Elon Musk is a security risk

 Al Jazeera English

Once upon a time, the world’s richest person – Elon Musk, the megalomaniacal CEO of rocket company SpaceX and the officially self-branded “Technoking” of Tesla – endeavoured to bribe 19-year-old Florida college freshman Jack Sweeney with $5,000 to cease operation of the Twitter account @ElonJet, which tracks Musk’s private jet using publicly available data.

The offer was no doubt generous coming from an individual with a private aeroplane and a net worth of some $276bn. The Twitter account provides such updates as “Took off from Kahului, Hawaii, US” and “Landed in Austin, Texas, US. Apx. flt. time 2 Hours : 19 Mins”. Sweeney also tracks the private aircraft of other members of the earth’s ruling class, including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

It does not inspire enormous confidence, of course, that the man who has determined to colonise Mars has to resort to bribing teenagers to sort things out on Twitter. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

From Havana with love

 All Jazeera English

As I was preparing to travel from Mexico to Cuba in early February for a one-month stay, a Cuban friend in Havana messaged me with some tips. If you are going to need things like milk and coffee, he said, be sure to bring them with you.

Indeed, as Cuba now marks six decades of existence under United States embargo, basic commodities are hard to come by – and that is just one aspect of the ongoing US policy of making life hell for Cubans. While the right-wing Cuban exile crowd and allied zealots like the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady prefer to insist that there is “no blockade”, reality indicates very much otherwise.

Sixty years ago, on February 7, 1962, an “Embargo on All Trade with Cuba” entered into effect under the supervision of then-President John F Kennedy, who had taken care beforehand to procure for himself no fewer than 1,200 Cuban cigars. It continues to be the most exhaustive embargo ever imposed on any country by the US, and at the time included a ban on all sales of medicine and food. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Biometric surveillance: Face-first plunge into dystopia

 Al Jazeera English

Flying into Dallas Fort Worth International Airport from Mexico in December, I queued in the immigration line for US citizens and was taken aback when – rather than request my passport – the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent simply instructed me to look at the camera and then pronounced my first name: “Maria?”

Feeling an abrupt violation of my entire bodily autonomy, I nodded – and reckoned that it was perhaps easy to lose track of the rapid dystopian devolution of the world when one had spent the past two years hanging out on a beach in Oaxaca.

A CBP poster promoting the transparent infringement on privacy was affixed to the airport wall, and featured a grey-haired man smiling suavely into the camera along with the text: “Our policies on privacy couldn’t be more transparent. Biometric Facial Comparison. Faster meets more secure.” . . .

[But] face surveillance technology has been exposed as wildly inaccurate, . . . [with] is a much higher rate of misidentification of people of colour and women, which only stands to further exacerbate systemic inequality and discrimination." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Tom Friedman and Israel will save US democracy and blow your mind

Al Jazeera English

Back in 2009, heavily remunerated multi-Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman – who has been employed by the US newspaper of record since 1981 – wrote with characteristic eloquence: “Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things.”

This was presumably news to the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the myriad other locations on the planet that have been on the receiving end of “big good things” from America. 

Sadly, according to Friedman, the United States has lost its way in recent years, afflicted by a crippling partisan “polarisation” that is preventing it from being the best big good superpower it can be. . . .

In his January 2021 New York Times column titled Biden-Cheney 2024?, Friedman urges the US to recuperate its democracy by following in the footsteps of Israel, where a new national unity government . . . has been “getting stuff done and muting the hyperpolarisation that was making Israel ungovernable”.  Indeed, nothing says democracy like a racist apartheid state that bombs, tortures, and ethnically cleanses Palestinians. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Me versus myself: Imposing order on chaos

 Al Jazeera English

When I was growing up in Texas, I was organised and tidy – annoyingly so. I went to sleep at night looking forward to making the bed the next morning, and took great delight in meticulously washing and drying the dishes by hand and ensuring that the vacuum cleaner left precisely proportionate tracks on the carpet.

Somewhere down the line, my daily routines underwent a radical change. After graduating from college in New York, I commenced a life of almost obsessive-compulsive itinerancy, darting between countries and continents and fleeing the notion of a fixed residence. I nonetheless continued to accumulate possessions in all of these countries, which, given the impossibility of travelling with all of them at once, I proceeded to scatter across other countries at the abodes of friends and lesser acquaintances.

While the chaotic arrangement was certainly liberating in its own way, it also resulted in a scattered sense of self – even as I feigned some sort of control over my universe by scribbling lists of what belongings I had left where. . . READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Life and death on the ‘beach of death’

Al Jazeera English

On June 23, 2020, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck off the coast of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, not far from the coastal town of Zipolite where I had taken up accidental residence at the start of the pandemic in March. I had just sat down to work when the room began to shudder violently as though on the verge of self-combustion, and I dashed out the front door of my house to find the power lines sparking all over the place in a world that was suddenly frighteningly precarious.

Adding to the apocalyptic feel was the vehicle that then came flying by with passengers hanging out the windows, shouting at bystanders to run for the hills or else be killed by an alleged incoming tsunami. This was no doubt a fitting end, I told myself, to my stay in Zipolite – a place whose very name, so it is said, means “playa de la muerte”, or “beach of death”, in the Zapotec language.

There were various theories as to the origins of the name, the most obvious being that this was a lethal stretch of sea, where waves and riptides had caused the demise of countless bathers over the years. Some observers also contended that regional Indigenous populations had viewed Zipolite – positioned as it is at the southernmost point of Oaxaca – as an underworld of sorts. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

The US opioid epidemic, edition 2021

 Al Jazeera English

The other day in Mexico, I fell into conversation with an older gentleman from Virginia who had recently lost a brother to cancer. Choking up as he recalled how, as a child, his brother would approach parents on the street to compliment them on the beauty of their offspring, the gentleman added that cancer had not been his brother’s only affliction. He had also, he said, been a victim of “the other epidemic” – meaning the opioid crisis that caused some 500,000 overdose deaths in the United States between 1999 and 2019, while destroying countless more lives through addiction.

The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated the overdose phenomenon, with deaths in the US now surpassing 100,000 per year. Approximately 75 percent of these are attributed to opioids – a class of drugs that includes heroin, synthetic fentanyl, and prescription painkillers like oxycodone. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Elon Musk and all that was wrong with 2021

 Al Jazeera English

Time magazine recently chose Elon Musk – the “richest private citizen in history” and the CEO of rocket firm SpaceX and electric vehicle company Tesla – as its “2021 Person of the Year”. In the first paragraph of the lengthy profile of Musk accompanying the accolade, we learn that the man “tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun”, sends the stock market soaring and swooning with a “flick of his finger”, and also “likes to live-tweet his poops”. . . .

Presumably, the excremental intro is meant to project a down-to-earth, human dimension onto the tyrannical South African entrepreneur who wants to colonise Mars and has officially appointed himself “Technoking” of Tesla. Call it poop-washing, if you will. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Welcome to Tijuana – or not

 Al Jazeera English

In February 2017, Guadalupe Olivas Valencia, a Mexican man in his mid-40s, killed himself by jumping off of a bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, which lies directly across the border from San Diego, California.

The suicide took place just minutes after Olivas Valencia had been deported from the United States for the third time. Symbolically, he jumped holding the plastic bag that had been issued to him by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for his belongings, as CBP customarily does for deportees.

Now, nearly five years later, US border policy continues to destroy lives – and Tijuana continues to serve as an epicentre of destruction.

The Joe Biden administration has just reinstated the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP) – the criminally euphemistic Donald Trump-era policy that saw Tijuana and other Mexican border cities converted into holding pens for asylum seekers in the US. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Remembering US-backed state terror in El Salvador

Al Jazeera English

Forty years ago, on December 11, 1981, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history commenced in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote and its environs.

Some 1,000 civilians, most of them women and children, were slaughtered over a period of several days by the Salvadoran military’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, which had been trained, funded, and equipped by the United States.

A Jacobin Magazine tribute published on the 35th anniversary of the massacre recalls some of the gruesome scenes:

“The soldiers entered the house and began slashing the children with machetes, breaking their skulls with their rifles and choking them to death. The youngest children were crammed into the church’s convent, where the soldiers unloaded their rifles into them.” 

The bloodbath took place in the context of El Salvador’s civil war of 1980-92, which ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – with the vast majority of atrocities perpetrated by the right-wing state in collaboration with paramilitary outfits and death squads. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.