Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 278

A tiny island nation’s food is poisoning its people

(Credit: Mike Day)

In the remote Faroe Islands, traditional communities are facing a choice between their heritage and their health. In “The Islands and the Whales,” Scottish filmmaker Mike Day turns his lens on the isolated Atlantic archipelago to chronicle the mounting tension in this part of the world.

The Faroe Islands are remote by any standard, meaning traditional Faroese diets rely heavily on what can be harvested from the ocean. The consumption of whale meat and blubber, as well as puffin meat, has for centuries been viewed as an integral part of day-to-day life. Entire festivals are designed around whale meat and the hunting of these animals.

The community has, however, experienced notable backlash against its traditional hunting practices. Not only are anti-whaling organizations protesting the hunts, but increasing levels of world pollution have wreaked havoc on the ocean’s ecosystem.

The medical community has raised the alarm on the Faroese diet, as high levels of mercury in the meat can have disastrous health effects. The whales are essentially toxic, they say, and not fit for human consumption.

For many who live on the Islands, this knowledge is difficult to accept. What once ensured their survival now endangers their lives.

The mounting international pressure to ban a practice so heavily steeped in tradition and so deeply rooted in culture has proven to be a source of grave tension in this remote part of the world. “The Islands and the Whales” is a sensitive exploration of this tension, and it invites American audiences to consider how fragile and interconnected our environments really are.

You can watch the full film, “The Islands and The Whales,” on POV Monday, Oct. 9, at 10 p.m. ET (check local listings) on your local PBS station or online at pov.org/video.

Nirvana’s raw and spontaneous “In Utero” sessions

(Credit: AP/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon)

[Steve] Albini’s fee was a modest $100,000, and he refused to take any royalties (“Anyone who takes a royalty off a band’s record—other than someone who actually writes music or plays on the record—is a thief,” he told [writer Michael] Azerrad). They would also be recording at the same place Albini had recently finished working with PJ Harvey on “Rid of Me,” Pachyderm Studios, located just outside the small town of Cannon Falls, 40 miles southeast of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was felt that the remote location would cut down on outside distractions, and it was also inexpensive—recording costs were said to be a mere $24,000. Albini sent Cobain a copy of “Rid of Me” to give him an idea of what the studio sounded like.

Albini had also been sent a cassette by the group, of the songs they had worked on in Brazil. “I preferred them immediately to the stuff that I had heard of ‘Nevermind,’” he says. “The ‘Nevermind’ album seemed very confined in its parameters. Each song had a beginning, middle, and an end, and it was all presented in a way that allowed you to hear each chunk. This new material, some of it was kind of sprawling and aimless, and I liked that, but there were still moments that were really powerful and dynamic. It just seemed like they had made a conceptual break in how they wanted to be and how they wanted to behave as a band, and what they wanted their music to sound like.”

Just before leaving, there was a last minute equipment crisis. “The night before they flew out I got this panicked phone call,” says Earnie Bailey. “They were practicing the night before and Kurt said that his Echo Flanger was broken. When those things break, they’re really complex under the hood, and I don’t want to say poorly made, but they weren’t built to the highest standards. Kurt said, ‘It’s the entire album—it’s got to work!’ He had been using his Echo Flanger to do all of this material, and I think he was worried that it wouldn’t sound the same. So I said that I would take a look it. We met over at Krist’s house, and it was really funny, because they popped the pedal open, and all he’d really done was he’d bumped the AC switch that turns the power on with his foot! It was hilarious, because it was such a simple fix. I was able to fix it with a Phillips screwdriver and a pair of pliers, and the level of gratitude was ridiculous. ‘Man, you saved the album!’ I had to laugh because I was like, ‘Man, this is the easiest thing I’ve ever done.’”

The band, booked into Pachyderm as “The Simon Ritchie Bluegrass Ensemble,” arrived in Minnesota the second week in February. The studio grounds also had a large house where clients could stay, another factor that helped the group focus on their work. “We were isolated,” says Novoselic. “I don’t know how we survived through that. It was pretty mellow. For two weeks, we were in this house, cooped up in the middle of nowhere, like a gulag. There was snow outside, we couldn’t go anywhere. We just worked.”

Recording began on February 13, and most days the group adhered to a regular schedule, beginning work around midday, taking a dinner break, then continuing to work until around midnight. “It was pretty simple, straight ahead,” says Novoselic. “It was pretty live. Some of those songs were first takes.” Their work ethic impressed Albini. “We earned his respect,” says Novoselic. “’Cause he would stand there by the tape machine with his arms folded. And we’d play most of the songs in the first, second take, and he’d nod his head, like all right, these guys are the real thing.”

There was a moment when [guitar tech Earnie] Bailey’s services were thought to be required. “I got a call the day or two after they arrived and they were having some kind of trouble getting going,” he says. “I wasn’t really sure what it was about, if it was problems tuning—I don’t know if they didn’t want to be bothered tuning their own stuff and didn’t really feel like it would be a big deal having me along. So they arranged for me to fly out and I was waiting for the call, and then I spoke with Krist on the phone and he said that most of the instrument tracking was finished! They pounded out most of the album very quickly; I wasn’t expecting Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” but I wasn’t expecting it to happen that fast either. I remember being really excited by that, just thinking that they were doing something that raw and spontaneous and not being so critical that they were going to go over everything and kill it, you know?”

As usual, most of the album’s lyrics were worked on up to the point of recording; Albini remembers Cobain carrying around a notebook of potential lyrics. “Many people would be expecting me to be writing about the last two years and my past experiences—drugs, having a child, the press coming down on us and stuff like that,” he told a journalist a month before the album’s release. “There’s a little bit of my life on [the album], but for the most part it’s very impersonal.” It was a remarkably disingenuous claim, for Cobain’s recent experiences permeated virtually every track on the record. The key events in his life the previous year had been the success of his band and the resultant media frenzy that had caused, his struggles with drugs, and the birth of his daughter. Accordingly, the record was replete with references to babies, childbirth, and reproduction (the album’s very title means “in the womb”), witch hunts, the loss of privacy, illness and disease, and ambivalence about fame. The songs expressed a heartfelt anguish that would later cause some to interpret the entire album as a cry for help, but even at the time of its release “In Utero” could easily be read as an album focused on physical and spiritual sickness. But “In Utero’s” saving grace is that it doesn’t fully give in to despair; the bursts of anger and sarcasm throughout the album keep the songs from sinking into abject despondency. Rather than being overwhelmed by circumstances, Cobain’s songs on “In Utero” show him—for the most part—still able and willing to fight back. As such, among Nirvana’s recorded efforts, it stands as Cobain’s most personal work.

Noam Chomsky on the Trump presidency

(Credit: AP/Hatem Moussa)

[This interview has been excerpted from Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, the new book by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian to be published this December.] 

David Barsamian: You have spoken about the difference between Trump’s buffoonery, which gets endlessly covered by the media, and the actual policies he is striving to enact, which receive less attention. Do you think he has any coherent economic, political, or international policy goals? What has Trump actually managed to accomplish in his first months in office?

Noam Chomsky: There is a diversionary process under way, perhaps just a natural result of the propensities of the figure at center stage and those doing the work behind the curtains.

At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how. Who even remembers the charge that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton, depriving the pathetic little man of his Grand Victory? Or the accusation that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower? The claims themselves don’t really matter. It’s enough that attention is diverted from what is happening in the background. There, out of the spotlight, the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully advancing policies designed to enrich their true constituency: the Constituency of private power and wealth, “the masters of mankind,” to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase.

These policies will harm the irrelevant general population and devastate future generations, but that’s of little concern to the Republicans. They’ve been trying to push through similarly destructive legislation for years. Paul Ryan, for example, has long been advertising his ideal of virtually eliminating the federal government, apart from service to the Constituency – though in the past he’s wrapped his proposals in spreadsheets so they would look wonkish to commentators. Now, while attention is focused on Trump’s latest mad doings, the Ryan gang and the executive branch are ramming through legislation and orders that undermine workers’ rights, cripple consumer protections, and severely harm rural communities. They seek to devastate health programs, revoking the taxes that pay for them in order to further enrich their Constituency, and to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed some much-needed constraints on the predatory financial system that grew during the neoliberal period.

That’s just a sample of how the wrecking ball is being wielded by the newly empowered Republican Party. Indeed, it is no longer a political party in the traditional sense. Conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have described it more accurately as a “radical insurgency,” one that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics.

Much of this is being carried out stealthily, in closed sessions, with as little public notice as possible. Other Republican policies are more open, such as pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, thereby isolating the U.S. as a pariah state that refuses to participate in international efforts to confront looming environmental disaster. Even worse, they are intent on maximizing the use of fossil fuels, including the most dangerous; dismantling regulations; and sharply cutting back on research and development of alternative energy sources, which will soon be necessary for decent survival.

The reasons behind the policies are a mix. Some are simply service to the Constituency. Others are of little concern to the “masters of mankind” but are designed to hold on to segments of the voting bloc that the Republicans have cobbled together, since Republican policies have shifted so far to the right that their actual proposals would not attract voters. For example, terminating support for family planning is not service to the Constituency. Indeed, that group may mostly support family planning. But terminating that support appeals to the evangelical Christian base – voters who close their eyes to the fact that they are effectively advocating more unwanted pregnancies and, therefore, increasing the frequency of resort to abortion, under harmful and even lethal conditions.

Not all of the damage can be blamed on the con man who is nominally in charge, on his outlandish appointments, or on the congressional forces he has unleashed. Some of the most dangerous developments under Trump trace back to Obama initiatives – initiatives passed, to be sure, under pressure from the Republican Congress.

The most dangerous of these has barely been reported. A very important study in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published in March 2017, reveals that the Obama nuclear weapons modernization program has increased “the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three – and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” As the analysts point out, this new capacity undermines the strategic stability on which human survival depends. And the chilling record of near disaster and reckless behavior of leaders in past years only shows how fragile our survival is. Now this program is being carried forward under Trump. These developments, along with the threat of environmental disaster, cast a dark shadow over everything else – and are barely discussed, while attention is claimed by the performances of the showman at center stage.

Whether Trump has any idea what he and his henchmen are up to is not clear. Perhaps he is completely authentic: an ignorant, thin-skinned megalomaniac whose only ideology is himself. But what is happening under the rule of the extremist wing of the Republican organization is all too plain.

Barsamian: Do you see any encouraging activity on the Democrats’ side? Or is it time to begin thinking about a third party?

Chomsky: There is a lot to think about. The most remarkable feature of the 2016 election was the Bernie Sanders campaign, which broke the pattern set by over a century of U.S. political history. A substantial body of political science research convincingly establishes that elections are pretty much bought; campaign funding alone is a remarkably good predictor of electability, for Congress as well as for the presidency. It also predicts the decisions of elected officials. Correspondingly, a considerable majority of the electorate – those lower on the income scale – are effectively disenfranchised, in that their representatives disregard their preferences. In this light, there is little surprise in the victory of a billionaire TV star with substantial media backing: direct backing from the leading cable channel, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, and from highly influential right-wing talk radio; indirect but lavish backing from the rest of the major media, which was entranced by Trump’s antics and the advertising revenue that poured in.

The Sanders campaign, on the other hand, broke sharply from the prevailing model. Sanders was barely known. He had virtually no support from the main funding sources, was ignored or derided by the media, and labeled himself with the scare word “socialist.” Yet he is now the most popular political figure in the country by a large margin.

At the very least, the success of the Sanders campaign shows that many options can be pursued even within the stultifying two-party framework, with all of the institutional barriers to breaking free of it. During the Obama years, the Democratic Party disintegrated at the local and state levels. The party had largely abandoned the working class years earlier, even more so with Clinton trade and fiscal policies that undermined U.S. manufacturing and the fairly stable employment it provided.

There is no dearth of progressive policy proposals. The program developed by Robert Pollin in his book Greening the Global Economy is one very promising approach. Gar Alperovitz’s work on building an authentic democracy based on worker self-management is another. Practical implementations of these approaches and related ideas are taking shape in many different ways. Popular organizations, some of them outgrowths of the Sanders campaign, are actively engaged in taking advantage of the many opportunities that are available.

At the same time, the established two-party framework, though venerable, is by no means graven in stone. It’s no secret that in recent years, traditional political institutions have been declining in the industrial democracies, under the impact of what is called “populism.” That term is used rather loosely to refer to the wave of discontent, anger, and contempt for institutions that has accompanied the neoliberal assault of the past generation, which led to stagnation for the majority alongside a spectacular concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

Functioning democracy erodes as a natural effect of the concentration of economic power, which translates at once to political power by familiar means, but also for deeper and more principled reasons. The doctrinal pretense is that the transfer of decision-making from the public sector to the “market” contributes to individual freedom, but the reality is different. The transfer is from public institutions, in which voters have some say, insofar as democracy is functioning, to private tyrannies – the corporations that dominate the economy – in which voters have no say at all. In Europe, there is an even more direct method of undermining the threat of democracy: placing crucial decisions in the hands of the unelected troika – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission – which heeds the northern banks and the creditor community, not the voting population.

These policies are dedicated to making sure that society no longer exists, Margaret Thatcher’s famous description of the world she perceived – or, more accurately, hoped to create: one where there is no society, only individuals. This was Thatcher’s unwitting paraphrase of Marx’s bitter condemnation of repression in France, which left society as a “sack of potatoes,” an amorphous mass that cannot function. In the contemporary case, the tyrant is not an autocratic ruler – in the West, at least – but concentrations of private power.

The collapse of centrist governing institutions has been evident in elections: in France in mid-2017 and in the United States a few months earlier, where the two candidates who mobilized popular forces were Sanders and Trump – though Trump wasted no time in demonstrating the fraudulence of his “populism” by quickly ensuring that the harshest elements of the old establishment would be firmly ensconced in power in the luxuriating “swamp.”

These processes might lead to a breakdown of the rigid American system of one-party business rule with two competing factions, with varying voting blocs over time. They might provide an opportunity for a genuine “people’s party” to emerge, a party where the voting bloc is the actual constituency, and the guiding values merit respect.

Barsamian: Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia. What significance do you see in that, and what does it mean for broader Middle East policies? And what do you make of Trump’s animus toward Iran?

Chomsky: Saudi Arabia is the kind of place where Trump feels right at home: a brutal dictatorship, miserably repressive (notoriously so for women’s rights, but in many other areas as well), the leading producer of oil (now being overtaken by the United States), and with plenty of money. The trip produced promises of massive weapons sales – greatly cheering the Constituency – and vague intimations of other Saudi gifts. One of the consequences was that Trump’s Saudi friends were given a green light to escalate their disgraceful atrocities in Yemen and to discipline Qatar, which has been a shade too independent of the Saudi masters. Iran is a factor there. Qatar shares a natural gas field with Iran and has commercial and cultural relations with it, frowned upon by the Saudis and their deeply reactionary associates.

Iran has long been regarded by U.S. leaders, and by U.S. media commentary, as extraordinarily dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous country on the planet. This goes back to well before Trump. In the doctrinal system, Iran is a dual menace: it is the leading supporter of terrorism, and its nuclear programs pose an existential threat to Israel, if not the whole world. It is so dangerous that Obama had to install an advanced air defense system near the Russian border to protect Europe from Iranian nuclear weapons – which don’t exist, and which, in any case, Iranian leaders would use only if possessed by a desire to be instantly incinerated in return.

That’s the doctrinal system. In the real world, Iranian support for terrorism translates to support for Hezbollah, whose major crime is that it is the sole deterrent to yet another destructive Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and for Hamas, which won a free election in the Gaza Strip – a crime that instantly elicited harsh sanctions and led the U.S. government to prepare a military coup. Both organizations, it is true, can be charged with terrorist acts, though not anywhere near the amount of terrorism that stems from Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the formation and actions of jihadi networks.

As for Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, U.S. intelligence has confirmed what anyone can easily figure out for themselves: if they exist, they are part of Iran’s deterrent strategy. There is also the unmentionable fact that any concern about Iranian weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) could be alleviated by the simple means of heeding Iran’s call to establish a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. Such a zone is strongly supported by the Arab states and most of the rest of the world and is blocked primarily by the United States, which wishes to protect Israel’s WMD capabilities.

Since the doctrinal system falls apart on inspection, we are left with the task of finding the true reasons for U.S. animus toward Iran. Possibilities readily come to mind. The United States and Israel cannot tolerate an independent force in a region that they take to be theirs by right. An Iran with a nuclear deterrent is unacceptable to rogue states that want to rampage however they wish throughout the Middle East. But there is more to it than that. Iran cannot be forgiven for overthrowing the dictator installed by Washington in a military coup in 1953, a coup that destroyed Iran’s parliamentary regime and its unconscionable belief that Iran might have some claim on its own natural resources. The world is too complex for any simple description, but this seems to me the core of the tale.

It also wouldn’t hurt to recall that in the past six decades, scarcely a day has passed when Washington was not tormenting Iranians. After the 1953 military coup came U.S. support for a dictator described by Amnesty International as a leading violator of fundamental human rights. Immediately after his overthrow came the U.S.-backed invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussein, no small matter. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed, many by chemical weapons. Reagan’s support for his friend Saddam was so extreme that when Iraq attacked a U.S. ship, the USS Stark, killing 37 American sailors, it received only a light tap on the wrist in response. Reagan also sought to blame Iran for Saddam’s horrendous chemical warfare attacks on Iraqi Kurds.

Eventually, the United States intervened directly in the Iran-Iraq War, leading to Iran’s bitter capitulation. Afterward, George H. W. Bush invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons production – an extraordinary threat to Iran, quite apart from its other implications. And, of course, Washington has been the driving force behind harsh sanctions against Iran that continue to the present day.

Trump, for his part, has joined the harshest and most repressive dictators in shouting imprecations at Iran. As it happens, Iran held an election during his Middle East travel extravaganza – an election which, however flawed, would be unthinkable in the land of his Saudi hosts, who also happen to be the source of the radical Islamism that is poisoning the region. But U.S. animus against Iran goes far beyond Trump himself. It includes those regarded as the “adults” in the Trump administration, like James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the secretary of defense. And it stretches a long way into the past.

Barsamian: What are the strategic issues where Korea is concerned? Can anything be done to defuse the growing conflict?

Chomsky: Korea has been a festering problem since the end of World War II, when the hopes of Koreans for unification of the peninsula were blocked by the intervention of the great powers, the United States bearing primary responsibility.

The North Korean dictatorship may well win the prize for brutality and repression, but it is seeking and to some extent carrying out economic development, despite the overwhelming burden of a huge military system. That system includes, of course, a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles, which pose a threat to the region and, in the longer term, to countries beyond – but its function is to be a deterrent, one that the North Korean regime is unlikely to abandon as long as it remains under threat of destruction.

Today, we are instructed that the great challenge faced by the world is how to compel North Korea to freeze these nuclear and missile programs. Perhaps we should resort to more sanctions, cyberwar, intimidation; to the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system, which China regards as a serious threat to its own interests; perhaps even to direct attack on North Korea – which, it is understood, would elicit retaliation by massed artillery, devastating Seoul and much of South Korea even without the use of nuclear weapons.

But there is another option, one that seems to be ignored: we could simply accept North Korea’s offer to do what we are demanding. China and North Korea have already proposed that North Korea freeze its nuclear and missile programs. The proposal, though, was rejected at once by Washington, just as it had been two years earlier, because it includes a quid pro quo: it calls on the United States to halt its threatening military exercises on North Korea’s borders, including simulated nuclear-bombing attacks by B-52s.

The Chinese-North Korean proposal is hardly unreasonable. North Koreans remember well that their country was literally flattened by U.S. bombing, and many may recall how U.S. forces bombed major dams when there were no other targets left. There were gleeful reports in American military publications about the exciting spectacle of a huge flood of water wiping out the rice crops on which “the Asian” depends for survival. They are very much worth reading, a useful part of historical memory.

The offer to freeze North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs in return for an end to highly provocative actions on North Korea’s border could be the basis for more far-reaching negotiations, which could radically reduce the nuclear threat and perhaps even bring the North Korea crisis to an end. Contrary to much inflamed commentary, there are good reasons to think such negotiations might succeed. Yet even though the North Korean programs are constantly described as perhaps the greatest threat we face, the Chinese-North Korean proposal is unacceptable to Washington, and is rejected by U.S. commentators with impressive unanimity. This is another entry in the shameful and depressing record of near-reflexive preference for force when peaceful options may well be available.

The 2017 South Korean elections may offer a ray of hope. Newly elected President Moon Jae-in seems intent on reversing the harsh confrontationist policies of his predecessor. He has called for exploring diplomatic options and taking steps toward reconciliation, which is surely an improvement over the angry fist-waving that might lead to real disaster.

Barsamian: You have in the past expressed concern about the European Union. What do you think will happen as Europe becomes less tied to the U.S. and the U.K.?

Chomsky: The E.U. has fundamental problems, notably the single currency with no political union. It also has many positive features. There are some sensible ideas aimed at saving what is good and improving what is harmful. Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 initiative for a democratic Europe is a promising approach.

The U.K. has often been a U.S. surrogate in European politics. Brexit might encourage Europe to take a more independent role in world affairs, a course that might be accelerated by Trump policies that increasingly isolate us from the world. While he is shouting loudly and waving an enormous stick, China could take the lead on global energy policies while extending its influence to the west and, ultimately, to Europe, based on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the New Silk Road.

That Europe might become an independent “third force” has been a matter of concern to U.S. planners since World War II. There have long been discussions of something like a Gaullist  conception  of  Europe  from  the  Atlantic  to  the  Urals  or, in more recent years, Gorbachev’s vision of a common Europe from Brussels to Vladivostok.

Whatever happens, Germany is sure to retain a dominant role in European affairs. It is rather startling to hear a conservative German chancellor, Angela Merkel, lecturing her U.S. counterpart on human rights, and taking the lead, at least for a time, in confronting the refugee issue, Europe’s deep moral crisis. On the other hand, Germany’s insistence on austerity and paranoia about inflation and its policy of promoting exports by limiting domestic consumption have no slight responsibility for Europe’s economic distress, particularly the dire situation of the peripheral economies. In the best case, however, which is not beyond imagination, Germany could influence Europe to become a generally positive force in world affairs.

Barsamian: What do you make of the conflict between the Trump administration and the U.S. intelligence communities? Do you believe in the “deep state”?

Chomsky: There is a national security bureaucracy that has persisted since World War II. And national security analysts, in and out of government, have been appalled by many of Trump’s wild forays. Their concerns are shared by the highly credible experts who set the Doomsday Clock, advanced to two and a half minutes to midnight as soon as Trump took office – the closest it has been to terminal disaster since 1953, when the U.S. and USSR exploded thermonuclear weapons. But I see little sign that it goes beyond that, that there is any secret “deep state” conspiracy.

Barsamian: To conclude, as we look forward to your 89th birthday, I wonder: Do you have a theory of longevity?

Chomsky: Yes, it’s simple, really. If you’re riding a bicycle and you don’t want to fall off, you have to keep going – fast.

Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling political works, including Hegemony or Survival and Failed States. A laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at MIT, he is widely credited with having revolutionized modern linguistics. His newest book (with David Barsamian) is Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy (Metropolitan Books, December 2017) from which this piece was excerpted.  He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

David Barsamian is the award-winning founder and director of Alternative Radio, an independent syndicated radio program. In addition to his 10 books with Noam Chomsky, his works include books with Tariq Ali, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, and Richard Wolff. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

How “The Florida Project” found its magical setting

"The Florida Project" (Credit: A24)

The opening frame of “The Florida Project,” a “Little Rascals” in modern times sort of film from Sean Baker, finds two young children in front of a vibrant violet backdrop. The children run and the shot widens. The violet is revealed to be the exterior of an Orlando area motel. But initially it’s abstract; it could be anything, anywhere. Only, it couldn’t. Not really. The colors, the thickness of the air, the sweat, the children’s faces, it all feels distinctly of Florida. Sure, the film’s title is a tipoff. But at the very least, it’s immediately clear that this isn’t a constructed set in Los Angeles or Toronto, a street in New York or a small anywhere American town.   

Light on plot, “The Florida Project” instead is an immersive ride, more delightful than horrifying. The viewer follows these kids — one, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), in particular — around the motel, where they live with their parents or grandparents. The motel, called The Magic Castle, is off Route 192, not far from Disney World. It and its surroundings — an Orange World supermarket, a gift shop in the shape of a wizard, a Twistee Treat ice cream shop and a cow pasture — are a kind of Disney for the imaginative mind. (There’s a parallel for many of the theme parks — Epcot being the cow pasture, and so forth.)            

Mostly through crisp, geometrically precise 35mm steady shots from cinematographer Alexis Zabe, Baker presents a real contemporary locale with a touch of the fantastic. The default setting on Zabe’s steady cam was low, so the viewer experiences the world at the same altitude as the children. But that only partially explains the sense of the spectacular that Baker infuses into this place. It also just is spectacular — the colors, the architecture, the way kids rule the land. Each year, the Oscars honor best production design, but the academy has no award for best setting. “The Florida Project” deserves one, though.

So, how did Baker find this exceptional world?

The story begins on a sunny day in the spring of 2011. There were puddles on the ground from the previous day’s rain and screenwriter Chris Bergoch was driving on Route 192 to his mother’s house in Kissimmee, Fla. Out the window of his car, he noticed something that struck him as slightly odd. There were kids playing whiffle ball in a motel parking lot, at the edge of the busy highway. The kids, who weren’t wearing any Disney-themed T-shirts or playing with any Disney-themed toys, didn’t look like tourists. Bergoch didn’t think too much of it at the time but then the scene recurred and his curiosity mounted.  

When Bergoch asked his mother about it, his mother explained that families live in the motels. He started Googling and he found that it wasn’t just there; across America, families, like the ones he saw, were residing in cheap motels.

Bergoch is a Disney enthusiast. “What tugged at my heartstrings was that this was happening in the shadow of Cinderella Castle and the most magical place on Earth,” he said. “But it also struck a chord with me that these kids were having just as much fun as I had growing up [in New Jersey], playing manhunt and whiffle ball and hide-and-seek.”

With a vague notion that there might be a story to tell from those kids’ perspective, Bergoch emailed his frequent collaborator and former NYU classmate Sean Baker. At the time, they were working on “Starlet,” an indie film about an unlikely friendship between a porn star and an elderly woman. “I don’t know if Sean set out to have a career consciously trying to do this, but it’s turned out that he seems to have a penchant for stories that take place on the fringes of certain things. So it seemed to lend itself well to what he likes to do,” Bergoch said.

Baker was interested. But this was before he and Bergoch made “Tangerine,” the iPhone-filmed movie about transgender sex workers in Santa Monica that would put Baker on the map as a hot youngish (he was 44) director. They wrote a treatment about a mother and daughter, which they hoped would get them financing and enable them to do more extensive research.

But by the time Baker and Bergoch began pitching production companies, “Beast of the Southern Wild,” another mother-daughter story set in the South, was coming out. “Even though our style was going to be very different, it was very hard to pitch something like that,” Baker said. “One time, I didn’t even get through half the pitch — like literally I got through three sentences — and this woman was like, ‘It’s OK, we’re not looking for that.’”

Baker and Bergoch put the project on pause. And with help from Mark Duplass, they made “Tangerine” on a microbudget. The film’s success made funding a Sean Baker movie a more attractive proposition for independent studios. June Pictures offered Baker final cut plus a budget of a few million dollars, which was more than the budgets of all his other films combined.   

With that budget and a research grant from Cinereach, Baker and Bergoch began taking trips to Florida. They would scout locations (Bergoch had a list of about 20 that he thought could work) and talk to the people they found, much like they did when making “Tangerine.” “We started meeting all these people — not only residents but motel managers,” Baker said. “There was this one guy who just opened up his world to us. He became the inspiration for the Bobby character in many ways.”

Early on, they fell in love with Magic Castle. “We were going to shoot at either the Magic Castle or there was this other motel that had a castle motif; we knew Moonee was living in her own castle,” Baker said. “But I couldn’t see us not shooting at the Magic Castle. The purple was already there; it looks that way. When I found it, it was a little grungier. It had been through harsher times.”

“Harsher times,” as in the recession. For Baker, that was part of the appeal of capturing the area; as in Orange County, outside of Disneyland, Route 192 in Orlando was a formerly bustling area on the edge of a theme park that had been transformed by hard times. That environment mirrored the Great Depression backdrop of “The Little Rascals.”

But the physical space of the Magic Castle also worked in their favor practically. “There’s a lot of ground that these kids could cover. You have this beautiful little stream right next to it and a playground. From the very beginning, we were setting up shots,” Baker said.

The other locations presented in the movie were in actuality quite close to the Magic Castle. The ice cream shop was within a mile. And Baker and Bergoch noticed that kids living in the Magic Castle would run over to Futureland (in reality, the Paradise) to play with their friends, like Moonee does in the film.

And one morning, when Baker was walking his dog, he found an uprooted tree that wound up in the movie. “I brought my producer, Shih-Ching Tsou, who I co-directed ‘Take Out’ with, and who played the perfume girl, and she said, ‘I love this tree because it’s special: it’s uprooted but it’s still growing.’ I was like, That’s like the tagline of the movie: ‘It’s uprooted, but it’s still growing.’ We have to get Moonee to say that in her words.”

Genius ways companies get kids to market for them

(Credit: AP)

In 1975, there was one song every kid knew by heart: “Two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun.” By any measure, it was a viral success.

Companies still use tweens and teens to do their marketing for them. And today’s youth marketing methods still focus on activities kids love, such as sending funny GIFs, watching YouTube, and applying cool Snapchat filters. But yesterday’s Big Mac song is today’s big data grab: The information trail your kids leave behind online equals big bucks for companies. You’ll only find out what you’re giving up by reading the small print in privacy policies. So it falls to parents to help kids build their marketing savvy, think critically about their digital footprint, and be clear-eyed about using so-called free stuff.

You could argue that kids enjoy these gimmicks – so a little payback to the marketers is a small price to pay. But the lack of transparency about how companies track digital data, combined with the risks kids take when they go public, make this an uneven playing field. And remember: kids are kids. They’re susceptible to marketing messages, sensitive to peer approval, and impulsive. But they also don’t like to be tricked. Parents can help kids understand how these ploys work. Learn more about the impact of marketing on kids, how to help your kids view all media critically, and think through marketing messages.

Take a look at some of the genius ways companies are getting kids to do their marketing for them.

Social Media Apps

If you were a retailer, wouldn’t you want to create a store kids never had to leave and virtually follow them around to find out what they liked so you could sell them more? That’s the idea behind the Justice Store’s Live Justice app, which lets kids create profiles, connect with friends, and upload photos and videos of themselves (sort of like a kiddie Facebook, but only for customers). It offers wishlists, exclusive content, and deals, as well as delivers advertising directly to your kid (and tracks everything she does in the app).

Shareable GIFs

Iconic sneaker brand Converse taps into the “reaction GIF” trend with its back-to-school First Day Feels campaign, a series of 32 shareable images starring “Stranger Things” actor Millie Bobby Brown. Kids can use the images to express themselves in photos instead of words. Companies can track the path of these GIFs and may follow their digital trail – which could be used to create demographic profiles for marketing purposes or to potentially share or sell that information to other brands.

Geofilters

Pioneered by Snapchat, geofilters are images that businesses create and make accessible to a specific location. Say you’re a lemonade stand at Coachella. Make a really cool filter only people near your booth can get. Concert-goers will love sending out the image either to fellow attendees, so they can find you (just look for the booth that matches the Snap) or to the poor souls who couldn’t make the show and enjoy the delicious, refreshing drink. The images serve as advertising, deployed by users. Both Snapchat and the third parties have access to the user data.

Promotional Events

What’s cooler than the next Star Wars movie? Augmented reality. What’s cooler than commercials? Disney’s “Star Wars” Treasure Hunt – a giant game that fans want to play so bad they may not notice that they’re totally promoting your product. Taking place in 20,000 stores across the United States in fall 2017, Disney’s “Last Jedi” treasure hunt uses an AR app (sort of like Pokémon Go) to lead players to stores to find “Last Jedi” characters. The app lets you take photos and videos and upload everything to your social media account – infinitely magnifying the reach of the event.

Product Reviews

In the internet economy, the people who watch other people on YouTube have as much value to companies as the YouTube hosts themselves. The folks who do product reviews on YouTube – called social media influencers – for things like makeup, clothes, and hair products typically get free products from companies so that they can discuss (i.e., promote) them. But it’s the audience for these videos that companies really want to reach. These (mostly) teen girls are highly prized trendsetters and word-of-mouth influencers who will tell all the kids at school about the latest thing she saw on YouTube. The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on social media influencers to make sure they’re disclosing their sponsorships. That won’t change word-of-mouth marketing, but it will at least clarify that social media influencers are compensated.

Hashtag Campaigns

Some kids live for Instagram glory. Some companies live for free advertising. That’s the arrangement behind Levi’s #LiveInLevis campaign. Take a cool pic of yourself wearing Levi’s, add the hashtag, and wait for the company to leave a comment asking to feature your photo on their site. Voilà – instant brand ambassador! It’s called “user-generated content,” and marketers love it because it conveys authenticity when real people use your product. Most user-generated content becomes the property of the brand after they post your image.

How chewing gum could detect disease

Nobody likes having their blood drawn. Peeing in a cup isn’t so bad, but it’s far from convenient. But typically, these are the biological fluids that nurses ask us to provide. Except for the finger prick of blood glucose testing, this usually must be done on location at a diagnostic lab. Upon relinquishing our ephemera, we go home and wait a few days for the results.

But what about spit? Saliva is a dispensable, non-invasive fluid that’s full of ions, hormones, antibodies, and other proteins – it even contains DNA. And it’s in your mouth, which is where it could stay while you test yourself at home.

That’s the goal of a team of European researchers who recently reported their efforts to develop a chewing gum self-test that gives users (chewers?) the result in minutes. And how do researchers propose delivering those results? Via a truly universal interface: taste.

Leaving an extremely bitter taste

The contents of a bodily fluid which are useful in diagnostics are called biomarkers, and if their levels are out of whack, it can indicate disease. The biomarker the researchers focused on, matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), are more abundant during oral inflammation, which occurs during the mouth ailments periodontitis and gingivitis.

MMPs are proteins called proteases that break the chemical bonds of other proteins. Specifically, proteases target and cleave the peptide strands that make up a protein’s building blocks. Different MMPs recognize and cleave different peptide targets. The authors take advantage of that feature in the design of their system, which identifies biomarker MMPs that cleave a peptide attached to the chewing gum, releasing a flavorful molecule.

If the test is positive, the gum will produce an intensely bitter taste shortly after someone starts chewing it. This is because the molecule released by MMP activity, denatonium, is the most bitter-tasting molecule known to science. Because it is so bitter, it can be detected at very low concentrations​, making it a sensitive diagnostic tool. For example, the threshold for denatonium detection is 75 times lower than the spearmint-flavored carvone. Plus, it’d be unsettling to combine a good flavor and the bad result: “What a delightful wintergreen sensation, I guess I’d better get this disease taken care of.” So they went with denatonium.

False start

At least, that was the plan. It didn’t work at first. In studying the basic activity of the reporter molecule, the researchers set the gum aside and simply tested a peptide linked to denatonium, referred to hereafter as the probe. In this way the researchers could determine if MMPs would cleave the probe to release enough bitterness. The problem was, the probe didn’t work well. MMPs did cleave it, but the denatonium was burdened by the leftover peptide fragment afterwards. That molecular baggage dampens the bitter sensation, decreasing the usefulness of the entire system.

A very clever probe redesign resulted in a cleaved fragment that could be further degraded by another protease present in saliva called salivary aminopeptidases (APs). Once the so-called second generation probe is cleaved by MMPs, APs chew off the remaining peptide fragment to reveal the unburdened denatonium in all its bitter glory.

The researchers made further tweaks to the probe with purified MMPs and APs, but the true test was to see if the probe could identify oral disease from clinically diagnosed patients’ saliva. They focused on peri-implant disease, because among oral inflammatory conditions, this one has a significant increase in MMPs. Currently, this condition is diagnosed at the periodontist’s office, where the dentist harvests fluid from the gap between the patients’ gum and the oral implant, and ships the sample off for lab testing.

It turned out the probe could discriminate between healthy and diseased saliva nearly as well as the lab test, with release of the denatonium occurring within 5-10 minutes in clinically-confirmed disease samples. Translated to gum, that would represent a good bit of chewing, but it’s certainly more convenient than an office visit and waiting for test results.



Chew safety

But don’t expect to be chewing your lab tests anytime soon. First off, the authors must demonstrate that the probe itself is safe before it’ll enter a human mouth. Secondly, economics: the market of people looking for peri-implant disease-diagnosing chewing gum is slim to nonexistent.

However, this example could be extended to other protease biomarkers. For example, the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus expresses a protease called aureolysin, so a different peptide probe specific to that biomarker could aid identification of oral infections. The technological platform is in place; now it can be redirected to specific diseases in which saliva contains the relevant biomarkers.

Ever try to remember a time before the internet or smartphones and think, “How did we get by before?” Maybe in a decade we’ll feel the same way as we chew up differently colored test gums at home. For what it’s worth, the research team already applied for a patent and expect to commercialize a chewing gum diagnostic in the next two to three years. No syringes, no pee cups, no lab visits, no deductibles, no wait.

Why Harvey Weinstein’s apology is so hard to believe

Harvey Weinstein (Credit: Getty/Alberto E. Rodriguez)

I don’t buy Harvey Weinstein’s apology. I realize this isn’t really a novel opinion, as social media is burning up with people mocking the statement he released to the New York Times after Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published an exposé chronicling decades of allegations of sexual harassment against the renowned studio executive. Still, it’s an opinion worth explicating because the excuses that Weinstein trots out in his statement are the kinds of excuses that sexual harassers and abusers all too often get away with, even in the 21st century.

Weinstein is trying to gaslight us all. An insincere apology is no apology at all, and people should not accept it.

“I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then,” Weinstein wrote. “I have since learned it’s not an excuse, in the office — or out of it. To anyone.”

First, if it’s not an excuse, then why offer it up as one? Second, the claim that he didn’t know any better is particularly hard to believe in light of the eight legal settlements — that we know about — uncovered by the Times. After you have repeatedly paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to women who say you have behaved inappropriately, that might have been a clue that something was wrong.

But mostly, the whole “I didn’t know better” claim, common to sexual harassers, needs to be understood as the nonsense that it is. Sexual harassers know better. They know it’s wrong. They know their behavior upsets women.

That’s why they do it. 

A lot of sexual harassers want to pass off their behavior as merely awkward or unwelcome advances, knowing that draws sympathy. Who among us hasn’t flirted with someone who didn’t flirt back? Who hasn’t worried about asking someone out for fear of rejection? That’s how the harassers want you to imagine them: hapless Romeos, guilty not of being cruel but of having no game.

Well, don’t believe it. As most women who’ve been targeted by creeps — which is most women, by the way — can tell you, what is usually obvious is how much of the creep’s pleasure depends on knowing he’s making you uncomfortable.

The stories relayed by women to the Times reporters suggest that’s the case here. Many of the women describe Weinstein making excuses to get them alone in a hotel room. Making sure there are no witnesses to the behavior doesn’t suggest a well-meaning guy who doesn’t know better, but someone who knows exactly what he’s doing and how he plans to get away with it.

What Weinstein is described doing, once he was alone with a woman, also cuts against the notion that any offense was accidental.

“In interviews, eight women described varying behavior by Mr. Weinstein: appearing nearly or fully naked in front of them, requiring them to be present while he bathed or repeatedly asking for a massage or initiating one himself,” Kantor and Twohey write. Ashley Judd reported that he asked her to watch him shower.

These actions are, to put it plainly, weird. This isn’t what you do when you’re flirting or hitting on someone. Most people, even the most socially awkward among us, know that you don’t open by trying to take your clothes off. If you’re actually trying to get someone in bed for consensual and mutually pleasurable activities, you try to make it fun for that person by flirting and feeling out how they feel about you. You don’t just come right out and ask for weird stuff.

It especially defies credulity to ask people to believe that a film producer as successful as Weinstein is incapable of recognizing and understanding social cues. His entire job is built around either talking people into giving him money or convincing them to sign onto risky and time-intensive moviemaking projects, a skill that requires a well-honed ability to read people. It beggars belief to imagine that he was unaware of the disgust and discomfort he was causing.

Sexual harassment isn’t an accident, and it’s not the result of social awkwardness or a failure to understand the “new” rules for how to treat women. It’s not a mental illness.

Sexual harassment is, as Irene Bremis put it when I was on Sirius with her recently, just plain bullying. The fun of it for harassers may be sexualized, but it’s not really about sex. It’s about that feeling of power one gets from making someone else feel uncomfortable and helpless. That domineering feeling is compounded when the target is unable to do anything about it, either because she won’t be believed or because her harasser is willing to pull on his immense resources to destroy her life for speaking out.

It’s good to see that many people can see right through Weinstein’s excuses. It would be even better if we all start to see through it when other men who are less in the limelight make similar excuses for their own bad behavior.

Are great works of art like Buster Keaton’s “College” in danger?

Anne Cornwall and Buster Keaton in "College" (Credit: United Artists)

Have you ever encountered a news item that synchs up oh-so-scarily with some of your deepest fears about exactly what you don’t want to happen in the future, but what you’ve been dreading could?

I had this experience in late August when I learned that a Memphis theatre canceled a screening of “Gone with the Wind.” I’m not a huge “Gone with the Wind” guy, but I am a huge art guy, and I have this pet theory — like some horned monster I keep in my back pocket, hoping he will remain there — that all art is likely to be censored or buried away if more people become aware of it.

The reason many works of art are allowed to carry on unchecked now is because the avenging angels of society are largely ignorant about the art of the past.

For instance, there is my man Buster Keaton, who was born on Oct. 4, 1895. This fall marks the ninetieth anniversary of his film “College,” which is still the best movie I’ve ever watched about what it means to head off to a university, full of hopes, fears, a burgeoning sense of love in your heart that affections more adult than any you’ve experienced with your high school significant other await. Your heart might be going sailing for a tour around your chest — and the heavens of affection — Magellan-style. The setting is ironic, as it represents a freedom of ideas in the film, a stark contrast to today’s university model.

Keaton’s protagonist is a winsome character, and once he finds his would-be love, it’s not just that he wants to be with her — he wants to cater to her happiness, so that this person he cares about can enjoy a happiness greater than his own.

I always admired that. It made me look within myself to see if I ever did that in my own life, and how I could improve there. For this, really, is the point of art. It directs the focal lens back inward, into ourselves, what we can be, what we may need to address.

Keaton’s character takes a number of jobs to impress this young woman, one of them being a gig that requires him to dress in blackface. Obviously, dressing in blackface is terrible. But there is a galaxy of difference between an artist who incorporates the mores of the time and one who espouses racism.

Today’s rampaging angels don’t stop to consider this difference, because shouting something down serves as the shifting sands on which they seek to build themselves up. This is not an identity, it’s a house of cards on which nothing, save a lack of true fulfillment, trimmed with depression, can be built.

In basketball, there’s a term called “hero ball,” for when a player will launch ill-advised shots, disregarding teammates, in an effort to lead all to glory.

Hero ball is rampant in our culture now. We play hero ball when we make retroactive claims that were we in the past, we would never do what someone like a Keaton would. We would be the individual going against the grain of the totality of a society.

But would we? I’ve noticed that people who use words like “heteronormative,” “patriarchy” and “intersectional” did not even know what those words meant a few years ago. They started saying them because a large group started saying them.

There’s an irony that one of Keaton’s best films takes place in the college arena, when it’s also the kind of film that is so easy for college justice crusaders to shout down now. Keaton’s Great Stone Face expression is given multiple airings in “College,” that look of sad understanding that comes with the knowledge that it’s going to be very hard to get the outside world to grasp what you see so clearly, so undeniably, in a given moment. The communication of those concomitant thoughts may well be the root of all great art. In “College,” Keaton’s lovelorn hero, who is striving for true connection and smart enough to know it’s rare, has shouldered ceremony to the side. We stand on so much of it now, with this need to never appear to be in earnest. That’s not “chill,” certainly, and “intense,” instead — a very bad thing to be in this society, because many people have no desire to get off their rear ends and instead prefer to be enabled in the course of nullity they’ve chosen. Or, if they not chosen, can’t rouse themselves from.

Keaton’s characters never want any part of that, which is a form of death-in-life. They exist within a context of a bygone world, in part, with different accepted sociological elements, and in a forever relevant one as well. If you dither about with always looking for things to object to, and that serves as the basis of your identity, you’re never going to have the kind of connection that is at the foundation of the quest in a film like “College.”

We exist in a sociological gloaming now, with a lot of the haze that’s in this Keaton film emanating from the Every School USA. It’s like there’s a big fog bank outside all of us, and when someone encounters something to avenge, a whistle is blown, and everyone races in its direction. Gazes are incessantly directed outward. Find more things to blow a whistle at, and you gain accreditation within the group as a good person. Pelts for crusading belts.

The miasma on the outside is matched with a fog bank on the inside, since we so rarely shine a light to burn off the clouds in our own conscience. Boom, meet the new make of human, one that is perpetually crowd-sourced. Art evades suppression only because we have to put in some effort to encounter most of it, beyond following the pack around.

The writer William Thackeray was a dude who didn’t like anything. But he loved Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” in much the same way I love Keaton’s “College.” And what he said was that you need to check out this book, because this man has done you a kindness in showing you ways back into yourself, back through your personal fog.

In other words, life is hard enough when you don’t truly live it. Start to live it. Live it full tilt. Drink it to the lees. Be a you, not a them. The pack that takes things down is ultimately the bloated task force that will take you down in a larger sense. Don’t go with it. You don’t have to go with Buster, necessarily, but go with art. Because no matter what you do to it, it will always be there to love you back, when you are ready for love. And there just isn’t very much in this world we can say that about.

 

Whitney Cummings and the whack-a-mole of codependency

You expect a book by Whitney Cummings to be funny. Over the past decade, she’s carved a career as a stand-up comic, actor and creator/co-creator of two network sitcoms, including the long-running “Two Broke Girls.” What you wouldn’t expect is that her memoir “I’m Fine … And Other Lies” would be such a frank, deeply moving account of her experiences with codependence, eating disorders, abortion, consent, fertility — oh, and getting her ear torn off. There are pictures.

During a recent episode of “Salon Talks,” Cummings talked about how writing a piece for Lenny two years ago — and the heartfelt response from readers — inspired her to write the book, and how nearly losing her ear helped her gain wisdom.

“I feel I had dealt with a lot of my codependence in my personal life and professional life but it still was rearing its ugly head in other ways,” she told me. “Codependence is like a game of whack-a-mole. You think you’ve dealt with one part, another part pops up.”

For Cummngs, that other part involved a very special relationship. “I rescue animals, and I had rescued a dog,” she explained. “A lot of my codependent things came up: denial, not looking at red flags, conveniently turning my head the other way — no pun intended — when I saw something that didn’t align with what I had envisioned. I threw all logic out the window with how I normally deal with an abused dog.

“I so badly wanted everything to be easy that I ignored reality,” she continued. “The same mentality can be, ‘Oh, this guy will change. He’s done this with every other woman but if I just love him enough, he’ll change.’ Or, ‘My boss yells at me every day but if I just dress a certain way or get this brief in on time, she’ll stop.’ These things that we tell ourselves to self-soothe but ultimately end up putting us in dangerous situations, for me is a slippery slope.”

Watch our full conversation on Facebook.

Tune in to Salon’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.

A loophole for discrimination? Jeff Sessions expands religious freedom protections

Jeff Sessions (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a new legal guidance to federal agencies on Friday that governs and expands the already broad protection of religious liberties. The change could impact a series of pending employment, contracting and programming decisions that could go against government regulations.

The memorandum — titled “Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty” — reminds executive agencies and departments that religious freedom is an indelible right and an essential aspect to American fundamentalism, which “includes the right to act or abstain from action in accordance with one’s religious beliefs,” for “no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law.”

The governance comes in response to President Donald Trump’s May 4th executive order which promotes “free speech and religious liberty.” It orders the Internal Revenue Service to “not take any adverse action against any individual, house of worship, or other religious organization” that endorses a political candidate, as there would be no such restrictions against secular organizations. It also orders various government departments to “address conscience-based objections” to covering contraception in employee insurance plans, as is required in the Affordable Care Act.

Among the 20 principles, the newly issued memorandum touches upon the ways in which people and organizations deserve sweeping religious freedom, argues that Americans do not sacrifice their right to religious freedom if operating within the public sphere and that the government cannot interfere with “the autonomy of a religious organization” or “burden any aspect of religious observance or practice.”

One of the most notable — and for some, concerning — points of the memorandum outlines that “religious employers are entitled to employ only persons whose beliefs and conduct are consistent with the employers’ religious precepts.”

In a statement Friday, Sessions explained that “as President Trump said, ‘Faith is deeply embedded into the history of our country, the spirit of our founding and the soul of our nation . . . [this administration] will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced anymore.’”

He argued that “the constitutional protection of religious beliefs and the right to exercise those beliefs have served this country well, have made us one of the most tolerant countries in the world, and have also helped make us the freeist and most generous. President Trump promised that this administration would ‘lead by example on religious liberty,’ and he is delivering on that promise.”

Sessions has also sent a memo to the Department of Justice and Attorney’s Offices across the U.S. directing them to incorporate the memorandum in “litigation strategy and arguments, operations, grant administration, and all other aspects of the department’s work.”

Though it covers a wide range of protections, the governance is, in many ways, rather vague. Activist worry that it legalizes and encourages discrimination against individuals based on their gender identity or sexual orientation. Many organizations have come forward to denounce the memorandum.

“Yes, the freedom of religion is a fundamental right…but it cannot be used as a shield to permit discrimination against LGBTQ people,” said Vanita Gupta, a former top DOJ official in the Obama administration and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, in a statement to Salon. “We urge the federal courts to reject the radical efforts by this administration to justify discrimination on the basis of religion. We are strengthened as a nation when we work to protect and balance the rights and dignity of all.”

The release of the directive came just hours after Trump announced the Affordable Care Act would no longer require employers to supply insurers with birth control, a follow-up to his 2016 campaign promise.