It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Video: Is bacteria the future of oil spill and radioactive waste cleanup?
In this episode of Reactions, our host, Sam, creates an oil spill at home and puts bacteria to the test:
The Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 released millions of tons of oil into the ocean. As governments and the oil industry were trying to clean up the disaster, bacteria were already hard at work.
Credit: The American Chemical Society
Video: There's gold in seawater! Can we extract It?
Credit: The American Chemical Society
The ocean has about 20 million tons of gold in it—that's around 700 TRILLION DOLLARS worth of gold
In this episode of Reactions, we explore how, for over a century, people have struggled to collect it.
And we see if, where they failed, we can succeed:
Ifeoma Ozoma: US tech whistleblower helping others speak out
Silicon Valley whistleblower Ifeoma Ozoma has tried to help others speak out
(AFP/Adria MALCOLM) Julie JAMMOT Mon, November 15, 2021
Being a whistleblower comes down to careful preparation but also an eye trained for dirty tricks, said Ifeoma Ozoma, an ex-employee of several Silicon Valley giants turned revealer of tech world wrongdoing.
"I planned it like a program or product launch. Obviously the experience is something very personal, but I approached it like work," she told AFP.
While Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has become a figurehead for the fight against social media's faults, there are others in the tech world, like Ozoma, who have also taken big risks to stand up.
An African-American, former policymaker relations specialist for Google, Pinterest and Facebook, she continues to work for ethics in tech, but from the outside, via her consulting firm Earthseed.
She has marked a first big success via the recent adoption in California of a law she co-sponsored, called "Silenced No More."
Starting in January, this law will prohibit employers from using confidentiality clauses to prevent victims of harassment or discrimination in the workplace from speaking out.
In mid-October, she posted online a guide for whistleblowers.
"The difference with tech companies and other industries is on the power that they wield, but also they pretend they're better for workers, consumers, society than more traditional industries," she told AFP. "That's just not borne out in reality."
- Keep the emails -
A Yale University graduate in political science, the 29-year-old was born in Alaska to Nigerian immigrants.
She left Pinterest at the end of May 2020, with six months of salary, after months of making complaints internally and also to the state of California, accusing the social network of discrimination and racist retaliation.
She said the company paid her less than if she had been a man, but she also complained about their lack of action after a colleague posted her personal details online to expose her to anonymous harassment.
In mid-June 2020, as the Black Lives Matter anti-racism movements were in full swing in the United States, her damning account on Twitter of her experience sparked a scandal for the company that had largely avoided controversy.
"Pinterest, told a number of reporters that the CEO had no knowledge of me being doxxed... and I was essentially making up a story about him being aware," Ozoma said.
"I knew that it was something that would probably come up later. And so I had the emails," she added.
The accused firms try to discredit whistleblowers by many means, said Libby Liu, the director of Whistleblower Aid which is working with Haugen.
"They will throw up against the wall every discrediting thing they can think of, through like every media organization on the face of the Earth," she added. - Losing their health insurance -
The whistleblowers that come forward often have a lot to lose.
"Just one example here in the United States -- because our health care is tied to our employment -- when you decide to whistle blow, you're also making a decision for yourself and for your family to lose access to your health insurance," Ozoma said.
"That is not a small thing to ask of people," she added.
Whistleblower leaks and damning media reports have tarnished Big Tech's image, but they have had limited tangible consequences for Silicon Valley.
In fact, Haugen's oft-repeated accusation that Facebook puts profits over safety is not entirely new.
"There are countless nonprofit organizations and reporters, who reported on the exact same thing for years," said Ozoma. "It remains to be seen whether anything fruitful will come of it."
But from anti-sexism protests at Google in 2018 to warnings from former top Facebook officials, the pressure for change is steady.
After Ozoma spoke out at Pinterest, other female workers did too.
The company paid $22 million in December 2020 to Francoise Brougher, its white, former COO to settle a gender discrimination lawsuit.
juj/jum/jm/mlm
US journalist freed from Myanmar jail says he thought ordeal would never end
An American journalist jailed for six months by Myanmar's military rulers said after his shock release that he battled to stay sane and feared his ordeal would not end, while insisting he should never have been detained.
Danny Fenster -- handed an 11-year sentence last week for incitement, unlawful association and breaching visa rules -- was freed on Monday, a day before he was to face terror and sedition charges that could have seen him jailed for life.
The 37-year-old looked gaunt, with his hair and beard grown longer during captivity, as he emerged from a jet in the Qatari capital Doha with former US diplomat Bill Richardson.
"I was arrested and held in captivity for no reason... but physically I was healthy," he told journalists at the airport. "I wasn't starved or beaten."
Myanmar's military has squeezed the press since taking power in a February coup, arresting dozens of journalists critical of its crackdown, which has killed more than 1,200 people according to a local monitoring group.
Fenster had been working at Frontier Myanmar, a local outlet in the Southeast Asian country, for around a year and was arrested as he headed home to see his family in May.
"I'm feeling alright physically. It's just the same privations that come with any form of incarceration. You're just going a little stir-crazy," said Fenster.
"The longer it drags on, the more worried you become that it's never going to end. So that's the biggest concern, just staying sane through that."
Fenster is believed to have contracted Covid-19 during his detention, family members said during a conference call with American journalists in August.
The United States, which had said Fenster was unjustly and wrongfully detained, welcomed his release.
"I just spoke with American journalist Danny Fenster, who is free from prison in Burma and en route to reunite with his family in the United States," Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted.
"Looking forward to welcoming you home, Danny."
'I'm just so happy'
The junta said Fenster was pardoned and released on "humanitarian grounds", ending 176 days spent in a colonial-era prison where many of Myanmar's most famous dissidents have been held.
His release was secured following "face-to-face negotiations" between Richardson and junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, Richardson's organisation said in a statement.
Fenster was granted a pardon and release with a "view to maintaining friendly relations between nations", a report in state-run Global New Light of Myanmar said Tuesday.
Richardson visited Myanmar earlier this month on what was described as a "private humanitarian mission".
He said at the time that the US State Department had specifically asked him not to raise Fenster's case during his visit.
Fenster's father Buddy expressed relief after speaking with his son on the phone, saying there was "nothing harder on a parent" than knowing a child is in distress and being unable to help.
"He has been sleeping on a wooden pallet for close to six months. And he said, 'The plane's got a bed in it', and I said, you know, 'Danny, take a rest, man, just stretch out on that thing.' I'm just so happy to hear that," Buddy said.
The junta said two Japanese envoys, Hideo Watanabe and Yohei Sasakawa, were involved in the negotiations, without providing details.
"It's wonderful news for all of his friends and family," Fenster's colleague at Frontier Myanmar, Andrew Nachemson, told AFP.
"But of course he never should have spent six months in jail... and all the local journalists who remain imprisoned should also be released immediately."
More than 100 journalists have been arrested since the putsch, according to Reporting ASEAN, a monitoring group. It says at least 30 are still in detention.
(AFP)
No US return to the Moon before 2026: audit
Part of NASA's giant SLS rocket which will be used for the Artemis mission to return humans to the Moon (AFP/Handout)
Mon, November 15, 2021
The return of humans to the Moon, already postponed last week by NASA from 2024 to 2025, will actually take place in 2026 "at the earliest", according to a government audit published on Monday.
The Artemis program to return Americans to the Moon is encountering "technical difficulties and delays heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic and weather events," NASA's auditing body, the Office of Inspector General, said in a report.
"NASA's goal to land astronauts on the Moon's South Pole in late 2024 faces multiple significant challenges including major technical risks, an unrealistic development schedule, and lower-than requested funding levels," the report said.
First, the new space suits needed for the mission will not be ready "until May 2025 at the earliest," it said, noting "technical challenges and lack of funding."
Secondly, the development of the "human landing system" or HLS, that has been entrusted to the company SpaceX will also "probably" suffer delays.
The lander, named Starship, will transfer astronauts, traveling on a capsule launched by NASA, from a lunar orbit to the Moon's surface.
The Inspector General's office praised the "fast pace" of SpaceX's production, thanks to a system that "manufactures many engine parts and components in-house."
During visits in August to headquarters in California and factories in Texas, the OIG said 20 Starship prototypes and 100 Raptor engines had already been built.
While for the past 15 years, the average time between awarding a contract and the first flight was eight and a half years, SpaceX is supposed to achieve this feat in half the time, the audit said.
"Given the time needed to develop and fully test the HLS and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years," the report concluded.
The mission, which will be the modern-day equivalent of Apollo 11, is called Artemis 3. It will be preceded by Artemis 2, which will take astronauts to the Moon but without landing.
Before that, Artemis 1 will also go to the Moon, but without an astronaut on board. This mission is nominally scheduled for February 2022, but the audit estimates that it will actually take place "in the summer of 2022."
The OIG report also concluded the lunar program was too expensive. It will cost as much as $93 billion by fiscal year 2025, according to the report's estimates, with a cost per launch of $4.1 billion for the first four missions.
The space agency, financed by US taxpayers, must "identify ways to reduce costs", it said.
la/dax/jh/md
Sierra Nevada shown to have two geologic birthdays
The east side of the modern Sierra Nevada mountain range at the edge of the Basin and Range Province. The range crest in the background is Kings Canyon National Park. Credit: Jens-Erik Lund Snee
When geologist Elizabeth Miller started mapping a fault system in Death Valley, she questioned the origin of some sedimentary rocks previously assumed to be locally derived. Now, analysis has revealed where they really came from: central Nevada, indicating that part of today's Great Basin was the highest land in North America some 40 million to 20 million years ago.
The journey of these sediments southward in river systems draining into the ancient Pacific Ocean tells a story about the history of the Earth and the much-debated formation of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the awe-inspiring backbone of eastern California that encompasses three national parks: Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Yosemite.
The ancestral Sierra Nevada began as a volcanic chain more than 100 million years ago, a time when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. New work published Nov. 15 as chapters in a Geological Society of America Special Paper on the paleogeography and topography of the western U.S. suggests that the mountains later "died" – meaning they were dwarfed by a vast plateau—during a region-wide volcanic flare-up about 40 million to 20 million years ago. Then, they were "reborn" about 10 million years ago, lifting to the scenic heights we know today.
"The highest points 40 to 20 million years ago were in central Nevada. Then, basin and range faulting came along and broke it all up, and now the Sierra Nevada is the westernmost or last of those major fault blocks," Miller said. "As a mountain range, it's had three completely different histories."
The findings from Miller and Jens-Erik Lund Snee, who conducted the research while a Ph.D. student at Stanford, propose that the Continental Divide—which is typically considered to be static—went through a progressive shift eastward. The divide, which separates the watersheds that drain into the Pacific Ocean from those draining eastward, remained in the ancestral Sierra Nevada in eastern California for tens of millions of years before moving into central Nevada when the volcanism that started 40 million years ago lifted the Earth's surface in a south-migrating wave.
The papers describe how the region-wide flare-up of volcanic activity in southern Idaho, Nevada and Utah caused the inland plateau to rise above the ancestral Sierra. That upheaval in the Earth's mantle and crust created whole new systems of rivers, some of which carried sediment southward, forming the layers that Miller studied near Death Valley with co-author Mark Raftrey, a former graduate student.
"The material from those volcanoes made it all the way out to the Pacific side of the Sierra Nevada—that's how we know the region in central Nevada where the eruptions occurred was higher than everything else," said Miller, noting that previous papers charted the ancient rivers that carried the volcanic material. "Our work adds to this previous work in that we argue that the volcanism itself actually caused a big increase in the topography because there was so much hot material coming up from below the continent."
For tens of million years after the plateau rose, the ancestral Sierra range was "merely the ramp from the high country in Nevada down to the paleo-ocean in what's now the Central Valley," Lund Snee said. That was also when much of the famous California gold was deposited in ancient rivers that flowed west from central Nevada out to the Central Valley. Then, beginning around 10 million years ago, the new Sierra Nevada emerged when the western U.S. was chiseled apart by basin and range faulting, which involved uplift and extension – a process that had very little to do with its earlier history, according to Miller.
"There's been a lot of recent debate about when the Sierra Nevada came up as a mountain range, and our work is suggesting that both prevailing views are right—it's old and also young for completely different tectonic reasons," said Lund Snee, who is now a Mendenhall Research Fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey.
When the ancestral Sierra Nevada first arose over 100 million years ago, the mountains marked the edge of the North American continent, bordered by the Pacific Ocean to the west. East of that area, geologists have long thought the Earth's crust thickened and became unstable, eventually causing the continent to spread apart and form today's basin and range topography.
But Miller and Lund Snee found that the region east of the ancestral Sierra was relatively low, supported by thinner, more stable crust until the wave of volcanic eruptions 40 million to 20 million years ago lifted the plateau higher than the ancestral range. The eruptions came from dozens of Yellowstone-like supervolcano calderas in addition to hundreds of smaller volcanoes – an event that blanketed some areas with thousands of feet of lava.
The research paints a picture of the topographic evolution of the western U.S., which has been debated since the area was first explored by geologists in the 1800s and flooded by gold miners seeking fortunes in the Sierra Nevada's western foothills. It also impacts our understanding of how plants and animals evolved and dispersed across the West; in order to understand migration, biologists need a clear grasp of landscape evolution.
The authors refined geologic maps and used radiometric dating of the minerals zircon and feldspar to gage the timing of eruptions and changes in topography. They also revised the ages of previous estimates of elevation and climate from stable isotope analyzes of calcite in sediments deposited before and after the volcanic rock.
"You need to know when things happened and how long it took things to happen to truly understand them in the geologic context," Miller said. "It's an evolving story, and as we pick up more pieces, the story begins to get tighter and tighter.Crustal motion and strain rates in the southern Basin and Range province
More information:John P. Craddock et al, Tectonic Evolution of the Sevier-Laramide Hinterland, Thrust Belt, and Foreland, and Postorogenic Slab Rollback (180–20 Ma),(2021).DOI: 10.1130/SPE555
This uniquely Canadian conspiracy theory group was on the edges of obscurity.
Then vaccine mandates came down
LONG READ
Alex McKeen Vancouver Bureau
Toronto Star November 14, 2021
VANCOUVER—It's a rainy Sunday and inside a small church on the east side of Vancouver, talk has turned to mutiny.
About 20 unmasked people have trickled into the church's wooden pews for a meeting, eating potluck soup, holding long hugs by way of greeting and chatting about their own version of current affairs.
The cloudy weather has left the space dark inside, with only intermittent bursts of sunshine coming in through colourful stained-glass windows. Artwork of Jesus, dreamcatchers, and circles of hands cover every spare patch of wall.
Topics among those gathered range from the certain — that COVID-19 was planned by the global elite; to the speculative — the fate of microchipped individuals lucky enough to survive their COVID-19 vaccine.
One woman breaks away from her private conversation, looking down to make a comment to no one in particular.
"We must sound just crazy," she says. "To someone who doesn't know about this stuff yet."
The conversations between those in attendance eventually fall silent, as a large, older man sitting at the front of the church begins to talk. He speaks in a slow, commanding drawl, a man in a cowboy hat standing sentry behind him.
"You might step off the ship of commerce, but did your mind follow you?" the man introduced as maathlaatlaa booms, gesturing to his own head.
"Are you still caught in the world of corporatocracy up here?
"This is our de jure government we're building," he says. "We have invited you to walk beside us."
Some in the pews nod their heads, or let out a murmur of agreement.
Among those gathered here, "stepping off the ship of commerce," refers to leaving society as we know it and being freed from the constraints of Canada's institutions and laws.
Members of this group will also talk about commandeering the "vessel." That vessel is the Canadian government — and they want to take it over.
Welcome to the latest meeting of the Peoples of the Salmon.
While there are only 20 people at the church, this group's online footprint is bigger. A recent petition boasts more than 19,000 signatures.
It's a manifestation of what experts describe as a uniquely Canadian brand of conspiracy-theory-laden, anti-government belief — one that's picked up steam during the pandemic. If you've wondered where Canadians go when their beliefs diverge so strongly from reality that everything — from vaccines, to Canada's own elections — seem like a conspiracy, it's to places such as this.
The general trend worries experts, for both the social harm they say it can do, and the fear that it might, in some rare cases, lead to violence.
Let it be said upfront: this particular group, eating soup in the pews of a darkened church, does not have any obvious or viable path to overthrowing the government. They say they have no plans at all to incite violence — that they fight with the pen, not the sword.
At the Sunday meeting, a woman named Dayna Furst, an erstwhile anti-vaccination organizer who has taken over recruiting for the Peoples of the Salmon group since mid-September, is wrapped in a ceremonial blanket.
It is meant to symbolize the protection of her spirit outside of the corporate world, with a $10 Canadian bill pinned above her heart.
The symbolism is keenly felt in the room. Furst, and many others, cry.
"We need everybody to spread our petition to collect signatures," Furst had told an earlier meeting. "So that we can take over the government."
The origin story of the Peoples of the Salmon could be said to start with one man's grievances with the legal system.
These days, he goes by "popois." In the past, he has been known as David Quinn. The B.C. Supreme Court says he's not allowed to file any more lawsuits by either name. The founder of the Peoples of the Salmon was declared a "vexatious litigant" by the B.C. court in 2018 for undertaking a series of "pseudolegal" battles over the course of nine years — claiming repeatedly and with no success that the court's jurisdiction did not apply to him and certain neighbours because he, as an Indigenous person, had not consented to participate in the court's rules.
After that, as he explains it, he started thinking of ways to move even further outside the government system.
"We started (the group) two years ago, when we were looking for a name other than a country," he told the Star in an interview.
"So I came up with Peoples of the Salmon, and it's the de jure government west of the Rockies, north of the 49th parallel, and south of the Yukon."
He's describing the geographic area of B.C., but says he is willing to "adopt" any Canadian regardless of where they are located into his imagined regime. In doing so, he says, he can make them "sovereign" — as he claims to be, and untouchable by the legal system. He and the older man present at the church meeting, maathlaatlaa, both refer to themselves as "headsmen" of the group, but it's popois who is the main spokesperson and organizer.
maathlaatlaa is a more enigmatic figure, serving as something of a spiritual adviser inaccessible to members of the group except at the Sunday meetings. On the phone with the Star, he said it wasn't right to think of his role in the group as a "title" or "position" — that's language used in the corporatocracy, he said.
"popois and me, we are flesh, blood and bone. We're not corpses like the corporation," he said.
popois' claims to sovereignty are not true in the eyes of the law, and that's been established by his dozens of failed court petitions and cases.
Yet popois knows that speaking in the language of Indigenous land claims adds an air of legitimacy to his pitch. That, he says, it what differentiates his group from other "sovereigntists."
The name of his group, the Peoples of the Salmon, is based on a theme important to the Coast Salish people in western B.C. and the U.S. Pacific Northwest, referring to the importance of salmon in their cultures.
popois is himself a member of the shíshálh nation in B.C., but the nation has said in previous court filings he does not represent or speak for them. The Star reached out to the current chief of the shíshálh nation but did not hear back.
While the shíshálh, which has been a self-governing nation since 1986, and other First Nations across Canada have a legitimate right to self-determination and governance — rights that in some cases are being negotiated through treaty talks and the court system at present — popois appears to be using the familiar term for a purpose that is detached from those realities. And it's resonating beyond Indigenous circles. White Canadian anti-government leaders, such as Odessa Orlewicz, who runs a far-right social network with her husband in Vancouver, have previously given little focus to reconciliation efforts in Canada, but have taken up popois' statements with reverence.
"The Indigenous have asked us ... to bring together the non-Indigenous Canadians with the Indigenous Canadians," she said in one of her most-viewed videos last month. "The tyranny above, they want the Indigenous and the white man to be fighting each other right now. Well, those Indigenous and non-Indigenous that are awake know they're trying to do that.
"The Indigenous can't do it without us, and we can't do it without them."
The ideology popois espouses is sometimes called the "sovereigntist" movement, sometimes the "freemen" approach.
It purports that people can prevent laws from applying to them by "withdrawing their consent," and its appeal has motivated groups in Canada and the U.S. to try to get their taxes refunded and gain immunity from criminal law, with no success, since the 1960s. It's also a conspiracy theory at its roots, because it claims the legal system itself is an elaborate ruse, and that people who are "awake" can just opt out.
A prominent Canadian espousing this type of thinking is David Lindsay, a "sovereign citizen" activist who has served jail time for refusing to pay taxes, and more recently has organized anti-vaccine rallies in Kelowna, B.C. He also has given interviews with Paul Fromm, a white nationalist — ties the Star has not made to the Peoples of the Salmon group.
popois is careful to distinguish his group from the "freemen" types. He says others may talk a big game about freemen, but they don't have the same legal mechanisms for achieving it as he does.
popois started to get into this thinking sometime around 2009, the year he filed his first court challenge, which was a lawsuit against police officers who charged him for driving without licence plates.
He's a former fisherman from the shíshálh Nation on B.C.'s sunshine coast — a remote coastal community that, despite being on the mainland of B.C., is only accessible by ferry.
This is worth pausing on, because it points to one of the group leader's early gripes with Canada. popois, who these days lives mostly in Vancouver, was one of many making his livelihood off fishing Pacific salmon, but the population of salmon has been declining since the 1990s, due to a combination of climate change, overfishing and habitat destruction. Like many others, popois places the blame for the decline squarely on the government of Canada, what he calls the "corporation of Canada," for allowing fish farms along the coast, a practice that may interfere with wild fish.
"The corporation has done with the fish farms the same as what they did with the buffalo," he told the Star.
The group only began taking off last summer, when popois posted a flagship petition on its website, claiming that anyone who signed was "withdrawing consent" from the laws of Canada, and submitting instead to a new order run by him.
That caught the notice of some right-wing conspiracy theory influencers, who were already interested in looking for ways to defy government authority on policies such as vaccine mandates.
The petition had little traffic when it was first posted on Sept. 16. But it started gaining steam on Oct. 8, after a B.C. anti-government protester named Pat King posted it with one of his livestreamed videos. The same thing happened about a week later, when another right-wing influencer from Vancouver, Orlewicz, also posted the petition. The petition is still well short of its stated five-million-signature goal, but it claims to have more than 19,000 signatures.
If all those signatures genuinely come from Canadians, it's an alarming indication of how many people are eager to actively oppose Canadian institutions.
The Star reached out to the creator of the petition platform, which is run through a plug-in on the website builder WordPress. Steve Davis, the contact for the Australian-based plug-in provider 123host, said the number of signatories listed on the Peoples of the Salmon website should be accurate, unless a person with coding skills has been fudging it on the back end of the website or stuffing the petition with names. Due to the fact the signatures increased at the same time the petition was publicized on right-wing networks, though, that person would have to be fairly sophisticated, fudging the number in concert with the dates the petition was publicized, and not at other times.
The group also has an active Telegram channel with about 150 volunteers, and daily meetings where they plan how to fundraise for "legal fees" associated with their aims. In one recorded meeting viewed by the Star, participants were asked to cough up a $1,000 donation to attend a webinar with "experts" promising to start legal actions to help them retrieve tens of thousands of dollars in taxes.
To those unfamiliar with legal concepts, and who want to believe popois' message, one can see how there's an air of feasibility to his pitch. He relies on two real legal principles, it's just that neither can be used in the way he describes. One is the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination, and the other is an obscure American contract law called the Uniform Commercial Code (which he says, wrongly, is legal mechanism for declaring independence from the state of Canada).
The Peoples of the Salmon offers one window into a world in which conspiracy theory groups are increasingly vying for the attention, time and money of Canadians. And in Canada, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that potential audience is larger than you might expect.
A poll done by the firm Léger for Elections Canada in April showed that conspiracy-theory thinking is common among a large minority of the country.
The study, which surveyed 2,500 Canadians, reported 17 per cent said they believed the government was trying to cover up the link between vaccines and autism, and that 30 per cent said they thought new drugs or technologies were being tested on people without their knowledge.
A further 40 per cent of respondents indicated they subscribed to thinking that certain big events have been the product of a "small group who secretly manipulate world events."
What popois knows is that the appeal of his pitch is broadening, as Canadians who strongly oppose vaccination find themselves increasingly on the fringes of society.
"If you don't get your vax and your passport, you're going to be on unemployment," popois told the Star, referring to those individuals who have lost their jobs as a result of vaccine mandates at workplaces. "So all these people: where are they going to go? What are they going to do?"
He said he hopes they will join him and his plan to declare as sovereign citizens any Canadians willing to follow him.
Helmut-Harry Loewen, a researcher of the far-right and retired University of Winnipeg instructor, said that, even if they're not explicit about it, the increasingly inflammatory language employed by sovereigntist groups can be a concern.
The Peoples of the Salmon are explicit about their non-violent intentions. Asked whether he is worried anything he says will be used to justify anyone else's violent intentions, popois says he is not.
"No. The sword that we use is the pen. And this is the first time in history that documents have been so used properly that there is no defence against them," he said. "Our people aren't of that nature. And there aren't enough of us to carry out that kind of threat."
Still, Loewen said anti-government theories can be interpreted by individual actors in the most concerning of ways.
A ready example: the QAnon conspiracy theory, which says the world is run by a pedophile ring, seems to have inspired Corey Hurren to attempt to attack Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2020.
Experts say it's not that people who go down these rabbit holes are just gullible — there's something conspiracy theories and the groups that form around them do for people on a personal level.
In a QAnon chat room or church meeting of the Peoples of the Salmon, there's a lot of validation, a lot of hugging, and therefore a lot of social encouragement to keep following the conspiracy theory, while eschewing other sources of information.
It's easy to see how Canadian anti-vaxxers, pushed further and further to the margins by vaccine mandates but steadfast in their ill-formed beliefs, could find some solace in a group like that.
But wherever groups coalesce around an alternative reality, there is potential for danger, Loewen said.
Think about the January insurrection in the U.S., in which participants expressed seemingly genuine belief that their actions threatening the capitol amounted to patriotism.
"If governments are constructed as an enemy, what does that do? It forms the rhetorical platform for further action," Loewen said. "We saw what happened in the U.S. with the months and months of lies told about the election and how that resulted in the insurrection of Jan. 6."
Alberta legal scholar Donald J. Netolitzky tried to summarize the consequences of groups such as the Peoples of the Salmon broadening their appeal. It's not that they would threaten a country's institution in any of the ways they claim to, he said. But there was a huge social cost to both the legal system, the people who fall prey to these schemes and anyone unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a person whose actions are inspired by them.
One such person was the landlady of a Calgary man named Mario Antonacci. Around 2012, he claimed he was a "freeman-on-the-land" and that his rental property was an "embassy." He threatened her with action by "Territorial Marshals" if she would not pay money to him. Eventually, he was arrested and evicted.
Richard Warman, another legal scholar who has worked with Netolitzky and with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said the fact the anti-vaccine movement is currently mobilized as a result of the pandemic is a potential boon to groups like this.
"The anti-government sovereign citizen movement is an opportunistic infection. If it can find a new host population, like the anti-vaxxers, it will infect them as much as possible," he said. "It will try to use that population that is already susceptible to conspiracy theory messages and introduce them to this overarching conspiracy theory."
Both Loewen and Warman pointed out that where these movements become the most concerning is where they begin to overlap with racist, anti-Semitic and openly hateful neo-Nazi group members. There is no indication that the Peoples of the Salmon group have done this, or made any moves toward violence.
Loewen and Warman warn that a strong anti-government message can be just the thing that brings apparently disparate groups together under one banner, and potentially inspire "lone wolf" types to take violent actions.
That's how, for example, at the London, Ont., campaign event where Canada's prime minister was pelted with gravel, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists found themselves shouting alongside members of the white nationalist group Canada First.
Bringing these groups together does not mean they will all adopt the thinking of the most extreme among them, but it does open up this possibility, something Loewen calls "far-right mobilization."
popois chooses his words carefully while making what he admits are extraordinary claims. He has a low, calm, slightly raspy voice that could fit a radio announcer.
He spoke once on the phone with the Star, explaining about the group and its background, but saying he didn't think his ideas would be permitted to be printed in the newspaper, because he believes the Canadian state controls such sources of information.
Subsequently, other members of the group contacted by the Star and who initially expressed interest in discussing the Peoples of the Salmon stopped responding. But popois invited the Star to a group meeting, saying that even if his group was portrayed in a negative light, it would just be further evidence of the deep state at work.
popois said he is not trying to dismantle Canada and install himself as the prime minister of a new country. But only because he says he is already the leader of the land. And the word "country" does not apply.
"I am the leader of this government presently," he said in an interview with the Star. "When you consent to myself you're consenting to being under our jurisdiction."
If that sounds far-fetched, he said, it's nothing compared to the way we've all been duped into believing in our legal system, he said. The ideology he is actively recruiting other susceptible Canadians into is one he really seems to believe. And it's based on legal-sounding terminology that dangles the promise of defecting from an unwanted authority — like a country, for instance.
Alex McKeen is a Vancouver-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_mckeen
Charismatic prophets show few signs of recanting after failed prophecies
Leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), who prophesized that Donald Trump would be reelected, show few signs of recanting their predictions, according to scholars assessing the movement at a recent meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, which RW attended. This is even as a formalization of the movement seems likely, with more denomination- like networks emerging. The NAR, a coalition of charismatic megachurches, church networks, and evangelists teaching that the biblical prophetic and apostolic offices are being restored, attracted worldwide attention for its prophecies about the Trump presidency starting in 2016—and ending in 2020, when its reelection predictions were met by Trump’s defeat at the polls. Stuart Wright of Lamar University has been compiling a growing database of 49 of the movement’s prophets and found that 70 percent still say the election was stolen and that Trump should be president, with some prophets even claiming that Trump was declared president in heaven. Meanwhile, 10 percent have remained silent on the matter, at least for now, while seven percent have stated that their prophecies were wrong and have apologized to their followers, most notably Jeremiah Johnson and Chris Valentin.
Wright argues that there is a strong “party line” among prophets and pressure to maintain the validity of their prophecies. As reported in a paper by Damon Berry, any reassessment of the prophetic ministry that might be discerned came in the issuing of a “prophetic standards statement” last spring that sought to establish protocols for making prophecies. In another paper, J. Gordon Melton of Baylor University reported that there are now 220 apostolic networks that often function like denominations. He said that new NAR prophecies emerge daily and are “vague enough that what constitutes fulfillment or failure is difficult if not downright impossible to discern.” But the Trump prophecies were clearer and more definite, making them more difficult to recant or re-interpret, which suggests why very few prophets have announced that they are wrong and have apologized.
Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet attend the Dune UK Special Screening at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on October 18, 2021 in London, England.
[Samir Hussein/WireImage via Getty Images]
The recent release of Dune: Part One (2021), an American science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve, has once again raised the vexing question of Hollywood mis/representation of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam. Film critics particularly from the Arab and Muslim world are up in arms and back on their hobbyhorse of how Hollywood misrepresents them.
It is time for a reality check and to come to terms with the fact that “Hollywood” as an abstraction is in the business of misrepresenting everyone. It has no commitment to truth. It has made a lucrative business of deluding the world. Native Americans, African-Americans, Arabs, Asians, Latinx, Muslims, Africans – everyone on planet Earth is misrepresented for the simple reason that at the epicentre of Hollywood as an industry stands a factual, virtual, or fictive white narrator telling the world he is the measure of truth and wisdom, joy and entertainment
Dune is now doing its bit of mis/representation with the latest visual panache and state-of-the-art digital bravura and virtuosity. Set in the distant future amid an interstellar dystopia, it is based on the 1965 science fiction novel by American author Frank Herbert. In 1984, David Lynch made a film version of the novel to critics’ dismay. But the 2021 adaptation by Denis Villeneuve has received much praise, from almost everyone other than some Arab and Muslim film critics who think it misrepresents them and has a white saviour fantasy at its core.
It does. It is a textbook white saviour fantasy. But so what? What does it have to do with us – Muslims, Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis, Turks, Indians, “Orientals” as they call us? A white American novelist, a white Canadian filmmaker, and a mass media company based in Burbank, California – Legendary Entertainment – think the whole universe needs a white saviour who looks like actor Timothée Chalamet. What is it to us? All the power to them
For Arabs and Muslims to chase after these films and ask why did you misrepresent us, or why did you borrow from Islam without any acknowledgement, or why did you cast a white actor in the lead role rather than a first generation Indian, Pakistani, or Egyptian “Muhammad” (as Ridley Scott once put it) is blowing the horn from the wrong side, as we say in Persian. Props are not people
“Arabs” are not real people in these works of fiction. Arrakis in Dune are not Iraqis in their homeland. They are figurative, metaphoric and metonymic. They are a mere synecdoche for a literary historiography of American Orientalism. They are tropes – mockups that are there for the white narrator to tell his triumphant story.
The world at large will fall into a trap if we start arguing with these fictive white interlocutors, and telling them we are really not what they think we are. It is not just a losing battle. It is a wrong battle. This is not where the real battle-line is.
You do not fight Hollywood with critical argument. You fight Hollywood with Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Suleiman, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Moufida Tlatli, Ousmane Sembène, Yasujirō Ozu, Guillermo del Toro, Mai Masri, ad gloriam. You do not battle misrepresentation. You signal, celebrate, and polish representations that are works of art
What difference would it make if you were to cast Riz Ahmed or Dev Patel or Rami Malek instead of Timothée Chalamet as the lead in Dune? Would that have resolved the issue – in what way?
We are dealing with a massive machinery in Hollywood that keeps spinning around itself producing stronger doses of fantasy to keep alive the delusion that it is the epicentre of the universe. If you throw Sydney Poitier or Denzel Washington at it, it will digest them and still spit out the selfsame delusional fantasies. So if you want to fight that machine, you need to change the interlocutor – opt for a different storyteller, farthest removed from Hollywood. One single shot of a Kiarostami or Ozu will melt mountains of snowflakes in Hollywood. You do not improve the lie with cosmetic creampuffs. You correct the lens with truth.
The late Jack Shahin spent his precious lifetime documenting such Hollywood abuses. He presented his findings in his 2001 book, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, which in 2006 was made into a documentary. Other more detailed criticism of such misrepresentations has piled over the years. To what end?
It all started in 1921. In October that year, the silent romantic drama, The Sheik (pronounced like the French word “Chic”), premiered in the US and Europe. For the next 100 years, from 1921 to 2021, from Sheik to Dune, Hollywood has had a ball – it produced and promoted one delusional fantasy after another about Arabs and the wider Muslim world. But what does it have to do with us, the real Arabs and Muslims? The question to be asked
The question that Arabs and Muslims need to ask themselves is precisely the question James Baldwin asked some half a century ago – exposing white peoples’ dark subconscious:
“The question you got to ask yourself,” Baldwin said, “the question the white population has to ask itself – is why was it necessary to have a Negro in the first place. Because I’m not a N****. I’m a man. But if you think I’m a N****, it means you need it. And you got to find out why. The future of the country depends on that.”
Today Arabs and Muslims need to reverse that question and ask themselves why does it matter to them what an irredeemably racist culture thinks of them. Why this preoccupation with the Hollywood depiction of Arabs and Muslims or anyone else for that matter? The more Arabs and Muslims delay asking that same question by just replacing Negro with Arab the longer they paradoxically prolong white supremacist Hollywood’s ability to torment them, perpetrate upon them epistemic violence, put them on the defensive, and make them question whether they are what Hollywood thinks them to be.
“Is Dune a white saviour narrative?” mostly Arab or Muslim film critics are asking themselves. Of course, it is. So what? Of course, Hollywood opted to cast a dashing Rudolf Valentino of his time in Dune to go and save “the Arabs” from themselves. What else is new?
“Frank Herbert’s novel drew from Islam,” they also say. Frank Herbert did no such thing. He could not tell “Islam” from a hole in the wall. He drew from the Orientalists’ fantasies of Islam, not Islam. No two Muslims can even agree what Islam is – let alone two Orientalists of the Hollywood vintage.
I watched most of Hollywood’s fantasies about the Muslim world and I found nothing in them that is remotely about me as a Muslim or an Iranian. Nothing.
These films are like English “translations” of Rumi I occasionally come by. Looking at those “translations”, I can never tell what the original poem is and I have spent a lifetime reading and teaching Rumi forward and backward. Because the English “translations” of Rumi are really acts of piety by well-meaning Americans trying to find a decent “spiritual” way attributed to Rumi and I find nothing wrong with it, for Americans. It, however, has nothing to do with me – or with anyone else who reads Rumi’s work in its original.
Years ago, in my 2009 book Post-Orientalism Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror, I wrote that throughout his magnificent life, Edward Said had a fictive white interlocutor sitting in his mind who he was trying to convince that Palestinians had been wronged – unless and until that fictional character was totally convinced that indeed Palestinians were wronged then Palestinians were not wronged.
But we are done with that fictional character sitting inside the best of our critical thinkers. Perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson of the Palestinian cause died unconvinced he had convinced that figment of his own imagination of the most brutal fact of his history. We have long since changed that interlocutor. We are not talking to him anymore. He is fictional. He is not real.
The frontier fictions separating East and West, Hollywood and Bollywood, have dissolved into cyberspace. They are meaningless in a reality in which how a white saviour’s fantasy may tickle the fancies of its white audience is of little relevance to the rest of humanity at large. They need their white saviours. It is a psychotic disposition. We can only wish them a speedy recovery.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Hamid Dabashi Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual PhD in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. Professor Dabashi has taught and delivered lectures in many North American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. Professor Dabashi has written twenty-five books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, and comparative literature to world cinema and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan. His books include Authority in Islam [1989]; Theology of Discontent [1993]; Truth and Narrative [1999]; Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future [2001]; Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran [2000]; Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema [2007]; Iran: A People Interrupted [2007]; and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema[2006]. His most recent work includes Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (2011), The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012), Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body (2012), The World of Persian Literary Humanism (2012) and Being A Muslim in the World (2013).
Chile wants to export solar energy to Asia via 15,000km submarine cable
The Antípodas project was announced by the Chilean government last week. It is aimed at taking advantage of the huge solar potential of the Atacama Desert, which is the world’s region with the highest solar radiation.
The Chilean government is planning to build a submarine cable to export photovoltaic energy to China, according to Chilean solar energy association – ACESOL – which cited a statement made by Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera, during the National Meeting of Entrepreneurs (ENADE).
Called Antípodas, the project is aimed at taking advantage of the huge solar potential of the Atacama Desert, which is the world's region with the highest solar radiation.
Piñera explained that, through the cable, the electricity produced by between 200 and 600 GW of photovoltaic generation capacity may transmit power to Asian countries when it is daytime in Chile and nighttime across the Pacific, or when it is winter in Asia and summer in the southern hemisphere.
“We have the deserts with the highest solar radiation in the world and a gigantic potential for generating clean, renewable and economic solar energy, which we can export during our day to supply Asian countries,” said Piñera.
The president clarified that the idea is particularly ambitious and thajust t to carry it out requires studies and strategic alliances with large Asian economies. The cable should be about 15,000km long and building a 1,300km cable would cost $2 billion. In addition, it would be necessary to invest in new solar plants since Chile has 3,106 MW of photovoltaic capacity installed, according to IRENA.
In Europe, British company Xlinks announced in the spring that it plans to build 10.5 GW of wind and solar power in Morocco and sell the power generated by the massive plant in the U.K. This would be possible thanks to a 3,800km, high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line. In total, Xlinks expected to invest about £18 billion ($24.1 billion).
In Asia, Sun Cable is leading a consortium that wants to build the Australia-ASEAN Power Link (AAPL) project, which would export solar energy from Australia’s Outback to Singapore via a submarine transmission link.
Revolution at the home of Thai boxing after Covid KO Sophie Deviller and Pitcha Dangprasith Mon, November 15, 2021, Kullanat Ornok (left) battles Australian opponent Celest Hansen at Lumpinee Stadium in Bangkok. "We are so proud to have been the first women to fight here. We've been fighting for more equality for years," said Ornok (AFP/Lillian SUWANRUMPHA)
A portrait of Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn overlooks the Muay Thai ring at Lumpinee Stadium in Bangkok (AFP/Lillian SUWANRUMPHA)
Australian Celest Hansen is attended to between rounds in her bout against Kullanat Ornok (AFP/Lillian SUWANRUMPHA)
Nongkai F.A. Group (right) fights Seeta Chor Chokamnuay after Muay Thai returned to its spiritual home after 20 months (AFP/Lillian SUWANRUMPHA)
Out with the gamblers and harsh neon lights, in with female fighters and fancy lasers -- after a 20-month coronavirus break, Thai kickboxing's spiritual home is embarking on a revolution.
On fight days before the pandemic, thousands of passionate fans would pack Bangkok's Lumpinee Stadium -- the symbolic heart of the ancient, brutal art of Muay Thai.
It was not just admiration for the fighters' skill that drew the crowds: on big days more than a million dollars could change hands in bets, in a country where gambling is largely illegal.
Then in March 2020 everything came to a halt as Thailand's first Covid-19 outbreak was traced back to the stadium, which was immediately closed.
But rather than throw in the towel, the stadium owners -- the Royal Thai Army -- say they have bounced back off the canvas to turn the enforced break into an opportunity.
Major General Ronnawut Ruangsawat, deputy chief of the stadium, told AFP that the grand old arena was "taking advantage of the pandemic to revolutionise itself".
"The arena has been completely renovated, betting is now prohibited and women are allowed to fight," he said.
- 'Clean up the sport' -
Gone are the harsh neon lights that once bathed the ring in an unforgiving white glare, and on Saturday fighter Sitthichoke Kaewsanga stepped into the ring under a shower of ultra-modern red and silver lasers.
Behind him, giant state-of-the-art screens previewed the bout with pictures of the 21-year-old and details of his record.
The stands were empty of fans and much had changed, but the hooks, jabs and knee strikes were the same, as was the backdrop of traditional Thai music played by a live band.
Lumpinee will welcome fans back in January, albeit with a greatly reduced capacity and strict virus-prevention rules such as testing and social distancing.
And betting will be off the cards because the army decided it "led to too much cheating with players sometimes being paid to lose the fight", Ronnawut said.
"We want to clean up the sport and we hope that other venues in Thailand will follow."
But industry professionals are sceptical the army's good intentions will succeed.
"They will continue to bet online -- gambling is part of the Muay Thai DNA," Jade Sirisompan of the World Muay Thai Organisation, one of the main international federations, warned.
"Many gamblers, among them many gym owners, make a living from it and can pocket thousands of dollars on a good day.
"They are not going to give it up." - Taboo-smashing bout -
No less revolutionary is the decision to allow female fighters to take part in bouts at Lumpinee's main arena.
For years, women -- including fans -- were banned from even touching the ring because of a superstition that their menstruating bodies might break the magic protecting it. Other Muay Thai venues have accepted female fighters for some time, but Lumpinee -- the sport's equivalent of Lord's in cricket or football's Wembley -- held out.
After a low-profile bout in a backroom in September, Saturday saw two women compete in the main ring for the first time.
After beating Australia's Celest Muriel Hansen, 21-year-old Thai fighter Kullanat Ornok said: "We are so proud to have been the first women to fight here. We've been fighting for more equality for years."
Wiping blood from her head, the 27-year-old Hansen added: "We have come such a very long way. This was so much more then just a fight."
For Kullanat, getting back in the ring to earn money after the long break was just as important.
"I hadn't fought in almost a year. I used to earn a hundred dollars a match, then nothing for months to support my family," Kullanat said.
- 'Lost its soul' -
Deprived of bouts because of the pandemic, thousands of professional boxers -- men and the much smaller number of women fighters -- returned to their villages.
After so long away from the gruelling daily training regime the sport demands, many will never make it back to the same level and the government has offered no financial support.
Many fighters found themselves with no choice but to take side jobs. Sitthichoke became a rider for a delivery service.
His five-round victory in Saturday's bout earned him less than $1,000. Before the pandemic he could earn triple that.
"It was really strange to fight in an empty arena. It's not easy without the energy of the crowd," he said.
And perhaps inevitably for a venue seen as a bastion of tradition, the changes have not gone down well with everyone.
"We don't recognise anything. The Muay Thai temple has become a big showroom," lamented Jade Sirisompan after watching a broadcast of the matches.
