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marketing@boldcorp.com.au+61 7 54 77 0197
Bold Corporate Communication
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Alison Green
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Alison is happiest when working with words. Evident since childhood, her intuitive interest in language has developed into a mature and intelligent skillset that is client-focused and effective. As a copywriter, Alison is known for her high-level knowledge and abilities that enable her to offer insights and solutions that help professionals who offer complex financial products and services to develop marketing communications that resonate with their clients. A bright, friendly and dedicated professional, particularly when the focus is to help Bold! clients create marketing communications that are concise, relevant and engaging.
Alison has held leadership positions in software development, instructional design and education. Her career began at IBM UK where she was responsible for finding and fixing 'bugs' in a leading international software product. After moving to Australia, she researched computer-based language learning at Bond University before moving to Queensland University of Technology where she later headed up the interface design team for Australia's first proprietary online education system.
As a teacher and Head of Department at Queensland high schools, Alison developed reporting systems for students with special needs that were later circulated to regional education offices throughout the state as the recommended standard. Her thoughtful approach to teaching and genuine concern for young people led to the development of practical and solution-focussed communication strategies that were effective both inside and outside the classroom.
Alison has honed her written communication skills over many years. Her extensive hands-on experience as a writer, editor, proofreader, teacher and researcher, and her work in print and online media in academic, business and community contexts, have earned her respect and an outstanding reputation both professionally and personally.
At Bold!, Alison uses her communication skills and business knowledge to support business owners in developing their marketing communications and related text-based material, print and online. In addition to her linguistic ability, she offers a compassionate, understanding and incisive eye in developing or editing effective strategies and copy in marketing communications.
Alison holds a First Class BA(Hons), a Master of Education (with a grade point average of 6.75) and a Graduate BEd, as well as an A-pass Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Adults (TOEFLA). She speaks fluent French, reasonable German and classroom Spanish. Her natural flair for language and ongoing interest in literature and historical linguistics help explain her extensive vocabulary and nuanced appreciation of how to write effectively.
Alison has excelled in state, national and international representative sport including equestrian for Singapore, age-group swimming for Queensland Masters and triathlon. She was British champion in the 1991 World Triathlon Championships, held on the Gold Coast. Her commitment, determination, and sheer stamina are as evident in her professional achievements as they are when she is swimming, cycling or running. More recently, she has developed rather more spiritual interests including mindfulness practices to find balance amid the busy-ness of modern life. Also to this end, she and Gypsy, a black Labrador rehomed from Queensland Guide Dogs, spend lots of time swimming and walking at the beach.
Alison's strong community focus has led to consistent involvement in community activities including teaching English to refugees and migrants with CARE Australia, volunteering in permaculture gardens, and as secretary of sporting clubs including the New Zealand Triathlon Association and Queensland Masters Swimming.
In the years ahead, Alison plans to spend time walking the historic public pathways of regional Great Britain between B&B stays in the cathedral cities. Back in Australia, she is investigating 'tiny houses'.
At Bold! Alison is committed to supporting clients as they establish the habit of effective marketing communication. She enjoys working in a quiet environment as a member of a warm and dedicated team: drafting, editing and helping clients understand that a well-designed marketing communications strategy is not only achievable but rewarding.
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🥛📈😬
China's thirst for milk is bad news for the planet
Reuters/Aly Song
Globally, milk consumption is on the up, set to increase by 60% in the next three decades.
By Emma Bryce
Published May 25, 2018 This article is more than 2 years old.
China's milk consumption will increase threefold by 2050, reveals a study in Global Change Biology—a major shift that could increase global greenhouse gas emissions from cows by more than one-third. But this isn't inevitable: If the country takes steps to improve its dairy sector, its environmental impacts could be significantly reigned in.
Globally, milk consumption is on the up, set to increase by 60% in the next three decades. That's being driven mainly by China as the most populous country in the world, with its growing appetite for milk. The researchers predict that by 2050, China will be consuming an average 82 kilograms of milk per person annually, up from a mere two kilograms in 1961. The impact of this increase could unfold in multiple ways, depending on the path of dairy production that China takes.
Sticking with a business-as-usual approach—wherein China's extra milk requirements are met by both domestic production and international imports—would be the most detrimental for the planet. Under this scenario, greenhouse gas emissions from livestock shoot up by 35%, and global land-use increases by 32%, from 84 to 111 million hectares. This also comes with a 77% surge in water use, and a 48% increase in nitrogen pollution—partly due to the increased need to farm resource-guzzling crops like soybeans and maize as feed.
This grim outcome isn't the only option. China could also choose to produce all the extra milk it needs domestically. But, existing pressures on the land would then force the country to import tons of international feed, to meet the huge appetite of its growing livestock numbers. That simply shifts the environmental burden of increased water, land, and nitrogen pollution to other countries, the researchers note. Similarly, if China relied completely on global imports to meet its growing desire for milk, dairy production in other countries would begin to compete for land with other types of food production: In major milk producing regions like New Zealand and Europe, land use would in fact go up by 57% and 39% respectively.
Under any scenario, China's milk demand will have detrimental impacts on the planet, the researchers say. But, there are ways to limit the extent of that impact.
If China becomes a hub of sustainable dairy innovation, and aligns its domestic milk production with the highest global sustainability standards, it could reduce expected greenhouse gas emissions from milk production by 12%, and land-use by 30%. This would require, for instance, that China improves manure management, which is a major source of greenhouse gas from cows. The country would also need to invest in animal nutrition to ensure the most efficient production of milk, while using the least land. "The optimal option is to produce the additionally required milk in China, but with greatly improved technology," the researchers write.
China is now the world's leading importer of milk, as well as its fourth-largest producer—despite its long history of dairy-free diets. With increased globalization, the desire for milk is mounting in China, despite the fact a high proportion of Asians are lactose-intolerant or lactase-deficient—meaning they lack sufficient lactase, the enzyme necessary to absorb the sugar in milk, lactose, and may suffer from diarrhea, gas, and bloating after consuming dairy products.
To estimate the impact of this rising thirst, the researchers gathered data on China's current and projected milk consumption, and then applied a method called the Nexus Approach, which maps out the interdependencies between environmental resources to measure the impact of a product. This revealed the varied and interconnected environmental impacts of milk consumption under different possible scenarios.
Even under China's best dairy production scenario, global greenhouse gas emissions from cows would rise by 19%, the researchers caution. So, short of dissuading the planet and its growing population from consuming milk, a pragmatic balancing act will ultimately be what's needed to meet our future dairy needs, sustainably.
Source: Bai et. al. "Global environmental costs of China's thirst for milk." Global Change Biology. 2018.
This piece was originally published on Anthropocene Magazine, a publication of Future Earth dedicated to creating a Human Age we actually want to live in.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Nottingham drugs gang locked up after police bug delivery car
The court was told the addicts were living 'hand to mouth'
Natalie FahySenior Editor
A drugs gang was locked up by the city's senior judge as he spoke of the wasteful and degraded lives of addicts.
QC Gregory Dickinson made the comment after hearing how police bugged a drugs' delivery car as it toured Nottingham, Ripley and Uttoxeter.
The Recorder of Nottingham said: "All four defendants were involved in peddling the misery of Class A drugs. The court gets to see the degradation and waste associated with addiction to drugs."
During the hearing at Nottingham Crown Court, he said one dealer's mobile phone was hidden in a bag of children's clothing. One offender hid another phone between his buttocks.
57-year-old man arrested on historical child sex abuse allegations
The four admitted conspiracy to supply heroin and cocaine between August 17 and September 28 last year.
A five-year term was imposed on Mark Dickens, 28, of Wayford Walk, Nottingham. Prison for four years was ordered for Declan Baguley, 27, formerly of Brancroft Street, Bulwell, a term which will begin after a three-year sentence he is already serving for making threats and having an imitation firearm.
A prison term of 30 months was passed on Mark Angus, 30, of Stoneacre, Bestwood Park. He also admitted possession of 41 wraps of heroin on October 20 last year.
A woman acted as driver for the gang and was jailed for two years. Kimberley Elder, 36, of Hogan Gardens, Top Valley had never been in trouble before.
David Allan, prosecuting, said: "There was a use by the police of a covert audio device to record material inside a car for an operation on busy heroin and cocaine dealers."
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This revealed that Dickens and Baguley referred to street dealers as "kids" while supplying them with drugs to sell.
"Dickens said he had made £2,000 to £3,000 in four months but had spent most of it," Mr Allan told the court.
And the police probe found that Angus had inherited over £100,000 but spent it largely on drugs. He was paid under £40 a day to work as a street dealer, while also receiving state benefits.
"He cuts a somewhat pathetic figure," added Mr Allan.
Matthew Smith, for Angus, told the judge: "It was a desperation to find money for what was a crippling addiction to Class A drugs. He was scratching around for work."
Adrian Langdale, for Dickens, said the police bug recorded "a lot of talk and bluster."
He added: "There is the boast that he is making two to £3,000 in four months. That is 120 days at £25 a day.
"This is not large scale dealing the court is used to, they are low level dealers."
Adrian Reynolds, for Baguley, said: "This is a case of people living from hand to mouth." Because he had been held in a remand wing while awaiting sentence, he was unable to enrol for courses. Mr Reynolds added: "The boredom must have been stultifying."
Steven Gosnell, for Elder, said at that time her mother had died "and she was her world." Mr Gosnell said Elder took responsibility for her actions, adding: "She was befriended and became embroiled in what we have seen."
Under government rules, the quartet will have to serve half their terms inside before being released on probation. Police are not seeking to claw back drugs profits because the four are thought to have nothing left.


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"South Park" renewed for three more years
We'll just keep on killing Kenny: Comedy Central and the producers of South Park have come to an agreement to keep the series on the air through the 2016 season. This means the series is guaranteed to reach its twentieth season, only behind The Simpsons, who notched its own renewal deal last month with a deal that guarantees its 25th season in 2014.
The renewal deal comes despite tensions last year between South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker and Comedy Central over the series' 200th and 201st episodes and rumors the series could end due to the success of their Tony Award-winning Broadway stage play The Book Of Mormon.
But South Park continues to draw eyeballs in its longtime Wednesday night time slot. So far this season, Park has averaged around three million viewers and has finished near the top among cable shows in the adult 18-49 demo for the night, and beats all cable programming for the night in all key male demos. For example, South Park beat all prime time programming in the male 18-34 demo on the night of November 16 except for Modern Family.
Even though Fox's Animation Domination Sunday night block has sprung a leak (thank you, Allen Gregory), adult animation is still in high demand, thanks to the successful return of Beavis and Butthead and the continued success of FX's Archer.
Allen GregoryAnimationArcherBeavis and ButtheadComedy CentralFXMatt StoneRatingsSouth ParkTrey Parker
CBS revamps morning show – again
WFLD picks up new "Ricki Lake" show


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Subscribe to Today in Judaism
Learning & Values Jewish History A Brief Biblical History The Kingdom of Judah
By Jacob Isaacs
Published and copyrighted by Kehot Publication Society
The Piety of King Asa
Abijah's son Asa, who succeeded his father as king of Judea, was truly pious and G‑d fearing. During his long reign of forty-one years he was successful in his determined efforts to purify and restore the true religion of his people and their belief in the one and only G‑d and His Torah. He lived in deepest accord with the prophets and priests who in his time exerted the strongest influence over the people of Judea. Most of the idolatries that had infiltrated during the time of Asa's father and grandfather were abolished. Not only did he expel the heathen priests from the land, but he even deprived his mother of her queenly privileges, because she obstinately clung to the worship of Ashtarte.
Asa was truly a worthy descendant of David.
Asa's Confidence in G‑d
Asa began to enrich the Temple with newly consecrated treasures of gold and silver. He fortified the cities in the strategic points of the land and trained fresh troops from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the art of warfare.
The strength of Asa's army was soon put to test. The mighty King Zerah of Kush (Ethiopia) had conquered Egypt under Shishak, and, among other loot, had taken away treasures Shishak had stolen from the Holy Temple and the royal palace in Jerusalem. Eager for more treasures, King Zerah led his mighty army against Judea. He forced King Asa into battle, as there appeared to be no prospect of victory for the outnumbered army of Judea. Asa, however, prayed to G‑d for help, and Zerah's troops were completely defeated. Asa pursued the fleeing Ethiopian divisions as far as Philistinia and recovered all the loot Shishak had taken from Jerusalem. This miraculous victory strengthened Asa's position both in the eyes of his own people and in the eyes of the other nations. When he returned to Jerusalem at the head of his victorious troops, he was jubilantly received, and the prophet Azariahu came to greet him and convey to him the following message from G‑d: "The L-rd is with you, when you are with Him, and if you seek Him, he permits Himself to be found by you; but if you desert Him, He will desert you too." This message from G‑d was the signal for an intensive campaign to clear out every trace of idolatry still left in the land. Harsh punishment was inflicted upon those who were caught violating G‑d's holy commands, and all those who were found serving idols were threatened with death.
Many people from the kingdom of the Ten Tribes were attracted by the success of King Asa, who was obviously in favor with G‑d. They were the pious and noble elements who could not bear the turmoil of continual fighting over the throne of Israel and the G‑dlessness of its various occupants. Asa's prestige was growing.
Asa's War with Baasha
Baasha, who at that time was king over Israel, desired to weaken the prestige of Judea, which was increasing even in his own realm. He was all the more apprehensive because of a prophecy that after thirty-six years the breach in King Solomon's empire would be healed, since Solomon's thirty-six-year long marriage with the Egyptian princess would, by that time, have been atoned for. King Asa appeared to be the man under whom this prophecy might come true.
Resolved to carry out his plan, Baasha began to build near the border of Judea, the city of Ramah, from which he hoped to control his rival kingdom. Asa well understood Baasha's intention. He was further alarmed by Baasha's overtures to Benhadad, king of Syria, to help him in his design upon Judea. However, in the ensuing strife with the jealous king Baasha, Asa made a grave mistake. Instead of siding with the prophets who had supported him thus far and helped him in the most desperate situations, Asa put his trust in political play. The great courage with which he had formerly faced the overwhelming hosts of the Ethiopians failed him on this occasion, and he lent a willing ear to the advice of his counselors who told him that he could easily win Benhadad over to his side by outbidding his rival Baasha. Asa followed this advice and offered Benhadad the treasures he had taken away from the vanquished Ethiopian army. Benhadad, who liked money, was easily tempted, especially since he regarded an alliance with Judea as a safer bet than an alliance with his troublesome neighbor, the king of Israel.
While Baasha was busy fortifying his frontiers against Judea, his former confederate Benhadad attacked him in the north and forced him to leave his half-finished work and rush to the defense of his land. King Asa took full advantage of this situation and destroyed Israel's frontier defenses. The construction material was hauled to his side of the border and there was erected an equally strong line of fortifications that assured Judea against further invasions from Israel.
But, Asa had displeased G‑d by his lack of faith, and for the remainder of his reign he was continually troubled by fighting against Baasha and other neighbors, just as the prophet Hanani had predicted. Asa died in the forty-first year of his reign. He was one of the most pious kings of Judea. Except for his slip in the case of Baasha, he faithfully followed the teachings of the Prophets and devoted his time to the glorification of G‑d's name among His people. He outlived five successive kings in the neighboring kingdom of Israel. The people of Judea deeply mourned his death and gave the deceased monarch the most glorious burial ever given to one of their kings. Asa was succeeded by his equally pious son Jehoshaphat.
From Our People by Jacob Isaacs published and copyrighted by Kehot Publication Society 1946-1948
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Our People: A History of the Jews »
Our People, originally published in 1946, was the first Jewish history book for the English speaking reader. Read today, it still provides a comprehensive outline of Jewish history, and also a view of the telling of history as it evolved over the last century.
Creation And Early History
The Forefathers
Suffering in Egypt and the Exodus
Wandering in the Desert
In the Promised Land
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Kehot Publication Society and Merkos Publications, the publishing divisions of the Lubavitch movement, have brought Torah education to nearly every Jewish community in the world, and are the world's largest publisher of Jewish literature.
Ahaziah and Athaliah
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Countdown to Women's Representation in Congress
infogram_0_countdown_to_women_in_congressCountdown to Women in Congress//e.infogr.am/js/dist/embed.js?cDvtext/javascript
Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress in 1916 by the state of Montana. A Republican and a pacifist, she spoke out fiercely against U.S. military intervention. Rankin was not seated in Congress until April 2, 1917 due to a prolonged discussion about whether a woman should be admitted into Congress. As History.com notes:
Finally, on April 2, 1917, she was introduced in Congress as its first female member. The same day, President Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress and urged a declaration of war against Germany. On April 4, the Senate voted for war by a wide majority, and on April 6 the vote went to the House. Citing public opinion in Montana and her own pacifist beliefs, Jeannette Rankin was one of only 50 representatives who voted against the American declaration of war. For the remainder of her first term in Congress, she sponsored legislation to aid women and children, and advocated the passage of a federal suffrage amendment.
Rankin went on to become a figure in the suffrage and pacifist movements. She was elected to Congress for a second term in 1940. Rankin passed in 1973 at the age of 93.
Women of Color in Congress: How We Can Do Better
Weekend Reading on Women's Representation February 3, 2017


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How a small-town police department overcame its GIS challenge
Written by Colin Wood
Jan 22, 2021 | STATESCOOP
To ensure its 911 dispatchers wouldn't need to rely on Google Maps when directing first responders to emergencies, the Radcliff, Kentucky, Police Department recently underwent an arcane but critical upgrade to its data systems. The city last fall hired GeoComm, a company specializing in geographic information systems for public safety, to update its mapping platform, ensuring that dispatchers have an accurate and complete accounting of the city's roadways.
Radcliff, a city of about 25,000, isn't big enough to need a full-time GIS specialist on staff, but without a GIS data set available to dispatchers that includes the latest streets, there was a risk of lost response time, said Jeff Hale, a technology coordinator at the Radcliff Police Department.
"It's very important when someone calls for help you can know exactly where they're at, and you can get the proper authorities there very timely which ultimately could make a huge impact," Hale told StateScoop. "If that data was not there, then ultimately you would have where the dispatcher would have to know by memory or they would have to look it up on a map."
Hale said dispatchers could sometimes be forced to resort consulting Google Maps an Excel spreadsheet if the data hadn't been integrated into the city's dispatching software. Radcliff only built about 20 new roads over the past three years that needed to be added to the department's data set. But even in a small city, Hale said, a few lost seconds could have meant lives lost.
To conduct the update of Radcliff's public safety systems, GeoComm first checked "the level of synchronization" between the city's GIS data and Master Street Address Guide, a standardized database used by public safety answering points, as well as with its computer aided dispatch system. The company cleaned up any inconsistencies in the data by updating road centerlines, address point layers and boundary layers, it said.
Maintaining a current record of public roads and addresses is a constant challenge for local governments around the country, which frequently have understaffed or nonexistent GIS offices. In Radcliff, which borders Fort Knox, having a clear picture of the environment is useful to dispatchers, Hale said, who might need to deploy help to city, county, state or federal jurisdictions.
Hiring a full-time GIS employee wasn't viable for the city, he said, and finding a company to help wasn't easy either — he contacted several before finding success with GeoComm. After an initial email in October, he said the company completed the work in about 30 days, adding that GeoComm "heavily" discounted its services because Radcliff operates a 911 center.
"We would rather contract somebody to do the upgrade, like we did with GeoComm, rather than basically have somebody on staff that's sitting there twiddling their thumbs until we need to do the update," Hale said.
In addition to the direct benefits offered by the GIS data update, GeoComm also claims the city is now better prepared to adopt next-generation 911, a suite of IP-based technologies that would in the coming years enable the sharing of photos, video and location between 911-callers and public safety answering points.
GeoComm, GIS, Kentucky, Public Safety, Radcliff


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OnePlus 11R 5G India launch date revealed by Amazon: specifications
OnePlus has a bunch of products to offer during its upcoming February 7th Cloud Event, including the OnePlus 11 5G, OnePlus Buds Pro 2, its first-ever Keyboard, and the new OnePlus TV 65 Q2 Pro. That said, it looks like OnePlus might also take the wraps off its OnePlus 11R 5G smartphone on the same day. Amazon India, earlier today, pushed a notification prompt via its app, which says the OnePlus 11R 5G will also launch on February 7th, 7:30 PM in India, although the company is yet silent on the same.
OnePlus 11R 5G India launch date
As seen in the image above, the OnePlus 11R 5G is said to launch on February 7th. While the notification that we have received does not look like a typo made by the e-commerce website (notice the new quote, The Shape Of Power), there's no way to tell whether the notification was sent out by mistake or whether the device will actually launch on the same day. For those unaware, OnePlus has already confirmed the launch of the four devices that we have mentioned above, but the OnePlus 11R 5G has so far been fairly limited to leaks, listings, and rumours.
OnePlus 11R 5G specifications (expected)
The OnePlus 11R 5G is expected to sport a 6.7-inch FHD+ AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. Under the hood, the device is said to be powered by a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, which will likely be paired with up to 16GB RAM and up to 512GB storage. In terms of OS, the device will run the latest Android 13-based OxygenOS 13 out of the box.
As far as cameras are concerned, the OnePlus 11R 5G is tipped to offer a 50MP + 12MP + 2MP triple rear camera setup and a 16MP selfie snapper. Lastly, the device will reportedly feature a 5,000mAh battery with 100W fast charging support.
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OnePlus Buds Pro 2 Indian variant specifications leaked ahead of launch


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The Shia Genocide
by Bina Shah / April 2, 2013 / 2 Comments
During the first 48 days of this year an estimated 260 Shia Muslims have been killed and nearly 500 injured in systematic attacks in Pakistan.
On March 3, 2013 a vehicle carrying a bomb detonated in Abbas Town, Pakistan, killing 48 people, injuring 200, and destroying several apartment buildings in the Shia-dominated neighborhood. Photo: Nadir Burney via Flickr.
2013 has been an ominous year so far for Pakistan's Shia Muslims, who are finding themselves the target of bombs and shootings aimed specifically at members of their community. Two bombs killed hundreds of Shias in Quetta, followed by another bombing in Karachi; all took place in areas where Shias live and work. In addition to this, many Shia doctors, professors, businessmen, and lawyers have been shot dead while they commute to work or are otherwise trying to conduct the business of their lives.
Pakistan is a country of contradictions – full of promise for growth, modernity and progress, yet shrouded by political, social and cultural issues that undermine its quest for identity and integrity. My bi-monthly column "Pakistan Unveiled" presents stories that showcase the Pakistani struggle for freedom of expression, an end to censorship, and a more open and balanced society.
Bina Shah is a Karachi-based journalist and fiction writer and has taught writing at the university level. She is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. She is a columnist for two major English-language newspapers in Pakistan, The Dawn and The Express Tribune, and she has contributed to international newspapers including The Independent, The Guardian, and The International Herald Tribune. She is an alumnus of the International Writers Workshop (IWP 2011).
The perpetrators of this deliberate violence against Pakistan's Shias (who constitute roughly 15% of the nation's population) are the Sunni Deobandi militants who believe Shias are not just non-Muslims, but need to be completely destroyed or driven out of Pakistan. The motivation for this offensive campaign can be found in the generous funding these militant networks receive from outside sources, especially Saudi Arabia, who uses Pakistan's militants as a way of exerting pressure on their rival Iran. Perhaps most tellingly, the name for what's happening to Pakistan's Shias has been termed "The Shia Genocide."
Genocide is a difficult word to say. It sticks in the mouth, like a bite of something you can't bear to swallow. The United Nations Office of the Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide defines it as: "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group … " including:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Given this definition, even the most cynical person would have to agree that what's being done to the Shia in Pakistan qualifies as genocide.
Most of us who grew up at the end of the 20th century read about genocide in the context of World War II—at least that's how I first learned what the word meant, watching crackling black and white footage of Jews imprisoned in concentration camps. Later, I studied history and realized that the Jewish population did not have the monopoly on genocide: Similar campaigns of extermination took place against the indigenous peoples of North and South America; the people of Armenia; and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Even later, I realized that the Pakistan army had enacted genocide on the people of East Pakistan when they decided to break away and form Bangladesh.
We watched in horror as genocide occurred in Bosnia and Rwanda in the last decade of the 20th century, yet all the cries of "never again" seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. It would seem that genocide is part of the human condition, as long as there are different ethnic groups competing for power and resources in any part of the world. In that sense, genocide will be impossible to eliminate, as long as identity politics continue to fuel conflicts between religious, ethnic, and racial groups. As the UN Commission states, "Given that no country is perfectly homogeneous, genocide is truly a global challenge."
I remain unconvinced that Pakistan has the will to put a stop to the Shia genocide. For that to happen, the government would have to end discrimination, hate speech, and severely punish the incitement of violence against minority religious and ethnic groups in the country as the UN recommends; right now, while Pakistan transitions from one government to another, it's simply too weak to do that. It's also never going to stop the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia and other interested parties to militants. Until then, all we will have are words to describe the injustice that is being committed, once more, in front of our eyes.
Tags: Bina Shah, discrimination, human rights, Pakistan, Shia Genocide, social injustice
2 Comments on "The Shia Genocide"
Muhamed Shakbar October 17, 2014 at 9:34 am ·
HEIL HITLER
Pakistan's Ahmadis: Victims of Identity Theft « Persecution of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community


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Champollion's Foot by Haris A. Durrani
by Haris A. Durrani | Apr 11, 2017 | Fiction
I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
— Rumi
Being deprived of a dream is much more cruel than simply being shot and dismissed.
— George Saliba
The crew of La Mariposa Negra had scoured the starless planet for days before the jinn told them the truth. The Akasharians were dead. They had been dead for seven millennia. Came in and out of existence in the blink of God's eye. It was a moment of revelation.
Lieutenant Najam Cortes stood outside La Mariposa, a neat line of footprints leading behind him to the ship like the footprints of a ciguapa. Minutes ago, the Shaykha had radioed out the news.
A grin crossed his face. In Dominican folklore, ciguapas were omens of death, mythical women with backward feet who'd walk from the ocean at night. This reminded him of the first evening he spent watching the stars with his father, lying on the cool sand of Dominico, ears cocked to the whisper of the sea.
"Look, Najam," his father said. Young Cortes rolled his eyes and looked up. "People — they say they look, but they do not. Not truly. They fail to notice the immensity."
As Cortes regarded the sparkling black, he wondered how many stars there were and how much more empty space there was. Was there life out there? This was a childish thought, he would admit eventually. In two dozen millennia, humanity had discovered nothing smarter than a ferret.
"Al-Ghaib," his father murmured.
"Dad," he protested. "English."
"God, the Unknown."
He and his step-brother, ship's archaeologist Burhan Jimenez, idled away their early youth on that beach. They spent hours in the water and sand until the sun set. They'd lie on their backs and watch the stars each night with fresh eyes, waiting for an answer to drop from the sky until their eyelids drooped and one of them began to snore. Soon the sun would cast the night violet-blue in premonition of dawn, when birds would rouse them. The brothers would perform their morning prayers, attend academy, and return in the evenings to repeat the routine.
Nothing could climb from the ether, eyes searching, brains occupied with anything more than hunt, forage, mate, defecate. The corporate empire, Kradys, declared this a mathematical impossibility. They had explored enough of the uncharted space to know that the statistical probability of intelligent life was magnitudes of fractions of one percent. It may as well be zero. They had derived a mathematical proof for the Fermi Paradox and claimed the universe humanity's absolute manifest destiny.
Or so they said.
Thousands of years of wishful thinking, despite the mounting evidence against it, that there was someone else out there — to end with this. At first, Cortes couldn't believe it. Now, he'd stopped caring. He had come to save Paco Sol for the Shaykha, not for Paco, science, or the experience of first contact. He owed the Shaykha for her charity and the lives she saved in the war, including his own. She was honorable, and if Cortes lived by one principle, it was that honor was to be reciprocated.
Now he had completed his moral obligations. They were on Akashar. But the extinction of the Akasharians — the crew's only hope for Paco's survival — merely escalated Cortes's frustration. Something more had to be done. This couldn't be the end of their long journey, could it, the ashes of a dead civilization?
He surveyed the ambiguous remains of Akashar in La Mariposa's meek light, his jungle-green suit crinkling like twisted aluminum. His large grey eyes, flecked with black, stared back at him from inside his visor.
Cortes knelt in the Akasharian ash and faced a triangular, black edifice overhead, then the grey smog above and the opaque debris behind it. The ship rested behind him like a coral reef doused in ash, wings sticking out awkwardly as if to catch heat from the cold. A hole occupied the debris overhead, a dark gap in the sky, a black mockery of the sun this world never had. In their desperation, the Akasharians had wrenched a peephole in their orbital junkyard so that as they perished they could glimpse the worlds beyond.
He stared into the probe's camera readout in the periphery of his helmet. The probe hovered over the surface, climbing mountains and crossing fields of ash.
Something dark blue flashed across the screen. He inhaled sharply.
"I seek refuge in God —"
He switched the probe to manual and turned it around. There was something there, wriggling in the thin atmosphere of Akashar.
The Physicist
Inside La Mariposa, Arondi Maduro stared into the debris above and held Orlando Rodriguez. He paused, a pouch of Gliesean rum on his lips. He wasn't smiling, Arondi noticed. He always smiled. He smiled too much. She was about to tell him this but stopped, watching as his face grew blank. She wished she were more than mildly satisfied with his change in character.
Arondi wanted to return to that age when people believed they would find a universe thriving with sentient life. They had just perfected cryogenic science, and everything had seemed possible. People listened for signals in every wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum. They searched every star system in the Milky Way and half the next. They looked for patterns in nature, anything that could tell them another sentient race awaited. In the end they found white noise from the Big Bang; prokaryotic cells on Bashar; and algae in a few places like Europa, Lincei, Gliese 581g, and Santiago. Dominico once bustled with life, but Kradys had industrialized it into desert and mulch.
There was nothing. After twenty-four millennia, people concluded the search was a lost cause. Kradys wrote a predictive formula telling them so.
Of course, the Shaykha's analysis revealed a small but significantly nonzero probability of sentient life elsewhere. It was something on the order of one hundredth, a far cry from Kradys' magnitudes of fractions of one percent. Set the Shayha's probability against the statistical enormity of the universe, and intelligent life seemed a lot easier to find. Kradys incarcerated the Shaykha on Gliese 581g to prevent her from rallying followers. Bad science, Kradys bureaucrats declared, was a cultural malaise. The crew could've stormed the prison, but the Shaykha had insisted on remaining in protest.
A decade later, her son, Paco Sol, came to the old crew. He told them he'd seen the strangest things. Something had infected him. No, infected was wrong. The jinn called it Champollion's Foot. He was dying. They broke out the Shaykha, evaded the corporate fleet, and journeyed here only to find —
What was it? It wasn't nothing. It wasn't something. It was frustrating, anticlimactic. The weight of eons of human curiosity pressed down on the barrenness of this cosmic non-answer, as if Arondi had lived those billions of lives spent searching.
We are still alone.
"A star," she murmured. She stared through the gap in the debris. "We always thought it would have a star."
"You didn't believe the observations from Dominico?" Orlando's hot breath caressed her temple.
"I thought it was temporary, not a home world. Not their only home world. What kind of world doesn't have a star?"
"Akashar," he translated, "the world without light."
Outside, La Mariposa's light forged a path out of the dark. Only now, engulfed by this planet's unending blackness, did Arondi understand the name. She had previously thought of light as the norm and shadow as anomaly. But here light was not a status quo eclipsed by its absence. Rather, the absence of light was the norm, accompanied by little but the faint luminosity of distant stars. All her years of study culminated with this moment of simple experience. It was almost embarrassing how poorly her research had helped her achieve this raw feeling of comprehension. The idea of vacuum was a concept now tangible, something not merely known but somehow, inexplicably, felt. Finally, she grasped the essential nature of the cosmos: an ocean of shadow eclipsed by anomalies of energy and mass.
Titanus "Tito" Fernandez sat in the middle of the engine room curled around his electric cigarette. The cigarette blushed red as he peered into the thermodynamic tank where the jinn idled. It was an incredible piece of machinery. Jinn, beings of smokeless fire, were perfect combustion reactions. No excess. When you stuck them in a ship's ass like provisions in a cargo bay, you did away with half the thermodynamic inefficiency.
"Fuck inefficiency." He winked at the jinn. They writhed in their cage.
These jinn had brought the crew of La Mariposa here, for what that was worth. Thermo tanks ran the damned corporate empire. Human rights? Shit, they weren't human, were they?
This was when Tito experienced his epiphany. He snapped to his feet, strode to the wall opposite the tank, and turned to Burhan Jimenez, who was staring at a holographic diagram of the wastes from Akashar. Tito pointed at the diagram.
"It's a long piece of shit, man." Tito sucked on his cigarette. He frowned at Jimenez. "We had all these fancy ideas about first contact. We invade them. They invade us. We encounter by chance in deep space. We get each other's signals. They make patterns out of stars, write messages in distant nebulae." He pushed off the wall. "At the end of the day, all we find is their shit, literally — washed up in our backyard. These fucking wastes from Akashar. Like a Megalodon's giant turd floating onto our cosmic beach. I mean, what the fuck?" He laughed again, a high, wheezing cackle. "Man. We're dogs, sniffing each other's asses."
Jimenez glared at him. "Can you take anything seriously, Titanus?"
"It's a shit-cloud." Tito smirked, ignoring Jimenez. That pompous bastard. "One big-ass snake monster. Now we've finally arrived at the bottom of the drain, and all we found is the Mother Shit. Akashar." He rapped on the tank, where the ghostly forms of jinn squirmed in their cage. "Eh, boys?"
Orlando Rodriguez pushed from Arondi's embrace. Tito liked to call them "star-crossed lovers," regurgitating an antiquated phrase only the engineer seemed to understand. This era felt like an antiquated thing, immortal, obsolete, and perversely old. Somehow Tito's epithet worked — Arondi, the daughter of a massacred revolutionary, and Orlando, the son of a military contractor, together at the edge of known space.
Arondi could flush her cheeks and tell him she loved him, but it was difficult for him to believe her. "Do you think this, us — is it pheromones?" she would ask him, straight-faced. "Are our feelings the byproducts of evolution?" He could never help but agree, the way she always asked it, lips open and wet. But today felt like the end of something, like he had to call her out before they each passed to another life.
He moved the pouch of rum from his mouth, the fermented alien algae bitter on his tongue, and took her hand.
"Pheromones," he echoed from those long-lost bedside conversations. Arondi kept staring at Akashar, but her grip tightened. "So you think we're animals?"
"It's not an ugly thing." She said it as if he'd called her stupid. Her eyes flickered over the unintelligible sprawl of Akashar, Cortes's figure a dark green pinprick in the distance dimly lit by La Mariposa's overhead. "Science is beautiful on its own. It doesn't require meaning."
"Beauty without meaning…" he answered. He wanted to tease her, but the words felt manufactured. The bleak landscape of Akashar seemed to latch on to every thought with an enormous weight, like the Higgs ascribing mass. The Midas of gravity, these ragged structures, these mountains of ash, that orbital junk obscuring their view of this side of the universe.
He rubbed her thumb. She flicked it and turned, facing him.
"Science is the only thing we know," she replied. "You're the psychologist. This should be obvious for you. We're addicted to meaning… It's nothing more than neurons firing. What we know is the only thing that matters, because it's the only thing we have."
He could see in her furrowed brow that she knew her reply was as vacant as his silence.
"So." He gestured at Akashar. "Why do you keep staring?"
She looked into the black expanse, quiet.
Pheromones. He almost laughed. A relationship based on the concept that love itself could be parsed and understood — was that love at all? It was as empty as the planet before them.
He reached for her cheek.
"Look at me, Arondi."
For many of Orlando's patients, the stars not only inspired awe. They conjured the thought that maybe there were others with whom they might share the cosmic toil of consciousness. People dreamt this for millennia. After twenty-four millennia, people kept dreaming, but they knew it was that. A dream.
Arondi continued to stare through the hole the Akasharians had wrenched out of their sky.
"Look at me," Orlando said.
"I'm looking."
He struggled to retain his poise.
"We're alone," he told her. "That's the truth. We have to live with that."
She had the look of one who had moments ago suffered a revelation, experienced rather than realized an item of great portent that stood in the face of prior intelligence. Like the face of an angel who had experienced, if it were possible, the absence of God. Her skin was prickly against his fingers.
The Archaeologist
The moment the jinn from the Hydrogen Bridge relayed the news, Burhan Jimenez finally understood the images he had scrutinized for so many months. They were the physical illustration of the slow death of an ancient civilization. Arondi's diagrams depicted centuries of refuse launched from Akashar, crossing the void like streams of cosmic bile. Now he knew, as a matter of conscience over mere fact, that it displayed the gradual extinction of an old race.
Tito taunted the jinn. "Eh, boys?" he was saying. How ironic for a man named Titanus to be so small. Of course, this was why people called him Tito.
Burhan ignored him and turned back to the diagrams of the wastes from Akashar. He followed the debris again and again through the display, trying to make sense of something dark and cosmic at the edge of comprehension.
The jinn made it clear, the Shaykha had said. The Akasharians were dead, bodies vaporized. They wouldn't say why. This made sense. They couldn't say. Jinn were animals, weren't they? What more could they do than rely on basic information? They knew the Akasharians were dead the way a dog barks after the stench of a buried carcass.
He kept perusing the diagrams, as if to wring an alternate truth from the debris. The initial discovery should have fascinated him. And it had. But he now realized Kradys' ideas lived so deeply in him that the thought of an alien was itself alien, surreal, impossible. The revelation of Akashar's existence had ignited a brief if wary hope, but the Akasharians' apparent extinction rendered that question moot and extinguished his excitement as quickly as it had arrived. Only the existence of a living species, a threat to Kradys' manifest destiny, was capable of rousing those age-old flames that kept children up at night beneath the stars, as they had for Burhan and Najam on the Dominican beaches of their youth. During no other time in his life had Burhan felt this distinct conflict between the rational clarity of his academic fervor and what he now suspected was the absurdity of his preconceived notions, which until this point he had assumed as fact. They were ideas he had been told from a young age, so young it seemed he had always believed them.
Burhan rubbed his eyes and moved his fingers into the somber purple aura of the display. He tracked the sinews of waste from Akashar all the way to the edges of the corporate empire, to the tiny black globule that had infected the Shaykha's son, Paco Sol.
The diagrams revealed the evolution of Akashar and its inhabitants. First the dust of planetary creation. Then the debris of soon-to-be space farers — "What kind of civilization is that," he wondered aloud, "that it simply discards its waste in hordes? My God, what excess… " Then the silver, geometric remains of what he assumed were battles. Then the moons and rocky planets the inhabitants had brought near Akashar. They had no diaspora. No one ever found Akashar, he realized, because the Akasharians brought worlds to their home rather than colonizing worlds beyond. Without a diaspora, the probability of discovery was narrow; Akashar and its trail of debris occupied less than a hair's width on the cosmic map. Each pattern in the debris made way for another. Like layers of rock and deceased life-forms beneath ground indicate the life of a planet and its inhabitants, the stream of extraterrestrial waste indicated the civilizations of Akashar.
"History," he concluded, "is physical. A timeline in space."
"No shit," Tito said behind him.
Burhan swiveled in his chair but chose to disregard the engineer's remark.
"What I still cannot determine is how they passed," Burhan wondered, rubbing his jaw.
Tito held his cigarette aside and pretended to blow smoke.
"How does this not to disturb your conscience?" Burhan demanded. "That we can watch the history of the extinction of a sentient race — likely the only other such race in existence — before our eyes?"
Tito tapped the smart glass built into the jinn's thermodynamic cage.
"And these bastards?"
Burhan squinted. "Pardon me?"
"Jinn aren't sentient?"
Burhan shrugged. "You're the man who operates the tank."
"You traveled in this ship." Tito clutched a rung. "Kradys built the damned system anyway. 'Economic progress.' 'Interstellar cattle.'" As Tito stepped close, Burhan could smell the man's odor gravitate toward him. Tito stopped inches from his face. "Just because I take advantage of the bastards doesn't mean I think their brains are mush. They're the ones who found this place first."
"No. The jinn from the Hydrogen Bridge—"
"Oh so some jinn are sentient?" He raised a wiry brow.
Burhan sighed. "I feel disinclined to comment. We know terrestrials spoke of them millennia ago. They lived, occasionally hidden, among us on Earth and existed long before our species evolved. We've enslaved them for so many millennia that, even if they did possess the faculties of man, they do not feel resolutely — hm, that word — alien."
"If they're not alien," Tito replied, left nostril twitching, "then what the hell are they?"
Burhan raised his arms. "So after all that fuss, you suggest they are animals? Smart, gaseous monkeys? Savages from the hydrogen jungle or Earth or whichever planet you so choose? Is that the answer you're looking for, my friend? Because I have none."
Tito scoffed. "No, my friend," he replied, imitating Burhan's pitch. "I'm not suggesting they're animals. I'm suggesting the opposite. You intellectuals, this idiot crew, this damned intergalactic culture of comatose fuckups —" He paused, staring into La Mariposa's cragged ceiling. "You're an archaeologist, not a philosopher, but you are obsessed with the Truth. Whatever that fucking is. Even you can't figure judgment from fact. You're no different from a bureaucrat. You think either too much or too little. You're as stupid as your brother. He believes in dignity and rules. That makes for a bad revolutionary; he's the one captain who didn't die in the war. Fuck the rules. Your brother doesn't care about discovery or tragedy. He cares about honor, as if that's something else. You don't know how to care. Who makes the rules for this shit? There're no rules for mass extinction, man."
Burhan thought for a moment that Tito was talking to the air. Was that foul-mouthed cretin mocking him?
"You defile my brother's name," Burhan murmured.
"Did you hear a fucking word I said, Jimenez?" Tito looked away and waved a hand. "Whatever." He shrugged, looked back. "I just happen to think we're all implicit in a system."
"A system?"
"Yeah. No escaping it, not even death. Or shit." Tito grinned. "Which is why, you know, who cares? Stick 'em in a fucking tank for all I care. End of the day, no matter what I do, I'm just another comatose fuckup like you, no matter how much I deny it. I know these space monkeys must be self-aware" — he tapped on the cage — "but the idea is so socially, biologically, existentially… wrong. It can't be!" He threw up his arms. "Impossible! You know? You know. You know exactly. We're brought up like that. It's in our blood. That's self-awareness. But unlike you, my friend, I thrive in the Hell of civilization. I embrace evil. You languish in its banality, searching desperately for a way to be anything other than a product of our time."
Burhan scowled. Tito was out of his mind. He couched himself in proletarian straight talk, but beneath the veneer he was a misanthrope. One does not argue with madmen.
Tito laughed at him and inserted his cigarette between his lips.
The intercom blared. Burhan cocked his head. He watched Tito extract his cigarette. In the backdrop, the jinn scurried in their tank, a contained storm of crackling blue fire. The com buzzed a second time. It was Najam.
"Cortes here. The probe found something. I think…" Pause. "It's a flag."
The Inorganic Biologist
Karell Cory found it difficult to describe the condition of her fiancé, Paco Sol, without scientific precedent. The most she could say was that the alien shit was eating him from the inside.
Alien enzymes reversed his genetic structure constantly, molecules realigning, shifting to left-handedness in a chain reaction. They tried to recreate the foreign inorganic compounds in his system but couldn't, not fully. So his genes crumbled, malformed helixes splitting slowly like cracked ice. There was a reason life as humans knew it was based mostly on right-handed DNA. The only thing keeping his system from falling apart was the garish blue glow of his cryogenic cocoon. Even that wouldn't last. It was partly to blame.
Karell touched the surface and shivered. Beneath the icy saline goo, Paco's pale complexion radiated white light as if he were a pile of bones at the bottom of a pool. Paco had lived decades in cryo as he delivered corporate goods across void, in ricochet between Bashar and Gliese 581g, and then one day he'd found the black orb outside the wastes from Akashar.
"Idiot," she told the cocoon. "Why'd you touch it, Paco?"
The cocoon growled.
"You're not a fool, are you?" She smiled briefly.
Paco had killed dozens in attempts to find a cure, but he wasn't always a bad guy. His problem, Karell believed, was that he hadn't considered death since the war. Death scared him. None of this was his fault. He'd say it was God's, she knew.
Paco was always scrawny. He had a hard life trekking in cryo between Bashar and Gliese 581g. He had learned to deal with it even as he searched constantly for a way to settle down. He rode in Paradigm, the smallest ship in the corporate fleet, and had the sense of humor to think of this as a joke. He had a pet Empress, a charaxes brutus natalensis whose wings and abdomen were brick-red splotched with white, the tips of her wings lined with those colors like a mutated peacock's spread. He named her Esperanza. He didn't feed her too much or too little and built a tiny cryogenic cocoon so she, like Paco, could last the years between the stars. After he and everyone else on La Mariposa except Orlando Rodriguez fought in the war, he hadn't hurt more than a fly.
In those days, before the last fleet of Kradys ships arrived like cities in the sky, he was a war hero. After the last rebel ship plummeted into the sea and Kradys settled on Dominico's beaches, just before the corporation ordered Paco into his menial career as interstellar delivery boy — as he lingered through that no man's land of memory, forgetting the fighter he was and meandering through memories of the present, the military compounds on the beach — he had met Karell. She had graduated from the academy that year. The two of them spent weeks on the damaged beaches sunbathing between the wrecks of fallen ships.
Within the year they were engaged, but soon Kradys contracted Paco to his reparations job as interstellar mailman. The couple vowed they'd find the cash to settle. She stuck it out in cryo on Dominico, waking up for two weeks every few hundred years. She worked her biologist's grind from the plug-in during sleeps, running equations, formulae, and diagrams. They were bizarre creatures in her icy, electric dreams. Dreaming in cryo was proprietary technology. It scrambled her brain every time she popped out. Insomnia, migraines, cycles of melancholy and rage.
Karell sent him messages when she woke. He sent messages back. As the years passed he stopped replying. She figured he'd given up on their prospects. She would have too if she hadn't holed herself into the long-term cryo job.
From what he did send Karell, it seemed he had become a reader. When he wasn't in cryo there wasn't much else to do. He would float in the middle of his ship's cramped bridge, the Empress fluttering on his shoulder, and call books out of the display. Sometimes he would read them, sometimes he would turn on the audio, close his eyes, and listen. At first they were novels — adventures and romances, as if to replace what he had lost, his memory of Dominico now reduced to an aspiration.
When he ran out of novels he read philosophy, religion, science, politics, whatever else he had in the database. He disagreed with a lot of it, he wrote to Karell. He agreed with some of it. He figured it didn't really matter what he knew. He described himself as an observer dislocated from space and time, studying the distant intellectual produce of his species from afar.
"Not out-of-body," he wrote to her. "An out-of-civilization experience. You ever had one of those?"
This was the closest he usually got to human contact.
Paco was a delivery boy after all. What did his dreams matter? What did any of theirs?
Of course, what he read was what Kradys had on file. And what it had on file was a few millennia old. Anything Dominican, anything without a link to Kradys or the Medusa System, was absent. There was no way Paco could ever know what he didn't know. Karell tried to explain this to him, what she knew from the journals at home, the attempts to rewrite history, but even she struggled to deny her own presumptions. In the end, she wasn't reading history written only by the winners; it was written by the losers too. Dominico's Golden Age still concluded with her people's failure to uphold the planet's economy, culture, and military might, no matter how Karell tried to explain it away.
She suspected this interpretation was wrong — wanted it to be so — but like Paco she also suspected, when presented with meager information outside the Kradys archives, that she hardly knew how to reconstruct a different narrative. Their people's history had been taken from them. They did not know what they didn't know. There was only the conviction, the faith, that they could not — should not — be blamed for their own demise.
Conviction wasn't enough for Paco. He could not take solace in who he was. There was nothing to take pride in. They'd lost the war. That much was clear. In place of pride, Paco felt what Karell could only interpret as a religious combination of fear and awe of the corporate empire. Kradys thrived on the idea that humanity was the only thinking species in existence. People were destined to conquer the stars, the stars being their domain alone. Top of the food chain. Kradys had delivered this message to Paco, to humanity, and thus deserved to lead this uncompromising conquest of the infertile universe. They had unveiled their species' purpose through the power of rational inquiry made possible by technological might, and so they possessed the right to govern it.
Surrounded by outer space, Paco wrote to her that he could not bear to look into the cosmos, as if its expanse were as looming as a Kradys compound on a Dominican beach. As if it could crush him with its emptiness.
Then, a century later, Paco found the stream of debris like a river from Hell. The thing from Akashar.
Everything made sense to Karell. Like ice XI, Champollion's Foot transformed its host following a process of freezing and electric shock — which was exactly what happened in cryo. The process triggered the necessary enzymes, a biological switch.
It made even more sense for Akashar. How does life come out of a planemo, wandering in the cold, dark space between suns? How did life happen without a Goldilocks zone? The answer was obvious now. Akasahar didn't need a star. It sat in a patchwork of dark matter. A cosmic womb. The stuff drifted everywhere near the center of the Milky Way. When dark matter came into contact with itself, it generated heat. Pocketed in the core of Akashar, dark matter collisions produced the thermal conditions necessary for an inorganic, DNA-like structure like Champollion's Foot to evolve. These were also the perfect conditions with which to develop molecular chain reactions similar to that of ice XI.
Karell didn't know what to say. For the first time in her life, she felt no desire except the need to know why. Why would God do this to the crew, to Paco, to Akashar, to the human species? She couldn't ignore the existential questions.
But it wasn't God alone. The flag Cortes found was dark blue behind black ships. The Kradys logo. If this was an act of God, God worked with human hands.
Karell heard the door unlatch. The sound echoed through the chamber as she turned. In the artificial breeze, the Shaykha's robes billowed around her colossal figure.
"The cryo will hold him but not for long," Karell said. She touched her thin-rimmed spectacles. "I'm sorry."
"As am I." The Shaykha smiled. "You would have made a fine daughter-in-law, once we overcame our differences." Karell thought she detected scorn. The Shaykha placed a wide palm against the cocoon's surface. "There is only so much we can do," she continued. "I suggest we let him pass naturally."
"That would hurt him," Karell said, shocked.
The Shaykha nodded as if unaware of Karell's bitter reply. "At least he will leave this world conscious."
"Even if pain is part of it?"
The Shaykha moved a hand over the cocoon's dashboard.
"I think my son would want to know about the Akasharians and his impending death. When death arrives, we should feel our last breath. So we understand we cannot live if we do not also pass from this world."
The Shaykha wasn't usually this masochistic. Karell watched her type commands into the dashboard.
"Did you hear the news?" the Shaykha continued with brevity undeserved for knowledge so devastating.
"The flag?"
"Yes." She paused to inspect Karell with amber eyes. Paco's eyes. "You don't seem surprised."
The news of xenocide had occupied the silent quarters of La Mariposa since Cortes radioed in thirty minutes ago. Karell had greeted Cortes when he returned to the ship and had helped him depressurize his unwieldy suit. He was surprisingly wordless for the hulk of a man she knew. There was no talk about following orders or important memories of lessons learned. He only stared at her from beneath the dark visor, air hissing through the constructed perforations in his suit, breathing heavily. His black-flecked, grey pupils were hard as chiseled granite, daring Karell to stain her cheeks with tears. She wasn't that kind of girl.
"I think it makes sense," Karell replied to the Shaykha. "Violence is natural to us. It's natural to the Akasharians. It's written in their DNA for God's sake."
"Champollion's Foot," the Shaykha suggested. "Chain reactions. Biological switch. Enzymes. Converted genes."
"Yeah, biological colonization. Life comes at a price. I don't think it's right, but it's evolution."
The Shaykha had returned to the dashboard, but she looked up once more.
"With due respect, my dear, that's bullshit."
Karell put a hand to her mouth. She'd never heard the Shaykha this crude.
The Shaykha pressed a button and the cocoon shook, then cracked open. Goo began to seep from the edges. Beneath, the body began to twitch.
The Delivery Boy
Paco Sol woke with a shock. He felt the cocoon's defibrillator lift off his chest as he rose blind through the icy saline goo. No one dreamed in cryo. Time passed, dark and empty — and then, with this shock, the undreamt nightmares of a decade under and light-years of travel coursed through his consciousness.
His mind's eye filled with the grey skies of Dominico. The long, dreamless hauls between Bashar and Gliese 581g. The stony gaze of Gliese 581g itself, the Capitol.
In the dark beneath his lids, he saw the giant eyeball of Gliese 581g below, fixed in synchronous orbit so that its dilated, dark blue pupil gazed forever into Medusa's dying glare as if intending to go blind. One side of Gliese 581g always faced the sun, warm enough for an ocean, albeit lifeless. The other side, like a grey cornea, always faced the cold of space, a dark sheath of rock and ice. Below, Medusa's steady glow carved the distant cities into dark silhouettes bobbing in the water. Slabs of thin ice shifted like tectonic plates on the surface of a cool, violent magma. Medusa's red light spread everywhere.
Paco had seen this before. He'd seen it too many times. For years he had traveled in cryogenic suspension between Bashar and Gliese 581g, staring inevitably into Medusa's nightmare of fire. He had learned to muster the eerie sight, admire it occasionally, and appreciate the solitude of interstellar travel, even as he searched for a way to return permanently to Dominico. Usually he couldn't bear the sight of outer space. He had seen too much of it. But Gliese 581g — now in his mind's eye a dark spot against Medusa's crimson disc — drew emotions from him. He felt like a child confronted by a ciguapa, paralyzed by deference and terror.
Now his eternal ricochet between the stars measured itself according to the time he would last until his DNA crumbled like old brick.
When he recalled his condition and felt the fever and the tension in his stomach, his eyes burst open. The light of the ship's cabin filled his retinas with bright white, dispersing the mental image of Medusa and the Capitol. He glimpsed the sepia blur of his mother's robes. The thawing goo needled through each pore in his skin, cold and sharp, reminding him of the first time he had taken it upon himself to handle the alien thing he had retrieved from the sinew of waste. The acute chill of the object from Akashar lingered in his sensory memory.
He gasped as he pushed from the cocoon. His pale, hairless body tightened, stretching across his bones. He winced as his mother placed her coarse palm against his back. For several minutes they maintained this position. He breathed deeply from La Mariposa's filtered atmosphere.
"How long?" he croaked.
"One thousand one hundred and forty-three years," someone said. His mother's voice? Karell's? His ears were clean of goo but numb. Speech came to him as if through water. "Average time for a trek this distance, don't ya think?" the voice concluded. It was Karell, from his left.
He focused on the blur in front of him, where he distinguished a yellow headscarf. His mother. She hadn't woken him with a cure, her silence told him. Why had she woken him, for her pious bullshit?
"They killed them," Karell said, seeming to blurt the words. "The Akasharians are dead. Akashar is ashes, Paco."
"Who?" He blinked hard, feeling his sinuses widen. "Who killed them?'
"Kradys," she replied.
He focused away from his mother's blur.
"Fuck me," he declared, then shrugged. "Not unexpected."
"It's unexpected for me," his mother said finally, her voice deep and smooth.
"It wasn't a question, Mother."
A time passed. His mother didn't say another word. Was she afraid to speak to him, embarrassed that she believed in God in the wake of the day's revelation?
A thought occurred to him. He wondered why he had never asked before. Then again, there hadn't been much of a before for him and his mother.
"Mother," he said. "You pray five times a day?"
"I adjust the math for travel, but yes," she answered.
As she hauled him the rest of the way out of the goo, her fingers bit into his skin. She had detected his mockery of her antiquated rituals and chosen to ignore it. She wanted to derive meaning from his final hour, to bond with her last and only son.
He refused to spare her the courtesy.
"We were under for a thousand years," he said, continuing his game. "That mean you don't pray in cryo?"
He heard her laugh. "There is some disagreement among scholars, but most would say, when we study the science, that cryo does not count. Take life in moderation and according to circumstances. It's a stasis anyhow."
"So to you it's like dying."
His pupils adjusted so that he could now identify another figure behind his mother. Karell. Whatever life he could have lived with her was gone. She was looking away, arms folded behind her back.
"I suppose," his mother agreed. She handed him his clothes. "For the purposes of jurisprudence, yes. In suspension you may as well be dead."
Paco grunted and found himself remarkably sincere. "Sounds like a damn good definition to me."
Kradys had robbed him of his aspirations, quietly and by force, the way a cryogenic cocoon's blue glow, soft but insistent as an unblinking neon sign, deprives its user of dreams. Indentured servitude to be a fucking delivery boy. Part of the corporate machine like jinn in a thermodynamic cage. What's sleep, the jinn liked to say, without dreams?
The Shaykha
In this moment of revelation, Shaykha Suraya Shatir could only fear. Now that the crew understood the cause and gravity of Akashar's demise, now that she had already radioed out the existence of Akashar, Kradys would track their location if the crew didn't leave within the hour. She hadn't forgotten the technological feats of their enemy during the war: signals intercepted by ansible technology inaccessible outside the offices of power, Dominican fleets underhanded by machinery indescribably of human origin. Most of all, she feared for her son.
Paco had taken the news well. Nothing could break him further. He was no longer hysteric.
He slid off of the cocoon and landed on his feet. Unobstructed by the cocoon's light, the grey-blue hue of La Mariposa accentuated Paco's pale, gaunt features. He stooped the way a spider bends over itself in rigor mortis, its mind refusing to acknowledge its mortality while its body yearns to accept what it has coming.
"I'm dying," he managed, as if realizing it for the first time.
"Ina'lilahi wa ina'Illaihi raj'un," Suraya crooned. She touched his shoulder. "To God do we belong and to God shall we return."
"I'm not returning anywhere. I'm going to die."
She slipped off her glasses and rubbed the loose, dark skin around her eyes. "There's beauty in death."
His features hardened. Skin stretched across the ridges of his brow. His apricot eyes glazed over. "No. There isn't."
Paco turned and ambled into a corridor as queasily lit as his own complexion, a skin color that suggested too many years in cryo between the stars and too few awake on the worlds that circled them.
Karell glared at Suraya before following him out. Suraya frowned. It had been so many years since she had spent time with her son. Kradys had stuck him in that job for a decade. It was by sheer luck that her travels coincided with his, that they were still alive to see one another, even if for the last time. Thank God for relativity and cryogenic science.
Suraya extracted a string of rosaries from her pocket. She considered consoling Paco. She knew he didn't want to talk with her. He saw her faith as a crutch.
As she whispered the Ninety-Nine Names of God, she remembered her little sister's funeral. Her sister was twenty-two. Suraya had received a message from her mother. She recalled running through the hospital with her father. Through familiar corridors. Up the elevator. Across the waiting area. A sofa. Two thick pillars.
"Is she all right? Is she all right?"
Dry silence. Her uncle leaning against the door frame, head shifting left, right. Sobs from the hospital bay, seeping between the throbbing in her ears, as if they'd only now risen to an audible cacophony.
The door frame grew. Cold flesh on the white, white bed. Ringing.
"It's been ten minutes. Where have you been?"
Memories of long days on the Dominican beaches crashed against the bank of her consciousness until, finally, they flowed as tears. She felt detached, pathetic, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her head down and her knuckles pale, leaning against her grandmother's knees.
As per tradition, family would wash her body within a day before sending her Earthward for a proper burial. They kept her sister at a funeral home during the night. The next morning, Suraya, her mother, two aunts, and two cousins left for the funeral home. They cleansed her sister's cold form. Blood flowed from the tiny incisions where doctors had applied their needles; no life system remained to clot the vessels. The blood looked bright and fake, and the scene seemed to pass without end. The process was thorough, cathartic. Suraya remembered trying not to cry. The soul has a harder time leaving when people can't let go. It has to be able to let go. She had to be able to let go.
At the burial, they lowered her sister's body, wrapped in white cloth, into an old and yellow cryogenic chamber. The closest of kin — Suraya, her parents, and her grandparents — knelt to the chamber and lifted. They hauled it to the tiny rocket nearby, no taller than a tree, and slid her sister's chamber into the inner cavity. Her grandmother shut the door, locked it, and keyed Earth's coordinates onto a remote panel. They prayed. One by one each willing relative passed the rocket and looked upon her sister's shape, wrapped in white beneath the yellow goo as if caught in the process of metamorphosis. Her grandmother pulled a lever and the small crowd slowly departed as the rocket hummed to life. They were a kilometer away when it torpedoed into the sky, trailing a bright yellow plume. Distant relatives would receive her in Earth orbit and bury her covered with that bare white cloth in a spot overlooking the Caribbean. No caskets. No tombstones. No gaudery.
We come from dust, we return to it. Ina'lilahi wa ina'Illaihi raj'un.
In La Mariposa, Suraya thumbed her rosaries, head inclined and eyelids half-cast, and listened to the ship's incessant groan. She relived memories of her sister, reminding herself of what it first felt like to lose a loved one, as if in preparation for Paco's death. It was difficult to love a man she scarcely knew.
Behind her, she heard crackling fire.
Suraya flinched. She dropped her rosaries and turned toward a bony, wrinkled face shrouded in pale blue mist. The jinn had drifted in through the wall, his cloudy shape diffusing in the pressurized cabin of the ship. He grinned, a form like gnarled roots in his mangle of blue flame. It was Istikar, Prince of the Hydrogen Bridge.
"Salaam, Istikar," she mouthed bitterly, bracing her muscles, before he dove beneath her arms and snaked round to her back.
She could feel the heat of him over her left shoulder. Whispering. Something unintelligible, an accumulation of neural triggers, emotional catcalls, demanding actions out of her involuntary biology like a magician conjuring spells from rock. Searching her brain like a database, invoking the collection of words and emotions he agreed with, even if she had buried them. These thoughts gathered in her ear and ran down her spine, prickling every nerve in her body. She could parse out meaning, interpreted through the networks the jinn activated inside her body —
Before Paco woke…
She felt a rush of heat, a sharp, familiar gas on her tongue, and gagged. Her whole body convulsed, arcing like she was about to retch. Suraya's mouth opened against her will, finishing the sentence aloud —
"… you spent more time with a suspended corpse than with the living," the jinn mused, through her.
Istikar was a free jinn, from the swathes of gaseous refuse between galaxies. Deuterium. Lambent blue fire. Suraya was among the few who still called them free in the true sense of the word. For most, free meant wild, like untamed steeds in untouched land, although Kradys had by now begun projects in the Hydrogen Bridge. Unlike their enslaved cousins terrestrial to Earth, the free jinn were not discovered until humanity left the solar system. It was hardly a discovery, given that jinn were by that time a known species. A known commodity.
Suraya ignored Istikar, concentrated her mind on nothing, and forced out the thoughts the jinn had summoned from deep inside her mind as a means of communicating on his own behalf. The heat receded to her stomach, away from her spine. She found herself unhinged from Istikar's neural anchor.
"Why didn't you tell us about Kradys from the start?" she demanded. "You could have spared us many hardships."
She was used to this, the temporary possessions. The invasions of privacy. That was what jinn did. Possession was the only way to communicate with them. They had to creep in and access particular fundamentals of human biology, the building blocks of temptation translated into puppetry. No wonder the Devil was a jinn. No wonder no one thought of jinn as sentient: they communicated exclusively through human bodies, and what they could communicate simply rehashed latent thoughts and suppressed desires. For this reason people hardly interacted with them at all. Suraya had relayed Istikar's message about the Akasharian extinction to the crew, and it was only by her authority, she knew, that they implicitly trusted what Istikar had to say. It required enormous composure to communicate with Istikar's kind. A state of controlled entropy. A tolerance for pain and ideological dislocation.
Others called it induced schizophrenia.
Istikar's blue eyes appeared before her, glowing, and then plunged into her breast. She lurched again, gasped, felt him dredge through her mental backlog until words emerged from her lips. She spoke to the empty cabin —
"You in all your honor and integrity, you whose moral gravity draws the respect of the defeated souls aboard this ship with such weight that they will sleep in the cold to the end of this universe for you, to save your son… Even for you, to be told of an extinction at the hands of your kind… You…" She coughed, resisting. "… Not — would not — believe. Even if Kradys, predictably, perpetrated this crime. Neither would your… crew… no matter what they claim after the — fact."
She grunted, then quieted. She waited for him to continue. A portion of his flame burst out of her, drifting before her, churning the filtered air —
"I was eavesdropping on your conversation with the girlfriend."
Furrowing her brow, pushing out the being of smokeless fire, coughing —
"She's a biologist," she corrected. "Of sorts."
Again, Istikar plunged thick rivers of lambent blue into her body —
"Inorganic biology." The blue haze before her laughed, a noise like crackling fire. "I think her… bitter. She blames God. Paco also does — similarly."
Suraya grimaced. Outrush of blue —
"What do you want, Istikar?"
And back in, hot —
"You know what I…want, Shatir. I — I… relish your torment…" The haze moved closer. "So," he said, through her, a wheezing, guttural sound. "Do you blame God? Why does suffering exist? Where are the answers in this mess?" He was prodding her limits.
Suraya exerted him outward, straightened her glasses. She bent to snatch her rosaries, pocketing them, and then stood, facing the blue flame but thinking inward to the part of the jinn still there. How unsettling, and yet how appropriate, that in order to speak to an Other she in fact spoke to herself.
"Faith is not a source of knowledge as much as it gives us a means of understanding it," she replied. "Answers are, in a way, irrelevant. Our enemy is not God. We cannot presume to know what is beyond our comprehension. Our enemy is ourselves."
She jerked —
"So you believe in free will."
Her last push against entropy, expelling the jinn like vomit —
Istikar swept out of her in one final rush. Once again, the crackle of laughter burst from the lambent blue silhouette.
None of this was revelatory to Istikar. He didn't have any thoughts on the issue. He had only memories.
He had lived long enough to remember the era of Jean-Francois Champollion himself. Champollion's discovery of the Rosetta Stone had enabled communication with a culture not only distant in space but also time. His contribution to the study of ancient civilizations, particularly Ancient Egypt, was tremendous. And yet this very study also resulted in the erasure of a millennium of another culture's history from the world's historical consciousness.
For one thousand years preceding Champollion's era back to antiquity, a civilization had thrived in Egypt, one which birthed many of the greatest artists and thinkers in history. They had ruminated on inertia, momentum, the camera obscura, and optics. They had preserved and improved upon Greek and Roman thought, science, and art. They had written poetry that could make sisters and brothers of enemies; that could excite the nerves of gentle old men; and that could melt even jaded jinn such as Istikar, though he didn't like to think of himself as such then. Egyptology contributed to a view of history that diverted focus toward the present and the ancient and away from the interim. It stuck a hole in the course of time, like the man-made gap in Earth's polluted ozone or the artificial one wrenched out of Akashar's littered sky. But this was not to glimpse the beauty of worlds beyond grasp; rather, intentionally or otherwise, it was to conceal them.
Nothing of significance had occurred, the implication had it, for one thousand years. People like Champollion had entered, robbed what artifacts they deemed fit, and restructured the history to an effect that implied that the civilization living in this period had contributed little to the progress of human history. These were the dark ages.
Soon, prestigious academies in Earth's western hemisphere established reputed Chairs of Egyptology. In France, before the Sorbonne, Champollion's statue stood tall, one boot atop the crumbling face of a pharaoh's bust. The millennium that had birthed some of history's greatest works of philosophy, art, and science was forgotten, even by the progeny of that civilization itself. Pyramids, pharaohs, and Moses now occupied the cultural consciousness above the poetry, philosophy, and science of medieval Egypt's thousand-year heyday. The latter had devolved into an outlier in the course of time.
This was a system based on forgetting. Champollion was not the instigator, but he certainly enabled an historical pattern that continued for millennia. Neither was Egypt the locus of the problem. But it was certainly a symptom. The devastation of that moment still burned in Istikar's memory.
Today, the modern era had yet to pass. It moved like a slow death, always in anticipation of apocalypse by its own hand, as if possessed by a Napoleonic inferiority complex. It teetered on its inflexible call for progress, as if willingly chained to the idea that it had reached the end of history. Under the guise of modern philosophy, politics had infested everything. Peoples were erased, genocide and colonization justified under modern civilization's new way with power. God was political. Morality was political. Science was political. Even death was political. And politics was the reserve of bureaucrats and their labyrinthine offices. Whether one believed in life after death or not, only its completion relieved the living from the constraints of the modern condition. No posthuman race had emerged, no singularity, nothing with which humans might transcend their bonds.
This was why, when Shatir told Istikar she believed in free will, he laughed.
"Age has granted you knowledge," she murmured in reply, "but not wisdom."
He plunged into her, searched her synapses for those unprocessed thoughts he needed, picking them out and regurgitating them through her own throat —
"Why don't we count? Would the Akasharians, if they lived?" he forced out of her. "Why do your kind hesitate — upon the idea of our consciousness?" These were her thoughts, her fears, ones she hid or disbelieved, but with which he agreed. "I will… tell you. In the beginning — God created the universe… the Heavens, Earth… the angels, who obey God's command. God created jinn from smokeless fire, capable of commanding our own fate, but our civilization wasted its existential nuptials with war. So God created humankind from Earth, likewise unstuck from determinism, and called all Creation to bow in respect to Adam and Eve. But one jinn, Iblis, the Devil — he… did not. He did not recognize your kind, Shatir, as conscious. Not elevated. Not hot and light as smokeless fire. Incapable of resisting basic temptation, of thinking for yourselves, of overcoming involuntary biology."
She began to spasm, losing control as his temperature rose, but he would not relent.
"Today we find a… reversal. You… dear Shatir… your kind is now Iblis. Like him, you refuse to bow in respect of the equal ground of another like yourselves. Like him, you are possessed by your deluded sense of enlightenment. But you are only enlightened — conquered — by those among you who bear arms… shed blood… eradicate dreams. Kradys. According to scripture, our two species are not meant to interact. Once, many millennia ago, we did so among a few. But — now. Now…. Perhaps God does not wish for us to communicate with other intelligences, as few as there are. I believe we would… destroy them… as we destroy ourselves. We see in each other only… animals. Constructs of evolution."
She forced him out, slowly but with strength, and moved so close he singed the hem of her scarf.
"I'd like to believe otherwise," she said. She rested her palms against her knees, catching her breath, her towering figure reduced to fits.
Observing this, Istikar felt, for a brief moment, grief. He had not experienced this for many millennia, such a deep feeling of sorrow.
"You forget one thing, Istikar," she went on. "The Devil is not divine. He challenges God, says he will cast humanity astray and thus prove our inferiority. God humors him. God lets him wreak trial and tribulation upon humankind, knowing, in the end, that we will not fall prey to the Devil's tricks. The Devil is powerless. Is that too hard for you to believe?"
"If there is one thing I believe," Istikar replied, diving back in, feeling her resist like a clenched fist, "it's this: The human race can go to Hell."
And yet the sorrow lingered. He could sense in her the feeling of anticipation, unspoken intentions whispering from deep in her organic circuitry of clay.
Why did God command Creation to bow to Adam and Eve? she was asking herself. Because they possessed the highest form of knowledge. Understanding. Consciousness. Angels follow God's orders but have never possessed true understanding, were never sentient. In the beginning, jinn possessed this form of knowledge but squandered it; consciousness without conscience is not consciousness at all.
Istikar understood her conviction now. She planned to broadcast the flag, to make people see, to show them Kradys was wrong, so wrong that the corporation had worked — massacred — to sustain its lie. To give them ashes from which to rise. She would display an article of knowledge so terrible no amount of indoctrination or apathy could trick their conscience. She believed resolutely that conscience existed; beyond the facades of politics and culture there was a moral bedrock from which all beings could draw, each in their own way and by their own time and place.
What is the panacea of this endless modernity? How does one defeat a system based on forgetting? The thought — hers, his, he found them difficult to distinguish as his blue flame settled like an aura around her sepia robes — pressed into him with patient ferocity. The answer poised on her tongue, on his fluid kinematics, on the premonition of a thought of a whisper — By the recollection of knowledge presumed unknown.
The Akasharian
In death, each Akasharian experienced its own moment of revelation. Most would recall, looking back, that in order to live one must die. The purpose of life was not to consume but to recycle.
Akasharians wouldn't call it Champollion's Foot. They believed it was adoption, not destruction. With every new form of life that their enzymes converted, both the new and the old lost something, while each gained from the other. Their corpus adopted new forms of life, again and again. There were costs. There were deaths. There was growth.
As the Akasharians would say, colonialism was not timeless. It wasn't human. It wasn't jinni. It wasn't Akasharian. It had little to do with evolution. Like life itself, it was only temporary.
For the empire would now know the cause of Akashar's fate. If Paco Sol lived for anything, the Akasharians would believe, it was this. If he died for anything, it was this. The xenocide transmission, as future generations would call it, was Paco Sol's legacy, and his mother its agent. Like Galileo wielding the evidence before his inquisitors, Shaykha Suraya Shatir would radio out a second message to the empire: the image of a dark blue flag squirming in the near vacuum of the desolate landscape of Akashar, the world without light.
Haris A. Durrani
Haris A. Durrani is an author, engineer, academic, and lawyer-in-training. His debut, Technologies of the Self, won the Driftless Novella Contest. His stories and nonfiction have appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, Buffalo Almanack, The New Inquiry, Catapult, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Comparative Islamic Studies, Skin Deep, Media Diversified, and altMuslimah. He is a JD candidate at Columbia Law School. He holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and a BS in Applied Physics from Columbia University, where he co-founded The Muslim Protagonist literary symposium. Follow him @hdernity.


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Letter from Washington, DC
Teacher opposes assault on public schools
The WSWS received the following letter from a teacher in Washington, D.C., where one in ten public schools is slated for closure.
After hearing for months that our school was closing for low enrollment, it became reality when a team of supervisors arrived from central office in March for a meeting with the staff. It was not so much of a meeting as it was a pep rally. The meeting was so upbeat. The supervisors stood for the majority of the meeting pumping fists in the air. They stated that they would host resumé building workshops and a job fair for teachers at the closing schools.
If there is an art to telling a group of teachers, some who have taught over 40 years, that they must interview for a job to keep a job, then DCPS [DC Public Schools] has excelled. It felt like they did everything but give us a hug and a kiss to ease the pain of having the misfortune of working in a school located in a low-income area. All of us left the meeting scratching our heads and wondering why it felt like we had just come out of a pep rally instead of facing the harsh reality of losing our jobs. Nevertheless, some of us were excited about the "Only For Us Job Fair". This seemed like a way to transition a negative situation into a positive situation.
The day of the job fair, teachers brought their "A" game; dressed up in their power suits with portfolios and Impact Scores ready at hand. They were met with administrators dressed in jeans, T-shirts and sneakers laughing, talking loud and snacking on food bought with our money by the WTU [Washington Teachers' Union]. At a desk, they gave each of us a paper with a list of rooms that contained schools with openings. Teachers were to go to a room that had two or three schools interviewing the teachers all at the same time. It was a cattle call and very demeaning. Teachers were packed inside each room with no order or instructions on what line was for what school, and who was first, next or last to talk to the administrators at the tables. When you finally made it to the table, an interview was held openly for everyone to see and hear. It was embarrassing to see some people being given a lengthy interview, or some being rejected on the spot or being told their papers were incorrect.
Watching teachers trying to focus and shut out the madness and the stares was very heartrending. To undergo a positive interview while being surrounded by eyes and ears of people vying for the same positions would be challenging for anyone. It was also obvious that some administrators were not happy campers for being at the Job Fair on a Saturday because of their facial expressions and attitudes. There was one particular principal who had a negative attitude with everyone that he interviewed. This was a very disheartening process. I was furious. I felt demeaned, dirty, and humiliated by a process that was engineered to help me segue into another position. I collected the five signatures that all access teachers needed as proof of being interviewed and headed out the door. This job fair was a travesty; it was implemented as a formality and not designed as a serious interview process that would ultimately lead to the hiring of teachers.
WTU and AFT [American Federation of Teachers] donated almost a million dollars to DC Mayor Gray's campaign and all WTU President Nathan Saunders could provide us was a donut, some fruit and juice. One would have thought that President Saunders would have asked Mayor Gray for compassion for the sake of the parents, if not for the teachers, because they are the ones who must find the money to get their children to schools outside of their neighborhood and to deal with fights and school shootings after school.
As a teacher in the District of Columbia Public System, I have seen the erosion of public education, and now a movement that appears to relocate poor and working class communities by closing their neighborhood schools.
First, you impose a standardized test that requires students to read a passage, which is fine, but if the test is written in a terminology that is not utilized in the home or communities, the students will fail the test. The students are failing not because they cannot read but because of the lack of exposure to books. This is a result of the haves and the have-nots. Only the affluent schools in DCPS with a deep-pocket PTA have access to books, eBooks, functional Libraries and Labs with a full-time Librarian at the helm. The lack of exposure to books and technology breeds a class of students who may know how to read, but have not seen certain terminology, such as the word "ponder." Students in many parts of DC do not use the word "ponder" in their everyday speech. Ensuring a full-time librarian in every school in low-income areas has been proven to improve reading scores.
Yes, students from horrific home environments can learn, but the skill must be taught at least 10 times. Impact, the evaluation tool used in DCPS, does not allow for the same skills to be taught over and over and does not have a curriculum.
Finally, to penalize the parents by closing their schools because of a lack of resources, to penalize the teachers by closing schools because of an unfair evaluation tool, and to penalize the students by closing their schools because of an unfair testing tool is wrong and horrendous. DC Public Schools, you have failed in your mission to serve the students, to serve the community, and to provide a way out for the majority of the students under your care. Your grade is F.
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