Global
“Protecting the border” is essentially the same thing as protecting your own property, right? You’ve got to protect it from invaders, thieves — lawless jerks who want what you have.
If you’re rich and paranoid, then you have no doubt that’s what refugees are, especially down there at the southern U.S. border, or if you’re the European Union, the northern edge of Africa. The EU’s “Mexico” is the failed state of Libya, which, thanks to its former colonial conquerors, can now make a little scratch stopping the desperate hordes of people fleeing poverty, violence and the vicious effects of climate change from crossing the Mediterranean and finding a more secure life in Europe.
How do we move beyond a world that is shredded by invisible (imaginary) borders into endless enclaves of us and them? How do we embrace Planet Earth as a single, organic whole, of which we are just a part? How do we govern with a reverence for this whole?
Backroom deals are being made to introduce secretive, paperless, risky Internet voting (IV) to San Francisco (SF) and the Bay Area (BA). This has been going on for many months, with no notification to the public, and most tellingly, no notification to the SF Elections Commission (EC) until October, 2021.
To stop this, democracy advocates are now going public. We are asking you to speak out for paper-based, transparent elections, and for assisting the disabled to vote without endangering our government.
To make them easy to find, we are starting with a Summary, Objectives and Contacts. Below these is a Background section that you may need to read to understand what is involved.
Secret SF Bay Area IV project
SF is working in collaboration with BA-UASI to develop a voting system using Internet voting (IV). They issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) April 2, 2021. Nobody informed the SF Elections Commission until October, 2021.
While “anti-vaxxers” continue to clash with police in various European cities, a whole media discourse has been formulated around the political leanings of these angry crowds, describing them in matter-of-fact terms as conspiracy theorists, populists and right-wing fanatics.
LA Opera’s version of Gioachino Rossini’s 1817 Cinderella (or, in Italian, La Cenerentola) is by far my favorite production of this season. Indeed, La Cenerentola is one of the most enchanting, charming operas I’ve ever seen mounted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, full of the joie de vivre of Mozart’s ebullient works, notably The Marriage of Figaro. La Cenerentola is absolutely the perfect choice for the holiday and is ideal for bringing children to share in the enchantment, especially to the matinee performances.
There are17th century written versions of Cinderella and by 1812 the renowned Brothers Grimm wrote their own iteration of the fairy tale. In essence, Rossini and librettist Jacopo Ferretti adapted French author Charles Perrault’s folk tale published in 1697, Cendrillon, which means “The Glass Slipper.” However, La Cenerentola doesn’t have any glassy footwear or pumpkin carriages per se, although Rossini’s opera does follow most of the other conventions of this age-old, beloved children’s fable, which can also be read as a parable of class struggle.
The first time it happened was bad enough.
“It” amounted to this: It was Wednesday afternoon, I had finished my column early and walked out to my car, parked in the alley behind my house. I was on my way to an art show — very excited. I got in the car — hmmm, why is it so cold in here? — began backing out, what’s that? It looked like there was something on my rear window. I got out, walked around back. Oh my God! My rear window has been smashed in! What I saw was a fragment of broken glass dangling in a corner.
Was this a robbery? I had two umbrellas in the back seat; they were still there. Nothing had been taken. Apparently it was plain old idiotic vandalism.
I almost drove down to the art show anyway, but soon enough realized I needed to get this fixed, so I swung back, drove over to my car-repair place. “What year is your car?” I almost couldn’t remember. Oh yeah, 2009, Toyota Corolla. They ordered a rear window, which arrived a day later. And the window was installed. Problem solved, life goes on.
At a recent New York event, the President of the Foreign Press Association Ian Williams declared, before an approving audience, that it is time “to reclaim the narrative on Palestine”.
This phrase - ‘reclaiming the narrative’ - is relatively new to the Palestinian discourse. Years ago, the concept, let alone its implementation, were quite alien: the pro-Israel crowd refused, and still refuses, to acknowledge that Palestinians, their history and political discourse matter; some in the pro-Palestinian movement relegated Palestinian voices as if they were simply incapable of articulating a coherent narrative.
For many years, I, along with other Palestinian intellectuals, raged against the misrepresentation and marginalization of Palestine and the Palestinians, not only by Israel and its allies in mainstream media, but also against the elitism that existed within the Palestinian movement itself.
On October 21, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced the issuance of a military order designating six prominent Palestinian human rights groups as ‘terrorist organizations’. Gantz claimed that they are secretly linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a socialist political group that Israel considers, along with most Palestinian political parties, ‘a terrorist organization.’
The Palestinian organizations included in the Israeli order are Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights, Al-Haq, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children Palestine, Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.