#also there's an ad campaign running in my country right now from an animal rights group that goes

[edenorisshitposting]

Who's the idiot who spread that myth milk is pus? Turns out it spread so badly even my vegan (not brain damaged) roommate believes there's noticeable pus in cow's milk.

[fernstream]

For months, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joseph R. Biden Jr as he sought to defeat President Trump.

But on Saturday, in a nearly hourlong interview shortly after President-elect Biden was declared the winner, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made clear the divisions within the party that animated the primary still exist. And she dismissed recent criticisms from some Democratic House members who have blamed the party’s left for costing them important seats. Some of the members who lost, she said, had made themselves “sitting ducks.”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

We finally have a fuller understanding of the results. What’s your macro takeaway?

Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.

We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.

But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.

To your first point, Democrats lost seats in an election where they were expected to gain them. Is that what you are ascribing to racism and white supremacy at the polls?

I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.

Some of this is criminal. It’s malpractice. Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.

And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.

Well, Conor Lamb did win. So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy?

These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.

If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: “This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.” And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election? They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.

Is there anything from Tuesday that surprised you? Or made you rethink your previously held views?

The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realizing what work we have to do.

We need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country. Because if we keep losing white shares and just allowing Facebook to radicalize more and more elements of white voters and the white electorate, there’s no amount of people of color and young people that you can turn out to offset that.

But the problem is that right now, I think a lot of Dem strategy is to avoid actually working through this. Just trying to avoid poking the bear. That’s their argument with defunding police, right? To not agitate racial resentment. I don’t think that is sustainable.

There’s a lot of magical thinking in Washington, that this is just about special people that kind of come down from on high. Year after year, we decline the idea that they did work and ran sophisticated operations in favor of the idea that they are magical, special people. I need people to take these goggles off and realize how we can do things better.

If you are the D.C.C.C., and you’re hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms. But instead, we banned them. So the D.C.C.C. banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing.

The leadership and elements of the party — frankly, people in some of the most important decision-making positions in the party — are becoming so blinded to this anti-activist sentiment that they are blinding themselves to the very assets that they offer.

I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.

So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.

What is your expectation as to how open the Biden administration will be to the left? And what is the strategy in terms of moving it?

I don’t know how open they’ll be. And it’s not a personal thing. It’s just, the history of the party tends to be that we get really excited about the grass roots to get elected. And then those communities are promptly abandoned right after an election.

I think the transition period is going to indicate whether the administration is taking a more open and collaborative approach, or whether they’re taking a kind of icing-out approach. Because Obama’s transition set a trajectory for 2010 and some of our House losses. It was a lot of those transition decisions — and who was put in positions of leadership — that really informed, unsurprisingly, the strategy of governance.

What if the administration is hostile? If they take the John Kasich view of who Joe Biden should be? What do you do?

Well, I’d be bummed, because we’re going to lose. And that’s just what it is. These transition appointments, they send a signal. They tell a story of who the administration credits with this victory. And so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district.

It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout.

If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.

You are diagnosing national trends. You’re maybe the most famous voice on the left currently. What can we expect from you in the next four years?

I don’t know. I think I’ll have probably more answers as we get through transition, and to the next term. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.

The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.

Is the party ready to, like, sit down and work together and figure out how we’re going to use the assets from everyone at the party? Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do.

Is there a universe in which they’re hostile enough that we’re talking about a Senate run in a couple years?

I genuinely don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to be in politics. You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for re-election this year.

Really? Why?

It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy. When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion.

I chose to run for re-election because I felt like I had to prove that this is real. That this movement was real. That I wasn’t a fluke. That people really want guaranteed health care and that people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them.

But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.

[shadowfromthestarlight]

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news  companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that  long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to  understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts  they want to emphasize.

It’s why  Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over  the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of  potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this  audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led  discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the  manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to  be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the  animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon  calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The  Migrant Caravan? Fox slices  off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the  border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters  by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White  House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none other than Mitch McConnell put it last week, a country:

Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.

The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most  obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the  financial incentives encourage it.

Everyone monetized Trump. The Fox  wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start, abandoning its  supposed fealty to “family values” from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without  a thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of  pseudo-respectability Fox  had always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers  started to bail in horror, as they did with Glenn Beck). He reinvented Fox as a platform for  Trump’s conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than let some more-Fox-than-Fox imitator like OAN sell the  ads to Trump’s voters for four years.

In between its titillating quasi-porn headlines (“Lesbian Prison Gangs Waiting To Get Hands on Lindsay  Lohan, Inmate Says” is one from years ago that stuck in my mind), Fox’s business model has  long been based on scaring the crap out of aging Silent Majority viewers with  a parade of anything-but-the-truth explanations for America’s decline. It  villainized immigrants, Muslims, the new Black Panthers, environmentalists —  anyone but ADM, Wal-Mart, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, and other sponsors of  Fortress America. Donald Trump was one of the people who got hooked on Fox’s  narrative.

The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to  the last election by looking harder at the tensions they didn’t see coming in  Trump’s America, which might have meant a more intense examination of the  problems that gave Trump his opening: the jobs that never came back after  bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor zones in places  like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous  contradiction of an expanding international military garrison manned by a  population fast losing belief in the mission, etc., etc.

Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in  favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over  and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything  else. To juice ratings, the Trump story — which didn’t need the slightest  exaggeration to be fantastic — was more or less constantly distorted.

Trump  began to be described as a cause of America’s problems, rather than a symptom,  and his followers, every last one, were demonized right along with him, in  caricatures that tickled the urbane audiences of channels like CNN but made  conservatives want to reach for something sharp. This technique was borrowed  from Fox,  which learned in the Bush years that you could boost ratings by selling  audiences on the idea that their liberal neighbors were terrorist traitors.  Such messaging worked better by far than bashing al-Qaeda, because this enemy  was closer, making the hate more real.

I came  into the news business convinced that the traditional “objective” style of  reporting was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at  the parade of “above the fray” columnists and stone-dull house editorials  that took no position on anything and always ended, “Only one thing’s for  sure: time will tell.” As a teenager I was struck by a passage in Tim  Crouse’s book about the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, describing  the work of Hunter Thompson:

Thompson  had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the  crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press  secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and  meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their  wives asked them, “What was it really like?” Thompson’s wife knew from  reading his pieces.

What Rolling Stone did in  giving a political reporter the freedom to write about the banalities of the  system was revolutionary at the time. They also allowed their writer to be a  sides-taker and a rooter, which seemed natural and appropriate because biases  end up in media anyway. They were just hidden in the traditional dull  “objective” format.

The  problem is that the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of  politicized hot-taking that reporters now lack freedom in the opposite  direction, i.e. the freedom to mitigate.

If you  work in conservative media, you probably felt tremendous pressure all  November to stay away from information suggesting Trump lost the election. If  you work in the other ecosystem, you probably feel right now that even  suggesting what happened last Wednesday was not a coup in the literal sense  of the word (e.g. an attempt at seizing power with an actual chance of  success) not only wouldn’t clear an editor, but might make you suspect in the  eyes of co-workers, a potentially job-imperiling problem in this environment.  

We need  a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those  financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:

not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans;

employ a Fairness Doctrine-inspired approach that discourages       groupthink and requires at  least occasional explorations of alternative points of view;

embrace a utilitarian mission stressing credibility over ratings, including by;

operating on a distribution model that as  much as possible doesn’t depend upon the indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Innovations like Substack are great for opinionated individual voices like me, but what’s  desperately needed is an institutional reporting mechanism that has credibility with the whole population. That means a channel that sees its mission as something separate from politics, or at least as separate from politics as possible.

The media used to derive its institutional power from this perception of separateness. Politicians feared investigation by the news media precisely because they knew audiences perceived them as neutral arbiters.

Now there are no major commercial outlets not firmly associated with one or the other political party. Criticism of Republicans is as baked into New York Times coverage as the lambasting of Democrats is at Fox, and politicians don’t fear them as much because they know their  constituents do not consider rival media sources credible. Probably, they  don’t even read them. Echo chambers have limited utility in changing minds.

Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension  the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making  pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter.  Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity  to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out  access to “wrong” information.

What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and  conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes  shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a  failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.

Matt Taibbi is one of the only people I subscribe to. He’s one of the few journalists I like because I actually believe he’s genuine.

[randomvarious]

Arthur Lyman Group - “Taboo” Shaken Not Stirred Song released in 1958. Compilation released in 1996. Exotica / Lounge / Experimental

So, there was this big Polynesian cultural boom in the U.S. in the late 50s and early 60s. Wanna know why? World War II vets. All those guys who were stationed in the South Pacific brought back with them a real appreciation for a bunch of different aspects of island culture. And some of those things really managed to permeate American culture, too, after about a decade. Hawaiian shirts, tiki bars, and surfing were some of the biggest examples. And on the musical front, a bunch of surf rock songs were implementing that wavy reverb sound that we all tend to naturally associate with images of Hawaii (listen from about the 25-second mark to the 40-second mark on this one if you’re not sure what I’m talking about). On top of that, in that timespan, Hawaii was campaigning to become a state and then became one, so that also probably sparked some added interest from non-Hawaiians in a formerly-exotic-and-now-suddenly-American culture. You can just picture the black-and-white newscasts with bullet-point-listed graphics with headings like “Who Are Hawaiians and What Do They Do for Fun?”

This sudden popular wave of Americanized Polynesian culture would prove fortuitous for the music genre known as exotica, too. Though mostly thought of as novelty, it still managed to sell really well. Exotica wasn’t purely Polynesian or Hawaiian though, and it probably still would’ve existed without as much American interest as it ended up garnering. It had a much broader scope, basically representing any sound thought to have come from the tropics, whether they actually did or not. And the genre’s king ended up being a Hawaiian guy named Arthur Lyman. 

Lyman’s music represented a mix of cool jazz and tropical sounds. And although many critics dismissed his tunes as inauthentic and kitsch, he was truly a master of both the vibraphone and marimba. Most vibes and marimba players were two-mallet guys, but Lyman managed to be a four-mallet guy, sporting a pair of mallets in each hand, that, when held right, could manifest the loveliest combinations of ringing, reverberating chords.

Look at him feeling it on this slow number:

Lyman would begin his career in Martin Denny’s band, the man who was known as the father of exotica (he’s not actually the father of the genre, though. That title should belong to Les Baxter). But soon after joining Denny, Lyman would leave and start his own band and thus become Denny’s fiercest competitor. In 1958, Lyman released his spectacular debut album, Taboo, which sold something like two million copies and hit #4 on the US Billboard charts. Contained on that album is, naturally, its title track.

What boggles my mind is how Taboo ended up selling millions of copies. I mean, it’s a weird album, and I like weird stuff, but you have to wonder what kind of vibe a significant chunk of Americans were on in the late 50s to make such a weird album like this go to #4 in the country. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement for any album, much less one that sounds as strange as this one does..But maybe Americans really just couldn’t get enough of the sounds of the tropics. I dunno.

Regardless, “Taboo” ended up being one of Lyman’s most celebrated songs. It’s exotica and it’s lounge and it’s in distinct parts. Some parts sound tailored to the cosmopolitan and open-minded, hipster-leaning frat brother type and the other to the unhygienic, bongo-obsessed, beatnik slob  You could play it in a swanky bachelor pad or in a starving artist’s hovel. Both settings were somehow appropriate. Made for taking in a nice cocktail or, alternatively, a nice cocktail of inexpensive street drugs. Your choice.

A fun fact about this song is if you listen closely, you can hear those corrugated bamboo sticks passing from the left ear to the right ear and back again. And that’s not because of the mixing. This was the pre-stereo, high-fidelity days. The musicians are literally running back and forth across the stage to play their instrument into different mics to yield a surround sound feeling. And the overall sound quality and acoustics on this are absolutely pristine for 1950s recordings, thanks to Lyman being allowed to record in Harry Kaiser’s aluminum dome auditorium in Honolulu for free.

Although the glut of Lyman’s catalogue would be celebrated for how his chilly  vibraphone rode over tropical rhythms, “Taboo” stands out for the bongo sessions, the flute, and just its overall unpredictability. The verse-chorus-verse formula is not something that typically suited Lyman well, unless he was recording covers (check out this sweet, subdued version of “Sunny,” for example). Here, we start with something almost conventional-sounding as Lyman and his band toy with volume by starting out soft and getting increasingly louder and more dramatic. Then we head for a sharp transition to tribal and furious bongo slaps and taps, which is then followed by a sedate section of breathy, snake charmer’s flute work. And of course, there’s bird calls and other whooping animal noises mixed in. It wouldn’t be an Arthur Lyman original without those. Those are all human-generated sounds, by the way.

Still confused as to how this was ever remotely popular and managed to garner such mass appeal though. It appears that despite how ordinary and white picket fence-y America seemed to be at the time, and contrary to what history often tells us, the 1950s were actually quite a wild and weird time for a lot of folks.

The first song off the first album from this god of exotica.

[sakorispolyglot]

About Me

Hello everyone (Hallo Leute)! I am a 21 year old University student studying Creative Media (not my actual major; my actual major is specific enough to dox me, but that’s the best generalization) who loves learning languages! Currently, I’m focusing on my German, but I’m an aspiring polyglot. Hopefully, you’ll get to know me a bit better with this post.

On this blog, I’ll mostly be posting about my language learning journey, how I’m learning my various languages (listed below) excluding perhaps sign language for obvious reasons, and my progress in those languages.

My Languages and Levels (on the CEFR scale; none of these are actually certified, just based on the CEFR scale and what it says and the self-evaluations that I’ve done):

English: Native

German: A1/A2

American Sign Language: B1

Spanish: A1

Italian: No Level

I have a few other languages that I would like to learn, and I’ll be adding them to this post as I go along. I think the next one I want to learn is Japanese (after I add Italian, that is).

Reasons for Each Language:

English: My parents speak English, my classmates speak English, and I live in America (even though English isn’t the official language of America, I will say that it is one of the most common languages used).

German: I am part German, so I wanted to connect with my ancestry and learn more about the country and the culture.

American Sign Language: I kind of fell into learning ASL. It’s kind of been part of my life for a long time now. My high school has a program for deaf students that provides interpreters in each class that they have, so every time an interpreter would come to our class, I would listen to the teacher and watch the interpreters and pick up signs as I would go. I would also watch videos online to pick up signs that way. Eventually, I decided to take a beginning ASL class to formalize my ASL knowledge. At the end of this class, we were required to attend a social event where everyone used ASL. Throughout the next year, I would try and attend any ASL social that I could.

Spanish: I took Spanish for two years in high school and would like to make use of some of that knowledge. Mostly just revising, although we didn’t go over a lot in those two years that I can remember.

Italian: Firstly, I am part Italian, so, like German, I would like to connect with my ancestry, the country, and its culture. Secondly, my family and I are planning a trip to Italy next summer, so I would like to have some command of the language before going. Plus I like the language.

Japanese (even though I haven’t started yet): I like me some anime. Also, the culture is super interesting to me and I would love to learn more about it.

Hobbies that I have other than Language Learning:

Reading sci-fi and fantasy, or basically any fiction. Right now, I’m reading the Dark Ability series by D.K. Holmberg.

Creating Languages, a la JRR Tolkien. I have a giant language family tree layout that has like 33 languages in it. It also contains sign languages.

Playing video games. Currently playing through Astral Chain, and I love it so much. It’s basically an anime. A really good anime.

Writing. I have some plans for a book that I want to write. I also am in the process of writing a D&D Campaign.

Video Game Development. I have a large background in programming (what with my previous major being Computer Science), although

Coding. I have a few languages under my belt from my previous Computer Science major.

Filmmaking. I’ve worked as a Gaffer (Lights) and a Folly Artist (Sound). I’ve also dabbled in Sound Editing.

Dungeons and Dragons. I play as well as run games (DMing). Mostly I play magic users (Sorcerer, Warlock, Bard, mostly Bard).

I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do after graduating from University, but the main thing that I want to try to do is create things. I have a large background in programming and computers, as well as film and sound. I want to post more on my YouTube channel and keep up with my bullet journal that I plan to start next year (that will help me with my language learning).

Fun Facts About Me:

Without doxxing myself, I attended the same high school as the creator of a popular TV show, as well as someone who was on an early season of the Voice (US).

I am a Gemini

My Hogwarts House is Ravenclaw, my Ilvermorny House is Thunderbird. My Patronus is White Mare, and my wand is a Cedar Wand with a Unicorn Hair core that is 14.5 inches in length with a Surprisingly Squishly flexibility.

I don’t have a favorite Pokemon. Although, my favorite game is Platinum and my favorite region is a tossup between Unova and Kalos.

My favorite season is Winter.

My MBTI is INFJ. My Enneagram is 9w1.

I play a billion instruments. Pretty much the only types of instruments I can’t play are brass instruments (e.g. trumpet, trombone, etc.). My first and best one is piano. My favorite is cello. I also sing; my voice type is kind of low baritone, kind of high bass--it’s weird. My vocal range is E2-G4.

My favorite animal is a fox. If it weren’t so bad to domesticate them, I would want to get one in the future.

I’m really good at remembering dates. For example, October 4th this year is when I started to decide to change my major.

Where does my url come from? I was trying to figure out what to choose when I thought of how I chose my Twitter handle (which is also my personal tumblr, linked in my description). It’s a combination of the mispronunciation of the German and Irish words for snow (Schnee and sneachta, respectively). So, I took the Icelandic words for snow and ice and changed it up a bit. Added the word Polyglot and Sakoris Polyglot was born.

My Duolingo: skeetcha My Memrise: skeetcha Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/skeetcha

[bambamramfan]

I've just returned from some travels throughout Southeast Asia, and I was struck once again by how pervasive and dominant American culture is worldwide. Our music, movies, celebrities, fashion, and sports are basically the lingua franca for all other cultures that would otherwise have nothing in common. I've encountered humble farmers in the Vilcabamba range of the Peruvian Andes that live at ~17,000 ft elevation in remote villages who harbor a passionate love for early 2000's era WrestleMania. I've met with Jordanian Bedouins who live in tents but can sing every word of Kanye West tracks. And now I've talked to Thai mahouts who live among elephants in the hills of Chiang Mai who have an eye for the apparel of Supreme, an overpriced American skateboarding brand

Sometimes it seems like this level of cultural penetration doesn't even make sense. Ads for televisions in Bangkok prominently featured the new Benedict Cumberbatch Grinch flick, which is strange when you consider that all of 0.7% of the country are Christian and they most likely lack the cultural context of Seussian canon to begin with. Other instances are genuinely sad: at the big S2O festival that closes out Songkran (the Thai New Year celebration), the stages for local acts - which included music, but also muay thai fights, for instance - were almost completely empty as everyone there congregated around C-list American acts like Steve Aoki and 3lau. Hearing a masseuse in a Thai bathhouse humming Drake's In My Feelings leads one to wonder just how much of the Buddhist nation's hypersexualization is attributable to western influence

However one media property above all others has stood out to me in my travels, and that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe Avengers films. This perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise given that it is the #1 highest grossing franchise of all time in terms of ticket sales, but these movies are culturally dominant all over the world. Ask a cabby in any city you find yourself in and even if he only makes it to the movies once every couple years he will tell you about his love for these films. The new one, Avengers: Endgame, just tripled the midnight screening records in China. Which is funny because...

Well, because the main hero of the MCU is called Captain America. He wears an American flag as a costume. He is, from his very origins - and this is played with in-universe, explicitly - a piece of outright propaganda for the US government. And this character is expressly the most heroic figure in the franchise, who other characters turn to for moral leadership because of his unimpeachable integrity and unquestionable virtue. He may not be the strongest or the fastest or the funniest of the heroes, but you can count on the guy in the stars and stripes who answers to the name 'America' to make the right calls and be the good-est good guy in every encounter. It is almost beyond parody how nakedly this franchise propagandizes its country to the world's youth - and it becomes even more absurd when you recognize that these other countries frequently lack the cultural context of the 80 years of cheesy comics we take for granted and are often encountering these characters for the first time fully-formed on the big screen

And this is fascinating because the Chinese government is very controlling about the media content that its citizens consume. There is a de jure quota on the number of foreign films admitted per year - currently 34 - and the State Council has banned entire areas of subject matter from appearing on its nations screens, e.g. time travel which critics speculate is to deter oblique commentary on current political affairs and/or fantasies of changing the fate of the nation. Homosexuality is also banned in Chinese media, leading films like Bohemian Rhapsody to become borderline incoherent in the wake of edits. Even cleavage has become restricted. Lastly, China has cracked down on "the promotion of Western lifestyles", noting that all programming must comply with Chinese Communist Party ideology. Yet somehow they've let the biggest film series in their country be about the heroic "Captain America", paragon of moral virtue, standing up to tyrants and despots, championing the dignity of the individual over the cold utilitarian calculus of the villain

I kept tossing these thoughts around my head as I watched little Thai boys run around with Captain America branded red white and blue squirt guns during the Songkran water festival. You could not dream of a more successful global propaganda campaign than what Disney has stumbled upon completely by accident (the Avengers films are largely the result of Marvel selling off its more popular characters e.g. Spidey, X-Men, etc during a rough financial period). And it's gotten to the point where these films are globally too popular to block; the very last thing Xi wants is to incentivize millions to get in the habit of bypassing party censors over something as trivial as a superhero flick

Which raises the question of exactly how far these films can go before encountering pushback from state censors. Iron Man 3 - starring, in RDJ's egotistical, alcoholic, womanizing, career capitalist Tony Stark, probably the exact antithesis of the attitudes the Chinese Communist Party is trying to inculcate in its citizenry - had a villain that was literally called 'The Mandarin' based on a yellow peril character devised during the Cold War, and was China's second highest grossing film of 2013. Now, granted, the cinematic version sidestepped the issue by making the character a blonde Anglo - as well as adding special Chinese only scenes in an attempt to appease cinema's fastest growing market. But what about when Disney won't budge on matters the CCP can't stomach? After recent rumblings about bringing an LGBT superhero to the screen - as is promised in Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises, as well - will China and similarly minded governments face a reckoning? As I see it their choices are A) entirely capitulate to Western values pervading their media; B) begin more aggressively blocking Western films, angering their citizens and corporations; or C) rely more and more heavily on Bohemian Rhapsody -style cuts in perpetuity, ushering in a future best defined by a hapless cgi animator editing in digital pants at the behest of some bureaucrat, frame by frame, forever

[writingsomestupidshitlovelies]

FMA AU; The Small Difference

I have this FMA AU where Ed saves a town from this whole big conspiracy that involved the town’s local church-- think the whole “Leto” situation except escalated times 100 and with a mini-civil war breaking out across this no-name area that the military has been neglecting. The whole area is kind of barren: food shortages, unreliable water source, crackpot doctors giving incorrect prescriptions, the whole shebang.

Anywhoot, when he’s done Saving Lives he gets up on this stone-pedestal type thing and stands before the crowd of people waiting for answers, and tells them what was happening and things he did/could do to help. Like he has a very basic knowledge of medicine/medical alchemy (he has automail and knows how to do basic maintenance on that, he and his brother had to do some pretty serious research on the human body to do the transmutation, and Ed healed himself after being impaled-- no matter how poorly or enhanced, he still had that basic knowledge.) and changed the acidity of the soil so things could grow better/ grew some of the crops faster, fixed the water filter, etc.

But while he’s giving this speech and telling people what he did and now what they should do, he inadvertently positioned himself so that the statue of their Goddess/messenger of their Goddess is directly behind him, so it looks like he has these huge stone wings. Their Goddess is one of truth and healing, and what has this boy done? He has healed their people from greed and illness and starvation, and he has unveiled the lies that were being fed to them. It helps that their religion has this well-known story of the Sword and his Shield, believed to be two parts of their Godess’ whole: Edward is more abrasive and blunt and honest but also caring and passionate (just like the truth should be); meanwhile, Alphonse is sweet and hopeful and determined (his mere presence can be healing at times). They see Al’s armor and it reminds them of this story: the person made of armor and the person that was completely made of metal/gold aside from his piercing eyes (Fullmetal, anybody?) and how the two were borne from man’s transgressions but the Goddess whispered to them and they became the most human of all. (Sorry for going into a bit of a rant here I am super interested in my made up religion lol)

So it doesn’t change anything. At first.

When Ed is on the run with Greedling they don’t do nothing. Greed does primarily want friends, and he knows Ed has to stay under the radar, but he is still Greed: he still wants power and fuck does he want to thrive after he beats down Father and his so-called siblings. So first they get disguised: Greed just wears his tacky clothes and, when not in their more animal forms, Heinkel and Darius just look like very confused and gruff dads. Ed needs to change: he gets some sort of haircut but Ed is Ed so he gets it in a bob or pixie cut or something super edgy. He disguises his automail by adding unnecessary flourishes to it: snakes or vines with flowers and skulls-- people associate him with the sleekest, newest models, now it looks like his arms are art pieces. Without the cloak and the hair and the different automail, most people don’t recognize him. Greedling’s group ends up saving a few towns and recruiting some more people: Ishvallans from slums, human chimera that are in hiding, hungry children without a home. As much as the entirety of the group try to pretend otherwise, the four and-a-half (does Greed-Ling count as two people??) original members are huge softies. 

And while they’re doing that? The town that Ed saved have been whispering. They see the wanted posters and frown. Because this boy saves lives. Because they’ve been following his misadventures and he’s helped so many people. Word of mouth lets them know that Ed and Al frequently help homeless people, pay off others’ debts, sit down and talk to someone on the knife’s edge, give thieves money and a stern talking to, help rebuild and feed and protect (without alchemy) in the Ishvallan districts. Edward is good, and they won’t believe this bullshit. They don’t believe that Ed is their Goddess, or even that he’s an angel of some sort, but there is this quiet belief that the Goddess crafted the Elric brothers herself, that she made them to save lives and bring goodness. They start rumbles of discontent. Contact people in towns the brothers had saved. It’s a quiet rebellion, but a rebellion none-the-less. People recognize Edward as the Fullmetal Alchemist and turn a blind eye, don’t call the authorities. They protest against more laws and officers than ever before. Something is stirring.

Ed and co. start a smear campaign against military officials they know are in on the whole “immortality” thing. With alchemy, the right lighting, and a camera, there isn’t a lot Ed can’t do. Scandals about officers sighted being at brothels or hitting a child are reported, mostly in gossip magazines, but the talk has started. Ed pays two little thief girls to cry and make say that this officer pushed them or threw their ice-cream money in the sewer or slapped their mother. He starts rumors about Lab Five and greedy old men that would take the lives of a whole country just for power and about a ruthless dictator who only acts innocent.  He encourages haunted ex-soldiers to talk to newspapers about the atrocities they were forced to commit. Anonymous women speak about how often the old men come to “see” them. Ed is thankful that Ling is part of their group because he never could have done this himself. Mustang is thankful because people in positions of power are weakening and he manages to pass a few laws and get a few people fired and get himself lined up for a promotion.

It all builds up when Greed remembers a base of operations full of fake philosopher's stones and chimeras and weapons. In order to take it out, Greedling needs a distraction. Ed, who has been hiding in slums and hanging out with the outcasts of Amestrian society, knows exactly what to do. He makes a monument. It takes a few days to set it up, but then he’s got it. It’s almost in the center of the city he’s in and it is covered in names. Designs of foreign desert plants line the oddly-rounded building. Ed has been speaking to survivor’s for months. He’s asked them if he could do this. It is the names of all the Ishvallan victims he has read and heard about. A statue of the Rockbells fitting a tired man with a new arm, of a now-dead Ishvallan with his arms and mouth open and beseeching eyes, of the real heroes of Ishval are scattered about. There’s a statue of Wrath, pleasant expression on his face and one hand on his sheathed sword and the other holding a leash. Collared to the leash is Kimblee, sadistic elation on his face and one armed stretched, crackling with alchemic energy. In front of him is an Ishvallan priest, face firm and determined, arms linked with Ishvallans that are faceless aside from piercing red eyes. Signs are in front of names and statues, giving estimated death tolls and heroic acts and anti-military sentiment. Of course the place is stormed. But people are already gathered around and inside. Ishvallans link arms just like in the statue around the monument because this is theirs, because they’ve given up so much but to finally see an acknowledgment? To see real stories and real names and the blunt, harsh truth? They won’t give in. They didn’t before and they won’t now. Guns are pointed at them, and the hesitation to shoot isn’t even there. Hate crimes done by the military are a constant, no one will even look twice at this. But then, a woman runs in front of them, eyes hard and mouth thin. She’s Amestrian. “My mother,” she begins, “died for something she didn’t believe in. She died in your dumb war so that my little brother wouldn’t be drafted. I won’t let you kill anyone else. Not again.” And she’s crying, but her arms are spread and she means it.  “Move.” One Amestrian woman could be a scandal, but swept under the rug. The soldiers stand firm. “No.” says one of her friends, standing besides her and linking arms like the Ishvallans behind them. “We let this happen once. We will not let history repeat.” And her friends join. The crowd thins as Amestrians stand in front of Ishvallans, arms linked, a silent but loud promise: You have to go through us to get to them. They use their privilege to protect, this once. They are all scared, terrified, but seeing the names and reading the stories somehow makes it all real: genocide. Not a war, genocide.  One soldier points his gun, finger on the trigger, and Ed decides he’s done hiding. “Instead of killing innocent civilians, why not pick on someone who can fight back? ‘Course, you’ll need a hundred more of you canon fodder to beat me.” He leads them on a wild goose chase throughout the city. He gets hurt, of course he does; they’re going for the kill and, just like with Kimblee, Ed is still going for the mercy blows. People see this. Officers notice. Something, again, stirs.  Greedling gets the stones, recruits the chimeras, and blows that base to kingdom come.  They’ve been destabilizing the military for awhile now, and Wrath has been unable to help in the preparations for the Promised Day because his main job is keeping the military afloat; without the military, the whole plan crumbles.  People rally, calling for officers to be discharged. For Bradley to resign or explain himself. There are riots in the streets and abuse against high ranking military officers by civilians. Ed becomes the face of a revolution. With all this focus on him, Mustang and his team can act a bit more freely, despite being separated. Laws are almost absently passed or remade or taken down entirely. Winry is giving poor people automail those people turn around and help others; they all realize that the military should not have abandoned them, that they have to help each other, and they are all angry and begin planning attacks of their own. Greedling makes several bases of their own, full of “minions” (hungry children and lab experiments and amputees and those with disfigurements. A home for the homeless. A war base and safe place for the oppressed.) and with the focus on Ed, manages to launch attacks of his own. Greed has been alive for centuries, although he has forgotten much of it, and Ling grew up in politics with assassins and war, they fight the government like they were born to do it. 

It’s a civil war; unlike in Liore, it is no longer one sided. The civilians fight their dictator, military officials fight from within the system. 

This is all I have for it, so far. It’s very ramble-y but vgadhbjnfk I refuse to believe that for about 6 months Greedling and co. sat around and goofed off like Ed has a saving people thing and Greed is antsy and wants (to know) things and Ling wants power and he wants it now. Ed is like pure chaos in a five-foot bundle like you can’t tell me he sat around and didn’t even try to do what he could from the outside?? He is a literal genius smh

Also, you might have noticed that I mentioned the Ishvallans a lot and that’s because there needs to be more about and with them. The manga/anime does handle it pretty well but there is so much potential that isn’t used. Also I am a culture-nerd and love learning about different religions and cultures and architecture so I need this ok???

[lycorogue]

Who Wants to Meet My OCs? (Part 2 - Gyateara)

First and foremost, I meant to have this whole series to be sort of churned out the same day/week as Part 1. Life.... didn’t let that happen. I then figured “okay, I’ll update the series every Sunday” and then yesterday came and went...

Regardless, from the NEXT POST onward, I’m aiming to update every Sunday. Now, back to the series itself.

Ever since at least November, I’ve wanted to do individual posts for each of my OCs so you could meet them all. Well, I’m finally getting off my butt and working on this massive project (we’ll ignore that I’m spending hours working on this instead of my ML fanfic.... >_>).

In Part 1, I gave a broad overview of this whole Meet My OCs series, as well as gave some generic IRL background to the two main worlds my OCs hail from:

1) Gyateara

2) Glitches

Well, in this part of the series, I’m going to stay IRL as I explain where each individual OC within the Gyateara universe came from. If this is interesting to you, feel free to check below the break.

If you’d rather just skip ahead to the character bios themselves, my first one about my Glitches character Willow should be up in two weeks (sorry for the wait).

If I’m talking about Gyateara characters, I should probably talk about the one that first birthed the world: 

Amara Yori

Amara was my first-ever D&D character. I had known of the game for ages since my father used to play it frequently (and apparently roped my mother into at least running the monsters so she’d be included; ignoring that she’d rather not be included XD). 

I really got interested in D&D when I was a teen and saw the gorgeously stylized covers for AD&D ver 3.5. My father had passed away before officially introducing me to the game (although we did used to play Dungeon all the time, so that was a start...), and none of my friends were going to touch that “nerd culture” with a 10ft pole, so I simply admired the books, but never actually played. Then I went to college and managed to Nerd Out.

Hubby (then boyfriend) offered to help me build my first-ever character, but in 2004 the D&D 3.5 expansions were so massive I had far too many choices to choose from.

So Hubby had me go through some of his extra minis, and let me pick out one that I really liked. With his help, I ended up with the 2003 version of the Wood Elf Skirmisher.

Based solely on this mini, I started building Amara.

Hubby suggested that I try out the Scout class for my first one, since I couldn’t choose between a Rogue, Ranger, or Druid, and Scout is sort of in between at least the Rogue and Ranger classes. For whatever reason - I can’t remember it now - I also decided I wanted to play a half-elf.

Upon reading the generic backstory description the D&D books had for the Scout class, I figured my character needed some sort of Tragic BackstoryTM that would explain her scouting skills. Things like trap finding and dismantling, masterful rope use skills, hiding and tracking skills, and connection to animals.

I was in a big The Vision of Escaflowne kick at the time - which shows up in a couple other characters’ backstories - and was fascinated with the history between Van Fanel’s parents. Van’s human father Goau stumbled upon Varie, a Draconian woman, in the woods one day. Draconians have the ability to manifest feathered wings which allow them flight. It was rare to see a Draconian, and her beauty - with her wings shimmering in the moonlight as she waded in a small pool of water - mesmerized Goau. He instantly fell in love and brought Varie home to be his wife. The duo seemed to love each other deeply. Amara’s parents, on the other hand....

I’ll get into more when I break down their actual bios, but I took the idea of “Human stumbles upon exotic non-human in the woods and instantly marries her” and twisted it slightly. Amara’s mother was very much emotionally, and possibly even physically (I haven’t confirmed this yet), abused by Amara’s father. Amara, being a half-elf, also had to deal with abuse at the hands of many of her fellow clansmen - both the human and the elven clans; pretty much exclusively because she was a “half-breed” (Yes, I was really into InuYasha then too).

As I kept building Amara, I kept adding more and more tragedy to her backstory. I do enjoy what I created, but, especially after reading a lot of posts here on Tumblr, I’m afraid her history is nothing but a giant knotted ball of cliches and tropes. For now, though, I’m running with it. Perhaps I can figure out work-arounds later....

I never did get to play more than a session or two with Amara before the game disbanded (which seems to be a repeat thing with my gaming group), but she still lives on in my mind, and eventually in Gyateara.

Natalie

As I mentioned above, The Vision of Escaflowne very much inspired me while I was working on the earliest bits of Gyateara. Therefore, Natalie is your basic Isekai protagonist.

For those who don’t know the term (I didn’t know an official genre term existed until about a year ago), Isekai refers to a subgenre of fantasy/speculative fiction where the main character is abruptly teleported from their world to a new one; usually one with a fantasy setting.

It’s a massive subgenre and includes most of the fantasy animes I’ve watched:

InuYasha

The Vision of Escaflowne

Fushigi Yuugi

The Devil is a Part-Timer

The Rise of the Shield-hero

The Saga of Tanya the Evil

The Familiar of Zero

How to NOT Summon a Demon Lord

Sword Art Online (technically)

.Hack//Sign (technically)

Digimon (first season, specifically)

Psyren (manga)

The list can go on, but that’s not the point of this post. Getting back to the actual point, I clearly enjoyed this genre without even realizing there was a term for it, and created my own Isekai story. Natalie is from our world, but is abruptly teleported to Gyateara’s main Northern Isle, where she must save the country from being destroyed by a power-hungry, put painfully charismatic, villain.

I had taken elements from Kagome (InuYasha), Hitomi (The Vision of Escaflowne), Miaka (Fushigi Yuugi), and I think I had Ariel (The Little Mermaid) in there as well at one point. She was - and still kind of is - just “Generic Isekai Female Protagonist”, which is one of the main reasons the story she was in failed so soon into NaNoWriMo back in... 2014, I think. Almost a solid decade after I started dreaming up her Isekai story. She definitely needs to go back to the drawing board a bit to be properly fleshed out.

Connor

He was from the same story as Natalie. Connor was a denizen of Gyateara’s Northern Isles, and became Natalie’s traveling companion as he helped her try to find a way home. Ya know, that old Isekai chestnut. I even leaned heavily into the cliche and had the two of them fall in love throughout their journey. Which would lead to a third-act twist of “Okay, we can defeat the villain, but then what? Could they stay together? Would Natalie stay on Gyateara? Will Connor instead try to go home to Earth with her?” Real original. I know. Add in that Connor was a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a character. Grab a snack, this is going to take a minute...

Connor’s traits included:

The basic backstory and drive of the player character in the video game Fable, in which his father was killed, his mother and sister tortured (and presumed dead, only to be proven still alive and captured), his home village burnt down, and he was taken in by the local guild so the guild master could train Connor to become the hero the GM believed Connor was prophesied to be.

The half-demon traits of InuYasha (InuYasha), which transformed him into a sort of were-cat. His mother, a full-demon, could become a 15ft (4.57m) tall panther with split tails. Connor’s half-demon heritage was hidden from him, and he only transformed under extreme moments of stress.

Yes. The “love interest is the only one who can snap the protag back from a monstrous rage” trope was heavily evident throughout the story.

His overall look was inspired by Link (Legend of Zelda video game franchise). His basic fighting style - swordsmanship and expert archery - was a sort of tag-teamed “thieving” from Link as well as Van (The Vision of Escaflowne).

A highly resistant, and begrudging submission to become the Hero of Prophecy lifted off of Tamahome (Fushigi Yuugi).

I know he was much more influenced by Van from Escaflowne when I was first making him. I even used Van as a reference guide when I tried to create character head shots of him. I just can’t recall now what else I swiped from that character.

I feel like there are also other male anime/video game protags I swiped traits from, but I can’t recall them anymore. Regardless, I threw them in a blender, and poured out the mixture that became Connor.

Jolene Crisslebalm

Ah, the character whose last name I always have to look up, because I can’t recall how I spelled it. Good starting point, right?

I am a very reserved person. In particular, a very sexually reserved person. But I do enjoy sex, and I love the act of flirting, and the “thrill of the chase” when it comes to dating, so a part of me always wonders what I would be like if I had let go of my reservations and just enjoyed the carnal pleasures of life.

So, two characters in particular - Willow (from Glitches) and Jolene - are my exploration of that Path Not Traveled. 

A friend of mine was hosting a D&D campaign via Roll20.net, and wondered if I wanted in. I hadn’t been involved in a D&D game in a year or so at that point, and I’ve enjoyed playing a couple of one-offs with him DMing, so I leapt at the chance to join. I had almost always played a form of Rogue class (hence the internet persona) in previous D&D campaigns, so I decided to stay the course, but with a twist I hadn’t tried before.

I wanted Jolene to be a sort of reluctant adventurer, preferring instead to be a cat burgler, but I also wanted that sexual/sensual exploration of character. So, she was a traveling prostitute (not exactly legal without proper ties to a brothel; much like a Sex Trade Guild sort of thing), but she also used her “alone time with clients” to scope out the place to see if it’s worth robbing.

Fast forward about 3 years, and I end up watching the first episode of the Freeform Marvel series Cloak and Dagger... where I saw Tandy doing the same thing, but roofying her targets instead of sleeping with them first... Great minds, and all that?

Eh, Jolene figures “might as well make money off of them before coming back and robbing the rest... less to carry later...”

In the end, while Jolene had an.... interesting run... and one I actually did enjoy role playing, even if it did leave me a bit frustrated afterwards (a good frustrated?)... Jolene just didn’t fit the world the DM created, nor did she fit in quite as well as I would have hoped with the other players.

They were all AMAZING players, by the way. Some of the best role players I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, and such fantastic writers as well. BTW, we wrote out everything in the Roll20 chat log instead of verbally playing or using video-chat. I must admit, I was quite envious of their skills. It was just a tighter knit group, and I wasn’t able to feel out their play-style well enough to continue with the group. Eventually they all had to go their separate ways anyway when their schedules no longer lined up.

Still, I LOVED Jolene, and she was the D&D character I had the joy of running the longest, so she NEEDED to live on. She did, in my first NaNoWriMo “win”. I managed to hit those 50,000 words, but I still had about 3/5ths of her story to write. 

See, while coming up with Jolene’s jaded attitude towards love and her pull towards a more hedonistic lifestyle, I went with the good old cliche of Heartbreak Was The Culprit. (With so many cliches in my character builds, is it a wonder why I just stick with fanfiction... the characters are already created...)

Jolene had her heart broken five times between the ages of 13 and 21. She was the type who fell quick into love, and fell HARD into it, and always felt intensely betrayed by her lovers when they left her. To be fair... they did routinely leave her for a woman of better social standing, or - in her youth - someone more willing to put out, or just straight up abandon her without so much as a farewell note. Eventually, she gave up on trying to find love, and joined a brothel, and then the thieves guild, and then headed out on her own from there.

The DM thought it unlikely that she was a prostitute for the better part of 5 years without a single pregnancy, so he rolled for it, and Jolene had one miscarriage, one still born, and one healthy child she gave up for adoption. I was not expecting to include that in her backstory, but it actually worked fairly well.

And all of that was the subject of my NaNo project: Lost Loves and Paramours. Jolene’s full biography leading up to the campaign: every man she fell in love with, every person she slept with, the one client who tried to murder her to avoid a scandal of his lust getting the better of him, the pain of her miscarry, the devastation of her stillborn, the heart break of giving up her surviving child, the struggles against a stalker, and her over-all YOLO attitude.

(Bitmoji is a beautiful thing...)

Well, second long post of this series is now complete. Next week, I’ll talk about the IRL inspiration for my Glitches characters. Thank you so much for indulging me on these epic ramblings.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

Four years ago I married my high school sweetheart. We gathered under a chuppah of cherry blossoms, twinkle lights, and kente cloth in our adopted home of Washington, D.C., and became a family. We were madly in love and full of hope for our future. When we consecrated ourselves to each other, we also became a symbol of America. A type of America you either fight for or fight against: a black Jewish family.

We are the most American family I know. What could be more American than a Thanksgiving table laden with jollof rice and kosher turkey? We are a mixed-race melting pot, a Jewish African Norman Rockwell painting, boating on Cape Cod and drinking beer in Milwaukee and road tripping the California coast. We are a happy story of children and grandchildren of immigrants flourishing. We are the American dream, the cover of the brochure. There are people who make a point of vigorously shaking our hands, of knocking over other people to greet us at synagogues, of welcoming us with comical cheerfulness. We are a stock photo, a campaign ad. Sometimes, I literally catch myself posing. We make them happy and they want to be our friends. We are the America they want to believe in. I don’t mind, because I want to believe in it too.

That was the picture we had at the time. To some, we were a dream. To others, a nightmare. But we would soon discover that some people thought what makes America great is white people.

When I got pregnant, I cried tears of joy. I told my family I was three weeks along at Passover and they screamed. I passed on wine and chopped liver and my cousins whispered and smiled knowingly. I was glowing. My belly grew and something strange happened. I started writing. With every kick and every ultrasound I lost the ability to be quiet. To be a stock photo of smiling American multiculturalism. I lost my capacity to stomach inequity when I learned I was having a daughter. I wanted her to have more than me and to demand more for herself. I began to demand things for her I never would have asked for myself. It was my first act of motherhood. I kicked up trouble, demanding movements for justice make way for my kid. My husband worried and made blueberry pancakes—the only thing I was willing to eat at the time.

At a work event, a favorite colleague saw me and ran over to rub my belly and squeal. She cooed over ultrasounds and asked my due date and showed me pictures of her grandkids. Then she asked me if I understood what it means to have a black child in America. Was I prepared? I nodded yes. I had read bell hooks and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Chocolate Hair Vanilla Care and the Curly Hair Bible. I had watched all 14 episodes of Eyes on the Prize. I had studied for the exam and expected a good grade. She nodded with approval and said, “You’ll have to be her advocate. You’ll have to fight for her every day. But you’ll be good at it, I think. Just don’t ever forget, you are not a mama to a white child.”

On Election Day, 2016, I was eight months pregnant. Boxes of paintings and books sat at our feet, as we were still settling into our first house. I was too pregnant and exhausted to get up the stairs, so we watched election results from the sofa bed. I fell asleep and woke up to each new state being called for one side or the other. My husband was afraid I would get so upset at the results that I would go into labor. I breathed deeply and steeled myself. The baby kicked happily.

The next day, I went to work at 6:00 a.m. and started making plans. I listened to Hamilton. “I am ready to fight,” I told myself. “Breathe deep—don’t go into labor.” I stopped in the coffee shop next to my office. People were crying. It was pouring in Washington and it was hard to see where people’s tears ended and the rain began. I rubbed my belly and told my daughter it would be OK. It had to be.

A few weeks later, nine months pregnant, I was informed I was listed on a neo-Nazi website as one of many “Jews who someone should shut up.” My husband was terrified. He insisted we take a day off work to determine if there was any credible physical threat to me or his child. I was mostly amused, as George Soros and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were also on the list. Thanks for the career boost, Nazis! But my husband did not laugh. We had a long talk with the Southern Poverty Law Center and they assured us there is no immediate danger. My husband installed an alarm system anyway.

Not long after, our daughter was born happy and healthy. She slept through Inauguration Day as I paced anxiously around the house. Our neighbors were braced for riots that never came and one advised me to get off the streets with my daughter. It felt just like it did when MLK died, she warned. When my husband finally got home from work, I cried and buried my face in his chest. “It’s hormones,” I lied. In the morning I dressed my daughter up in pink footie pajamas and a pink hat and posted a picture of her on Facebook with the caption Nasty Woman in Training. I wondered if one day she’d be disappointed to find out I didn’t go to the Women’s March. But I also wondered why the march leadership refused to include families like mine in their anti-oppression statement. Now that I could look my baby in the eye, I found that my inability to be quiet only grew.

Then, that August, we changed from being a happy multicultural family to being a terrified one. It happened slowly and then all at once. The anti-Semitic graffiti by our synagogue, the nooses hung on D.C. campuses, our friends running from their JCCs clutching their pregnant bellies and their babies. Then the rally in Charlottesville changed everything. I watched people march against our existence as my baby slept in my lap. They were young people. I stared at her little face, all tuckered out from crawling through the yard in the August heat. Who could hate her? I realized that who we are had become something to worry over, an issue to be handled, no longer something to celebrate.

People called me up to tell me they planned on confronting Nazis at a rally in Boston. They wanted to stand up for families like mine. They wanted to be good friends. I begged them to stay home, and open their wallets or their laptops instead. I said, “Stay away from the Nazis with the guns.”

What did it all mean? When your personal life is political, and your family identity makes people angry, you never know who will push you in front of a train and who will drive the train. So I never shut up. My colleagues call me brave. The truth is, it’s not bravery that drives me, it’s the terror of first-time parenthood coupled with the terror of raising a black child in America and the lingering taste of the Holocaust on my Jewish tongue. I am not brave, just very loud. The loudness makes me feel safe because I know evil grows in silence.

Every day there are new questions: What does it mean to raise a black Jewish daughter in the age of Trump? How do we keep her safe? Am I making her less safe or more safe by raising my voice? How do we give her a Judaism that will embrace and love her? What if all the Jewish summer camps have no black girls? What if American feminism continues to betray her? Where should we live, and how will it inform her identity and self-esteem? How will I teach her about slavery, about the Holocaust, about the Klan? I used to think I’d tell her a story with a happy ending—an imperfect country on the right path. A black president Mama campaigned for. Baby pictures on Hillary Clinton’s inauguration day in a Run Like a Girl onesie.

Now I am losing faith that it’s still possible. I threw the onesie in the trash. We scour the internet for books with black Jewish kids. We read to her all the time.

Whether you see us as a brochure for American multiculturalism or as a threat, we inspire opinions. People have takes on us. We are something to be celebrated or something to be afraid of or something to be angry about. We are never just a family, until we are alone, in our own home, surrounded by stuffed animals and trucks and pink hair bows and books and so much love. My baby is loud, just like her mother.

The day neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, was the day I stopped recognizing the path America was on. We were never a perfect place: I’d been in a driving-while-black incident with my husband and I had had a swastika drawn on my synagogue as a child. But before Charlottesville I believed we were on the path to justice and I believed in the American dream and I naively dove into a life more perilous than the one I was born into by becoming the sole inhabitant of white privilege in my home. Despite it all, I would dive all over again. I love my family.

This coming Aug. 12, white supremacists will march again. As plans currently stand, they will march just a few miles from our home in Washington, D.C. They will celebrate their macabre anniversary. They will march against our lives. They will march for death. We will not walk beside them. We won’t dignify them with our presence. We will take our daughter swimming in our neighborhood pool and feed her extra treats and hold her so close. We will have an escape route planned and a go-bag in our car. We will be a family.

[xb-squaredx]

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate DLC Speculation

With Super Smash Bros. Ultimate right around the corner, it’s natural to look towards the future, rather than just be satisfied with what we already have. With that in mind, since I already completely botched ALL of my choices for potential newcomers in the base game, so let’s try it again with the DLC characters we’ll be getting! Surely I’ll get at least ONE right!

So, to preface this, I do have to acknowledge a bit of a wrench in the works when it comes to speculation: the Piranha Plant. A part of me feels like making a Piranha Plant playable is a message to us: nothing is off the table. That we should expect the unexpected. That Sakurai is a beast that cannot be tamed and does whatever he wants! However…it’s also possible this is just a flex of Sakurai’s creative muscle, and just something he wanted to do. With the news that Nintendo chose the DLC characters for Ultimate, I’m assuming this was Sakurai’s one chance to rock the boat and we’ll likely get some more “safe” or “expected” choices for DLC. That said, with SO many potential characters apparently off the table as either Assist Trophies or Spirits, there is this general question of “Just WHO could they possibly add now?” Well, I have some ideas…

Smash Bros. and Fire Emblem have a strange relationship, and we’ve had characters added to the former to promote the latter before, so for me one of the few no-brainer picks is a character from Fire Emblem: Three Houses, slated for 2019. As of now, we really don’t know all that much about the game, and while there seem to be three main protagonists, I think it’d be a toss-up as to which one we’d get. But with Fire Emblem being treated as a major franchise for Nintendo now, it just makes sense. Fans might get upset, but maybe if we’re lucky they won’t use a sword!

I think in general most choices are going to be geared towards promoting UPCOMING games, but at the same time, the Xenoblade Chronicles series might see another rep. Why? Well, because Sakurai clearly likes the games, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 sold well and he’s already placed a TON of Spirits and Mii Costumes from that game in Ultimate already. Now sure, Rex getting a costume seems like it’s a nail in the coffin, but I look at it more as Sakurai whetting fan’s appetites for the eventual DLC addition. Now, if it’d be Pyra instead, or having Rex and Pyra as a weird duo character, I’m not sure, but I’d honestly be kinda surprised if they don’t get in as DLC. The Torna: The Golden Country DLC campaign is also fresh in people’s minds, so I’d still say there’s a good chance. That said…

I’m still holding onto some hope that Elma could make it in as a rep for Xenoblade Chronicles X as a bit of a curve-ball. There are rumors that X could see a port to Switch and putting Elma into Smash is totally possible as a way to give that port some good press. Now, Monolith Soft itself hasn’t exactly spoken like a port is a sure-thing, and really it’s probably better to go with the more relevant reps with Rex and Pyra, but I can dream!

As far as promotional characters go, I feel that Nintendo might be looking to pimp their mobile games, and we just got Dragalia Lost not too long ago. The first original IP on mobile (albeit in conjunction with CyGames), it seems like a real missed opportunity to not use Ultimate to promote the game. Granted, there COULD be Spirits or something instead, but a playable character isn’t off the table at all. I also hear rumors that a Granblue Fantasy character might be in the cards, which is also done by CyGames, but rather than go with a franchise that…well…isn’t well known outside of Japan and lacks ties to Nintendo, why not go with their new mobile IP? A mobile IP that’s been making more than either Super Mario Run or Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Just something to think about.

So that’s three spots, roughly, all from Nintendo. But I think it’s fair to expect at least one more third party rep. I wouldn’t expect more than two honestly, and that’s even pushing it I think. But with third party, the sky is the limit with possible inclusions. Pick a company, any company and there’s totally at least one possible choice from each; Square Enix, Bethesda, Ubisoft, even Microsoft! So who can we expect? Doom Slayer? Banjo and Kazooie? A Slime from Dragon Quest? Honestly, the more I think of it…I’m not really sure who I could trim it down to.

You could argue that Doom Slayer being put in would be a great way to promote Doom Eternal I guess, and I guess Bethesda has been in talks with Nintendo regarding Smash…but would that really fit? Would that be something Nintendo would have chosen? Hard to say. The same goes for characters from the Fallout or Elder Scrolls series; they don’t strike me as franchises Nintendo feels all that bothered to help promote. We’ve seen that Square Enix is pretty hard to work with; such as limiting Cloud’s Midgar stage to two songs and rumors that he was the hardest character to get back. I kinda feel like Nintendo wouldn’t want to keep playing with them. They have tons of possible choices to go with if Nintendo IS willing to play ball with them, but I’m not super confident in any one choice. Dragon Quest is arguably their biggest franchise, so that would make total sense to put in someone from those games…but there’s always a possibility they’d go with something else. Maybe Geno fans would get thrown a bone…but I’m not holding my breath. Regarding Ubisoft, I wouldn’t say that Rayman is out of the question, really, and he seems like the most likely pick. Maybe that random trophy he got in Smash 4 can be topped with a playable appearance. But then there’s the curious case of Banjo and Kazooie. While once Nintendo characters and allegedly considered for inclusion in at least one of the games, they’re owned by Microsoft now, and it’s pretty unlikely that a direct competitor with Nintendo would be willing to lend a character out.  Microsoft is on better terms with Nintendo than one would expect, nowadays though. With Minecraft on Nintendo platforms (with Super Mario skins, on top of Banjo skins), Microsoft’s Phil Spenser stating multiple times that he’d love to see the pair in Smash and the fact that he’s likely a pretty big fan request…it IS possible. But we come back again to the question of if this is on Nintendo’s radar. While there are plenty of thirty-somethings that would love Banjo and Kazooie to make it in, I’d argue someone like Steve from Minecraft is a far more logical choice, even if he isn’t my ideal pick.  

Honestly, I think one of the more likely candidates is Tekken’s Heihachi. Arguably the face of the fighting games series, he had a Mii costume in Smash 4 and despite Namco co-developing this game, so far only Pac-Man is repping from them, so why not add another? Seems odd that Capcom, Sega and Konami get two reps (or more with echoes) while Namco still has one. So really, if I have to pick two that seem most likely…I’d go with Rayman and Heihachi. Not my ideal picks if I’m being honest, but they make the most sense.

Overall, I think that’s it. I’m prepared to be mostly wrong here, but it sure is fun to speculate! It’d be actually kind of cool to be completely wrong here and get five total surprises. Regardless of who we get, we already have SO much and I’m sure to love anyone they add anyway. I have faith in Sakurai and his team, and with just about a week to go until Ultimate launches, we’ll have plenty to occupy our free time before any of these characters get confirmed anyway I’m sure.

Until next time,

-B

[goloyieng]

With OTE (Overtime Elite) League, Is the Basketball World ready for the establishement of its Academies as in Association Football?

Luka Doncic, the Dallas Mavericks $200 million, 4 year contract dollar star player went to a Real Madrid Basketball Academy at a young age and came out shooting the light outs in the most elitest league in the world, the NBA. In North America, particularly the USA, they have elite high schools, college basketball programs and NBA development league also known as the NBA G league, and with the G league, young players would be institutionally forced to play with amateur, or aging players with no future in the NBA, or Turkish Airlines EuroLeague. European football(soccer, or association football) have centuries old academies owned by the European footballing elite clubs such as Liverpool, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern and now with cash stacked giants, especially the likes of Paris Saint Germain, Manchester City and Chelsea. Thanks to the visionary exploits of Kevin Ollie, the former winning coach of the 2014 University of Connecticut Men's basketball NCAAM Champions, OTE was created out of a sheer desire to develop the future elite basketball stars and create a conducive environment where they could compete again each other; perhaps influence their game to the next level. Zion Williamson, the New Orleans Pelicans star player marketball value at Duke University was $7 million. This is the right environment where they will be able to market their images, and overall their value. Rapper Drake, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant and the world richest man, Jeff Bezos, invested in Overtime Elite.

From Martenzie Johnson's the Undefeated and Espn article:

Overtime Elite pro basketball league launching in September, will compensate high school-aged players

According to OTE president and commissioner, Aaron Ryan, some current players feel their high schools don't offer adequate academic and skills development and want to challenge current NCAA rules that don't allow them to profit from their likeness.

"This offering and opportunity not only gives you pro-caliber training and development in a facility that models and starts to simulate what life will be like in the NBA ... but it also provides a six-figure salary," said Ryan, who worked in the NBA for 22 years, including most recently as vice president of the NBA 2K league.

Each OTE player will earn at least $100,000 guaranteed for the season. The league also plans to compensate players through bonuses, equity in Overtime, and revenues from a player's name, image and likeness, the latter an NCAA issue that is currently being discussed in Congress.

Along with full health care benefits, OTE will offer up to $100,000 for players to use toward college tuition in the event a player doesn't go on to play in the NBA or other professional leagues.

In lieu of a traditional high school curriculum, the league will offer an academic program that it says will focus on "financial literacy, and media training."

On a Different Note

The Ugandan Twitter Blogger Charles Onyango - Obbo says, "Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote says barriers at borders making intra-Africa trade difficult, so most businesses prefer to ship from China than deal with the hassles at borders. Says Africa Free Trade would earn his businesses $12 billion a year. Dangote says today it takes 14 days to move goods to Ghana from Nigeria, which should ideally take 10-12 hours. Takes 10 days to move goods to Togo, which is just 270Kms to Lagos (Eliud Kipchoge could run there in less than half that time, I guess)." Full Article is on Salaam Gateway website: https://t.co/u2vpvtFKOb?amp=1

Professor Ndubuisi Ekekwe: I have accepted to speak at Growth Africa Conference which is bringing thought-leaders and innovators together, to discuss and marshal out how to build $billion entrepreneurs for this age of app utility. The planting season is here and many investors and knowledge builders are planting in Africa. We will enter the growth phase very soon.

I expect a massive harvest from 2026. Forbes Africa millionaire list, take note; everything you have there will change because harvest time is near. Tekedia Institute, Africa’s most diverse school, with 39 nations represented, will serve as the knowledge partner of this program.

There will never be a great nation without growing companies; let’s grow Nigeria/Africa!

Visit: www.growthatafricaconference.com, to get your ticket.

From the Zimbabwean British Entrepreneur, Sir Strive Masiyiwa

Products from the most important entrepreneurs on earth!

__Time to shine, and help others shine, too

Last month I gave a #ShoutOut to a few professions I admire most. Many of you added to my list, including one of the most important jobs on earth -- so important that not one of us would be alive today without these entrepreneurs…

The women and men who grow our food! And I don’t just mean our millions of smallholder farmers [mostly women] who help feed the African continent through their daily toil. I mean the emerging array of innovators in agritech, agbiotech, “Novel Farm Systems” and many many applications of fintech and AI designed to increase productivity, market links, capital access, and profitability in this critical industry.

With the rich land on our continent, there's just no reason why our governments should have to import tens of billions of dollars of food each year, [even though the balance of trade in at least a few countries is better than it used to be]. You all know by now that there’s a trillion+ dollar opportunity in Africa’s agrifood industry.

__But who's going to profit?

Our own agrifood Afripreneurs, innovators and industrious workers ... or others? Will jobs be created or lost with these new technologies? It’s really up to us to decide.

So! I have a little project for some of you. First, let me introduce you to this year’s GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize Top 14. These seven men and seven women agrifood entrepreneurs (ages 18-35) are going to compete online on Wednesday, 8 September at the AGRF Summit to win two prizes of $50k and four others of $2,500. Big congratulations to these innovators for getting this far, out of about 3,300+ registered applicants who started the process!

# Emanuel N. Kungu, Afri-EcoFeeds, Tanzania, https://bit.ly/TOP26-AfriEcoFeeds

Recycles waste from the food processing industry such as food peels and trimmings into low cost animal feed for poultry, pigs and dairy cows (M)

# Costantine Edward Herman, Agrilife, Tanzania, https://bit.ly/TOP26-AgriLife

Introduced pioneering waste-to-nutrient insect technology using black soldier fly larvae to up-cycle organic waste into eco-friendly protein for animal feed (M)

# Michael Ogundare, Crop2Cash, Nigeria, https://bit.ly/TOP26-Crop2Cash

Proprietary technology enables smallholder farmers to receive digital payments and build their financial identity while also making credit accessible (M)

# Baraka Jeremiah Chijenga, Kilimofresh Foods Africa Limited, Tanzania, https://bit.ly/TOP26-KilimoFresh

Trades and markets all types of foods, grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, reducing post-harvest losses via cold storage while powering all activities with renewable energy (M)

# Nana Yaw Antwi-Boasiako, ProSect Feed Ltd, Ghana, https://bit.ly/TOP26-ProSectFeed

Researches, farms, processes, and markets carefully selected insects as a sustainable and affordable source of protein to feed poultry (M)

# Gabriel Eze, Rural Farmers Hub, Nigeria, https://bit.ly/TOP26-RuralFarm

Provides agricultural services with a core product called Capture™ which uses a proprietary algorithm and big data to assess crop and soil health, then generates near to real-time farming insights and advice (M)

# Nshimiyimana Alexandre, Sanit Wing Ltd, Rwanda, https://www.sanitwing.net/

With 90% of his suppliers being local women farmers, Sanit Wing processes and manufactures locally sourced, pesticide-free avocados into high-value oils, cosmetics and soaps (M)

# Fily Keita, Agrowomen, Mali, https://bit.ly/TOP26-AgroWomen

Adds value to local cereals and oilseeds by processing sesame seeds and producing cold press and natural sesame oil, snacks, and tasteful rice, working with women farmers’ cooperatives as key partners (F)

# Tracy Kimathi, Tree_Sea Mals/Baridi, Kenya, http://baridi.co.ke/

Developed and introduced Baridi - innovative solar-powered cold rooms and IoT remote access, with vision to reduce post slaughter loss throughout East Africa's livestock value chain (F)

# Sepenica Darko, FarmerTribe Company Limited, Ghana, https://bit.ly/TOP26-FarmerTribe

A one stop shop for smallholder farmers in last mile communities to access quality and improved seed, agrochemicals and fertilizer, agronomic training, extension services and market linkages (F)

# Diana Orembe, NovFeed, Tanzania, https://bit.ly/TOP26-NovFeed

Uses a proprietary technology to up-cycle organic waste into high-protein fish feed and organic fertilizer using bacteria and the black soldier fly, while providing data to fish farmers to help them improve their yield (F)

# Evangelista Chekera, Passion Poultry, Zimbabwe, https://bit.ly/TOP26-PassionPoultry

Designed and now manufacture and distribute innovative proprietary poultry equipment for small scale urban farmers (F)

# Chidinma Eriobu, Phronesis Foods Nigeria Limited, Nigeria, https://bit.ly/TOP26-PhronesisFoods

Organically processes and packages local Ukwa (breadfruit) for sale in both local and global markets (F)

# Jolenta Joseph, Sanavita Company Limited, Tanzania, https://sanavita.co.tz/about-us/

Produces and processes orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, Pro Vitamin A maize, and high iron and zinc beans as well as runs awareness campaigns and nutrition education programs (F)

Now #Senior&JuniorClass, this is what I want you to do:

This is the real deal and next year it could be some of you! I have been talking to you for years about what investors look for, and have shared lots of information about how to pitch. I have told you about the 3Ps and Drucker's most important equation... [you know which one I mean].

Now it’s your turn. Let’s build each other up, but also be candid. Take a look at the 3-minute pitches with the criteria the Generation Africa GoGettaz Prize judges will use:

# Innovation

# Business model

# Social and/or environmental impact

# Market potential and traction

# Founder and management team

I will NOT be a judge myself but will be announcing the male winner, and my friend Svein Tore Holsether of Yara International [one of the co-founders with me] will announce the female winner. The four social impact award winners will be announced by my dear friend, Dr Agnes Kalibata who’s now both President of AGRA and the Special Envoy for the UN Food Systems Summit.

Here's a chance to apply your learning. A lot of people will be studying your comments. Time to shine, and to help fellow #Afripreneurs shine, too.

Let’s talk.

Image caption: From seed to table... without our frontline farmers and the whole supply chain to feed our world, where would we be? Here’s the link to see this year's 14 GoGettaz’ agripreneurs intro videos: https://genafrica.org/meet-the-top-14-finalists/

The 3-minute final pitches will be 1 - 2:30 pm CAT on Wednesday 8 September. Keep an eye out on Sasai and here for more info!

The AGRF Summit this year runs 7-10 September and I'll be taking part in a few sessions. You can register here to find out more... and also watch online: https://agrf.summit.tc/

#GrowEntrepreneurs

#TransformFood

#GoGettazAfrica

[96thdayofrage]

Health Freedom Is the Hottest Political Issue on the Entire Globe, and Our World Will Never be the Same after this

We are witnessing an epic global struggle for freedom, and the outcome of that struggle is going to greatly shape what our world is going to look like in the years ahead.  Ultimately, one of the most fundamental rights that we have is the right to make our own health decisions.  If someone else has the authority to make those decisions for you, then you aren’t really free.  This pandemic has transformed the debate over health freedom into the most hotly contested political issue on the entire planet, and the intensity seems to have been turned up a few more notches in recent days.  As governments around the world have begun instituting new lockdowns, new mandates and new “health passports”, we have seen huge eruptions of anger all over the world.

For example, over the weekend there was an enormous health freedom protest in London…

Thousands have gathered today Saturday, July 24, in London’s Trafalgar Square to protest against the lockdown rules and COVID-19 vaccinations. A wide range of speakers is attending the event, including well-known British conspiracy theorist, Kate Shemirani, who spoke to the crowd. Demonstrators are angry about the recent move which will see vaccine passports becoming compulsory in England to access nightclubs and other packed venues.

At the same time, there were also massive protests in the heart of Paris…

French anti-riot police fired tear gas Saturday as clashes erupted during protests in central Paris against COVID-19 restrictions and a vaccination campaign, television reported.

Police sought to push back demonstrators near the capital’s Gare Saint-Lazare railway station after protesters had knocked over a police motorbike ridden by two officers, television pictures showed.

Images showed a heavy police presence on the capital’s streets. Scuffles between police and demonstrators also broke out on the Champs-Elysees thoroughfare, where tear gas was fired and traffic was halted, the pictures showed.

On the other side of the globe, we continue to see violent protests in Sydney and other major Australian cities…

Thousands of people took to the streets of Sydney and other Australian cities on Saturday to protest lockdown restrictions amid another surge in cases, and police made several arrests after crowds broke through barriers and threw plastic bottles and plants.

The unmasked participants marched from Sydney’s Victoria Park to Town Hall in the central business district, carrying signs calling for “freedom” and “the truth.”

Millions upon millions of people are fed up and are refusing to accept any more violations of their fundamental rights.

But of course there are millions of others that are eagerly embracing the tyrannical measures that have been implemented by national governments around the globe.

In the end, the scale is going to tip one way or the other, and the outcome is going to greatly shape the direction of humanity’s future.

So let us hope that freedom wins.

Right now, the corporate media continues to work very hard to generate as much panic as possible.  Earlier today, I found it quite comical when one news outlet ran a story about how authorities are now warning us that COVID can be spread by flatulence…

The official advice is to open a window to increase ventilation and slow the spread of Covid, but now there could be an added incentive – the virus may also be spread by flatulence.

Ministers have privately pointed to evidence that Covid could be spread by people breaking wind in confined spaces such as lavatories. One said they had read “credible-looking stuff on it” from other countries, although government scientists are yet to produce a paper on the matter.

The source said there had been evidence of a “genomical-linked tracing connection between two individuals from a [lavatory] cubicle in Australia.”

You better run out and do as they say, because someone sitting in the next bathroom stall may have gas.

Here in the United States, we are now being told that more mandates and more lockdowns are coming because “this pandemic is spiraling out of control yet again”…

“More mitigation is coming. Whether it’s masking, or whether it’s closures or whether it’s your kids having to return to virtual learning, that is coming,” the Trump administration surgeon general told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“And it’s coming because this pandemic is spiraling out of control yet again. And it’s spiraling out of control because we don’t have enough people vaccinated.”

In fact, we are already starting to see some local governments put new mandates into place.

For instance, a new mask mandate has just been announced in St. Louis and St. Louis County…

Faced with a rising tide of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, St. Louis and St. Louis County leaders announced Friday that they will reinstate a mask requirement, for vaccinated and unvaccinated residents alike.

As more mandates are instituted by local governments around the country, it is inevitable that we will see widespread protests break out just like we are seeing in other countries.

Meanwhile, other “pestilences” continue to make headlines as well.  A drug-resistant “superbug” that is “resistant to all existing treatments” is causing quite a bit of alarm for U.S. health officials at this moment…

Cases of a deadly fungal infection resistant to all existing treatments have been spreading through nursing homes and hospitals in the United States for the first time, health officials said.

In the past we have seen isolated cases, but now we are being told that it looks like this “superbug” is spreading pretty easily from person to person…

“This is really the first time we’ve started seeing clustering of resistance” in which patients seemed to be getting the infections from each other, said Dr Meghan Lyman, a medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

If that wasn’t bad enough, scientists have recently confirmed cases of the Bubonic Plague “in animals and fleas” in six different Colorado counties…

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment says there have been laboratory-confirmed reports of plague in animals and fleas from six counties.

One of the six counties with confirmed plague is LaPlata County, where a 10-year-old resident died from causes associated with the plague. Laboratory testing has since confirmed the presence of plague in a sample of fleas collected in the county, according to CDPHE.

For even more examples like this, please see my previous article entitled “4 ‘Pestilences’ That Everyone Should Be Keeping An Eye On Right Now”.

As I have stated before, I believe that we have entered a new era of great pestilences.  Scientists all over the globe are constantly playing around with deadly diseases, and in many instances they are actually attempting to make them even deadlier.

With that in mind, it chilled me to the core to read that 33 ancient viruses were recently discovered “trapped in the ice of the Tibetan Plateau”…

Glaciers can preserve all sorts of relics from the distant past. So could they also be home to a pandemic from prehistoric times as well? It’s possible. A team from The Ohio State University has discovered a collection of viruses that have never been seen before in the ice of a glacier in China.

Scientists say the viral samples date back nearly 15,000 years and may reveal how pathogens evolve over the centuries. Of the 33 viruses found trapped in the ice of the Tibetan Plateau, the team considers 28 to be completely novel. About half of them also seem to have survived specifically because of the freezing conditions.

Now these ancient viruses will be “brought back to life”, and it is inevitable that scientists around the world will start playing around with them.

So what happens when there is an “accident” and one of those ancient viruses gets released?

We live at a time of incredible stupidity, and our stupidity is going to end up getting a whole lot of people killed.

[orbemnews]

Major conservative groups unify behind state GOP efforts to restrict voting Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, has publicly committed to spending at least $10 million to “secure and strengthen state election systems.” And guidelines sent out earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation — including extending identification requirements to absentee voting and barring third-party groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots — have emerged in bills now racing through the Legislature in Georgia and other statehouses. Organizations ranging from the libertarian-leaning advocacy group FreedomWorks to the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List also have jumped into the voting rights battle this year. The involvement of national groups shows that efforts to restrict voting in dozens of states “are not a coincidence,” said Hillary Holley, organizing director of the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight Action. “This is a strategic imperative that’s well-funded.” The Republican-controlled House in Georgia is slated to vote Thursday on a package of voting changes that include limiting ballot drop boxes, requiring identification for absentee ballots and making it a misdemeanor to give food or soft drinks to voters waiting in line to cast their ballots. Officials with Heritage Action say roughly 20,000 of its activists are working on the ground in the state to encourage its passage. Lawmakers in the Peach State are expected to take final action on the measures next week before adjourning. That puts Georgia on track to become the second Republican-controlled state this year to pass major legislation clamping down on ballot access. Earlier this month, Iowa passed its own restrictions, including cutting down the number of days available for early voting. In all, more than 40 states were considering bills that include voting restrictions as of mid-February, according to the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Since then, more have joined in. On Wednesday, Republican lawmakers in Michigan — another presidential battleground — introduced a package of 39 election bills. They include new voter ID requirements and a ban on prepaid postage for absentee ballots. National groups The leaders of Republican groups say they have joined the fray because worries about election fraud have become an animating force for conservative activists in the wake of the 2020 elections. Last year saw a dramatic increase in the use of mail-in voting, ballot drop boxes and other tools to avoid spreading the coronavirus. Turnout surged to record levels, helping Democrats take the White House and the US Senate majority. Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made false claims that widespread voter fraud contributed to his defeat last November, and Republican lawmakers have cited an erosion of public confidence as a key reason they are racing to tighten voting laws. “If voters don’t have trust in our elections, then voting turnout will be suppressed,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, said in an email to CNN. She said her group will “spend whatever it takes to reach our goals.” Ken Cuccinelli, who helped run the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, now oversees the Election Transparency Initiative — a joint effort of The Susan B. Anthony List and another group focused on social issues, American Principles Project. His initiative has a roughly $5 million budget and its goals include stopping a sweeping elections and campaign finance bill Democrats hope to advance in the US Senate. “Why is a pro-life and social conservative group engaging in this space?” Cuccinelli said in an interview this week. “The sort of simple answer is: Our members are effectively demanding it.” “Other groups are seeing the same thing,” he said. “They are having members who are asking the question: ‘Why should I give you any money? Why should I knock on doors? Why should I write my congressman when these elections are moving in the direction of being a sham?’ “ Cuccinelli argues that congressional Democrats are trying to expand voting in ways that are unpopular with Americans, such as allowing voters to sign an affidavit, rather than presenting identification to vote. Other Republican organizations that have launched new voting initiatives include the Republican National Committee and the Republican State Leadership Committee. FreedomWorks recently added Cleta Mitchell — a veteran GOP elections lawyer who assisted Trump on a January call in which he urged Georgia officials to “find” him votes — to run its national “election protection initiative.” The effort will focus on “election integrity” in seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Honest Elections Project, a conservative group launched to work on voting issues, has issued its own list of “best practices” for elections that include more photo identification. Honest Elections’ director, Jason Snead, a former Heritage policy analyst, said no evidence “has yet to be produced” showing widespread fraud that would have changed the 2020 election results. But he said that shouldn’t stop states from pursuing safeguards. “We do not live in a country, thankfully, where we see a lot of bank robberies going on,” Snead said. “But every bank in the country still has security systems in place, and they are not going to get rid of them.” Fighting voting rights package in Congress The groups are fighting on a dual track. Even as GOP lawmakers work to help advance bills at the state level, national Republican organizations are waging an aggressive campaign against the so-called For the People Act, a far-reaching congressional bill that would bring sweeping change to the ways in which elections are conducted and funded. The bill, which has passed the Democratic-controlled House and is under consideration in the Senate, would effectively establish a federal floor on voting procedures — requiring, for instance, 15 days of early voting, prepaid postage on absentee ballots and voter registration on the same day as the election. Progressive groups, which also plan to plow millions into the fight to support the Senate bill, describe the legislation as potentially their last chance to preserve voting rights as Republican lawmakers race to erect more barriers to the ballot at the state level. Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, cast the Senate measure as federal overreach. “This legislation would forcibly rewrite the election laws of all 50 states,” McConnell said during a Senate hearing Wednesday. Right now, Democrats lack the votes to change Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold required to overcome a filibuster on the legislation. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is the only Democrat not to sign on to the voting bill in the Senate, and the conservative Democrat is a leading proponent of preserving the filibuster. FreedomWorks plans a “multi-seven-figure” campaign on voting issues that will include keeping pressure on Democrats such as Manchin to retain the filibuster, according to FreedomWorks spokesman Peter Vicenzi. Over the weekend, activists tied to two of the conservative groups at the forefront of voting battles — FreedomWorks and Heritage Action — staged a rally outside the West Virginia State Capitol, urging Manchin to stay the course. Source link Orbem News #Conservative #efforts #GOP #groups #Major #MajorconservativegroupsunifybehindstateGOPeffortstorestrictvoting-CNNPolitics #Politics #restrict #state #unify #Voting

[dipulb3]

Major conservative groups unify behind state GOP efforts to restrict voting

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/major-conservative-groups-unify-behind-state-gop-efforts-to-restrict-voting/

Major conservative groups unify behind state GOP efforts to restrict voting

Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, has publicly committed to spending at least $10 million to “secure and strengthen state election systems.” And guidelines sent out earlier this year by the Heritage Foundation — including extending identification requirements to absentee voting and barring third-party groups from collecting voters’ absentee ballots — have emerged in bills now racing through the Legislature in Georgia and other statehouses.

Organizations ranging from the libertarian-leaning advocacy group FreedomWorks to the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List also have jumped into the voting rights battle this year.

The involvement of national groups shows that efforts to restrict voting in dozens of states “are not a coincidence,” said Hillary Holley, organizing director of the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight Action. “This is a strategic imperative that’s well-funded.”

The Republican-controlled House in Georgia is slated to vote Thursday on a package of voting changes that include limiting ballot drop boxes, requiring identification for absentee ballots and making it a misdemeanor to give food or soft drinks to voters waiting in line to cast their ballots.

Officials with Heritage Action say roughly 20,000 of its activists are working on the ground in the state to encourage its passage.

Lawmakers in the Peach State are expected to take final action on the measures next week before adjourning. That puts Georgia on track to become the second Republican-controlled state this year to pass major legislation clamping down on ballot access. Earlier this month, Iowa passed its own restrictions, including cutting down the number of days available for early voting.

In all, more than 40 states were considering bills that include voting restrictions as of mid-February, according to the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Since then, more have joined in.

On Wednesday, Republican lawmakers in Michigan — another presidential battleground — introduced a package of 39 election bills. They include new voter ID requirements and a ban on prepaid postage for absentee ballots.

National groups

The leaders of Republican groups say they have joined the fray because worries about election fraud have become an animating force for conservative activists in the wake of the 2020 elections. Last year saw a dramatic increase in the use of mail-in voting, ballot drop boxes and other tools to avoid spreading the coronavirus.

Turnout surged to record levels, helping Democrats take the White House and the US Senate majority.

Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made false claims that widespread voter fraud contributed to his defeat last November, and Republican lawmakers have cited an erosion of public confidence as a key reason they are racing to tighten voting laws.

“If voters don’t have trust in our elections, then voting turnout will be suppressed,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, said in an email to Appradab. She said her group will “spend whatever it takes to reach our goals.”

Ken Cuccinelli, who helped run the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, now oversees the Election Transparency Initiative — a joint effort of The Susan B. Anthony List and another group focused on social issues, American Principles Project. His initiative has a roughly $5 million budget and its goals include stopping a sweeping elections and campaign finance bill Democrats hope to advance in the US Senate.

“Why is a pro-life and social conservative group engaging in this space?” Cuccinelli said in an interview this week. “The sort of simple answer is: Our members are effectively demanding it.”

“Other groups are seeing the same thing,” he said. “They are having members who are asking the question: ‘Why should I give you any money? Why should I knock on doors? Why should I write my congressman when these elections are moving in the direction of being a sham?’ “

Cuccinelli argues that congressional Democrats are trying to expand voting in ways that are unpopular with Americans, such as allowing voters to sign an affidavit, rather than presenting identification to vote.

Other Republican organizations that have launched new voting initiatives include the Republican National Committee and the Republican State Leadership Committee.

FreedomWorks recently added Cleta Mitchell — a veteran GOP elections lawyer who assisted Trump on a January call in which he urged Georgia officials to “find” him votes — to run its national “election protection initiative.” The effort will focus on “election integrity” in seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Honest Elections Project, a conservative group launched to work on voting issues, has issued its own list of “best practices” for elections that include more photo identification.

Honest Elections’ director, Jason Snead, a former Heritage policy analyst, said no evidence “has yet to be produced” showing widespread fraud that would have changed the 2020 election results. But he said that shouldn’t stop states from pursuing safeguards.

“We do not live in a country, thankfully, where we see a lot of bank robberies going on,” Snead said. “But every bank in the country still has security systems in place, and they are not going to get rid of them.”

Fighting voting rights package in Congress

The groups are fighting on a dual track.

Even as GOP lawmakers work to help advance bills at the state level, national Republican organizations are waging an aggressive campaign against the so-called For the People Act, a far-reaching congressional bill that would bring sweeping change to the ways in which elections are conducted and funded.

The bill, which has passed the Democratic-controlled House and is under consideration in the Senate, would effectively establish a federal floor on voting procedures — requiring, for instance, 15 days of early voting, prepaid postage on absentee ballots and voter registration on the same day as the election.

Progressive groups, which also plan to plow millions into the fight to support the Senate bill, describe the legislation as potentially their last chance to preserve voting rights as Republican lawmakers race to erect more barriers to the ballot at the state level.

Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, cast the Senate measure as federal overreach. “This legislation would forcibly rewrite the election laws of all 50 states,” McConnell said during a Senate hearing Wednesday.

Right now, Democrats lack the votes to change Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold required to overcome a filibuster on the legislation. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is the only Democrat not to sign on to the voting bill in the Senate, and the conservative Democrat is a leading proponent of preserving the filibuster.

FreedomWorks plans a “multi-seven-figure” campaign on voting issues that will include keeping pressure on Democrats such as Manchin to retain the filibuster, according to FreedomWorks spokesman Peter Vicenzi.

Over the weekend, activists tied to two of the conservative groups at the forefront of voting battles — FreedomWorks and Heritage Action — staged a rally outside the West Virginia State Capitol, urging Manchin to stay the course.

[calacuspr]

Calacus Weekly Hit & Miss – Lewes FC & Gordon Elliott

Every Monday we look at the best and worst communicators in the sports world from the previous week.

HIT – LEWES FC

Every year on International Women’s Day (IWD) we see organisations looking to align themselves with topics such as gender equality, female empowerment, and fighting bias. 

The theme for IWD 2021 is #ChooseToChallenge, encouraging individuals and businesses to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements to help create an inclusive world.

While it’s easy to produce words on the importance of such issues, it’s the organisations that have proved they are committed to enforcing change that have the most credibility in this space.

East Sussex football club Lewes FC offer a perfect example after the fan-owned club promised equal investment, support and pay for their women’s and men’s teams in 2017. Four years on, Lewes are still the only club in Europe to have taken the stance.

This unique selling point has made Lewes an attractive employer to work for, with former England star Claire Rafferty joining the club as a non-executive director and Equal Playing Field co-founder Maggie Murphy taking on the role of general manager.

“For me, there wasn’t any other football club that I was interested in joining. It wasn’t really about football, it was about changing football,” Murphy explained in an interview with The Guardian.

“Joining the club, a little bit was about putting my money where my mouth was and to try and see if it’s possible to create a better type of club. Lewes had already done all the hard work, they’d already established the equality principle in 2017. So for me, this was like, well, let’s see where I can help to take it next.

“Football has so much potential to influence and impact culture. If we don’t engage with football as a vehicle for social change, we’ll get there, we’ll get wherever we’re trying to go, but we might just get there 10 years later than if we had used football as that vehicle first, because in this country it is so powerful.”

In December, Lewes benefited from a six-figure investment from fashion company Lyle & Scott, with the ground-breaking collaboration helping provide the club with funds for new players and enabling grassroots community outreach and the development of club facilities.

“The fact that they were willing to back us with such an investment in the middle of a pandemic was a huge validation for us of everything we’ve been putting into place for so many years.

“In the US, in the summer, fans were buying [National Women’s Soccer League sponsor] Budweiser to give to the Houston Dash players. Women’s football fans are very loyal to brands that back the product.”

Lewes FC offer a perfect example of an organisation benefiting from success that has stemmed from putting purpose at the heart of everything they do.

Results on the pitch have also improved with the team accruing more points in the 2020-21 season than in any previous campaign, however, it is the way that the club has communicated its core values and key messages in recent years that has really resonated with their audience.

A BBC Sport study recently revealed that the overwhelming majority of sports now offer equal winning prize money to men and women at the top level, but the biggest gap remains in football, and by some distance.

The hope is that other clubs will begin to follow the lead of Lewes and take action to provide female athletes with the same opportunities as their male counterparts, or as Rafferty commented: “I hope one day we don’t have to have special days and every single day is International Women’s Day.”

MISS – GORDON ELLIOTT

There is regular debate about the well-being of horses through their participation in horseracing and high-profile deaths at marquee racing events.

The British Horseracing Authority understandably goes to great lengths to underline its commitment to horse welfare and says: “Responsibility for the care of our animals rests with everyone in the sport. British horseracing is run by people with a deep love of horses.”

So the reputation of the entire sport has been rocked over the past week with photos emerging of three-time Grand National-winning trainer Gordon Elliott which showed him sitting on a dead horse.

Elliott did the right thing, making a statement on Twitter in which he explained the context for the image and promising to co-operate with The Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) investigation.

He said: “I apologise profoundly for any offence that this photo has caused. I can categorically state that the welfare of each and every horse under my care is paramount and has been central to the success that we have enjoyed.

While the way you react to a crisis often has a bearing on its longer-term consequences, it does not guarantee that those involved can come out unscathed.

The story has had devastating consequences with Elliott's yard sponsor eCOMM Merchant Solutions terminating their contract with the trainer.

Betfair also ended their sponsorship of Elliott last week, with a spokesperson for the firm saying: “While we recognise that Gordon deeply regrets and apologised unreservedly for his poor judgement his actions are completely at odds with the values of the Betfair brand and that of our employees. With that in mind, we have decided to discontinue our association with Gordon with immediate effect.”

Gigginstown House Stud, one of Ireland’s leading owners groups, said it will continue to support Elliott with joint-owner Michael O'Leary, backing the trainer despite his error

In a statement, O'Leary said: “The care and welfare of all our horses comes first with all our trainers. Sadly, from time to time our horses suffer injuries and/or fatalities and we expect all such cases to be treated with the care and attention they deserve.

“We accept that the photograph was a grievous but momentary lapse of judgement from Gordon, and not in keeping with our 15-year experience of his concern for and attention to the welfare of our horses. We all make mistakes, and what is important is that we learn from them and ensure we do not repeat them. We accept Gordon's profound, sincere and unreserved apology, and we will continue to support him and his team at Cullentra as they work to recover from this deeply regrettable incident.”

The story has taken on national importance, with Irish Sports Minister Jack Chambers admitting that Elliott should at least be barred from taking part at the Cheltenham racing festival in late March. 

Mr Chambers said: “I think he needs to be held fully accountable. I think anyone who saw it was shocked by it and we need to uphold the highest animal welfare standards in Ireland. 

“Any and every sanction should be on the table. It is important. We have a significant amount of equestrian activity in Ireland and we need to set a really high bar when it comes to welfare standards.” 

The British Horseracing Authority said it was "appalled" by the image and banned Elliott from saddling runners in Britain while the investigation was undertaken.

Elliott was subsequently banned from racing by an IHRB hearing for 12 months with six suspended and was also ordered to pay costs of €15,000.

The IHRB stated: “We consider that a suspension of Mr Elliott’s training licence is merited. In all of the circumstances of this case, to reflect the seriousness of the offence and the damage to the Irish racing industry, to deter other offences of this nature and having taken into account the mitigating factors we have heard we consider the period should be 12 months however the last six months of this will be suspended.”

Elliott made another statement after the verdict and said that he “will carry the burden of my transgressions for the rest of my career,” adding: “I will never again disrespect a horse living or dead and I will not tolerate it in others.”

However that ban looked toothless at the weekend when it emerged that Elliott’s horses could run under another trainer, Denise Foster, with a tweet from the stables, later deleted, saying that “Gordon will be available to assist her as she requires.”

Animal Aid Horse Racing Consultant, Dene Stansall, admitted that the sport’s reputation had been hugely undermined by the verdict.

“Animal Aid’s dismay at this pathetically small level of punishment, follows the initial shock when the disgraceful images first appeared. The Board’s decision lacks integrity and backbone and has failed the horses who are the real victims of this industry. This shows that the industry cannot self-regulate horse welfare – there needs to be a separate and independent welfare regulator that can impose its own sanction on the industry and upon individuals within that.

“A key question which needed answering before the image emerged, and still does, is why are young horses dying in training. Morgan, whose lifeless body was treated with such contempt by Elliott, was just seven years old. He was a victim of racing, without a doubt.”

The sport suffered a further blow when a video of a jockey sitting on another dead horse was circulated on social media.

Rob James, who rode the Elliott-trained Milan Native to victory at the Cheltenham Festival last year, said he was “heartbroken by the damage” he had caused.

“To try defending my stupidity at the time would add further insult and hurt to the many loyal people that have supported me during my career. I have caused embarrassment to my employers, my family and most importantly the sport I love. I am heartbroken by the damage I have caused and will do my best to try and make amends to those hurt by my conduct.”

With horse welfare such a key issue, the actions of individuals can have a devastating effect on the wider reputation of the sport and it will take more than social media apologies to recover.

[mattkennard]

Haiti: Creating a Modern Day Slave State

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

I was standing open-mouthed outside the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince 18 months after the earthquake had devastated the city when a man approached selling his paintings. “What do you think of that?” he said, pointing to the collapsed palace behind us. I told him the truth: I was finding it hard to come to terms with the completeness of the destruction. The man, who later told me his name was Charles Renodin, smiled slightly. “Tell the world how we are living,” he requested. “Let them know.” He paused and added, “I live in the camp there,” pointing across the road, where opposite the crumbling presidential palace a vast expanse of tents – emblazoned with the logos of the US, China, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, all competing shamelessly for brand recognition – spread out as far as the eye could see. “After the earthquake I lost my mum, my dad, one daughter, so I had to move to this camp. I don’t like it, it’s full of corruption, it’s run by gangs, and the little girls have to sell their bodies to eat,” he told me. “Little girls,” he added for emphasis. “Maybe eight or nine years old, getting raped every day. The police don’t do anything about it, the country has no law.” He told me that the Haitian people refer to the palace behind us, which should be a point of pride, as the “Devil’s House”. “It’s full of so much corruption, they don’t care about the people, they just want to make money, when the money comes they take it for themselves.” He was waiting on a house now so he could leave the camp, but he didn’t think it would happen any time soon: “The government has no plan.” In the camps, it was particularly bad news for women: “Because there is no work, women have to sell their bodies just to eat, the only job they have is to have sex for money. Men have to steal stuff – they have no choice.”

Like most in Haiti, Charles had an ambiguous feeling toward the thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in his country. “Some come to help, some come to make money, they like us living like this because they make more money.” It is easy to dismiss such sentiments, but the global “rescue” industry really is big business. There is often a direct and positive correlation between American influence over smaller countries and the crises they experience. “After the earthquake they would give us food, water, but now everything has stopped. If you go inside this camp you don’t see water, people have to walk six miles to get water. That’s why crime is up.” He became more agitated. “Everything is crazy right now, we’re living just like animals. There is no everyday life, nobody has a job.” Haiti has arguably had more US intervention in the last hundred years than any other country in the world – that it ended like this is not wholly accidental. As Doctor Maigot poignantly says to Mrs Smith, an American, in Graham Greene’s The Comedians: “In the Western hemisphere, in Haiti and elsewhere, we live under the shadow of your great and prosperous country. Much patience and courage is needed to keep one’s head.”

The following day, I was driving down a long, dusty and typically bumpy road in the middle of Port-au-Prince when I came across some imposing metal gates. Behind them stood the E-Power electricity plant. The site was unlike the rest of the city, which lay in complete ruin, even a year and a half after the earthquake: it had burnished sheet-steel doors and perfectly tarmacked roads. I was on assignment with the Financial Times and being escorted in a 4x4 by the World Bank, which had its own particular kind of tour that seemed to ignore the massive tent cities whizzing past our windows. Here was the optimistic vision, they told me. In a capital city where electricity blackouts were a nightly occurrence, E-Power was the kind of company the international financial institutions (IFIs) running Haiti believed would lead “reform” – by taking power away from the state-run company, and running the business for profit. My World Bank guide was adamant that this was the way out of Haiti’s tragic past and present. I soon found out the company was founded in 2004 by a group of Haitian venture capitalists excited by the departure of social democratic President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The aim, they said, was to “offer a solution to power generation in Haiti”. Sure enough, some years later, in 2006, the new US-backed President René Préval launched an open bid for a contract to provide electricity to Port-au-Prince. Seven companies took part. E-Power won.

For many in the Haitian business elite, such economic liberalization was to be the model for the new Haiti being built after the devastating 2010 earthquake. “The earthquake created trauma that could have been better exploited,” Pierre-Marie Boisson, board director at E-Power, told me as we sat in the upmarket air-conditioned offices at the plant. “Because of the political process that took place after that, it took too much time.” He added: “Earthquakes should be an opportunity because it destroyed. Where it is destroyed, we have to build. When we have to build we can create jobs, we can create a lot of changes, we can change a country.”

However, Mr Boisson’s cynicism about the slow rate of “exploitation” of the “opportunities” provided by the earthquake was not quite accurate. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the opportunity afforded by the destruction wreaked on Haiti was capitalized on immediately. As the dust was still settling in Port-au-Prince, the World Bank, the IMF and their regional analogues, alongside various US agencies – what became the de facto government in the absence of a Haitian alternative – carved up the society’s different sectors and doled them out among themselves. The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) got education and water, the World Bank bagged energy, while the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – a body that will be examined later in this book – gratefully accepted the planned new industrial parks. Alexandre Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, told me how it worked: “We basically have agreed that where we have each of us the competitive advantage, we then divide … the sectors among ourselves, and add in some sectors which go together.”

The mass privatization of state-run assets and the turning of Haiti into a Caribbean sweatshop – via an export-led garment production and cheap labor model that the US and the IFIs had been pushing from the mid-1990s through the 2000s – were now distinct possibilities. This could be enforced with minimal push back from a decimated civil society and a denuded government. All the extra-Haitian bodies, particularly the US government, shared this vision. “There is a lot of agreement, so I would say one of the unusual and very positive aspects about this project is that it is really done in partnership,” Jean-Louis Warnholz, a State Department official working on Haiti, told me when I was back in New York. (Mr Warnholz asked not to be named, but Haitians deserve to know the officials who are designing their destruction.) Haiti was to be the next Top Model on the World Bank and IMF catwalk. The “partnership” (in which the Haitian people had no part) believed that rebuilding the capabilities of the Haitian state should play no role in its reconstruction. Instead, the solution to Haiti’s problems lay in the creation of a flourishing private sector. “What’s really going to change Haiti and make this process different from all the previous ones is the development of the private sector, and I think there’s a consensus in that,” Agustín Aguerre, the Haiti manager for the IADB, told me. The bank disbursed $177 million in grant money in 2010 – more than any other multilateral source – to push this agenda. “Private sector is the big difference, it’s what will be creating wealth, creating jobs, not the public sector,” he added. It seemed there was no alternative.

After the election of President Michel Martelly in May 2011, things remained easy for this private-sector-led “consensus”: the IFIs and US not only had their Shock Event, but also their Shock President. Aristide, who was president in 1991, 1993–94, 1994–96 and 2001–04, continues to be the most popular politician in Haiti, but is banned from standing again for the presidency. In Martelly, the US government had found its “Chicago Boy”, a more-than-willing partner for their economic program (“Chicago Boys” is a term which refers to the University of Chicago economists who helped dictators impose neoliberal capitalism in its early stages). All the major business groupings and IFIs I spoke to in Port-au-Prince were effusive in their support for the president. Carl-Auguste Boisson, general manager at E-Power, told me: “I am pleased by what I heard Martelly saying about the importance of private investment, especially when he was campaigning he was talking about things like providing private provision of public services.” Kenneth Merten, the then US ambassador to Haiti, was similarly excited about the new president’s privatization agenda. “A few privatizations of flourmills, but aside from that you haven’t had much of anything in past decades,” he told me. “That’s the element that’s been lacking here, you need a government that understand investment and I think Martelly and his folks do.” For the US, a pliable figure like Martelly had been a long time coming. Despite many decades of effort, Haiti had not completely succumbed to the plans that its major patron had for it. And such recalcitrance had been causing increasing consternation in Washington.

History’s long shadow

In 1990, after the first democratic elections in Haiti’s 200-year history, the US became hopeful of breaking up the corrupt state institutions which had been run as the personal fiefdoms of Papa and Baby Doc, the US-backed Duvalier dictators who had ruled Haiti viciously for nearly 40 years. Private capital would then be able to penetrate deeper into the country, and an economic model conducive to the interests of the rich countries could take firm root. But it wasn’t going to plan. Instead of the US-orientated “reformer” many in Washington had hoped for, a huge mass movement, named Lavalas (“the flood”), propelled the social democrat priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide to a landslide victory. Over the next 20 years, the democratically elected Aristide would be ousted twice with US support, while the democratic hopes and dreams of Haiti’s people would be quashed time and again. Aristide had become a nuisance in the eyes of Washington and so when he was put back in power in 2001 it was under the tacit agreement that he would allow the World Bank, the IMF and the US to institute their plan. It had been 11 years since the democratic elections, and still economic “reform” was slow. Something had to change: democracy was fine, but it had to be of use.

In this period, René Préval, a former ally of Aristide who served as president from 2006 to 2011, seemed to offer some hope for the Americans. “In the context of the developing world, we would most accurately describe him as a neo-liberal, particularly in that he has embraced free markets and foreign investment,” notes one of the US embassy’s diplomatic cables, released by WikiLeaks, sent from Port-au-Prince in 2007. But the leader the US was really after in that period looked more like Haitian-American businessman Dumas Siméus. A resident of Texas, he assured the US embassy, according to a diplomatic cable sent in 2005, “he would manage Haiti like a business”. The same cable added: “Displaying abundant charm and energy, the 65-year-old said he had decided to run for President not only for Haiti’s benefit, but also as a gesture of thanks to the United States.” He was very clear about how he would do this: “The University of Chicago alum pledged to bring the ‘Chicago Boys’ to Haiti and establish a road map for change, promising investors would return.” It was exactly what the US embassy wanted to hear; Siméus was the candidate they had been searching for. The cable concluded by noting that the millionaire Texan was a “potentially viable candidate” who could, unlike Aristide, “govern responsibly and maybe effectively” – code in this case for “in the US interest”. The US deemed Martelly similarly “responsible”.

But in many ways, US exasperation at the apparent reluctance of Haiti’s leaders to sell off their country’s assets and create an economic playground for foreign capital remains hard to understand. From the mid-1990s through the 2000s, the “Chicago Boys” had to all intents and purposes come to Haiti; the process of opening up Haiti’s economy to the predations of foreign capital was well under way. The fetish of foreign investment was firmly rooted. In 1996 for example, the Haitian government had already, as one diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks noted, “established legislation on the modernization of public enterprises, which allows foreign investors to participate in the management and/or ownership of state-owned enterprises.” Moreover, a November 2002 law explicitly acknowledged the “crucial role of foreign investment in assuring economic growth and aims to facilitate, liberalize, and stimulate private investment in Haiti”. The law gave foreign investors exactly the same rights and protections as Haitians. Months earlier in 2002, the Haitian parliament had voted for a new free trade zone law which provided “zones” with fiscal and customs incentives for foreign enterprises – for example, a 15-year tax exemption. In other words, post-Aristide, the government had “seen the light” and embraced the US-led vision for the post-dictatorship Haiti.

But these steps, it seems, were not enough. Only a “Chicago Boy” would do. Another WikiLeaks cable noted that in 1996 a “modernization commission” was set up to decide whether management contracts, long-term leases or capitalization was the best option for each of the companies to be privatized. The commission would also decide how much the Haitian government would retain of each asset, with a cap at 49 percent – a minority stake, stripping the Haitian people of control over their own industries.

This had an immediate effect. In 1998, two US companies, Seaboard and Continental Grain, purchased 70 percent of the state-owned flourmill. Despite this “progress”, a diplomatic cable from 2005 lamented, “Some investments, however, still require government authorization,” adding, “Investments in electricity, water and telecommunications require both government concession and approval. Additionally, investments in the public health sector must first receive authorization from the Ministry of Public Health and Population.” It sounded like a reasonable demand from a sovereign country, but a sovereign country is exactly what the US didn’t want Haiti to be. Two years after Aristide had been spirited out of the country by the Bush administration and the local oligarchs, and just before the victory of the “neoliberal” Préval in 2006, the US embassy noted witheringly: “Since the privatization of the cement factory, privatization has stalled and appears to have been put on hold.” It added plaintively: “None of the major infrastructure-related enterprises (the airport, seaport, telephone company or electric company) have been privatized.” The document continued: “Although these entities were supposed to have been privatized by 2002, persistent political crises, strong opposition from the former administration, and a general lack of political will have delayed the process indefinitely.” The cable then noted a more plausible reason why this massive privatization program had not been enacted quite as smoothly as the US had hoped: ”Some opposition to the privatization of state enterprises continues from groups such as employee’s unions who have expressed opposition to workforce reductions that privatization might entail.” Those pesky Haitians.

By 2008, then, the US embassy was disconsolate at the slow rate of progress and local intransigence. “Despite assurances that privatization is still a priority for the government … we are increasingly skeptical that privatization, in whatever form, will happen,” one cable noted. “Time is running out.” The US, however, remained steadfast. “We will continue to advocate strongly on behalf of privatization and/or private management,” one cable noted. It further advocated using IFIs such as the World Bank and the IMF to bribe the democratic government of Haiti, one of the staples of the “structural adjustment programs” explored later, although it is rare to see it spelled out in such clear language. “[The US embassy] repeats its recommendation … that privatization be a requirement under future agreements with the IFIs … to be negotiated with the new government,” the cable to Washington noted.

The shock

Bribery might prove an effective strategy toward the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but it would still be messy. There was after all a Haitian parliament, populated with nationalist elements, which could continue to stall or even kill the massive privatization program the US favored. But as the US was honing its strategy for its latest push, on January 12, 2010 a huge earthquake hit Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises in the history of the world. More than 300,000 people were killed, while millions became homeless. The capital city lay in ruins, including the majority of government ministries as well as the presidential palace. What was left of an already strangled civil society and social institutions was destroyed. Haiti was a blank slate.

The US and its allies in the IMF and World Bank did not waste any time – this was their opportunity to push through the radical neoliberal program from the 1990s with little resistance. The opposition to this privatization program – which had ranged from quasi-nationalist politicians to worker-based collectives – had all but disappeared. Without a government in place to agree or disagree with the US and the IFIs, which were soon running the country, Haiti was ready for the “shock doctrine” – the radical economic prescriptions enforced throughout the world and outlined in Naomi Klein’s eponymous book. Klein’s argument was that these policies were so unpopular among the populations of the target countries that the agents of big capital, such the IMF and World Bank, would wait until there was a crisis “real or perceived”, when people could not organize resistance, to push the reforms through. This is what happened in Haiti.

The first step was to entrench a decision-making system that took all power out of the hands of accountable democratic institutions run by Haitians. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which became the country’s most powerful decision-making body in the aftermath of the earthquake, was the perfect example of this move. The IHRC was set up ostensibly to coordinate the response and spend donor money in the absence of a Haitian government. It had 26 members, 12 of whom were Haitian, leaving them without a voting majority (just as they were not allowed a majority stake in their industries). To those Haitian members, it was obvious they were window-dressing. In a December 2010 letter of protest to the IHRC chair, former US president Bill Clinton, they complained of being “completely disconnected from the activities of the IHRC”, as well as having “time neither to read, nor analyze, nor understand – and much less respond intelligently – to projects submitted”. According to one journalist based in Port-au-Prince: “These twelve board members surmised that their only function is to rubber-stamp, as Haitian-approved, decisions already made by the executive committee.”

That was exactly the perception that the US and the IFIs were trying to avoid. When officials from the US and international agencies in Haiti were interviewed they were at pains to explain how they were “working for the Haitians” and the phrase of the day was “Haitian-led”. It was the same all over the world – the US and its agencies were adept at making their domination be seen as demanded by the victim. In truth, there was, and continued to be, minimal Haitian involvement in the reconstruction (outside the business elite). An article in the Washington Post put it bluntly in January 2011: “There is a dramatic power imbalance between the international community – under US leadership – and Haiti. The former monopolizes economic and political power and calls all the shots.” The financial benefits to the American private sector of this set-up were immediately obvious. An Associated Press investigation found that of every $100 of Haiti reconstruction contracts awarded by the American government, $98.40 returned to American companies. The focus was never on building up indigenous capacity; any work was to be outsourced to foreign companies or NGOs by the IHRC. It was about making money for rich Americans. After Michel Martelly was sworn in as president in May 2011, it took months for the former pop star and former member of the savage Tonton Macoute militia (formed by the US-backed dictator ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier) to form a government, as his candidates for cabinet positions were repeatedly rejected by parliament. By the time his administration was in place in June 2011, 18 months after the earthquake, the coordinates of the economic reconstruction were already in place. Martelly’s hands were tied by the very IFIs which claimed to be subordinate to the Haitians. Though in Martelly’s case his hands didn’t even need to be tied – he was a willing “shock president”.

There were three elements that the US and IFIs wanted to build the “new Haiti” around: high-end tourism; export-processing zones; and a resurgent private sector in control of the previously state-owned assets. It was the racket’s standard playbook. The architects of the reconstruction actually had other countries in mind that they believed could serve as a model. One was the Dominican Republic, the country next door to Haiti, which had long been an oasis for private capital in the Caribbean. In Haiti, using the model of its Hispaniola neighbor, the IADB planned to spend $22 million on a high-end tourism resort near the 19th-century citadel at Labadee, a port on Haiti’s northern coast. Mr Almeida, Haiti manager for the IADB, told me the bank’s money would “provide the means for the private sector to come and invest”, adding that “in [the Dominican Republic] everything they have is all private. The airport is private, the roads are private, even the internal roads. So we could do the same thing [in Haiti].” (In the initial carve-up of Haitian society, the IADB was given road infrastructure.)

The other opportunity that had to be taken advantage of was speeding up the privatization process. The World Bank used the example of Teleco, formerly the national telecom operator, which in 2009 the bank’s private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), had helped partially privatize. (The IFC was, incidentally, the brainchild of Nelson Rockefeller in 1951.) Mr Naim, the private-sector Haiti manager for the World Bank, told me that Teleco was an example of what the government should do to the ports and the airport. “[They can] really transform these assets that generally the government handles poorly,” he said, adding that “It’s better for the government to focus on social things” and let these assets be privatized. Teleco itself is now due for complete privatization under the guidance of the IFC. For the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it is hard – possibly even suicidal – to argue with the World Bank. In March 2010, the bank promised $479 million in grants; the IFC put $49 million-worth of direct investment into Haiti’s private sector.

With Teleco on its way to privatization, the IADB had its own plans for the national water and sanitation authority (Dinepa), which had come under its domain in the initial carve-up. The bank soon handed over the authority’s management duties to the giant Spanish company Aguas de Barcelona, which won a three-year contract to train and assist workers, and for which they received millions of dollars. “Many local companies are taking control of small towns’ water systems,” Mr Aguerre of the IADB told me excitedly. This essential commodity and basic human right was now being turned into a for-profit venture. “We are seeing good examples of places where no one paid for water services, and little by little they are paying,” he added. Experts from Aguas de Barcelona became the leaders of discussions concerning the investment needed in Haiti’s water system and the process of opening bids to different contractors for the completion of new pipelines and other systemic improvements.

In education, the IADB’s plans were no different. Thanks to decades of neoliberal policies that prioritized the private sector above the Haitian ministries, even before the earthquake 80 percent of educational services were delivered outside the state (primarily by international bodies or the private sector). As a result, only half of school-aged children in Haiti went to school. For the IADB, this did not prove the folly of their enterprise. Contrariwise, they concluded that it meant they had not gone far enough. “It’s too ambitious to think you can turn it around,” Mr Aguerre said. The IADB settled on a voucher program that will allow the government to retain some “quality control”, but means that education will be completely privately run. To ensure full access, the plan creates a publicly funded but privately run education system. The small print is that this public subsidy will cost the Haitian government about $700 million a year, seven times what it spends now on education. With no new revenue streams evident (in fact, as we shall see, the government’s tax base was being all but destroyed), the obvious implication was that full access was not an aim (or even a hope). When the IADB’s promised $500 million over three years runs dry, more than half of Haiti’s children will still be locked out of the school system. The IADB rationalized this arrangement by arguing that the private sector would pick up the slack – explicitly holding Haiti’s kids ransom to Hollywood film stars. “There are many private actors willing to put money in,” added Mr Aguerre. “Half of Hollywood is interested. Everyone wants their Susan Sarandon School of Arts.” Incidentally, Martelly has been approving of both vouchers and subsidizing private schools as methods to rebuild the Haitian education system.

With the complete privatization of telecoms, water and education, the final piece in the jigsaw for the IFIs and the US became the new “industrial parks” or “integrated economic zones”. These, so the propaganda went, would ensure the economic growth that could put Haiti and its people back on their feet. But two years after the quake, more than 500,000 Haitians still lived in ad hoc camps around Port-au-Prince and 8 million still lived without electricity. The throngs of jobless who lined the capital’s streets are a reminder of the 70 percent unemployment rate. “We need to be realistic and understand that it’s still five years after Katrina and New Orleans is still being rebuilt, it’s 10 years after September 11th and that site isn’t rebuilt complete, the process takes time,” Kenneth Merten, then US ambassador to Haiti, told me, adding, “One of the things Haitians can really do themselves is to move quickly on making a business-friendly climate.”

It might perhaps be hard for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in ad hoc campsites to do that. In Haiti, I went to the La Piste camp, a barren enclosure with rows of one-bedroom “houses” on steeples. The owner of one, a middle-aged woman, spoke to me slowly via an interpreter. She was a single mother with three children with no means of income. She was living off money the Red Cross had given her, alongside selling some trinkets, although customers are few and far between. “It’s much better here than the last camp,” she told me. In the last place she and her children lived, like most others, in a tent, which meant they were subject to the rain and animals who decided to look in. “This is a house, it’s safer,” she said, but added that the fence of the camp should be higher, or be turned into a security fence because of the burglaries. She also said the lack of lighting puts them in danger: it is pitch black at night and easy for people to break in. You realize walking around La Piste that these people are completely at the mercy of nature – be that the elements, or their fellow man or woman. There is no security, there is no rule of law, and there is no place to go with grievances; there is merely the hope that someone is looking out for you. Hope cannot thrive in such an environment. “I would like to have hope,” she told me, her face blank, refusing any emotion at all. “I just don’t know who is going to make anything happen.” It seemed rude to ask how she planned to make a business-friendly climate for foreign investors in Haiti.

Therapy

The 30-minute drive to Codevi industrial park from the airport in northern Haiti is the smoothest in the country. In a place famed for its poor infrastructure, particularly its undulating roads, the park and the surrounding area are something of an oasis. Beyond the small bridge and metal gates which divide Codevi from the town outside, there’s everything that the average Haitian doesn’t have: paved roads, a functioning health service, employment and even a (small) trade union – the only one in the country. The 2 million square foot Codevi Park was originally built by a Dominican textile company, Grupo M, on the Dominican side of the border, but operations were expanded to Haiti in 2003 (with the help of a large investment by the World Bank).

“It was created as a vision of expansion that Grupo M had to look for as the Dominican Republic became more complicated competitiveness-wise,” Joseph Blumberg, vice-president of sales for the company, told me as we sat in his air-conditioned office inside the park. “Haiti offered us the competitive edge that we needed in this region to maintain ourselves with the US market.” He added: “It had a labor cost which was the lowest in the region.” The minimum wage in Haiti now is 150 gourdes ($3.70) per day, which is nearly half that in the Dominican Republic. This “competitive edge” – in a layperson’s terms “slave wages” – combined with favorable trading terms with the US had caught the eye of the IFIs in the aftermath of the earthquake. The aim was to rebuild Haiti as a Caribbean sweatshop that could enjoy the full fruits of the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity for Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act, which was passed by the US Congress in 2006, granting tariff-free access for Haitian textile exporters to the US market. This was followed by increasingly favorable terms through HOPE II, in 2008, and the Help Act after the 2010 earthquake.

Parks like that at Codevi are known in the IFIs’ literature as integrated economic zones (IEZs): places where infrastructure, welfare services and other services are provided for the lucky few behind imposing metal gates. The literature justifying their existence argues that prospective foreign investors put off by the decrepit or non-existent roads, electricity-grid and water system throughout Haiti would here have access to a ready-made mini-city. There was already a huge industrial park of this kind near the airport in Port-au-Prince called Sonapi, which is fully owned by the Haitian government and had, at one point, nearly 40 companies based there. But the new IEZs would be under the sole control of its initial investors – mainly USAID and the IADB. This raises the question of what will happen outside these so-called “poles” of economic activity. What would the incentive be for the central government to develop infrastructure and social services throughout the country if they are being built on this micro-scale? And where would the money come from? Alexandre Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, admits this is a problem; he told me that industrial parks “may not be sustainable if you were to do it as a policy everywhere”.

Codevi is essentially an “export-processing zone” (increasingly common in the “developing” world) where exports pay no tax to the central government and there is no customs duty on imported materials. “You’re in an extra-territorial concept so that your goods come in and out very quickly without much paperwork,” said Armando Heilbron, a senior private-sector development specialist at the World Bank working on the IEZs in Haiti. Therefore, Haiti’s reconstruction will take place in isolated small “poles”, primarily in the northern part of the country, while the rest of the country’s infrastructure and welfare services will fall further into disrepair.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the industrial parks is the unscrupulous nature of the companies that populate them. The public relations tour of Codevi, with its stops at the local doctor and training facilities, is a relief after experiencing the destruction that has been wrought in the rest of the country. But the tour does not include many of the most important episodes in its establishment. Codevi was originally built on farmers’ land against their will – a process that destroyed the region’s agricultural infrastructure to create sweatshops. It was a parable for the economic reconstruction that occurred after the earthquake. The diplomatic cables recount that there had been a “long-standing labor dispute between Dominican manufacturer Grupo M and workers in Ouanaminthe”. One said: “According to Yannick Etienne, a labor representative, the fight has its origins in the closed-door negotiations that established the Free Trade Zone (FTZ). The farmers were left out of the negotiating process until the day of the FTZ ground breaking ceremony in 2002, when they were told their land was being expropriated. Grupo M eventually published a social compensation plan in 2003, however, it came too late for the farmers whose land was already gone, and whose suspicions of the Dominicans were already aroused.”

Grupo M and its patrons at the World Bank do not, of course, tire of outlining the countless benefits that accrue to the local population because of Codevi. Every program of exploitation has an ideology bolted on to legitimate it to the world – but also to those benefitting: very few people want to look in the mirror and see a monster staring back. When I asked to speak to workers, two were dutifully brought out to give monosyllabic positive comments about their jobs, perhaps wary of the manager sitting next to them. Neither was a member of the union, I soon found out. In fact, Grupo M claims it has no conception of how many workers are in the union. “Very little,” is all Mr Blumberg would tell me. “It’s not part of their priority. They’re happy and when the workforce is happy they don’t mind if anybody is doing anything for them or not.” However, according to the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the soothing words of Mr Blumberg do not reveal the whole story. “Dominican unions allege [Grupo M] discriminates against labor organizers, fires their members, and has created a fraudulent ‘scab union’ in order to circumvent the legitimate one,” one cable notes.

It is clear that something similar has happened in Haiti. Grupo M did have a stronger union once – before it was busted after trying to exercise its rights. Just months after Codevi opened, the workers began complaining of “exploitation and mistreatment” by the management of Grupo M. Rounds of strikes and violence by union members were followed by a “series of employee terminations by the company throughout that summer”.

Mr Blumberg explained it thus: “When we had the first union, there was a lot of growing pain. They didn’t have the right groups guiding them, there were a lot of radicals, a lot of leftists.” But, he added: “In the end, everything was straightened out and we’re in peace and we’re fine with the union.” The union had been co-opted. Workers’ rights would not be a high priority for the economic model that would design the new Haiti. In fact, the plan was predicated on the lack of rights for workers. In an internal IFC document that was presented to the Haitian government, the administration was implored to amend the labor code in order to “lift restrictions on 24/7 multi-labor shifts” while “streamlining” the process by which night-time salary supplements could be done away with. The plan was also predicated on a lack of tax revenue. Another incentive for the foreign companies was the so-called “economic free zones” (EFZs), which offer companies tax and duty-free rights if they set up operations in Haiti. In reality, these zones do not exist in physical space but rather constitute the whole country. In other words, Haiti would now be tax-free for foreign investors – further disabling the Haitian government’s ability to rebuild any public institutions. In 2011, the Haitian government brought in an estimated $1 billion of revenue, much less than the per-capita rate in sub-Saharan Africa.

The answer to this dilemma for the IADB was the “multiplier effect” whereby companies supplying services to the population would in turn have more income and therefore pay more tax to the government (at some time in the distant future). “It’s on that side that we see the benefits of anchoring in the zones and having these companies come, even if under the current regime they do not pay taxes for a while,” said Mr Almeida, IADB country director for Haiti. The idea essentially is that around the industrial estates other smaller Haitian businesses, such as travel agents and grocery stores, will pick up the slack of lost tax revenue. The problem for the IFIs was that even with slave wages and lax labor regulation it was proving hard to attract foreign investment. In the face of such reticence from investors around the world, Haiti should have focused on building indigenous capacity, perhaps through a massive public works initiative and the construction of state-owned facilities, like Sonapi. Haitians were instead again put at the mercy of international capital and its “race to the bottom”. For the US embassy, the only thing going for Haiti was that its people were made to work for peanuts. “Haiti has the lowest wages in the western hemisphere,” boasted one US embassy cable. To Haitians it was nothing to boast about. Camille Chalmers, a local economist, told the Financial Times that the wages paid in the textile sector, Haiti’s biggest industry, were a “veritable scandal”.

Amid manifold reservations from both international investors and labor-rights groups, the IADB and USAID finished the construction of the flagship project in the economic reconstruction of Haiti: the Caracol industrial park (CIP), just 40 miles down the well-paved road back toward the northern capital of Cap-Haïtien. The CIP was inspired by the perceived success of Codevi, with those designing Haiti’s new-look economy trying to attract investment with the benefits that drew Grupo M into the economy: cheap labor and geographical closeness to the US, the world’s largest market, where its exports are duty-free. It is one of five planned. The US poured millions of dollars into the CIP, but only Sae-A Trading, a South Korean textile company, has been enticed to set up shop in the park (and according to people involved in the deal, Sae-A was promised a rent holiday of four years). Sweatshop-based development had, in fact, never provided more than 100,000 jobs even in the 1980s.

The fact that the US taxpayer is building industrial parks for the benefit of South Korean companies also raised eyebrows. The US may be the most active foreign country involved in the reconstruction, but even its companies are still keeping their distance. “We are professional beggars,” Mr Aguerre, the Haiti manager for the IADB in Washington, told me. The Haitian people would become beggars, too. For example, an internal IFC document on proposed IEZs argues that the reconstruction should be “propelled by private-sector-led development” even though the same document admits that “the existing Haitian Free Zone, Industrial Park and Investment Code policy and regulatory regimes have not been effective in attracting investments that are needed to create jobs”.

“To say that the private sector is rushing into Haiti right now would not be exactly what’s happening,” Pamela Cox, the World Bank’s vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean, told me when I met her in Washington. So why were these institutions focusing so much on a foreign-investment-led reconstruction, rather than building up domestic and public Haitian capacity? Was the fact that this would not make any westerners rich merely a coincidence?

There are still further complications; namely, that offering generous inducements to foreign companies will adversely impact businesses already in Haiti. Grupo M, for example, is fearful of what the incentives offered for the CIP and other IEZs being planned might mean for it. “[New foreign companies] have to train their workforces, they have to prepare themselves for what is coming,” said Mr Blumberg, vice-president of sales at Grupo M. “We want a level playing field if you will. We understand that [foreign companies] are getting a lot of things via grants and via sponsorships from different sources.” But if investment is not forthcoming or indigenous industries are stifled, as many predict, Haiti will suffer stagnation and destitution for another generation.

Enthusiasm from donors for aid and other forms of sovereign investment is now dwindling as the international community loses interest and the financial crisis continues to bite. The Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF), which aggregates funds from countries and NGOs to fill gaps in investment, has raised $352 million so far, but, “We’ve reached a plateau,” Mr Leitman, head of the HRF, told me. “I think the donors have been cautious and reluctant to contribute new money.” In March 2010, at a major pledging conference held in New York City, $4.6 billion was promised for the first two years of reconstruction. Only $1.9 billion of that ever materialized. “If you look at estimates made about rebuilding Haiti after the earthquake, they were huge, you know $15 billion, even more than that,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington DC, told me. “They haven’t come up with anything like that, even a fraction of that. It’s a small country but it’s still 10 million people and so if you don’t clear the rubble, you don’t have roads, you don’t have housing, you don’t have water, you don’t have sanitation, so what kind of economy are you going to get out of that? That’s the real problem.”

The real fear back home in Washington, however, especially among politicians, is migration and drugs. “They feared Aristide was a Castro want-to-be,” Larry Birns, an analyst in Washington, told me. “US policy has never been concerned with building a viable economy. The policies they followed destroyed Haiti’s economy.” On assuming power, Ronald Reagan proposed the Caribbean Basin Initiative to try, in a familiar story, to bring foreign investment to the region. It was a method of regaining control of the region, which seemed to be going on an independent path. Reagan even invaded Grenada on spurious grounds in 1983 to push that effort. The initiative was a failure, bringing little to no investment, but control was exerted. In that respect it was like John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin America, which sought to bring the region away from Soviet influence, under the guise of “development” and “investment”. The prevailing sprit now in Washington is that Haiti is messy, and people will openly tell you (off the record) that Haiti is beyond the capacity to be reformed, a “loser situation”. They favor what they call “keeping it on life support” so that the US doesn’t get too many people coming in (Haitian refugees dying on the beaches of Florida caused havoc for Southern politicians in the 1980s). But what the US never seems to understand about Haiti and elsewhere is that you cannot have a society operate like clockwork when you have for years persistently undermined all credible efforts for that society to function in an effective way. Haiti is now actually well below its per capita income of 1960, the only country in the hemisphere to have made no progress in that period. Ironically, the economy grew from 1960 to 1980 under the Duvalier dictatorships because, despite their brutality, they actually had a development strategy. It wasn’t great but it did move the country forward. This is true for a lot of the region where many countries had more growth under dictatorships because they had more control over policy than they did in a more democratic era when, in the subsequent neoliberal phase, the World Bank and the IMF controlled policy, and nobody allowed them to have a development strategy. From 1991 to 1994 and from 2000 to 2004, in fact, there was a deliberate strategy to destroy the economy, and that’s how they got rid of President Aristide both times. “This is more about power. It’s hard for people to believe this, but the US really does care who runs the government,” said Mr Weisbrot. “They’ve overthrown the government twice, the US, Canada, France, and their allies. 1991 was more covert but it did come out that the CIA paid the people who did the coup, and they also financed death squads in the period after.”

Robinson Deese’s story shows the human side of this brutality. “After the earthquake everything turned terrible,” he told me, as we sat in his bedroom. He lost his home and moved with his four children and wife to Golf, one of the biggest camps in Port-au-Prince on the capital’s only golf course. But he was given a lifeline. The Red Cross – one of the most influential and powerful NGOs working in Haiti – offered him a rent subsidy to move his family into permanent accommodation. The charity gave him 4,000 Haitian dollars toward the yearly rent of 6,000 Haitian dollars. (Prices have ballooned since the earthquake because of the squeeze on supply.) Now he lives in one small and sweltering room with six other people, including his wife, children and brother. Formerly a tailor, his working life was destroyed when he lost all his sewing machines in the earthquake. “We have to manage with this because we have no means to rent a bigger place right now, I have to work for other people now,” he said. “I preferred to take the subsidy because I didn’t have a piece of land where I could build a shelter. I decided the best option would be to start a small business for myself while I tried to save money, maybe get a piece of land.” He was also awarded a $500 Livelihood Grant to start a business, which he said was not going well so far. In these conditions, saving is hard for a family like this, as he has to stump up money for tuition for his kids’ schooling as well as for books and uniforms. The Red Cross has helped countless people this way – it is one of three options they offer to some of the 500,000 Haitians still living in tent cities around Port-au-Prince. The other two are building a T-shelter on a greenfield site, or finding someone who will let them do it. But the program is a parable of the short-termism that has overtaken the reconstruction of Haiti. Mr Deese only qualifies for this subsidy for a year. After that, he and his family are back at square one unless he finds a job, which with 80 percent unemployment seems unlikely. “I can’t say I will have enough to cover next year’s rent,” he admitted. “It doesn’t stress me out right now, I know that I can work, I have two hands to work with.”

No room for an alternative

Haiti is a notoriously difficult country to operate in: its institutions are frail, weakened by years of underinvestment, and the system is riven with corruption. For the economic managers post-earthquake, this was the default reasoning for their reliance on the private sector and “export-led” reconstruction. But there was nothing inevitable about such a program. There were plenty of reconstruction plans that could, most likely would, have created a fairer and more sustainable future for Haitians. The problem was and remains that these plans go against an ideology purveyed by the IMF, the World Bank and the US. For example, the Haitian government could have rebuilt the country’s crumbling infrastructure with a modern-day equivalent of the Marshall Plan from donors, which would have created public-sector jobs for Haitians to construct roads, ports and energy infrastructure which has either been non-existent or in disrepair. Everyone, after all, puts infrastructure as among the top problems for making Haiti work. Some 10,000 jobs could have been created just clearing the rubble. The Red Cross has, for example, created hundreds of jobs for Haitians reusing the rubble to build bricks and other building materials, clearing the city and creating employment. “We’re the only ones doing it,” the co-coordinator of the program in Port-au-Prince told me. “At the moment, now, all the rest goes down the dump, and the cost of processing it is about the same as taking it down to the dump.”

Perhaps most importantly, Haiti could have focused on creating a new agrarian economy, a sector which had been thriving before President Clinton dumped tonnes of US rice in the country in the 1990s, destroying Haitian agriculture by completely distorting trading terms, something that will be explored in a moment. About 60 percent of the Haitian population, or 4 million people, live in rural areas. Promoting community-owned agricultural land would have instantly depopulated the overcrowded capital and provided a sustainable way of feeding its people (with any leftovers ready for export). It was never even discussed.

“Agriculture is still missing,” Mr Naim at the IFC told me. The IFC is yet to make one loan to an agricultural small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), instead training its focus on agribusiness rather than the smallholders that Haiti needs. Likewise, the World Bank has admitted that not enough priority is being given to agriculture. It has put $55 million into a new agricultural program (in the grand scale of things in Haiti, peanuts). “This is our first true agricultural project,”  Mr Abrantes acknowledged. The US government claims it is not ignoring agriculture. The ambassador to Haiti told me the US has invested $200 million in the sector already; but, once again, the focus remains on produce for export as opposed to providing for the Haitian population, large portions of which are starving. The IADB, on the other hand, contends that infrastructure is important but “there are other needs” (such as “investing in the private sector” in order to import seeds). The bank has a plan to get a private company to buy the mangoes, centralize them, distribute them and then send them to the exporters. “We’re changing the dynamics of how we can do agriculture in Haiti,” said Mr Almeida at the IADB. This new dynamic is straight out of the neoliberal guidebook: providing vouchers to small producers so they can buy seeds through imports. With no public or community-held land, such ventures have to date not got very far. “It’s not a big number of jobs,” Mr Almeida admitted.

The internal Haitian market continues to be ignored by all parties, a travesty considering that 90 percent of eggs and poultry consumed in Haiti come from the Dominican Republic, while 80 percent of rice is imported. Changing that state of affairs through publicly funded subsistence farming is not an option. “When I say agriculture I say agribusiness,” said Mr Almeida. The alternative, which is unthinkable in the world of these institutions, is that money is provided to subsidize domestic small-scale rice production.

An emblematic project of this “new dynamic” was brokered by the IADB: an initiative with Coca-Cola which has created a new soda called “Mango-Tango” that will be supplied with mangoes from newly developed producers. A similar deal with Starbucks coffee seeks to transform individual micro-farmers into cooperatives and then supply coffee to Starbucks and market it as Haitian coffee. Critical analysts call this the “sweatshops and mangoes” development model. “They need roads, they need irrigation in the countryside, but that’s the one thing these guys won’t do,” said Mark Weisbrot, the analyst at the CEPR. But the Martelly administration’s agriculture policy has so far followed the export-orientated agribusiness model of the Bretton Woods institutions to the letter. “What I hear from [the Haitian government] is that they want to go into the export mode, including the agriculture,” said Mr Abrantes. In fact, Martelly had pushed the IFIs to go even further. “We were preparing traditional agriculture projects for Haiti which were basically focused on poverty alleviation, on the small farmers,” added Mr Abrantes. “When the Martelly administration came in, they looked at the project and said, ‘We would like it to have a different slant. We would like to have significant components on stimulating agribusiness’, which is quite a different thing from what we had anticipated, and so I think the overall view is, even in agriculture, to encourage parts of the agricultural sector to move into export-production.” Haiti remains a majority agrarian country; it needs an agrarian-based development model that distributes land among its homeless people for community-based subsistence cultivation. The economic managers of the country are not interested. The long-held dream of a Caribbean sweatshop is being born instead. Out of one of history’s worst human catastrophes we have Mango-Tango. The racket’s victory was Haiti’s defeat, but this was no accident.