Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 669
September 6, 2016
Ann Coulter just won’t let the Khzir Khan feud end for Trump: America shouldn’t be lectured by a “snarling Muslim”
With summer drawing to its unofficial end, the presidential election seems to be again heating up into a competitive race after more than a monthlong post-Democratic National Convention bounce in favor of Hillary Clinton. But just as Donald Trump begins to inch his way up in the polls, one of his biggest boosters is rehashing the very feud that might have caused his public standing to plummet in the first place.
After being repeatedly humiliated during Comedy Central’s roast of Rob Lowe (no clue why she was there in the first place), conservative commentator Ann Coulter took refugee in an interview with an Australian political commentator on Monday — ostensibly to hawk her new pro-Trump book without further ridicule. A typical conversation on the 2016 election, however, suddenly turned controversial when host Andrew Bolt pressed Coulter on her criticism of Khizr Khan, the father of Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq.
“That still leaves the case of the Muslim parents of the soldier who died. I just don’t think you criticize the parents, any parents of a soldier who died in battle,” Bolt told Coulter.
“No I totally disagree on that one,” Coulter shot back, refusing to back down from her attack on the Gold Star family. “I don’t know America very well if they want to listen to a snarling Muslim lecture them and tell us we’re not allowed to have opinions on important public policy issues unless we had a son die in Iraq.”
@AnnCoulter says Americans don’t want a ‘snarling Muslim’ to lecture them. On #TheBoltReport @SkyNewsAust https://t.co/EdLxjScOOS
— The Bolt Report (@theboltreport) Sept. 5, 2016
The conservative provocateur had been previously roundly criticized, even by her fellow conservatives, for her initial attack on the Khans:
You know what this convention really needed? An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) July 29, 2016
Recently asked by Yahoo News if she regretted the tweet (other than misspelling journalist Fareed Zakaria’s last name in a comparison to Khan), Coulter stuck to her anti-Muslim rhetoric.
“Oh no! I love that tweet!” she replied, adding that she sent that tweet while exercising on the elliptical machine and watching the “angry Muslim speak.”
“To have this angry Muslim standing with his [hajib]-wearing wife — saying nothing — haranguing us, telling us lies about our Constitution,” she continued. “You know, what he should’ve been doing was waving Sharia law and telling Americans to read it instead of telling Trump to read the Constitution, because we’re all going to be living under Sharia law if this guy has his way.”
September 5, 2016
Espionage Insiders: The Protocol Problem
“What Edward Snowden did was give us all a wake up call.” Morey Haber is discussing the safety nets—and lack thereof—that protect our privacy in the digital age. “We have to start with policy, then enforce it. Everyone has to participate in the procedures.”
As the VP of Technology at BeyondTrust, Haber has built a career ensuring that companies have the stopgaps in place to protect themselves and their employees in the face of ever-present cyber threats. He isn’t a fan of the infamous whistleblower, (“He took an oath,” he explains), but by his estimation the Snowden situation shed light on not only what protocols weren’t in place, but which were being ignored. “No one was looking over his shoulder. Even his use of a flash drive to steal the information—flash drives weren’t allowed. Why wasn’t anyone keeping an eye on him?”
The problem of protocol isn’t just a government-issued dilemma—it actively affects our everyday safety as we navigate lives lived online. From the Target breach that affected millions to the small, subtle siphoning of cash from your debit card after you dine at a local restaurant, each represents a failure to follow the steps that keep threats at bay.
“The truth is, some businesses are more secure because there is a ‘Big Brother’ sitting on their shoulder,” he explains. The credit card industry, banks, and healthcare, for example, face fines if they don’t prove the systematic practice of safety protocols. “It is a pain, but it works.”
Safety in Numbers
When a significant breach makes the news—think of Amazon—it’s easy to panic, but Haber believes those types of hacks are safer for the individual. “They are broad stroke attacks, which are harder to monetize,” he explains. When you are one of a million people affected, you are statistically less likely to be targeted yourself. “It’s a compromise en masse, so hackers take advantage by sending phishing emails about changing your password.” So what should you do if you are part of a breach? “You should be changing your password often anyway,” says Haber, who also advises caution when you are prompted to do things like store your information for future purchases.
Conversely, small businesses face larger problems if security measures aren’t followed. “Because there are less people involved, you’re a part of a more targeted attack, which is easier to monetize,” he says. One way to stay safe: Use the credit, not debit, feature on your card, since pin numbers are easily copied.
Safety—Big & Small
“The biggest benefit of what Edward Snowden did is that it motivated the U.S. Government to set better protocols and to actually follow them,” says Haber. As private citizens, we can do the same on a micro level.
Haber suggests securing your information strongly. “You should have different passwords for everything. You should change them often. If you write them down, store them in a locked, fireproof box.”
And, while Haber believes the government’s forced transparency is a nice side effect of Snowden, he is quick to point out that we are, in fact, safer as a nation based on the data that is collected worldwide. “I was speaking with someone recently in a [government security position], and he told me that the hardest part is understanding how our adversaries all believe they are 100% right, just the way we do.”
One safety measure that has proven effective is User Behavior Analytics (UBA), which follows the actions of individuals to predict any potential threats. “It’s based on keys,” he explains. “Did they go and buy 50lbs of fertilizer? What sites are they going to, are they using keywords and phrases that are associated with the terrorist community?”
Haber believes it is a necessity in today’s world. “If it stops another attack—and it does—I am gung ho.”
Data protects us in big and small ways. “If the e-mail app on your phone is tracking where you are and someone tries to log in from Russia, it’s going to stop that from happening.”
Haber offers optimism to skeptics. “There are benefits to these kind of data exchanges, as well.”
Morey Haber is the VP of Technology at BeyondTrust, a firm specializing in cyber security solutions that deliver the visibility to reduce risks and the control to act against internal and external data breach threats. To learn more about their work, click here . Mr. Haber’s perspective is offered as part of a four-part series by Salon.com on behalf of Open Road Films’ SNOWDEN , in theaters September 2016.
Sexual awakening in Hawkins: “Stranger Things” explores the terror and the triviality of adolescence
Natalia Dyer and Joe Keery in "Stranger Things" (Credit: Netflix)
Netflix’s summer supernatural drama “Stranger Things,” an 8-part series set in a small Indiana town menaced by a mysterious monster and sinister government agents, has earned near-universal praise. At Film Critic Hulk, an anonymous criticism site, “Hulk” bucks that trend, accusing the series of, amongst other things, underdeveloped characters, simultaneously trite and ambiguous messages and, above all, making no sense. In particular, Hulk finds the show’s perspective on sexual politics questionable.
“Like even the sexual politics of the show aren’t complex or nuanced; they’re just vague. It constantly steps into the arena of feeling kind of gross about older photography brother taking nakey pictures of older sister, or the way Eleven just wants to feel pretty, or why older sister is fine with stalker guy. They don’t play any of that for conflict either,” Hulk writes. (The review is formatted in Hulk’s trademark style, all caps, which I’ve removed for clarity.)
The depictions of sexuality in the show are deeply interesting and often overturn the clichés Hulk accuses the series of playing to. Let’s start with the children. Though much of the show’s appeal has been attributed to ’80s nostalgia, part of it is also nostalgia for childhood and particularly for childhood play away from the watchful eyes of today’s helicopter parents. The series opens and closes with shots of a group of boys — Will, Mike, Lucas and Dustin — playing Dungeons and Dragons. It’s not just any fantasy game; it’s a fantasy game with meticulously crafted worlds and rules.
It makes perfect sense, in the world of the show, that Mike, Lucas and Dustin would be the ones to figure out, when Will goes missing, where he is and be able to work their way toward him, partly out of a sense of loyalty to their friend, but partly out of the same spirit of adventure and play that motivates their nightly gatherings in small-yet-unknowable Hawkins, Indiana. Glimpses of the mysteriously powerful female interloper Eleven’s supernatural abilities are met with fear and awe, but also intense curiosity and, occasionally, delight. In many ways, for the boys, the stranger things they reckon fully with aren’t faceless monsters but the looming anarchy of adolescence. The prospect of crushes and kisses breaking up their all-male clique are in many ways more daunting than the danger Hulk confuses for the central tension of the story.
I will certainly grant that Eleven’s obsession with her own beauty, after Mike tells her she’s pretty when they cover her shaved head with a wig and put her in a dress, was off in a sexist way. The same child who had to be taught the word “friend” apparently needed no explanation for the word “pretty” and immediately began to question whether she fit the bill. It’s hard to argue that the need for affirmation wouldn’t be highly socialized, unlike her natural thirst for companionship and parental affection.
But Hulk’s interpretation of the storyline featuring Nancy — Mike’s older sister — seemed to be based on a fundamental misinterpretation. Here, the critic labels an adult’s reliance on demonstrably false truisms as the writers’ message to viewers:
“The woman in the police station issues the older sister a bit of ‘folksy wisdom’, telling her ‘You better tell him that!’ (he’s not your boyfriend) inferring ‘Only love makes you that stupid.’ . . . It is the perfect signifier of everything in this show: Get to the folksy line of rote human insight regardless of whether it’s earned.”
But the woman’s misread on the situation is meant to be exactly that, and it’s one of many illustrations of most adults’ complete cluelessness about what is actually happening in Hawkins. Mike and Nancy’s mother, bless her heart, tries desperately to get her children to talk to her, and at one point thinks she’s cracked the case by ascertaining that her daughter spent the night with a boy. “We slept together!” Nancy readily admits. “Is that what you want to know? It doesn’t matter!”
“It does matter,” her mother insists.
But Nancy’s right. In the grand scheme of things, sex wasn’t the boogeyman it was made out to be. The fact that she had it with Steve doesn’t really matter. The fact that her friend Barb went missing — as she later learns, abducted to a dangerous other dimension — while she was doing it does. For one thing, it is a welcome inversion on the horror movie trope, wherein the slutty teen screws her way to an early grave. But within the context of the show, it gives Nancy a sense of purpose and a way of reasserting her strength and independence outside of the arms of her jock boyfriend.
Nancy’s relationship with “pervert” Jonathan, the older brother of the missing Will and the only person at first to believe Nancy that Barb didn’t simply run away, is another inversion of trope. The woman in the police station referenced above is completely wrong about what made Jonathan behave stupidly. He calmly walked away from a fight, when what was at stake was Nancy’s honor, and made no attempt to clarify Steve’s misunderstanding, happy to have all involved parties mistakenly believe the two had hooked up. Instead, he was understandably baited into throwing punches when Steve took the cruel step of mocking his kidnapped brother, saying all but “good riddance” to the missing Will.
Steve later recognized he was out of line and proved himself worthy of Nancy’s high estimation. But this was redemptive for Nancy as well, who’d insisted he was “a good guy” when others, including Jonathan, rolled his eyes. The show’s writers could have had Nancy run from Steve’s arms to Jonathan’s, but instead they bucked trend yet again. Nancy exhibited agency and wound up with the partner she had a real romantic connection with, not one borne out of shared trauma. She was a fleshed-out character, not a projection of male fantasies wherein the creepy outcast gets the pretty girl.
Season 2 certainly leaves room to slide back toward the banal, but for now it rests comfortably above trite pop culture offerings, complete with overblown dangers surrounding teenagers and sex. If there’s one human insight the show most certainly earned, its the recognition that most monsters are of our own making.
Have we forgotten the true meaning of Labor Day? It’s not about the end of summer
(Credit: JasonCPhoto via Shutterstock)
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Labor Day is a U.S. national holiday held the first Monday every September. Unlike most U.S. holidays, it is a strange celebration without rituals, except for shopping and barbecuing. For most people it simply marks the last weekend of summer and the start of the school year.
The holiday’s founders in the late 1800s envisioned something very different from what the day has become. The founders were looking for two things: a means of unifying union workers and a reduction in work time.
History of Labor Day
The first Labor Day occurred in 1882 in New York City under the direction of that city’s Central Labor Union.
In the 1800s, unions covered only a small fraction of workers and were balkanized and relatively weak. The goal of organizations like the Central Labor Union and more modern-day counterparts like the AFL-CIO was to bring many small unions together to achieve a critical mass and power. The organizers of the first Labor Day were interested in creating an event that brought different types of workers together to meet each other and recognize their common interests.
However, the organizers had a large problem: No government or company recognized the first Monday in September as a day off work. The issue was solved temporarily by declaring a one-day strike in the city. All striking workers were expected to march in a parade and then eat and drink at a giant picnic afterwards.
The New York Tribune’s reporter covering the event felt the entire day was like one long political barbecue, with “rather dull speeches.”
Why was Labor Day invented?
Labor Day came about because workers felt they were spending too many hours and days on the job.
In the 1830s, manufacturing workers were putting in 70-hour weeks on average. Sixty years later, in 1890, hours of work had dropped, although the average manufacturing worker still toiled in a factory 60 hours a week.
These long working hours caused many union organizers to focus on winning a shorter eight-hour work day. They also focused on getting workers more days off, such as the Labor Day holiday, and reducing the workweek to just six days.
These early organizers clearly won since the most recent data show that the average person working in manufacturing is employed for a bit over 40 hours a week and most people work only five days a week.
Surprisingly, many politicians and business owners were actually in favor of giving workers more time off. That’s because workers who had no free time were not able to spend their wages on traveling, entertainment or dining out.
As the U.S. economy expanded beyond farming and basic manufacturing in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it became important for businesses to find consumers interested in buying the products and services being produced in ever greater amounts. Shortening the work week was one way of turning the working class into the consuming class.
Common misconceptions
The common misconception is that since Labor Day is a national holiday, everyone gets the day off. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While the first Labor Day was created by striking, the idea of a special holiday for workers was easy for politicians to support. It was easy because proclaiming a holiday, like Mother’s Day, costs legislators nothing and benefits them by currying favor with voters. In 1887, Oregon, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey all declared a special legal holiday in September to celebrate workers.
Within 12 years, half the states in the country recognized Labor Day as a holiday. It became a national holiday in June 1894 when President Grover Cleveland signed the Labor Day bill into law. While most people interpreted this as recognizing the day as a national vacation, Congress’s proclamation covers only federal employees. It is up to each state to declare its own legal holidays.
Moreover, proclaiming any day an official holiday means little, as an official holiday does not require private employers and even some government agencies to give their workers the day off. Many stores are open on Labor Day. Essential government services in protection and transportation continue to function, and even less essential programs like national parks are open. Because not everyone is given time off on Labor Day, union workers as recently as the 1930s were being urged to stage one-day strikes if their employer refused to give them the day off.
In the president’s annual Labor Day declaration last year, Obama encouraged Americans “to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies and activities that honor the contributions and resilience of working Americans.”
The proclamation, however, does not officially declare that anyone gets time off.
Controversy: Militants and founders
Today most people in the United States think of Labor Day as a noncontroversial holiday.
There is no family drama like at Thanksgiving, no religious issues like at Christmas. However, 100 years ago there was controversy.
The first controversy that people fought over was how militant workers should act on a day designed to honor workers. Communist, Marxist and socialist members of the trade union movement supported May 1 as an international day of demonstrations, street protests and even violence, which continues even today.
More moderate trade union members, however, advocated for a September Labor Day of parades and picnics. In the United States, picnics, instead of street protests, won the day.
There is also dispute over who suggested the idea. The earliest history from the mid-1930s credits Peter J. McGuire, who founded the New York City Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, in 1881 with suggesting a date that would fall “nearly midway between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving” that “would publicly show the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.”
Later scholarship from the early 1970s makes an excellent case that Matthew Maguire, a representative from the Machinists Union, actually was the founder of Labor Day. However, because Matthew Maguire was seen as too radical, the more moderate Peter McGuire was given the credit.
Have we lost the spirit of Labor Day?
Today Labor Day is no longer about trade unionists marching down the street with banners and their tools of trade. Instead, it is a confused holiday with no associated rituals.
The original holiday was meant to handle a problem of long working hours and no time off. Although the battle over these issues would seem to have been won long ago, this issue is starting to come back with a vengeance, not for manufacturing workers but for highly skilled white-collar workers, many of whom are constantly connected to work.
If you work all the time and never really take a vacation, start a new ritual that honors the original spirit of Labor Day. Give yourself the day off. Don’t go in to work. Shut off your phone, computer and other electronic devices connecting you to your daily grind. Then go to a barbecue, like the original participants did over a century ago, and celebrate having at least one day off from work during the year.
How I learned to love “adulting” — the word, if not the act
(Credit: Getty/SolisImages)
Depending on who you ask, “adulting” is either exactly the right word to describe modern life tasks or a scourge on the English language. Arguing for the latter is Danielle Tullo in Cosmopolitan, who wrote, “‘Adulting’ is a terrible fake word (that you will not find in the actual dictionary, for the record) that everyone should stop using. ‘Adulting’ implies that being an adult is not a necessary part of growing up, but rather a life choice you’re hesitant to fully buy into. It’s a singularly Millennial — especially female, at that — immaturity that reduces being a grown-up to a hobby. If nothing else you do makes you seem like a stereotypical Millennial living in an entitled fantasy land where actually growing up is, like your hobbies, optional, saying ‘adulting’ is sure to do just that. ”
Madeline Rosenthal echoed Tullo’s sentiment in an Elite Daily diatribe, writing, “Don’t get me wrong; I get that some things really do represent a transition from dependence to independence. They’re big steps: things like getting your own apartment or getting your own health and car insurance. . . . But this buzzword makes it all seem like a joke. It makes US seem like a joke.” Rosenthal urges those inclined to use “adult” as a verb to substitute “productive member of society,” concluding, “You ARE an adult. You’ve BEEN an adult. Act like it.”
Time reports that the journal American Speech has traced the use of “adult” back to a 2008 Tweet:
Grew up in a town of 2k and adulted 10 years NYC. Same values: Keeping the job. Feeding the family. Educating the kids. Buying the stuff.
— unholytwerp (@unholytwerp) October 2, 2008
It has, of course, taken off since then, with corresponding products like the popular Etsy coffee mug phrase, “Coffee because adulting is hard” and a popular blog turned into a book. As Merriam-Webster recently noted in a blog post about “adulting” in its “words to watch” section, “It’s not a serious word, but it’s increasingly used in published, edited text, and it keeps showing up in ad copy, which is a certain sign of some kind of linguistic arrival.”
Let’s set aside the fact that I find it infantilizing to tell people what words they should and shouldn’t use, unless we’re talking about a case like naming your NFL team the Redskins or the politics of the n-word, when the very words themselves have a history of hatred behind them. Basically, if you’re against Sheryl Sandberg’s quest to ban “bossy,” you shouldn’t be in favor of trying to do away with “adulting.”
Yet I understand the aversion to the word. When I first saw it all over Facebook, Instagram and my general online reading, I cringed. It sounded ridiculous, and I scoffed at it as a millennial aversion to doing any sort of adult task, as if people who proudly claimed their “adulting” status wanted a medal for getting up in the morning. But sometime over the last few months, I’ve found myself using it, if only in my head (I’m not quite at the stage of shouting it from the rooftops or emblazoning it on my clothes). What changed my mind? Well, the slog of some major adult tasks.
This year, perhaps because I feel the weight of being 40, a number that looms large in my mind, I’ve set about upgrading my life. I’m in the process of studying for a written driver’s exam, the necessary step to take driving lessons in my state. The last time I drove a car was about 15 years ago, and I’ve lived with a huge phobia about cars ever since I got in an accident at 17. I hate feeling like my phobia controls me, so I’m planning to get my license, even though I doubt I’ll drive more than a few times a year.
I also made a financial bucket list, including a numeric goal for my credit score and other specific monetary achievements I’m striving toward, like paying off all my credit cards and starting a belated retirement savings account. I’ve also quit drinking caffeine, in the hopes that doing so will help me conceive. I’ve forced myself to go to sleep at 10 p.m. and set my alarm for 5:30 a.m., so I can get as much work done as possible when I’m most alert. When I do mess up, like spilling seltzer on my couch, I’ve stepped up to the plate and hired a couch cleaner I found through much Googling.
That’s not to say I’m a paragon of adulthood. Last week, on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I left my rolling suitcase outside the airport. When I realized my mistake about ten minutes later, I promptly got off the bus I was on, called baggage claim, and thankfully, a half hour later was on my way, with all my luggage. In the past, when I messed up like that, I would spend umpteen hours berating myself. But part of being an adult is taking ownership of your mistakes, moving on and doing everything in your power not to make them again.
Some days, I’m more able to handle the ups and downs of real life than others. Plenty of mornings, I wake up feeling utterly unprepared for the day ahead. That sensation is, I believe, what lies at the heart of the “adulting” craze. We may know what we have to do, but often we just don’t want to; instead, we’d rather stay in our pajamas, eat sugar cereals and watch cartoons. It’s okay to embrace that feeling, as long as we don’t devolve into actually ignoring what we should be doing in favor of what we wish we could be doing instead (unless it’s the weekend or a holiday or a mental health day).
Here’s the thing: whatever name we call it, unless you can outsource of all life’s daily hassles, the reality of taking on adult responsibilities isn’t easy. Maybe some days it’s straightforward and not much of a bother, but I dare anyone reading this to tell me that their every day as an adult is carefree and simple. That’s just not realistic.
I often feel like adulthood is more akin to playing whack-a-mole than anything else. Just when I take care of one pressing task I’ve been neglecting, like, say, going to the dentist or getting a state ID or making a will, another pops up. There’s no graduate school we can attend to figure out what to do when we get laid off or how to handle aging family members or which cell phone plan to buy. And those are just the more practical tasks; matters of the heart are another ordeal entirely. A breakup at 16 is different than one at 26 or 36.
So while I understand the frustration with the term “adulting,” I think it’s misplaced. There’s a difference between shirking responsibility by crowing over every washed dish or bill paid and simply acknowledging the fact that we all deserve a break sometimes. That desire is what has fueled back-to-childhood businesses like Michelle Joni’s adult preschool. This program is both a throwback to simpler times and, from what I can tell, a way to harness that childlike energy and worldview back into our daily lives; Amanda Devereux described one of the exercises she participated in as creating “a superhero that combines our strengths with what we hope to become better at.”
Perhaps I’ve simply succumbed to a cultural zeitgeist originating with those a generation younger than me as a nod to my delayed adolescence, but I say, if you’re using “adulting” as a way to be proud of your achievements, rather than a means of agonizing over them, go for it. We should acknowledge that being an adult isn’t simply about having “freedom,” and that sometimes that very freedom, along with its attendant responsibilities, is something we just don’t want to deal with on any given day.
I love being an adult; I love earning my own income; I love setting my own schedule and planning my vacations; believe it or not, I actually love errands like grocery shopping. What I don’t love is stress and hard decisions and feeling like my life is half over and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I want to do with it. So when I give myself credit for “adulting,” it’s a way to simply pat myself on the back, and then move on to the next adult action.
Fearless, fresh “Atlanta”: Donald Glover’s dreamy, surreal series is infused with peculiar magic
Donald Glover and Brian Tyree Henry in "Atlanta" (Credit: FX)
In one of “Atlanta’s” earliest scenes, Donald Glover’s character, Earnest “Earn” Marks, knocks on his cousin Alfred’s door and is greeted by a gun being pointed in his face. Earn’s reaction is not one of shock, but annoyance. Once Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) sees who it is, he relents and lets him in.
Rounding the corner into the living room, Earn meets Alfred’s roommate Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) for the first time. Darius has a bandana over his face and is brandishing a knife in one hand while holding a plate of freshly baked cookies in the other which, once he gets the all clear from Alfred, he offers to Earn.
In a different context, this interaction might evoke dread. Here, it’s simply what Earn has to endure to visit family. Alfred, for his part, mostly seems to be going through the motions.
Make no mistake, though: Glover, who created and executive produces “Atlanta,” wants the viewer to feel the low-level tension that exists from moment to moment in the lives of these characters. We steep in that sensation for the entirety of the show’s premiere, in fact, before relaxing into the more amusing second episode. Fortunately, FX is airing the first two episodes back to back on Tuesday, September 6 at 10 p.m.
Fear and tension are odd accelerants for a comedy, and that’s precisely the point of “Atlanta,” one of several new series that defy the structure and tonal expectations of the standard television half-hour. “Atlanta” is nothing like other shows, which, given Glover’s experience with conventional sitcoms — first as a writer on “30 Rock,” before co-starring on “Community” — is intentional.
You will not find the caffeinated bounce and lightness of the standard half-hour here or see the usual sitcom ensemble recipe. Instead, “Atlanta” offers a view of city life in neighborhoods that television rarely explores, places that aren’t glitzy or safe, while simultaneously making a commentary on the questionable value of fame. Glover wants viewers to sense the lives of his characters, not merely watch them. And he conveys that feeling via moments of escalating anxiety that evaporate into nothing and scenarios contrasting shock and darkness with farce.
Earn, the show’s underemployed and somewhat directionless protagonist, has a job that doesn’t allow him to provide for his young daughter. He crashes with her mother and his on-and-off love, Van (Zazie Beetz), and his actions constantly remind her and his parents (Isiah Whitlock, Jr. and Myra Lucretia Taylor) of how disappointing he is.
Even so, Beetz makes Van warm, level and pragmatic; she so badly wants to give Earn a chance. He’s a sensitive, creative guy who simply can’t get it together, but she’s also at the end of her tether. Their situation mirrors that of so many people bound by their children, in that it contains as much love as palpable annoyance. Yet so much more can and should be done with Van. In contrast with her cohorts, Beetz’s character enjoys the least amount of development within the first few episodes.
In larger part, “Atlanta” follows Earn as he pins his hopes on managing Alfred, who’s enjoying underground success rapping under the moniker Paper Boi. Alfred’s limited fame hasn’t translated into cash, however. He’s also aware of how the world sees him, though his overnight notoriety agitates above all else. (That Henry’s character embodies this viewpoint as opposed to Glover’s should not be lost on the viewer, though the latter’s flourishing hip-hop career under his Childish Gambino moniker surely gives him some expertise in this area.)
Darius, meanwhile, has a philosopher’s brain percolating beneath a layer of weird. He may spout a nonsensical observation that confuses the room into silence or, perhaps, ask people he’s just met if he can measure their tree. Within “Atlanta’s” absurdist play, Stanfield’s Darius is the show’s secret comedy weapon; he’s either a genius or simply gifted at waxing poetic while stoned, which he seems to be all the time.
In “Atlanta”’s finest moments, the interplay of Earn, Alfred and Darius’s personalities create a peculiar magic, heightening the mundane and constant hustle to make a dollar out of a dime into an exhilarating journey. There’s also a danger looming around each corner of that trip, of which the viewer is made constantly aware.
In one frame, Darius and Alfred are harvesting the fruits of Alfred’s overnight success — achieved, it must be said, by an equal measure of Earn’s strategizing and a violent confrontation that gets them mentioned on the news. Soon, though, Alfred discovers there’s a danger in being “hot”; he’s on edge and warily looking over his shoulder. Earn, meanwhile, find himself stuck in a portion of a police precinct viewers don’t usually see, resulting in squeamish, ridiculous interactions that turn on a dime from hilarious to hair-raising .
Glover’s thesis in creating “Atlanta” was to make the viewer feel what it’s like to be black. “I always want people to be scared,” he recently told TV reporters, “because that’s how it kind of feels to be black. You are, like, there are awesome things going on here, but, like, it can be taken away at any moment.”
Thus, as Glover and his writers cloud the air with edged emotions, they also invite us to reconsider any preconceptions of who these people are. “Atlanta” is an overwhelmingly male-dominated series, which is typical for FX; that its gaze is fixed upon young black male characters in particular is important. The writers do not contort the story to assimilate Alfred, Darius or Earn into primetime TV’s ideas of acceptable blackness. Instead, they’re simply guys who smoke blunts and do what they need to do to get by.
They’re also funny, thoughtful and completely unsure of what they’re doing. Their lives aren’t merely unglamorous, they are filled with struggle, insanity and, yes, humor.
Laughter doesn’t emerge easily in the first thirty minutes of “Atlanta,” and in the second episode it’s telling that the funniest sequences take place in a profoundly grim setting, abruptly juxtaposed with casual bursts of violence and psychic pain. You can never get too comfortable while watching this show.
The deliberate pacing and dreamy, surreal tone of “Atlanta” may prove too off-putting for viewers searching for easy entertainment. But those thirsting for a fearless, fresh perspective in comedy will find much to appreciate here. A visit to “Atlanta” is a fine idea in either case, and it may leave you curious to stick around and see what’s waiting down the road.
“There’s no such thing as a victimless billionaire”: Inside the shadowy voter fraud conspiracy that’s “still in progress”
Greg Palast (Credit: YouTube/Larry King)
On Dec. 4, 2000, Salon ran a story by investigative journalist Greg Palast that added a whole new dimension to the controversy over the election in Florida — a premeditated, racially skewed effort to purge 173,000 likely Democratic voters from the rolls.
“We broke the story that Jim Crow was back but now he was Dr. James Crow, cyber analyst, using computers to conduct a lynching by laptop,” Palast told Salon, almost 16 years later. Since then, it’s only grown “more sophisticated, wider, nastier, bigger,” he said. He’s been on the story repeatedly ever since — most recently in Rolling Stone — and is about to release a noir-detective-themed documentary, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,” bringing the story up-to-date later this month.
“I wanted to give people the whole arc of the story,” Palast said, “so I have the Salon story done in cartoon form, Saturday-morning-cartoon-style, by the guy who did Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” But as compelling as the vote-stealing issue may be, there’s an even deeper story going on. “It’s not about the Republicans stealing the vote,” he said. “It’s about billionaires stealing the treasury.”
Money is definitely driving the story, as Palast’s investigation reveals, but the two are intimately inter-connected through a wide range of figures, including the Koch brothers, Karl Rove and Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach. Either side of the story can get dizzyingly complex — that’s part of how they pull it off — so the film brings narrative simplicity, or at least, coherence, by making it about the who-dunnit discovery process itself.
“This is the story of the investigation of the theft of the 2016 election — it’s a crime still in progress — and a hunt for the very rich guys behind the crime,” Palast explains at the beginning. So when Ice-T and Richard Belzer from SVU (Special Voter Unit) pop in for a couple of cameos, they fit in seamlessly, as does a commando-style approach to crashing a swank affair to ambush-interview a billionaire. But it all starts off with the GOP’s outrageous voter fraud claims catching Palast’s eye.
Palast watches Dick Morris’s 2014 on-air claim that over 35,000 people had voted in North Carolina and in some other state, and his accusations that “You’re talking about probably more than a million people that voted twice in this election,” which Morris claimed was “the first concrete evidence we’ve ever had of massive voter fraud.”
“A million double voters? Really, Dick?,” Palast asks, incredulous. “You vote twice, you get five years in the slammer.”
It’s followed up Donald Trump’s claims of people “voting many, many times.”
“Really, Donald? A double-voting crime wave?” You can hear the incredulity deepening in Palast’s tone. “Is there really a gigantic conspiracy of one million Democrats to vote twice, or is it a massive scheme to take away the votes of a million innocent people?”
He had to get his hands on the list of “skanky double-voting fiends” to see for himself. And so he called officials in North Carolina, asking for the list of names — from the interstate “Crosscheck” program spearheaded by Chis Kobach — but he got the brush-off. Undeterred, he called officials in 28 other states, and was told repeatedly that the Crosscheck list of supposed criminals was “confidential.” Finally a secret source provided the list of 7.2 million suspects in 29 states.
But as the list scans slowly up the screen, one thing immediately jumps out: The first names and last names may match, but the middle ones don’t. There’s “George Joseph Peck” matched with “George R. Peck,” “William Trad Price” matched with “William E. Price,” “Angela L. Reeves” matched with “Angela Kay Reeves.” The list goes on and on like that.
This is where the 2000 flashback comes in, providing the template for everything we’re seeing today in various, more sophisticated forms. “Ex-cons willing to go back to prison just for voting?” That was Palast’s original incredulous response back in 2000. Sure enough, after beating the bushes, “I couldn’t find a single illegal voter.”
Eventually, someone slipped him a copy of the Florida list, but the names didn’t match up. Jonathan L. Barber lost his right to vote, because he “matched” the felon Vincent Barbieri. On top of that, their birthdays didn’t match. Nor did their races: The felon was white, the voter, black.
Worse than that, Palast notes, “Some of these criminals were convicted in the future.” Take that, Philip K. Dick! 2021, 2025, 2035, 2040, 2050, 2071, 2099, 2187, 2805! Others had no conviction dates listed at all.
The number of real felons Palast could find? “Zero. Nada. Bupkis.” But not for lack of trying. And he tried again, years later, when he got his hands on the Crosscheck list. Finally, he had a lead! One character showed up voting 14 times — “He’s even got his own bus to vote in several states at once,” Palast notes: once as Willie May Nelson in Georgia and again as Willie J. Nelson in Mississippi.
“The first time you voted as a woman, is that why the pigtail thing?” Palast asks the country music legend. “Yeah,” Nelson hurriedly agrees. “What are you grinning for, are you smoking something?” Palast asks. “Aren’t you?” Nelson shoots back. “It sounds like you got better shit than I got.”
Altogether, Palast’s team found 2,000,000 middle names that don’t match.
Crosscheck’s PowerPoint presentation says they use Social Security numbers and birthdates, but the lists contain neither. “They don’t want to capture double voters,” Palast concludes. “It’s just a bunch of common names.” And why not? As the film later states, 90% of all Washingtons are black, 94% of Kims are Asian, and 91% of Garcias are Hispanic.
But it’s not as if double-voters couldn’t be found, if that were really the point. The Koch brothers are partial owners of i360, which has a highly sophisticated database, and is being constantly refined for GOP election work. It includes “trillions of data-points on hundreds of millions of people,” data analyst Mark Swedlund tells Palast.
“With all that computer power, couldn’t the Kochs and Rove find real double voters?” Palast asks.
“You could do that in a heartbeat.” Swedland responds. “I would argue it would be a piece of cake.”
In contrast, the Crosscheck system was “incredibly simplistic,” Swedland said, a “childish methodology.” In fact, it seems custom-made to produce garbage results, the better to bury unwanted voters with.
But that’s only one part of the story Palast is after — the data part of the “how” side of voter suppression. There’s also the very human side of how it plays out, the myriad other obstacles thrown together to help block unwanted voters — primarily black, Hispanic and Asian — from exercising their right to vote. But above all, there’s the “why” side as well — the money reasons driving the Kochs and others allied with them. “There’s no such thing as a victimless billionaire,” Palast explains.
That side of the story takes him all the way to the edge of the Arctic Sea, and all the way back to the mid-’90s, when the Kochs faced hundreds of charges for their environmental crimes. Pulling all the different strands together is a wild and woolly ride, peppered with moments of wry sardonic humor that would make Dashiell Hammett smile. There’s so much more I’d love to tell you about what Palast dug up. But then I’d have to kill you. So you’ll just have to see “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” for yourself.
From the streets to tweets: The dangerous rise of ‘internet banging’
Photo via GWImages / Shutterstock (Licensed)
Remix by Max Fleishman
This article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.
If you want to get a real first-hand look at gang culture in Chicago’s South Side, all you need to do is scroll through the Twitter feed of Gahrika Barnes.
The 17-year-old was a known member of the Gangster Disciples, a gang in the Woodlawn neighborhood, who’s suspected by police in multiple shootings.
Under the alias @TyquanAssassin, Barnes tweeted over 27,000 times to her 2,700 followers: boasting about her gang affiliation, posting messages of grief over friends who had been shot by rival gangs and threatening retaliation, and taunting the police. She describes herself in her bio as a “PAID SHOOTA.”
She was murdered on Eberhart Street, mere hours after tweeting the address of her current hangout.
Photo via TyquanAssassin/Twitter
Barnes is a casualty of what Dr. Desmond Patton calls “internet banging.” Patton is an associate professor at Columbia University in New York and one of the few academics looking into the language of gang members online. He’s found that social media has only exacerbated tensions between gangs, as the clashes and taunting that were once reserved for the streets have not only moved online but have done so with profound intensity.
In January, Patton published a piece in the Journal of Human Behavior and Development where he described how individuals who are gang-involved “live and narrate their lives on social media.” Their on- and offline worlds collide in a Gordian knot of profiles, personalities, real emotions and performative identities, often times with devastating consequences. That same month, Chicago’s interim police chief, John Escalante, blamed a rise in murders on the escalation of gang disputes through social media channels.
Patton began looking into the social media language of gang members while doing his Ph.D. research in Chicago, an ideal setting given that a 2012 study by the Chicago Crime Commission found the city had more gangs than any other U.S. city.
His early fascination with the social media language of rappers and gang members led to a study of over 1,000 tweets posted by Chicago gang members. Patton and his team analyzed not only the tweets but the people who tweeted them and the context that provoked them. This initial analysis was used to create a language resource for social workers and law enforcement officers and helped aid them in the prevention of violence.
As one of the few researchers in this field, Patton dominates the literature, most of which has been published this year. His January article in the academic journal Computers in Human Behavior, titled “Internet banging: New trends in social media, gang violence, masculinity and hip hop,” identified historical and cultural threads that have led to the intersection between social media and gang culture.
For starters, he notes the “relative low cost of smartphones, emergence of social media and SNSs, and increased technological literacy” has led to influx of tech-savvy teens. At the same time, Patton and his co-authors link urban growth and economic disenfranchisement to the rise in gang violence. They argue that the loss of factory jobs in urban areas “affected masculine identity profoundly. Almost overnight, many blue-collar men who embodied the American work ethic became unemployed and disenfranchised, severely damaging many urban men’s self images and representing an identity shift.”
Indeed, since 2000, America has lost over 5 million factory jobs. These losses have directly impacted the Rust Belt, America’s so-called manufacturing heartland, of which Chicago once reigned supreme. Yet, due to many factors including increased automation, free-trade agreements and the transfer of manufacturing plants, factory jobs have been on a slow decline since the 1980s and have, in part, contributed to the poverty of Chicago’s neighborhoods. A New York Times article from May of this year draws a link between the poverty in Chicago’s racially segregated neighborhoods and a lack of affordable housing to the rise in Chicago’s gang-related crime. Another article in Chicago Magazine from 2012 connects the rise of gangs in Chicago to failed fair-housing practices.
Of course, this issue is bigger than Chicago, and it’s impossible to measure the transformative power and growth of social media over the last 10 years. It’s affected every aspect of our lives, and it makes sense that it would have a ripple effect on gang culture and beyond.
“The outcome generated a hip-hop identity that, along with unemployment and poor educational opportunities, helps to situate urban males for mass incarceration and poor outcomes, and it is this identity that fuels the behavior we currently see in among African-American men on the Internet,” Patton writes. “In social media, the hip-hop identity has found the optimal playground to perpetuate and replicate itself, because of its public nature.”
In another article, also published in Computers in Human Behavior, Patton quotes a violence worker, Mario, who observed gang members travel into rival territory to taunt other gangs online. “[T]hey’ll go on the streets of the group and they’ll take pictures or they’ll take a video and they’ll put it on YouTube or ‘We’re in your neighborhood.’ And Facebook and they’ll take pictures right in the neighborhood like saying, ‘Ha ha,’ laughing, taunting them. And that’s part of a taunt too. Like provoking them, letting them know, you know what we got your guy. He was snoozing.”
In addition to the posturing and threats, Patton notes that grief and trauma play a role, too. It’s a daily cycle playing out in 140-character bursts. You can see it all through Barnes’s tweets and those that were made in the wake of her murder. (Barnes’s own account is locked now, but screenshots survive on news stories and sites like Hipwiki, a wiki for hip-hop culture.)
“We know that young people who live in violent context often use social media to communicate their everyday life. A part of that everyday life is the violence and grief and trauma that they experience. They use social media to talk about those things and to cope with it and to get support from other folks as well.”
As a result, police in major urban cities are keeping tabs on social media to crack down on gang violence. In 2012, New York police used Facebook posts to track down gang members and arrest them. But Patton says the goal of his research is to prevent violence, not fuel arrests. “Our goal is to create tools that support social workers and violence outreach workers in doing violence intervention. What we want to do is create a tool that is automatic and is informed by a real-world understanding of language context that can tell a violence outreach worker or a social worker when some challenging activity is happening on social media and they can use their intervention method to work with people around these issues.”
In his research for “Sticks, stones and Facebook accounts,” Patton identified the complex nature of using social media to both identify potential violence and to build relationships. He quotes one social worker, Luis, who gave an example of when social media was able to de-escalate violence:
So there’s branches of Warrior Kings, there’s branches of 26. Every branch is a street, right. So it’s like Minerva and 14th might be a branch. Darren and 26th might be another branch. If those two groups are identified in the video, right. And we notice that there’s going to be a conflict between both of the groups we go talk to somebody that we’ve built a relationship with in that group and will have somebody from this side talk to that group that they built a relationship with and try to avoid any conflicts from happening in the future.
Luis said that de-escalation is most effective when social media is used as a gentle reminder of the danger. He noted: “We use a lot of, ‘You guys are putting yourself out there. You guys are being watched by the police. You guys are starting drama that you don’t need.’ A lot of the times when we build relationships with these guys we’ll use family members. Like, ‘Hey you know you’ve got a sick mother and you need to take care of her’ … So you get them to start reflecting on their actions that they might be thinking about in the future like retaliation or anything like that.”
In Barnes’s case, the intervention was less successful. The Chicago police, who track gang-member activity online, were aware of the threats on her life and were actively searching for her to keep her safe, but she evaded them. In fact, she bragged on Twitter that she was hiding from the police. She was killed just a few days later.
The Golden State’s water crisis: California and EPA poised to expand pollution of potential drinking water reserves
California water tower (Credit: Wikipedia)
This originally appeared on ProPublica.
As the western United States struggles with chronic water shortages and a changing climate, scientists are warning that if vast underground stores of fresh water that California and other states rely on are not carefully conserved, they too may soon run dry.
Heeding this warning, California passed new laws in late 2014 that for the first time require the state to account for its groundwater resources and measure how much water is being used.
Yet California’s natural resources agency, with the oversight and consent of the federal government, also runs a shadow program that allows many of its aquifers to be pumped full of toxic waste.
Now the state — which relied on aquifers for at least 60 percent of its total water supply over the past three years — is taking steps to expand that program, possibly sacrificing portions of dozens more groundwater reserves. In some cases, regulators are considering whether to legalize pollution already taking place at a number of sites, based on arguments that the water that will be lost was too dirty to drink or too difficult to access at an affordable price. Officials also may allow the borders of some pollution areas to be extended, jeopardizing new, previously unspoiled parts of the state’s water supply.
The proposed expansion would affect some of the parts of California hardest hit by drought, from the state’s agriculturally rich central valley to wine country and oil-drilling fields along the Salinas River. Some have questioned the wisdom of such moves in light of the state’s long-term thirst for more water supplies.
“Once [the state] exempts the water, it’s basically polluted forever. It’s a terrible idea,” said Maya Golden-Krasner, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which is suing California to force it to complete an environmental impact assessment of the proposed aquifer changes. California, she said, is still offering breaks to its oil industry. “We’re at a precipice point where the state is going to have to prioritize water over an industry that isn’t going to last.”
California is one of at least 23 states where so-called aquifer exemptions — exceptions to federal environmental law that allow mining or oil and gas companies to dump waste directly into drinking water reserves — have been issued.
Exemptions are granted by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency division that has had difficulties in record-keeping and has been criticized for its controversial management of groundwater reserves. A 2012 ProPublica investigation disclosed that the federal government had given energy and mining companies permission to pollute U.S. aquifers in more than 1,000 locations, as part of an underground disposal program that allows toxic substances to be disposed of in nearly 700,000 waste wells across the country.
In many cases, the exact locations of the exemptions and the precise boundaries of areas where aquifer pollution was allowed had been left poorly defined, raising concerns that waste might reach adjacent drinking water. Several states, including California, have since admitted they’ve allowed that to happen.
As droughts have worsened and aquifers have become more cherished, the implications of aquifer exemptions have become more serious, even as regulators have continued to issue these legal loopholes.
The federal Safe Drinking Water Act distinguishes between underground aquifers that are too salty or dirty to ever be used and those that are pure enough to drink from, defining the latter as an “underground source of drinking water.” Protection of drinking water is required under the law, and any polluting of it through waste disposal, oil and gas production, or mining is a crime. Companies, however, can file petitions to change how an aquifer is classified, arguing that it either has already been polluted or is too deep underground to likely be used. Even if water is relatively clean, if the EPA approves a change in definition, an aquifer is no longer considered a “source of drinking water,” and is no longer protected.
Applications to exempt an aquifer are supposed to undergo extensive scientific scrutiny, and today they usually do. But when the Safe Drinking Water Act was initially implemented, the federal government traded away much of that scrutiny as a compromise to win state and industry support for the new regulations. The EPA granted blanket exemptions for large swaths of territory underlying California and Texas oil fields, for example, and did the same in other states with large energy and mining industries. Documents from California, dating to 1981, estimate that at least 100 aquifers in the state’s central valley were granted exemptions.
It’s not always clear where the aquifers polluted under these early exemptions are located. For decades, both state officials and the federal government have struggled just to identify the precise places where the permits they issued applied, and where pollutants were being injected into groundwater. A spreadsheet listing thousands of exempted aquifer locations nationwide, provided to ProPublica in 2012 by the EPA in response to a Freedom of Information request, listed incomplete location coordinates for a majority of the exemptions, describing them merely by the county or township in which they are located . When pressed for more information, an EPA official admitted that was all the information the agency had.
California’s exemption records are only slightly more precise, and no less problematic.
Most of them appear to be best described in the appendices of a tattered 1981 document, yellowed with age. (State officials suggested to ProPublica this week that other records exist but could not produce them.) Overlying sections of a simple map of the state’s vast central valley, hand-drawn boundaries are sketched over areas equivalent to thousands of acres and shaded in. There are only vague descriptions like depth and name of the geologic formation, but nothing as precise as latitude and longitude coordinates, for the borders of the shaded areas. “Unfortunately, what we do not have is an easy-to-use, enumerated list,” Don Drysdale, a spokesman for the California Department of Conservation, wrote to ProPublica in an email last week. The state has never endeavored to measure the total volume of water it has allowed to be spoiled.
The waste being injected into exempted aquifers is often described as merely “salt water.” Indeed, only “non-hazardous” substances are supposed to be pumped into aquifers, even with exemptions. But under concessions won by the oil industry and inserted into federal law, oilfield production waste — including chemicals known to cause cancer and fracking materials — are not legally considered “hazardous,” a term with a specific definition in federal environmental law. According to the California Department of Conservation, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, “drilling mud filtrate, naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM), slurrified crude-oil, saturated soils and tank bottoms” are all allowed to be injected into aquifers as “non-hazardous” material.
Despite the substantial wiggle room granted by law, California has come under fire for not managing its roughly 52,000 waste wells properly. In 2011, the EPA sharply criticized the state for keeping poor records, mismanaging its environmental reviews and failing to follow federal law. It suggested that the state’s autonomy over its groundwater regulations could be revoked, and that the EPA would impose federal oversight.
To fend off that change, California launched its own review and, in 2014, began to uncover extraordinary lapses: Thanks to poor record-keeping and confusion over which aquifers had been written off, the state found more than 2,000 wells were injecting toxins not into exempt areas, but directly into the state’s drinking water aquifers. In 140 cases wastewater was being put into the highest quality aquifers, raising concerns in the state capitol about the threat to public health. California shut down some 56 waste wells last year until it could sort out the mess, and it passed improved regulations that will give the state’s water agency a role in the approval process. Still, it has allowed injection to continue until the end of this year in 11 drinking water aquifers that it has to reevaluate because neither the feds nor state officials are sure whether they exempted them in the 1980s. The state is also allowing injection to continue until next February in other drinking water quality aquifers pending the approval of new aquifer exemptions that would extend that indefinitely.
Those 11 aquifers have been the focus of much of the state’s renewed attention, but California still hasn’t confirmed the borders of the hundreds of legacy exemptions in other aquifers that date back to the 1980s. Without taking this step, the state’s top water official said, there’s no way to know how much clean water California still has.
“That’s part of the whole point,” Felicia Marcus, chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board told ProPublica, “not injecting into aquifers that people are depending on now, but also to go back and make sure we were not too loose on it in the past. Certainly the discovery of all these mistakes puts us on red alert.”
Now California — with Marcus’ blessing — may fix the problem by expanding the boundaries of exempted areas rather than identifying and restricting them.
The Department of Conservation is poised to consider as many as 70 new aquifer exemptions, redrawing some to include areas where companies have been injecting waste illegally into drinking water. In the state’s central valley, where a substantial portion of the nation’s fruits and nuts are grown using groundwater, three applications for aquifer exemptions around the Fruitvale, Round Mountain and Tejon oil fields — all in or near Bakersfield — are already undergoing state reviews that would precede approval by the EPA.
And in February the state submitted final plans to the EPA to exempt a new portion of the Arroyo Grande Aquifer in Paso Robles, allowing oil companies to inject waste or fluids to help in pumping out more oil. In that case, Marcus and the state’s Water Resources Control Board — the agency in charge of the quality of the state’s water supply — say they agreed to allow the exemption because the aquifer was already of poor quality and would not be used in the future. Marcus said she was convinced the contaminants injected there could not migrate underground in ways that would affect other, cleaner water sources nearby — that they would be sealed in by the geologic structure of the region.
Still, the areas California is writing off are surrounded by underground water reserves that get used every day. An exemption might cover the water soaked up in one particular layer of rock, at a certain depth, even while wells extract water from aquifers above or below it. And, according to Golden-Krasner, the state’s assessment that pollution will remain confined is often dependent on an oil company maintaining a specific pressure underground, making the future of the clean water vulnerable to human error.
In our 2012 investigation, ProPublica found numerous cases in which waste defied the containment that regulators and their computer models had promised, and contamination spread. In many instances, injection wells themselves punched holes in the earth’s seal and leaked. In others, faults and fissures in the earth moved in ways that allowed trapped fluids to migrate. Several of the problems documented had occurred in California.
The area around Bakersfield affected by the majority of the new aquifer pollution applications is also home to one of the state’s largest underground water storage facilities, the Kern Water Bank, relied on by California farmers. It lies directly above at least one of the exempted aquifers and is pierced by dozens of oil wells. The state’s water board supports the exemptions, but their close proximity to drinking water could be reason to worry, acknowledges Jonathan Bishop, the chief deputy director of the Water Resources Control Board.
“Are we concerned that wells going through aquifers that have beneficial use be maintained and have high integrity? Yeah,” Bishop said. “They do go through drinking water aquifers in many locations, not just in Bakersfield.”
Opponents of the exemption program are infuriated by the fact that applications are evaluated on an isolated basis, without any consideration of the state’s larger water supply issues. The original criteria for aquifer exemptions set out in federal statute never contemplated that in California and plenty of others states, multiple exemptions could be granted in close proximity or that polluted areas could be sandwiched between clean water reserves. Neither state nor federal codes call for any broader analysis of the cumulative risk.
“Their whole review is from the perspective of can we check the boxes on federal criteria and the state law,” said John Noel, who covers oil and gas issues for the environmental group Clean Water Action. “Nobody is asking the question, if we exempt these five aquifers what is the long term supply impact? How much water are we writing off?”
Playing for green: A new wave of VR eco-games aims to save the planet
Filming for "The Crystal Reef" in Monterey, CA. (Credit: Cody Karutz)
Slay Aboriginal peoples with a bow and arrow — that was the mission in Survival Island 3, a video game released in late 2015 and removed from shelves after a change.org petition made the rounds. Then there’s Hatred, in which committing mass murder is the goal. Or Playing History 2, where the challenge is to fit as many Africans as possible onto a slaver’s ship in a grotesque version of Tetris. When it comes to the video game industry, if controversy isn’t assured, contemptible behavior surely is — remember the raped-and-murdered prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto? Anal probes in South Park: The Stick of Truth? But for the next generation of gamers, the best avatar might not be the one who wreaks the most havoc or horrifies the most mommy bloggers. It may be the one who tackles another, nobler mission: saving a polluted planet.
This is not just a goody-goody ploy meant to pander to the granola-gamer set (which, by the way, is totally real) — it’s about effecting real-world change. This possibility has been creating buzz since Pokémon Go swept the nation this summer, when fanatical hordes searching real neighborhoods for fictional characters rescued abandoned animals, thwarted would-be robbers and, yes, picked up trash. If augmented and virtual reality gaming can lead to such unintended payoffs, imagine the result if social change was built into the game. If the nearly-$24-billion-a-year video game industry throws its weight behind the proposition, could vigilante gamers use their powers for good — say, cleaning up real oil spills, identifying real poachers in Africa, reducing the size of real giant garbage patches in the Pacific?
“I think it can be done,” Mark Skwarek, Director of New York University’s Mobile Augmented Reality Lab and CEO of Semblance Augmented Reality, told Salon. This semester, he’s expecting more environmental pitches from amateur game designers than ever before. “What you need are smart, dedicated people who are willing to make it happen.”
Enter Aura Higuera Rodriguez and her team of fellow students at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, who are developing Doom Prepper Sailors. The game is set 50 years in the future, in an apocalyptic world in which water pollution has led to a plethora of diseases. If this doesn’t sound too different from the state of things today, that’s precisely why the game plays out in the real world of the present day. Players guide 3D-printed, remote-controlled 18-inch-long boats and equipped with sensors and GPS through actual waterways. Points come from identifying areas of contamination in real rivers and streams. Who wins? The high-scorer — and also the environment. The data collected by players gets downloaded to a server and sold to the organizations responsible for cleaning these areas. In the testing phase now, Doom Prepper Sailors’ official release is awaiting financial backing.
“My team and I are members of a key generation that witnessed the change to a digital era,” Rodriguez told Salon. “We were in close touch with our environment during childhood, and we’re working with cutting-edge technology in adulthood. We don’t want to lose our roots, but we want the benefits technology brings, so we have to find the way to correlate them.”
Here in the US, Congress has issued grant money for the development of climate change-related video games. And a game developed by Cody Karutz while he was a student at Stanford University, The Crystal Reef, takes players on a virtual scuba diving trip through the corals of Ischia, Italy. Players take on the persona of a marine biologist, observing and collecting marine life samples from a healthy area before moving over reef that’s been affected by ocean acidification, a byproduct of climate change. Here, snails and octopus are clearly hurting, and algae and seagrass are taking over.
The drama is less obvious than in a shoot-em-up adventure — there’s no chance your biologist avatar will die from lack of oxygen, and none of the octopi morph into murderous robots. But researchers say the focus of the game aligns with the values of a generation that prioritizes experiential purchases, like travel.
“If you’re a millennial who cares about environment and doesn’t want, or can’t afford, to waste jet fuel flying around the world — something that affects the very reef you’re traveling to see — you may be willing to pay $.99 to have that virtual experience, one that’s more ecologically sustainable,” Karutz told Salon.
Besides, experts say Americans are growing more comfortable with the idea of “gradual” drama — the same sense of patience we apply as we wait more than a year for a new season of Game of Thrones, makes us more willing to battle a slow-moving virtual foe, like climate change, versus an intense and immediate threat, like a zombie or terrorist. “Look at the relatively recent explosion of health trackers, calorie counters, and other self-monitoring devices,” Eddo Stern, game designer and professor of media arts at UCLA, told Salon. “These technologies allow you to track things over time, data that is subtly and slowly developing into a narrative. People are getting used to a longitudinal way of looking at drama.”
This burgeoning category of games — most funded by academics, nonprofits and social think tanks — are known in the industry as “serious” games. They serve a social purpose. And, though their higher purposes may make them sound like TV “after-school specials” masquerading as fun, they’ve already proven their worth. Four years ago, Yale University researchers developed a browser game called Planet Hunters in order to help overwhelmed astronomers. To play, citizen scientists of all ages comb through NASA data in search of irregular star patterns that might indicate the existence of a planet — the human eye is better equipped for this sort of thing than a computer. To date, the game’s enthusiasts have discovered more than 40 potentially life-supporting celestial bodies.
For-profit gaming companies have taken notice and are getting in on the action, turning to current events and social issues to create games. The Italian company Inner Void Interactive is developing That Day We Left, a 3D journey in which the characters are Syrian refugees fleeing their country. It’s only a matter of time before the gaming challenge is navigating melting ice caps and rising seas.
Cash prizes don’t hurt. This summer, a contest sponsored in part by Columbia University’s PoLAR Partnership, evaluated prototype video games with environmental themes. The winner of the $10,000 grand prize — an awareness-raising game called ECO in which renewable resources are the new gold coins, and choices made affect the ecosystem — came from Seattle’s Strange Loop Games. It is the company’s first foray into this new genre, which owner John Krajewski calls “global survivor games.”
“The current direction within the video game industry is an experience that’s less created for players by a designer with a linear purpose, and much more created by the players,” Krajewski told Salon. “That’s a pretty big shift that’s still in its early stages. Having large-scale simulations greatly affected by a player’s actions adds more fidelity and more richness to the fictional world. Tying that into climate change and ecosystems puts it in a real context.”
There are obstacles. Ecological games require developers to rethink the concept of winning. For so long, the first-person shooter who comes out victorious by taking out other characters has been the tried-and-true model. Despite the success of games like Spore — which features no adversarial opponent, and instead involves nurturing an alien creature from microscopic organism to adult — breaking with this convention is still seen as a big gamble within the industry, one which requires a hefty investment, in terms of research and development.
Although attitudes are slowly changing, there remains an industry-wide reluctance to take on partisan themes. “Traditionally, developers have been wary of politicizing games, and how that might turn off a customer base,” Skwarek said. “There’s a rumor that programmers who’ve done this on their own have been blacklisted from jobs at bigger companies.”
However, the overlords of the gaming industry might soon change their tune, according to some experts, as the gamer demographic is maturing, and so are its tastes. Gone are the days of a gamer subculture comprising pimply high school boys holed up in their parents’ basements, getting kicks from digital explosions. With the advent of mobile platforms, a once solitary, indoor activity is finding new audiences — those attracted to the social potential and location-based plots of games like Pokémon Go. Today, more than 150 million Americans – of every race, age, gender and socioeconomic group – play. Increasingly, this includes people following environmental news and policy.
Still, an eco-friendly agenda may sound strange for an industry with a historically large carbon footprint. A study published last year in the journal Energy Efficiency found that gaming computers — the fastest-growing gaming platform — guzzle $10 billion worth of electricity per year. And sales should double by 2020.
But, as Scott Steinberg, an expert in gaming trends and host of the Discovery Channel’s “Next Up,” told Salon: “It’s a pop culture business. As goes the news, so too goes gaming. Developers are going to cater to the tastes of the public. In a way, this will be a bit of a renaissance — some of the first floppy disc games, like Balance of the Planet, focused on environmental issues. Now we’re coming full circle.”
And this time around, the technology has advanced — maybe even enough to save the world.
