guns and ammunition and sent private texts threatening to shoot Rep. Nancy Pelosi in the head. The Trump acolyte had missed the storming of the Capitol by one day due to car trouble. Like Baker, he was charged with the interstate communication of threats. Unlike Baker, he had a history of hideous, racist online speech, and direct threats. And unlike Baker, he could leave prison soon: He will be sentenced in December and faces between six months to two years in prison; his eight months of pretrial detention will count as time served. Taking into account time served, meanwhile, Baker will spend another 34 months — almost three years — in prison.

“Dan’s case speaks volumes about how the state represses the left much differently than it treats the far right,” Brad Thomson, civil rights attorney at the People’s Law Office, who did not represent Baker, told me. “Here, Dan was sentenced to three and a half years for online posts opposing another January 6 incident. But for actual participants from January 6, we’re seeing charges and sentences far below that.” Thomson added that “every case is unique, but the overall message people will get from this is that online speech calling for militant antifascist action will send you to prison for much longer than actually taking militant action with fascists.”

Daniel Baker in 2020.
Photo: Courtesy of Eric Champagne


BAKER WAS CONVICTED at trial earlier this year on two counts of “transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure another person.” The threat of kidnapping charge stemmed from a feverish public Facebook post in which Baker put out a general call for anti-racists and anti-fascists to encircle the state Capitol, should far-right groups attack it “on or around inauguration day,” and “trap” right-wingers inside with cops. In the very next sentence, though, he wrote, “we will drive them out of Tallahassee with every caliber available!” The right wing militiae were thus to be trapped in and driven out at once, on an unspecified day, by an unnamed collaboration of counterprotesters.

The “call to arms” posts — of which Baker posted a number — were reflective of his genuine and rightful rage against white supremacist violence, but were disorganized and inchoate. Other social media posts that prosecutors pointed to as evidence at trial included memes featuring Homer Simpson, Baby Yoda, and a picture of a kangaroo. “It was truly a surreal experience being in a literal kangaroo court,” Baker told me. His prosecution, conviction, and sentencing exemplify the government’s commitment to conjuring a left-wing extremist threat when none is there.

Baker, slight and sinewy at 5 foot 8, lived in Tallahassee at the time of his arrest — just over one week after January 6. Federal agents raided his apartment with guns drawn and a flashbang grenade. “I thought we were going to die when the FBI broke down our door, the whole experience has been excruciating and traumatizing,” said his best friend and roommate Eric Champagne, an artist and former Hindu monk who had traveled with Baker to support Black Lives Matter protests around the country last year — a fact that was cited by the prosecution as proof of Baker’s extremist bent.

With his knowledge as an EMT trainee, Baker would, Champagne told me, run to the aid of injured protesters. In their hometown, the friends regularly brought food and necessities to the unhoused community, Baker having previously experienced homelessness himself. “My heart is about helping people who are homeless. I know how bad it can be,” he told me on a phone call from prison.


Rioters interact with Capitol Police inside the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images


THERE CAN BE little doubt that Baker’s online posts were reckless at a time when federal law enforcement had made clear its desire to demonize radical left-wing politics — to conjure extremist forces equal, if not greater, to those very real and deadly threats from the far right. Following Baker’s arrest on January 15, U.S. Attorney Larry Keefe, who led the prosecution, pronounced, “Extremists intent on violence from either end of the political and social spectrums must be stopped, and they will be stopped.”

It would be naive and ahistorical to hope that the U.S. government would draw a moral distinction between militant acts carried out in the service of genocidal white supremacy on the one hand and militant resistance to such acts on the other. Even a week after January 6, when it seemed that racist Trumpians had made undeniable their singular role as an extremist threat to this country’s already diminished democracy, the government once again doubled down on its baseless two-sidesism.

This came as no real surprise. The far right has for two decades been responsible for the vast majority of deadly extremist attacks, while both Republicans and Democrats have endorsed the targeting of leftists on the flimsiest of grounds — all the more so when righteous, Black-led uprisings swept the nation last summer. It was among the defining qualities of Donald Trump’s presidency, to condone neo-Nazis and condemn with theatrical fervor the dangerousness of anarchists and antifa. The Biden administration, while making greater overtures to the dangers of the far right, has been no less keen to make fallacious “both sides” claims about the threat of far-left extremism.

After January 6, national security experts and liberals urged Biden to take on right-wing extremism through a strategy of counterterrorist law enforcement. I noted at the time that it would be misguided to treat the state’s law enforcement apparatus as an ally in the struggle against white supremacist violence.

Cases like this exemplify how the invocation of domestic counterterrorism efforts against the right will inevitably harm the left, given the state’s reactionary ideological tendencies.

As Branko Marcetic argued in Jacobin after Baker’s arrest, cases like this exemplify how the invocation of domestic counterterrorism efforts against the right will inevitably harm the left, given the state’s reactionary ideological tendencies. The government made much of Baker’s “dangerousness,” citing his ownership of two firearms and the fact that he had placed an order for one more — hardly proof of a planned attack: Gun sales jumped 80 percent nationwide in January following the Capitol riot.

The prosecution focused, too, on Baker’s brief military training. He had joined the U.S. military in his late teens but refused to be deployed overseas. “His conscience prevented him from deploying with people he didn’t trust to uphold human rights in a far off corner of the world,” his friend, Champagne, told me. Baker then received an “other than honorable” discharge, receiving no benefits.

Baker would later choose to use his military and medical training for a cause he believed in. Like dozens of other anarchists, communists, and socialists from around the world, Baker spent his savings to fly to Syria to join the feminist-led, environmentalist, and directly democratic political project in Rojava. There, he fought with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units against ISIS. From his Kurdish comrades, he told me he learned the concept of “welatparazi,” which, he said, “denotes a sentimental feeling of loyalty and obligation of service towards one’s community which shelters and nourishes us.”

The internationalist involvement in Rojava has been compared to the communist International Brigades who fought against Francisco Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. Despite the fact that the U.S. had backed the very same Kurdish units in their fight against ISIS, Baker’s participation was consistently cited by the government as proof that he poses a terror threat.

At his sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump nominee whose appointment was vehemently opposed by a coalition of over 200 civil and human rights groups, said that Baker had intended to commit acts of violence, “like he went to Rojava to do.”

“The government’s case relied heavily on the fact that Dan is anarchist,” Thomson, the civil rights attorney, noted. “There is a long history in this country of police, prosecutors, and courts targeting anarchists for trumped up charges and excessive sentences. This legacy goes back to Haymarket and continues to today, with Dan’s case being the most recent example.”

BAKER DESCRIBED HIS first months held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee as harrowing. “I was placed in a cell covered in feces and rotated to other tainted cells every three weeks,” he wrote via email. Another man held next to him in the Special Housing Unit — solitary confinement — was severely mentally ill, traumatized, and autistic. “He was soiling himself and throwing his waste all over the cells and out under the door several times a day,” Baker told me, noting that the “crueler guards” would consistently taunt and abuse the man. “I eventually contacted his family with the help of a sympathetic guard,” Baker said.

The quotidian cruelties of prison life abounded. Baker had to plead for weeks to get vegan meals; as a Hare Krishna, he does not eat meat as a point of respect for human and nonhuman life and is lactose intolerant. “It took nine months to get them to stop sending me dairy products,” he said. He’s had equal trouble accessing prayer beads and says his legal mail was opened by prison staff, which is illegal. He has filed a civil suit against the prison and a number of named guards in relation to the alleged violations. The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on Baker’s lawsuit or the conditions of his confinement.

“When you remove one person from that sort of support network, it creates a great burden on the people who are left.”

Baker’s friends in Tallahassee are concerned for his emotional and psychological well-being. Music teacher Desiree Gattis described herself as playing “sisterly/motherly role” to Baker. She met him while he was unhoused and helped him get back on his feet. Gattis, who has helped organize Baker’s legal and financial support, is less interested in his lionization as a political prisoner and would rather he be primarily recognized as a vulnerable person, who has suffered serious trauma from seven months in solitary confinement. She called the government’s treatment of her friend “cruel and absurd.” “This is not a threatening person,” she said.

Gattis said that prior to his imprisonment, Baker helped her “a great deal” with her regular work with the city’s unhoused community. ”When you remove one person from that sort of support network, it creates a great burden on the people who are left,” she said. In a separate conversation, Champagne echoed the same message: “For each person in jail, a community suffers.”

Baker worries that, because of his felony conviction, he “won’t be able to find work or continue to rescue injured people” and that he will face far-right violence after his release and possibly while in prison too. He will be appealing his conviction, but the likely venue — the conservative 11th Circuit Court of Appeals — will not be a welcoming one. In the meantime, he told me that he plans to read and learn more about liberation movements and abolitionist histories.

At the end of our phone call on the day following his sentencing, he hurriedly read off a quote from the philosopher Bertrand Russell, which he had recently come across. “‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind,’” he said. “That’s how I feel.”

Opinion: Navalny's struggle goes beyond an anti-corruption crusade

Honored with the top European human rights award, Russia's most famous political prisoner, Alexei Navalny, is fighting to return to Russians their basic political freedoms, writes Konstantin Eggert.



Giving Navalny the Sakharov Prize is a thorn in Putin' side

It is an unpleasant surprise for Russian President Vladimir Putin: his arch-nemesis Alexei Navalny has been awarded the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Many consider it the European equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize.

According to my sources in the European Parliament, the decision to award the €50,000 ($58,000) prize to Navalny did not come about lightly. The main question about Navalny's nomination was whether one can consider what he does to be a struggle for human rights.

Navalny is primarily known as an anti-corruption activist and politician. He ran for the mayor's office in Moscow in 2013, winning 27% of the vote. His attempt to participate in the presidential elections in 2018 was blocked by the Kremlin.

Ultimately, he was selected for the "great courage in his attempts to restore the freedom of choice to the Russian people," the European Parliament's vice-president, Heidi Hautala, said in a statement. It cost him his freedom and nearly his life, she added. On behalf of the parliamentarians, Hautala called for Navalny's immediate and unconditional release from prison. The citation makes it clear: the award aims not only to honor what Navalny did but also to pressure the Kremlin to set him free.
Navalny's fight and Russia's fate

DW's Konstantin Eggert

MEPs got it right: Today Russians are devoid of a fundamental right — to freely choose a government that is responsible to the people, transparent in its actions and leaves power when voted out by the citizens. In a sense, it is little use debating whether Russia should be a presidential or parliamentary republic; whether it should have an EU-style hate speech legislation or the US-style bill of rights; whether it should define marriage as a union of one man and one woman or in broader terms, before Russians have the chance to freely elect their own representatives to debate these issues in the legislature.

Navalny's disclosure of massive abuses of power by the Putin regime that went unpunished as well as his history of government-concocted court cases and imprisoning dissidents remind us of another basic right that is lacking in today's Russia — a right to a fair trial, and broadly speaking, to an independent justice system based on laws that do not serve as an instrument of perpetuating authoritarian rule.
A constant irritant for Putin

Finally, Navalny's failed poisoning is a stark reminder that even the most basic right — the right to life — can be easily disposed of by the authorities. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet system, Russians in some sense are even worse off politically than they were in the last years of existence of the USSR. Navanly's struggle against high-level corruption and his personal life story contradict and subvert Putin's core message of unquestioning obedience and fear of reprisals.

Moreover, EU leaders are obliged to demand Navalny's release even more vigorously than before — something that is going to irritate Putin immensely.

Giving the award to Navalny will effectively put paid to attempts by some extreme left-wing activists in the West to paint him as a steadfast nationalist unworthy of support. The European Parliament has sent a clear message: Navalny's fight is to let Russians decide their fate themselves.

How SpaceX ignited a new Raptor engine on Starship without an explosion

So why don't all rocket engines have giant nozzles?

ERIC BERGER - 10/22/2021, 9:28 AM

Enlarge / SpaceX ignites a vacuum-optimized Raptor engine attached to Starship on Thursday, October 21.

SpaceX took another step on Thursday evening toward validating the rocket engine technology that will power its Starship rocket. For the first time, engineers at the company ignited a vacuum version of a Raptor rocket engine that had been attached to the Starship upper stage.

The test-firing at sunset in South Texas lasted only a few seconds. But it appears to have been successful, and it checks another box in a series of technical tests SpaceX must complete before launching Starship on a Super Heavy rocket for an orbital test flight. This may happen sometime in early 2022.

First firing of a Raptor vacuum engine integrated onto a Starship pic.twitter.com/uCNAt8Kwzo
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 22, 2021

SpaceX has test-fired its Starship vehicle with Raptor engines before, of course. In some prototype test flights, the vehicle has ascended up to about 10 km under the power of up to three Raptor "sea level" engines. But it is quite another thing to test a rocket with a version of Raptor optimized to operate in the vacuum of space.

Expanding nozzles

Rocket engines have many parts, of course, but the largest and most prominent is the nozzle, which channels the flow of exhaust gas. This exhaust originates in the combustion chamber, where oxidizer and propellant combust. This exhaust gas is then pushed through a narrow opening—called a throat—to accelerate it. Now traveling supersonic, the exhaust expands as it enters the nozzle, where, the longer and wider the nozzle is, the faster the exhaust moves.

Faster gas coming out of a rocket engine is good because it delivers more thrust. More thrust means your rocket can lift more mass. An expanded nozzle, therefore, means better performance.

So why don't all rocket engines have giant nozzles? Because of a phenomenon known as "flow separation," which happens when the flow of gas inside an engine separates from the nozzle walls. This can induce turbulence and vibrations. In a worst-case scenario, it could result in the engine blowing itself up. There is no absolute value for when this occurs, but the risk of flow separation increases when the pressure of exhaust exiting the nozzle falls below 50 percent of the ambient pressure.

This isn't a problem in space, where the atmospheric pressure is essentially zero. But at sea level, the larger the nozzle, the greater the risk of flow separation.

The most common way to address this issue is to design a rocket's first stage with engines optimized for performance at sea level and an upper stage with vacuum-optimized engines. The Falcon 9 rocket, for example, has a first stage with nine Merlin engines with smaller nozzles that do all the work in the lower atmosphere and a Merlin-vacuum engine with a much larger nozzle for outer space.
Alternative approaches

NASA's space shuttle took a more hybrid approach. Its main engines, which fired throughout its flight profile from launch into orbit, sacrificed performance on both ends. The shuttle ended up with a nozzle as large as possible at sea level—it really pushed the limits on flow separation without going over the edge—but considerably smaller than would be optimal in a vacuum.

SpaceX's Starship upper stage is designed to fly in both thick atmospheres and space. It aims to solve the nozzle-size conundrum by flying with three "sea level" Raptor engines and three "vacuum" Raptor engines. Thursday's test marked the first time one of the vacuum engines was attached to a Starship vehicle and test fired.

The most experienced US upper-stage engine, the RL-10 manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne, has a massive expansion ratio, in that its nozzle size is much larger than its throat. So this engine can only be tested on the ground in a large vacuum chamber. SpaceX's test on Thursday took place outside, in South Texas, a few feet above sea level.

So how did SpaceX complete the test firing of the vacuum-optimized engine without destroying it?

In response to this question, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter that the company solved the problem by building the Raptor engine to produce a very high chamber pressure. The engine is also not yet fully optimized for a vacuum, so there was enough margin to prevent flow separation from destabilizing it.

This allowed SpaceX to complete its test on Thursday without anything blowing up.

COP26: UK oil and gas facilities found to be 'super emitters' of methane

British oil and gas facilities are responsible for “significant” levels of methane emissions, an investigation by a climate campaign organisation has found.

By Jane Bradley
Saturday, 23rd October 2021

Climate advocacy group Clean Air Task Force (CATF) said it found some of the largest methane emission events the group has ever witnessed in Europe after visiting more than 200 sites in 12 countries.

The campaign organisation used a methane gas analyser to confirm the presence of high concentrations of methane at some locations and warned some UK sites could be “super emitters”. Methane is the main component of fossil gas and accounts for a quarter of today’s warming.

The report comes as the UK prepares play a critical role in advancing commitments to methane emissions reduction as president and host nation of COP26, which is due to be held in Glasgow in just over a week.

Larkwhistle Farm.

CATF visited a total of seven National Grid gas compressor stations out of a total of 25 nationwide, finding methane emissions at six of the seven stations.

The group also found significant emissions of methane and other toxic gases from 13 of 17 onshore oil wells it visited, with at least ten of these often using highly polluting cold venting techniques.

The organisation said it had recorded “significant plumes” at iGas Energy Larkwhistle Farm oil well, iGas Energy Glentworth 1 oil well, iGas Energy Horndean X and iGas Energy Beckingham 1, as well as “significant venting” from the Perenco Kimmeridge Oil Well on the Jurassic Coast. The Kimmeridge site is the oldest continuously producing oil well in the UK.

Jonathan Banks, international director of super pollutants at CATF, said: “The UK has an opportunity to become a world leader in cutting methane pollution. They have helped spearhead the Global Methane Pledge at COP26 and are making the right noises on tackling the biggest low-hanging fruit in climate policy.

"But these images show that promises must be turned into action as soon as possible. True climate leadership is achieved by actions, not words.”

James Turitto – super pollutants campaign manager at CATF, said: “Considering that cutting methane pollution is our best bet to avoid significant warming in the next 20 years, it's spectacular how much natural gas is being released into the atmosphere. In the middle of a gas crisis, it shows these companies have little regard for either the cost to the climate or costs to British citizens."

A spokeswoman for the UK Government’s Environment Agency said: “We take the environmental risks associated with onshore oil and gas sites very seriously. Oil and gas operators must meet the highest environmental standards which are set out in law.

“Our regulatory controls are in place to protect people and the environment. If the activity poses an unacceptable risk to the environment, the activity will not be permitted.”

Environmental permits require oil and gas operators to minimise emissions to the environment. It is understood that audits of the sites have not identified any major permit non compliance.

The Environment Agency on Friday published a study on approaches to quantifying whole site methane emissions on onshore oil and gas sites.

Discovery of ancient Peruvian burial tombs sheds new light on Wari culture
Agence France-Presse
October 22, 2021

Undated handout picture released by the Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum of one of the 29 human remains discovered at an ancient ceremonial site in Lambayeque - 

MUSEO TUMBAS REALES DE SIPAN/AFP

The skeletons were buried more than 1,000 years ago in Huaca Santa Rosa de Pucala, an ancient ceremonial center in the coastal region of Lambayeque, 750 kilometers to the north of Lima.

The burials of the three children and a teenager at the front of the temple indicated they were human sacrifices from the Wari culture, Edgar Bracamonte, the lead researcher, told AFP.

It is the first time a discovery linked to the Wari civilization has been made this far from their area of influence, said Bracamonte.

"These discoveries allow us to rethink the history of the Lambayeque region, especially the links to Wari and Mochica occupations in the area," said Bracamonte.

The Wari culture flourished in the central Peruvian Andes from the seventh to 13th centuries.

The Huaca Santa Rosa de Pucala enclosure, in the form of the letter 'D', was built between 800 and 900 AD.

"We found a ceremonial temple with 29 human remains, 25 belonging to the Mohica era and four to the Wari culture," said Bracamonte.

The Mochica, or Moche, culture developed from 100 to 700 AD on the northern Peruvian coast.

The 25 Mochica remains were found in clay tombs and burial chambers in a temple. Researchers also found pieces of pottery and the remains of camelids -- such as llamas and alpacas -- and guinea pigs.

One of the most significant discoveries related to the Mochica culture was in 2006 with the unearthing of the fifth century Lady of Cao mummy, that showed the civilization included female leaders.

The 1987 discovery of another mummy, the third century Lord of Sipan, is considered by experts one of the most significant archeological discoveries in the last few decades, as the main tomb was found intact and untouched by thieves.

© 2021 AFP

Egypt film on poverty ruffles feathers triggering patriotic backlash
Agence France-Presse
October 23, 2021

Egyptian film director Omar El Zohairy poses with his award poses with his award for the best Arab narrative film at the El Gouna Film Festival on Egypt's Red Sea coast 

Khaled DESOUKI AFP

Veteran actor Sherif Moneer, who walked out of a screening at Egypt's El Gouna Film Festival this month, has led a patriotic backlash against the film for "presenting Egypt negatively".

But others have praised director Omar El Zohairy for shedding light on a genuine social problem in a way that is both artistic and constructive.

On late Friday at the closing ceremony of the fifth edition of the El Gouna Film Festival, "Feathers" won the award for best Arab narrative film.''

"For me any artistic work will always generate differing views," a beaming Zohairy told AFP on the red carpet, addressing the issue after claiming the prize.

"The film is more important than any award," the director said. "The film is strong because of its feeling, artistic authenticity... and human values."

"Feathers" tells the story of Om Mario (Mario's mother), a poor woman from the rural south who struggles to make ends meet after her husband is transformed into a chicken.

The absurdist narrative is performed by an amateur cast, mostly from the country's Coptic Christian minority.

It was the first Egyptian feature film to win a major award at the star-studded Cannes Film Festival this year.

The film's opponents, who also include pro-government lawmakers, accuse Zohairy of creating an exaggerated image of squalor that bears no relation to contemporary Egypt.

"The slums that we had and those that are disappearing now are better than the scenes represented in the film," Moneer, the actor, said in a television interview this week.

"The state has made great strides in eliminating slums and moving people to excellent alternative furnished housing... We are in a new republic now."

Loyalist MP Mahmud Badr took to Twitter to condemn the "making of a movie depicting your country as if there was no development."

Samir Sabry, a lawyer with a penchant for suing critics of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, filed a lawsuit against the film's producers for "insulting Egypt and Egyptians".

'Shedding light'

But the rush of well-to-do Egyptians falling over each other to defend government policy and national pride over a movie about poverty was widely lampooned on social media.

Economic rights researcher Osama Diab said the film's depiction of poverty was by no means exaggerated, based on the government's own figures.

Around one in three of Egypt's 100 million people live below the poverty line.

Ammar ABD RABBO El Gouna Film Festival/AFP

"It has been steadily on the rise in Egypt since the '90s, according to official figures," Diab told AFP.

In the past two years, Covid-19 had further deepened social inequality because of "the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on the poor", he said.

"The highest concentration of poverty is among women living in the countryside of Upper Egypt, which is ironically the setting of the film."

Diab said poverty reduction had never been a priority for government economic policy, which had been set in agreement with the International Monetary Fund.


Egypt adopted a raft of harsh austerity measures in 2016 to secure a $12 billion loan from the IMF, including a devaluation of the Egyptian pound.

Last month, the IMF hailed the country as one of the few emerging markets that had weathered the pandemic and experienced positive growth.

"The IMF 2016 programme only speaks of mitigation of the shocks caused by economic reforms whereas they don't speak of poverty alleviation. It was never a goal in itself," Diab said.

Film critic Tarek El-Shenawy, who saw the first screening of "Feathers" at the Cannes Film Festival, described the backlash against the film as "vulgar and silly".

"There's no artistic production that can actually tarnish Egypt's reputation," Shenawy told AFP.

He praised the movie as artistically "great", with an "engaging story" and in no way insulting to Egypt.


"If you're actually shedding light on a social problem then you're really wanting to move your country forward not insulting it," he said.

© 2021 AFP

Why does a democratic republic founded in opposition to monarchy tolerate billionaires?
John Stoehr
October 23, 2021

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (AFP/File / Jim WATSON)

In Thursday's post, I imagined a world in which conservatives placed equality at the center of their sensibilities. It was fun, though hardly realistic. As one reader said, conservatives never do that. If they did, they'd be liberals. But the goal of the exercise was less practical than imaginative. At the root of the many problems we face are thorny questions difficult to answer. But there's also a failure of imagination.

I don't mean to say we need "attitude adjustments." I mean to say we tend to accept conditions as if they were natural rather than what they are, which is constructed. So today, I want to stretch our imaginations by asking a deceptively simple question. Why does our democratic republic, founded in opposition to monarchy, tolerate billionaires?

I say "deceptively," because the question might prompt a quick reply: why not? Most Americans believe billionaires don't intend harm, earn their wealth and, on the whole, benefit society. Some Americans even think billionaires deserve our respect. After all, they sell things consumers like, innovate useful technologies, and some, like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, give away their fortunes to worthy causes. But what if I suggested this is rationalizing a democratic abomination?

Let's cut through the haze to state two things plainly about how one person becomes a billionaire. One, it's with the government's blessing. Two, it's with the government's willingness to look the other way. The free market is not free. The very obscenely rich would not be nearly as very obscenely rich if it were. Billionaires, therefore, are not self-made. They are politically, legally and socially made. Yet the vast majority of Americans tends to believe billionaires are just the way things are.

I am not suggesting some kind of malicious conspiracy. I am merely pointing out an obvious fact. Jeff Bezos is worth a reported $200 billion. (He is personally financing all those rockets to space.) It is not humanly possible for one man to work so hard so much so fast to earn $200 billion. (It's been a little over two decades since he founded Amazon.) There has to be a system established in tandem with the government, or in tacit approval by the government, to make such a pile of cash.

Ten percent of the country owns 89 percent of stocks on Wall Street, according to new data from the Federal Reserve. "The top 1 percent gained over $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund wealth during the pandemic," CNBC reported this week. (The bottom 90 percent holds about 11 percent of stocks.) All that idle money is, moreover, taxed at lower rates than income you earn with your labor.

If it's taxed at all. Lots of very obscenely rich people hide their wealth. (Gerard Ryle, head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, said of the global network of secretive and legal tax havens: "The people who could end the secrecy … are themselves benefitting from it. So there is no incentive for them to end it.") Meanwhile, the US government's ability to find wealth to tax has been hamstrung by decades of starving the IRS of resources. The result, according to the LA Times' Michael Hiltzik, has been a "tax gap" that reached a stunning "$630 billion in 2019 — more than 2.5 percent of gross domestic product and about 17.5 percent of the more than $3.6 trillion owed."


Let's say that again, with feeling. The very obscenely rich owe more than $3.6 trillion. That dollar amount should sound familiar. It's roughly the same one being haggled over by the Democrats and the White House. If passed, the legislation would be, along with another spending bill, the biggest investment in the American people since the 1960s. Spending so much is controversial, but it might not be if the very obscenely rich had not, as they have for years, created the impression that there's not enough money to spend on public goods and works. There has always been enough money, but this idea keeps living, in part due to the inability of normal people to imagine an alternative.

I haven't explained yet why billionaires are a democratic abomination. I'll close with that. I think it will help to imagine a political alternative.

What does it mean when a government of, by and for the people treats the very obscenely rich in ways it does not, and never would, treat the people? It means the government, founded in opposition to monarchy, has found ways of replacing the old order of greater mortals (kings and queens) with a new order of greater mortals. Instead of having "magic blood," as Lindsay Beyerstein put it, this new order has magic money, meaning they have so much of it, they can create whole industries to rationalize their existence, thus forcing the rest of us to fight with each other over whether to pay for things like community college.


That's not just wrong.

It's a democratic abomination.

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; and senior editor at Alternet. Follow him @johnastoehr.

How the richest 1% tricks you into thinking climate change is your fault
Matthew Rozsa, Salon
October 23, 2021

Wealthy friends sip champagne on a yacht (Shutterstock)

Africa has 54 countries, more than one-quarter of the 195 nations on the planet today. The continent is also home to roughly 1.3 billion souls, more than one-sixth of the human population. And despite comprising a large chunk of the community of Homo sapiens, however, Africa is responsible for less than four percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Life being unfair, that isn't going to spare Africans from suffering as a result of man-made global warming. A recent study revealed that Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda and the Mount Kenya massif in Kenya are going to lose their glaciers — the only ones on the entire continent. Losing these iconic natural landmarks isn't the worst thing that will happen to Africa because of climate change — there will be extreme weather events, rising sea levels, economic devastation and more — but there is a melancholy symbolism to their impending disappearance.

Climate change isn't a problem caused by all people equally; it is caused mostly by the rich, and since we live in a capitalist world, the suffering will fall disproportionately on the poor. Climate scientists, sociologists and economists are largely in agreement on this point. And it presages the way that things will need to change in order to stave off the extinction of humanity.

"The problem is structural and systemic," Dr. David Fasenfest, an American sociologist and associate professor at Wayne State University, told Salon by email. "Capitalist society is geared towards waste and destruction in order to promote consumption while producing at the lowest cost. That requires power and that means without strict restrictions most of the time we use 'dirty' forms of energy like coal that pollutes and promotes climate change."

In this sense, there is no individual or group of individuals who can be accurately described as the single "culprit" behind climate change. Everyone is acting according to their self-interest within the system of incentives established by our neoliberal economic system. Cumulatively, these led to social developments that exacerbate climate change. For example, if a business uses a more expensive form of energy rather than a green one, their production costs will rise and consumers will probably respond to the likely price increase by rewarding their customers.

"We are all both culpable and not," Fasenfest observed. People who can afford and use air conditioning during hot weather, or continue to eat beef even though it exacerbates climate change, all contribute to a system that is destroying the planet. As Fasenfest observed, most people have no practical alternatives to participating in this system on a day-to-day basis; they can make lifestyle alterations which make teensy dents in the greater problem, but that is about it. If you are fortunate enough to live in a society that prospers under capitalism (relatively speaking), the chances are that you fall into the category of major climate perpetrator in one way or another.

One cannot discuss this problem without also mentioning industrialization. An advanced energy technology expert, Dr. Martin Hoffert of New York University, broke down the history by email for Salon.

"The agriculture-based civilization of the eighteenth-century using water and animal power to augment human muscle emitted few greenhouse gases," Hoffert explained. Once humanity became reliant on technologies that burn fossil fuel, they kicked off "an unprecedented transfer of carbon from the lithosphere (rocks) to the atmosphere was taking place with no precedents geologically."

"It took two hundred million years for the hydrocarbon energy reserves (coal, oil, and gas) to form, whereas at the current mining and oil pumping rates fueling civilization and supporting global GDP growth, we will have depleted them in a few hundred years," Hoffert added. "We're using fossil fuels a million times faster than nature made them."

In a sense, then, global warming is the story of how industrialized nations put humanity on a collision course with disaster in a capitalist system. It is a global problem, albeit one that wealthier nations have exacerbated the most. To quote Howard Beale from "Network": "We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first."

This is reflected in the nation-by-nation statistics that serve as the backdrop for the melting of the African glaciers.

"Most of the world's total greenhouse emissions have come from the world's rich countries—basically the members of the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]," Dr. Naomi Oreskes, an American historian of science at Harvard University, wrote to Salon. "Climate change is driven by greenhouse gases, which are produced by economic activity, so the countries with the most economic activity are most responsible for climate change." For most of modern history this included the United States, Japan and industrialized European countries like France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Now that China is experiencing an economic boom, it has become the world's top annual emitter. Moreover, Oreskes noted that national annual emission statistics are somewhat misleading "since the climate doesn't care when the emissions were emitted."

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If you look at per capita carbon footprints by country — that is, ascertaining how much carbon is emitted by the average individual in a given nation — the list is consistently topped by the affluent states.

"We are talking about people in nations that are either very rich, very inefficient, or both," Oreskes explained. In 2011, for instance, the top nations in terms of per capita emissions were Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the United States, Belgium and the Czech Republic. In lectures to students, Oreskes explains that the average American has the same carbon footprint as 1.3 Koreans, 7 Brazilians, 9 Pakistanis, 35 Nigerians and 52 Ugandans. Even so, those national statistics are also misleading in the sense that they can dupe someone into believing the problem is about border rather than money.

"This reflects consumption, which reflects wealth," Oreskes told Salon. "A rich person in India might have a carbon footprint similar to an average American. So basically, the answer is rich people."

If you're reading this and are among the global affluent, you should pause before starting to feel too guilty. As mentioned earlier, few outside the tiniest sliver of the billionaire class has the power to single-handedly make massive changes to the socioeconomic order. Even if you live a middle class lifestyle in an industrialized nation, that does not mean you chose the economic infrastructure you inhabit. There is a reason why our economy has not adapted to mitigate climate change, even though the world's nations acknowledged they had to do so by signing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. It isn't everyone's fault: It's the lobbyists from industries that, in one way or another, depend on climate change to make their profits.

Dr. Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who specializes in environmental sociology, described how the fossil fuel industry — including oil, coal and natural gas corporations — have undermined the planet's future.

"They sign pledges and advertise their commitment to reducing carbon emissions, but continually oppose (via PR campaigns, lobbying, and campaign contributions) efforts to achieve reductions — such as their current attempts to undermine [President Joe] Biden's climate agenda," Dunlap wrote to Salon. He identified a number of major actors in this campaign, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Manufacturers Association to industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the National Coal Association.

"All of these actors rely heavily on PR firms to design and deliver their messages to the public," Dunlap explained. "Opposition to climate change mitigation policies from these economically motivated actors was strengthened considerably in the 1990s when key segments of the U.S. conservative movement—conservative philanthropists such as the Koch Brothers and their foundations, the conservative think tanks they support, and conservative media and commentators—committed to a 'free-market' ideology began promoting denial and skepticism among the public, policy-makers and mainstream media out of fear of the regulatory implications of reducing carbon emissions."

In addition to casting doubt on the indisputable science proving the planet is warming, conservative groups also try to convince people that individual behaviors are more important than the consequences of their industries. Since Earth Day 1970, Dunlap pointed out, industries have tried to manipulate the public dialogue so that individual consumers believe their choices can save or destroy the planet, such as stopping littering and helping clean up green spaces. This obscures the systemic issues that are actually causing this problem, guaranteeing that they'll only get worse.

So what is the solution? Simply put: Acknowledge that capitalism is the problem, and tailor one's political solutions accordingly.

"The only way forward is political — challenging the very forces and structures that permit this degradation," Fasenfest told Salon. He noted how people continue to bitcoin mine even though it uses more energy than many small cities, or how corporate interest groups and economic fears overrode self-preservation after humanity began to make strides for the environment in the 1960s and 1970s.

"Today we debate social spending and the senator from a coal producing state [Joe Manchin of West Virginia] insists that alternative energy supports be dropped from those plans," Fasenfest wrote. "Consider that the gap between the 1% and 99% is smaller than the gap between the 0.1% and the 1%, and consider that those people are both insulated and indifferent to a whole range of problems, and you get the reason there has to be a mass intervention that aggressively forces changes."

In addition, people need to become more aware of the exact nature of the political forces that threaten humanity's future. While the elites are responsible for manipulating the masses, that doesn't mean there aren't millions and millions of ordinary people who are complicit through their political choices.

"A big issue is the GOP's tribal nonacceptance of inconvenient scientific truths, as Al Gore first observed," Hoffert wrote to Salon. "The Trump-led Republican Party is in full opposition to science: Whether it's anti-covid vaccinations, universal health care, unequal application of laws by police, Democrat-leaning Black vote suppression, or denying fossil fueled climate change -- in many cases opposing their own economic interests. This looks increasingly unlike loyal opposition and more like visceral hatred of "coastal elites." prioritizing "Owning the Libs,' over other policy alternatives."

He added, "Perhaps because they perceive themselves as dismissed by better educated 'progressive elites' as bunch of ignorant hillbillies. Humiliation is an unappreciated factor in politics. They may not easily give up their gasoline powered pickups with gun racks and Confederate Battle Flags to environmentally friendly cars and trucks."

IT ALREADY HAS

Trump's Big Lie is the new Lost Cause — and it may poison the country for decades
Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
October 23, 2021

In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told supporters he would bring back jobs to the depressed steel town (AFP)

Perhaps the biggest of many imponderables about Donald Trump has always been the question of what playbook was he following? His 2016 campaign didn't have a plan beyond questioning the manhood of his male primary rivals and ceaseless yapping about Hillary Clinton's "emails." His 2020 campaign never found a focus until October, when he seized upon his victory over his own case of COVID-19 as evidence of his manhood. Remember his return from Walter Reed Medical Center to the White House? Trump was ripping off his mask on the Truman balcony! That'll show 'em!

In between campaigns, Trump's presidency seemed aimless, stumbling vaguely forward from one indictment to another until the time came to issue pardons, which we soon learned was his "favorite" presidential power — not being commander in chief, not ordering up Air Force One to fly him off on his many golf weekends, not even being able to pick up his bedside phone in the middle of the night and order a Big Mac and a Diet Coke. The pardon power was it.

Losing the election in November and having to move out of the White House has given him something to focus on, however. He never cared about governing and didn't have much of an ideology to guide him, but he's finally found something he can believe in and a playbook he can follow: his very own Lost Cause. Trump has embraced with gusto the South's strategy after losing the Civil War: Tell your own people that you didn't really lose, and double down on the nobility and honor of what they still believe in. In the case of the Civil War, it was slavery and the inherent superiority of whiteness and inferiority of blackness. The new Lost Cause is of course Trump himself, to whom his followers attach the same kind of gauzy metaphors that came into use after the Civil War: flags (Trump campaign flags, the Confederate flag and the "Don't Tread on Me" banner are in heavy rotation) songs ("I'm Proud to be an American" by Lee Greenwood and — perhaps not so ironically now — "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones are played at all his rallies) and symbols (Mar-a-Lago has become a kind of antebellum shrine to the garish excess Trump represents).

And of course, most important of all are the lies. The lies told to support the South's Lost Cause were as outrageous as they were numerous: Slaves were well treated by their kind and understanding masters and were far better off than they would have been had they remained with their savage tribes in Africa. The war wasn't fought over slavery, it was fought for the cause of "states' rights." Gender roles were preserved in revanchist amber: Men were the protectors of Southern white women's "honor" and "purity," and women returned the favor by forming the Daughters of the Confederacy and charging themselves with erecting the monuments to Confederate war heroes and the Confederate dead which became ubiquitous throughout the South.

It's hardly necessary to delve into Trump's lies about the election: They have been well documented and confirmed by more than 60 losses in his lawsuits contesting the election's outcome in battleground states. Trump has now launched himself into an adjunct of the Big Lie — the lie that the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 wasn't violent and wasn't an assault, but merely a "tourist visit" by Trump supporters, while outside agitators and antifa infiltrators committed all the violent acts to tarnish the Trump cause. Trump has turned Ashli Babbitt, killed at the head of a mob as she broke through a door into an area of the Capitol where members of Congress were sheltering, into a martyr. And his minions on Capitol Hill have done everything in their power to stymie and tarnish the work of the House committee investigating the assault, including voting en masse against a nonpartisan commission to investigate the Capitol assault and now opposing the move by the House to hold Steve Bannon in contempt for defying a subpoena to provide documents and testify before the House committee.

POSTMODERN CONFEDERATE TRAITOR

Bannon is in the process of transforming himself into a latter-day Robert E. Lee, talking about commanding a 20,000-strong army of "shock troops" he plans to use to intimidate "enemy" voters during the 2022 and 2024 elections.

The centerpiece of Trump's personal Lost Cause is nursing his grudge, and the collective grudge of his followers, against the "elites" they blame for bringing down the dream. Which involves, of course, whipping up the festering sore of resentment and hate that is the Trump "base." The South used the KKK and later the so-called Citizens Councils. Trump has the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. I am certain we're going to learn from the House committee that Trump himself was involved in their deployment on Jan. 6 in the violent assault on the Capitol.

Perhaps the most important way the South promoted its Lost Cause after the Civil War was through electoral and legislative means. The rebellion of Southern states against the Reconstruction laws and the 14th and 15th amendments is instructive. Major figures of the Confederacy took prominent roles in the Democratic Party. The Confederate raider and first Grand Wizard of the KKK, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and other Confederate veterans attended the Democratic convention of 1868 in New York where one of Forrest's friends, Frank Blair Jr., was nominated as the party's candidate for vice president on a ticket with a former governor of New York. Their campaign slogan was "Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man's Country; Let White Men Rule." Speeches against emancipation of the slaves given by Blair were said to contribute to Ulysses S. Grant's comfortable electoral victory.

Later, Southern states would virtually nullify the 14th and 15th amendments by passing the Jim Crow laws, stripping Black citizens of the right to vote and consigning them to subservient roles in the Southern economy and society little better than those they had held as slaves. The South separated itself from the rest of the country by its continuing adherence to the doctrines and practices of white supremacy in its legal and social systems.

Something very similar is going on right now in Republican-controlled states, including all of those that comprised the Confederacy, with state laws being passed to suppress the votes of minorities and gerrymander legislative districts to limit representation by minorities and the Democratic Party in general. It's a kind of legalized second secession by Republican states and the Republican Party, which has remade itself as the Trump Party, parroting Trump's racism and lies about the election and following his lead in Jan. 6 denial.

The words constitutional crisis and slow-motion Civil War have entered the lexicon. Former Republican writers like David Frum, Robert Kagan, Charlie Sykes, David Brock and Max Boot are all over the op-ed pages, warning that Trump and his allies are preparing to "ensure victory by any means necessary."

"The stage is thus being set for chaos," Robert Kaplan wrote recently in a widely shared op-ed in the Washington Post. "Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn't have."

Donald Trump had to be handed a loss in 2020 in order to begin championing his new Lost Cause. There won't be another one. If he runs and wins in 2024, we will not recognize the smoking ruins left by a second Trump victory. It won't take them long to begin erecting statues to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and renaming public squares after the "Great Replacement." The only question is, what will the Daughters of the New Confederacy call themselves? The Mistresses of Mar-a-Lago?