Are men becoming collateral damage in the battle for gender equity?

A good piece about how, "in order for women to be raised up, men have to be put down," in this modern age of ultra-feminism. We do undoubtedly need gender equality in our society, but we seem to forget whose rights are we trampling upon in achieving that. We need to be careful of how we are achieving our goals.

Primary problem with Western neo-feminism culture is that man & woman are not considered as 2 halves of the same species / human race. They are considered as 2 opposing forces. Modern neo-feminism teaches society that men are nothing more than garbage with their brains good for only one action only (in the bed) & they are good for nothing else.

Yes, there are men who are abusing women. And I am not talking or even defending their actions. But actions of a few are defining the whole half of a human race.

When society talks about men & male violence towards women, they forget to think about women & female violence towards men. Be it being portrayed in comedy movies like "Horrible Bosses," where Jennifer Aniston's character is sexually harassing & blackmailing her assistant, or news stories after stories coming out from North American schools where female teachers are sexually abusing their male students.

Islam teaches woman & man are equal, but both in their own places. Just like all fruits are equally required for our body to function properly (apples & oranges are 2 different fruits, but they are both needed by the body), both male & female halves of the human race / species are required for the proper functioning of the society. Similar to functions of the fruits, both of these halves of human race have different functions but both equally important.

If Islam has made woman in charge of the house & man out of the house (except in some special conditions), then it doesn't mean that man has more power in society over woman. Or, in a witness stand, if one man's testimony is enough versus 2 women's, then it doesn't mean that women are somehow below men or women are somehow more retarded than men.

Similar to these rules, in a home, husband is made to be the head of the household, since only one person can make decision in any organization (usually one CEO in organization) but the wife is not barred from giving her sincere advice to help her husband & her family, & husband is required to listen to her advice, even if, in the end, he makes a decision seemingly contrary to her advice (just like a CEO takes suggestions from his/her corporate team, but may not follow through on all of the suggestions).

Islam required both males & females to get education but it doesn't mean both of them need to be out of the house to use their education, to bring home the turkey. An educated mother is far more important to raise proper citizens for the society than an educated mother who is leading a billion-$$$ multinational corporation, all the while, ignoring her kids.

Other religions, like Christianity, considered woman akin to dirty distractions who takes away the focus of man from his work (that's why, Catholic priests used to not marry ... but they still had biological needs, which they fulfilled by sexually abusing young boys).

The Western feminism took woman out of the house but it didn't reduce the woman's workload at home. Whereas, man are still implicitly considered to not do anything at home. So, woman is doing the double the work in the Western society (outside & inside), whereas, man is only doing half (outside). Now, Islam didn't stop husbands from helping their wives in the household work or in raising their children.

In this race of showing sympathy to women's cause, the Western world is quickly beating down men. For instance, paternal rights to their children after a divorce. Maternal rights are strictly upheld, while paternal rights gets trampled upon.

Man & woman are not two opposing & competing forces in a society. They are both essential in forming a healthy & strong family unit & the whole society. One half of the human race (man) need not be put down so another half (woman) can come up, to achieve gender equality.
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/are-men-becoming-collateral-damage-in-the-battle-for-gender-equity/article23616895/

Fraternity culture doesn’t have a fig leaf to hide behind these days.
 
I’m not making an apology for brutish, sexually violent behaviour. In recent reports from postsecondary campuses, some fraternity brothers ... sound like Neanderthals in fine wool sweaters.
 
At the University of Oklahoma, members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity were caught singing a racist song. At Penn State, 144 members of Kappa Delta Rho participated in private Facebook postings of “nude females that appeared to be passed out or in other sexual or embarrassing positions,” according to police. One of the members, disgusted with the postings, reported them to authorities. The women were not aware that their photos were being taken. The fraternity has been suspended, & an investigation is reportedly under way.
 
And these stories are just the latest additions to a heaping pile of dirty frat laundry, much of it inadvertently aired by social media & surreptitious smartphone video.
 
But in the need to ensure there are safe places for women to be educated – which is crucial – isn’t it worth asking if there can be safe places for men to gather without suspicion of being a cabal of misogynist terrorism? In the heated discussion about rape culture, the feminist voice is loudest at the moment, which makes many young men feel that their every move, every thought, is policed. Some might even suggest they’re victims of misandry, if they weren’t sure their complaints would fall on deaf ears.
 
A witch hunt, you say? Well, I won’t use that loaded term, because it only serves to ratchet-up the gender wars when what we need is a little calm.
 
Earlier this year, when I was at Dalhousie University in Halifax to look into the dentistry faculty’s ordeal, in which a group of final-year male students posted sexually violent content to a private Facebook page, I came across a story about an altercation between female students & a fraternity last year. It spoke to the heightened tension between men & women in the fraught sexual culture on campus. Kappa Alpha fraternity at King’s College, which is connected to Dalhousie University, was criticized by a group of female students for being exclusionary.

“I became aware that a lot of the first year [female students] in the first couple of weeks at school were being targeted by frat members while they’re learning their limits with alcohol & being invited to frat parties,” Bethany Hindmarsh, one of the students who wrote a letter to the King’s Students’ Union (KSU) about the fraternity, told me in an interview. While Hindmarsh & others canvassed opinions about the fraternity on campus to start a conversation about gender-equality issues, she says, one of the Kappa Alpha men reportedly threatened the KSU president, warning her not to interfere with their club. Several of the women were called “feminazis” by men & received sexually violent hate mail, Hindmarsh told me.
 
In an effort to unravel the he-said, she-said conflict, I also talked to a current Kappa Alpha member, Ari Flanzraich, who reported that the fraternity had meetings with King’s equity board in the wake of the women’s complaints. “Nothing came of it,” he said of the discussion. The complaints about the fraternity “were largely theoretical & broadly social [about the idea of exclusion].” He acknowledged that the “default patriarchal white-hetero-capitalist” society prevails & that it needs to change, but he feels the “anti-frat idea” is unrepresentative of what the men in Kappa Alpha at King’s uphold. “We’re open to talking. There is no personal animosity. What often goes on in fraternities in the States is despicable. We have no interest in that.” The King’s chapter of Kappa Alpha, which consists of approximately 15 friends, was set up as a literary society, he says.
 
Asked how rape culture pathologizes male thought & behaviour, he was cautious about making a comment for fear of how it might be misinterpreted. “As soon as I open my mouth, I’m judged,” he said. “I don’t walk around thinking of myself as a sinner,” he finally confessed, after some hesitation, adding that men are expected to constantly “be vigilant of their potential slippage” from politically correct actions & comments.
 
He’s right, of course. And that’s because part of the cultural discussion about fraternity culture centres around how aware men are of internalized (and normalized) misogyny.
 
But in the effort to bring about a harmonious culture of gender equity, how helpful is it to alienate all men, given that their collaboration is part of the solution? Sometimes, the cultural equation seems to be that in order for women to be raised up, men have to be put down, which is just as reductive as women being defined by their biological function – something early feminists found understandably demeaning & offensive.

Hundreds forced to work as slaves to catch seafood for global supply

World economy may improve but the conditions of the poor keep declining. People say, this world is a modern world. How is it exactly a modern world, when human trafficking is on the rise, where humans are being considered nothing more than a disposable tissue paper ... use them & throw them.

And then why do we wonder at the dismal state of this world?
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/men-forced-to-work-as-slaves-to-catch-seafood-for-global-supply/article23609283/ 

The Burmese slaves sat on the floor & stared through the rusty bars of their locked cage, hidden on a tiny tropical island thousands of miles from home.
 
Just a few yards away, other workers loaded cargo ships with slave-caught seafood that clouds the supply networks of major supermarkets, restaurants & even pet stores in the US.
 
But the 8 imprisoned men were considered flight risks — labourers who might dare run away. They lived on a few bites of rice & curry a day in a space barely big enough to lie down, stuck until the next trawler forces them back to sea.

“All I did was tell my captain I couldn’t take it anymore, that I wanted to go home,” said Kyaw Naing, his dark eyes pleading into an Associated Press video camera sneaked in by a sympathetic worker. “The next time we docked,” he said nervously out of earshot of a nearby guard, “I was locked up.”

Here, in the Indonesian island village of Benjina & the surrounding waters, hundreds of trapped men represent one of the most desperate links criss-crossing between companies & countries in the seafood industry. This intricate web of connections separates the fish we eat from the men who catch it, & obscures a brutal truth: Your seafood may come from slaves.
 
The men the AP interviewed on Benjina were mostly from Myanmar, also known as Burma, one of the poorest countries in the world. They were brought to Indonesia through Thailand & forced to fish. Their catch was then shipped back to Thailand, where it entered the global stream of commerce.
 
Tainted fish can wind up in the supply chains of some of America’s major grocery stores, such as Kroger, Albertsons & Safeway; the nation’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart; & the biggest food distributor, Sysco. It can find its way into the supply chains of some of the most popular brands of canned pet food, including Fancy Feast, Meow Mix & Iams. It can turn up as calamari at fine dining restaurants, as imitation crab in a California sushi roll or as packages of frozen snapper relabeled with store brands that land on our dinner tables.
 
In a year-long investigation, the AP talked to more than 40 current & former slaves in Benjina. The AP documented the journey of a single large shipment of slave-caught seafood from the Indonesian village, tracking it by satellite to a gritty Thai harbour. Upon its arrival, AP journalists followed trucks that loaded & drove the seafood over 4 nights to dozens of factories, cold storage plants & the country’s biggest fish market.
 
The tainted seafood mixes in with other fish at a number of sites in Thailand, including processing plants. US Customs records show that several of those Thai factories ship to America. They also sell to Europe & Asia, but the AP traced shipments to the US, where trade records are public.
 
By this time, it is nearly impossible to tell where a specific fish caught by a slave ends up. However, entire supply chains are muddied, & money is trickling down the line to companies that benefit from slave labour.
 
The major corporations contacted would not speak on the record but issued statements that strongly condemned labour abuses. All said they were taking steps to prevent forced labour, such as working with human rights groups to hold subcontractors accountable.
 
Several independent seafood distributors who did comment described the costly & exhaustive steps taken to ensure their supplies are clean. They said the discovery of slaves underscores how hard it is to monitor what goes on halfway around the world.
 
Santa Monica Seafood, a large independent importer that sells to restaurants, markets & direct from its store, has been a leader in improving international fisheries, & sends buyers around the world to inspect vendors.

“The supply chain is quite cloudy, especially when it comes from offshore,” said Logan Kock, vice-president for responsible sourcing, who acknowledged that the industry recognizes and is working to address the problem. “Is it possible a little of this stuff is leaking through? Yeah, it is possible. We are all aware of it.”

The slaves interviewed by the AP had no idea where the fish they caught was headed. They knew only that it was so valuable, they were not allowed to eat it.
 
They said the captains on their fishing boats forced them to drink unclean water & work 20- to 22-hour shifts with no days off. Almost all said they were kicked, whipped with toxic stingray tails or otherwise beaten if they complained or tried to rest. They were paid little or nothing, as they hauled in heavy nets with squid, shrimp, snapper, grouper & other fish.
 
Some shouted for help over the deck of their trawler in the port to reporters, as bright fluorescent lights silhouetted their faces in the darkness.

“I want to go home. We all do,” one man called out in Burmese, a cry repeated by others. The AP is not using the names of some men for their safety. “Our parents haven’t heard from us for a long time. I’m sure they think we are dead.”

Another glanced fearfully over his shoulder toward the captain’s quarters, and then yelled: “It’s torture. When we get beaten, we can’t do anything back. ... I think our lives are in the hands of the Lord of Death.”

In the worst cases, numerous men reported maimings or even deaths on their boats.

“If Americans & Europeans are eating this fish, they should remember us,” said Hlaing Min, 30, a runaway slave from Benjina. “There must be a mountain of bones under the sea. ... The bones of the people could be an island, it’s that many.”
 
———————
For Burmese slaves, Benjina is the end of the world.
 
Roughly 3,500 people live in the town that straddles two small islands separated by a five-minute boat ride. Part of the Maluku chain, formerly known as the Spice Islands, the area is about 400 miles north of Australia, & hosts small kangaroos & rare birds of paradise with dazzling bright feathers.
 
The small harbour is occupied by Pusaka Benjina Resources, whose five-story office compound stands out & includes the cage with the slaves. The company is the only fishing operation on Benjina officially registered in Indonesia, & is listed as the owner of more than 90 trawlers. However, the captains are Thai, & the Indonesian government is reviewing to see if the boats are really Thai-owned. Pusaka Benjina did not respond to phone calls & a letter, & did not speak to a reporter who waited for 2 hours in the company’s Jakarta office.
 
On the dock in Benjina, former slaves unload boats for food & pocket money. Many are men who were abandoned by their captains — sometimes 5, 10 or even 20 years ago — & remain stranded.
 
In the deeply forested island interiors, new runaways forage for food & collect rainwater, living in constant fear of being found by hired slave catchers.
 
And just off a beach covered in sharp coral, a graveyard swallowed by the jungle entombs dozens of fishermen. They are buried under fake Thai names given to them when they were tricked or sold onto their ships, forever covering up evidence of their captors’ abuse, their friends say.

“I always thought if there was an entrance there had to be an exit,” said Tun Lin Maung, a slave abandoned on Benjina, as other men nodded or looked at the ground. “Now I know that’s not true.”

The Arafura Sea provides some of the world’s richest & most diverse fishing grounds, teeming with mackerel, tuna, squid & many other species.
 
Although it is Indonesian territory, it draws many illegal fishing fleets, including from Thailand. The trade that results affects the US & other countries.
 
The US counts Thailand as one of its top seafood suppliers, & buys about 20% of the country’s $7 billion annual exports in the industry. Last year, the State Department blacklisted Thailand for failing to meet minimum standards in fighting human trafficking, placing the country in the ranks of North Korea, Syria & Iran. However, there were no additional sanctions.
 
Thailand’s seafood industry is largely run off the backs of migrant labourers, said Kendra Krieder, a State Department analyst who focuses on supply chains. The treatment of some of these workers falls under the US government’s definition of slavery, which includes forcing people to keep working even if they once signed up for the jobs, or trafficking them into situations where they are exploited.

“In the most extreme cases, you’re talking about someone kidnapped or tricked into working on a boat, physically beaten, chained,” said Krieder. “These situations would be called modern slavery by any measure.”

The Thai government says it is cleaning up the problem. On the bustling floor of North America’s largest seafood show in Boston earlier this month, an official for the Department of Fisheries laid out a plan to address labour abuse, including new laws that mandate wages, sick leave & shifts of no more than 14 hours. However, Kamonpan Awaiwanont stopped short when presented details about the men in Benjina.

“This is still happening now?” he asked. He paused. “We are trying to solve it. This is ongoing.”

The Thai government also promises a new national registry of illegal migrant workers, including more than 100,000 flooding the seafood industry. However, policing has now become even harder because decades of illegal fishing have depleted stocks close to home, pushing the boats farther and deeper into foreign waters.
 
The Indonesian government has called a temporary ban on most fishing, aiming to clear out foreign poachers who take billions of dollars of seafood from the country’s waters. As a result, more than 50 boats are now docked in Benjina, leaving up to 1,000 more slaves stranded onshore & waiting to see what will happen next.
 
Indonesian officials are trying to enforce laws that ban cargo ships from picking up fish from boats at sea. This practice forces men to stay on the water for months or sometimes years at a time, essentially creating floating prisons.
 
Susi Pudjiastuti, the new Fisheries Minister, said she has heard of different fishing companies putting men in cells. She added that she believes the trawlers on Benjina may really have Thai owners, despite the Indonesian paperwork, reflecting a common practice of faking or duplicating licenses.
 
She said she is deeply disturbed about the abuse on Benjina & other islands.

“I’m very sad. I lose my eating appetite. I lose my sleep,” she said. “They are building up an empire on slavery, on stealing, on fish(ing) out, on massive environmental destruction for a plate of seafood.”
—————————

The story of slavery in the Thai seafood industry started decades ago with the same push-and-pull that shapes economic immigration worldwide — the hope of escaping grinding poverty to find a better life somewhere else.
 
In recent years, as the export business has expanded, it has become more difficult to convince young Burmese or Cambodian migrants & impoverished Thais — all of whom were found on Benjina — to accept the dangerous jobs. Agents have become more desperate & ruthless, recruiting children & the disabled, lying about wages & even drugging & kidnapping migrants, according to a former broker who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
 
The broker said agents then sell the slaves, usually to Thai captains of fishing boats or the companies that own them. Each slave typically costs around $1,000, according to Patima Tungpuchayakul, manager of the Thai-based non-profit Labor Rights Promotion Network Foundation. The men are later told they have to work off the “debt” with wages that don’t come for months or years, or at all.

“The employers are probably more worried about the fish than the workers’ lives,” she said. “They get a lot of money from this type of business.”

Illegal Thai boats are falsely registered to fish in Indonesia through graft, sometimes with the help of government authorities. Praporn Ekouru, a Thai former member of Parliament, admitted to the AP that he had bribed Indonesian officials to go into their waters, & complained that the Indonesian government’s crackdown is hurting business.

“In the past, we sent Thai boats to fish in Indonesian waters by changing their flags,” said Praporn, who is also chairman of the Songkhla Fisheries Association in southern Thailand. “We had to pay bribes of millions of baht per year, or about 200,000 baht ($6,100) per month. ... The officials are not receiving money anymore because this order came from the government.”

Illegal workers are given false documents, because Thai boats cannot hire undocumented crew. One of the slaves in Benjina, Maung Soe, said he was given a fake seafarer book belonging to a Thai national, accepted in Indonesia as an informal travel permit. He rushed back to his boat to dig up a crinkled copy.

“That’s not my name, not my signature,” he said angrily, pointing at the worn piece of paper. “The only thing on here that is real is my photograph.”

Soe said he had agreed to work on a fishing boat only if it stayed in Thai waters, because he had heard Indonesia was a place from which workers never came back.

“They tricked me,” he said. “They lied to me. ... They created fake papers & put me on the boat, & now here I am in Indonesia.”

The slaves said the level of abuse on the fishing boats depends on individual captains & assistants. Aung Naing Win, who left a wife & 2 children behind in Myanmar 2 years ago, said some fishermen were so depressed that they simply threw themselves into the water. Win, 40, said his most painful task was working without proper clothing in the ship’s giant freezer, where temperatures drop to 39 degrees below zero.

“It was so cold, our hands were burning,” he said. “No one really cared if anyone died.”
————————

The shipment the AP tracked from the port of Benjina carried fish from smaller trawlers; AP journalists talked to slaves on more than a dozen of them.
 
A crane hoisted the seafood onto a refrigerated cargo ship called the Silver Sea Line, with an immense hold as big as 50 semi-trucks. At this point, by UN & US standards, every fish in that hold is considered associated with slavery.
 
The ship belongs to the Silver Sea Reefer Co., which is registered in Thailand & has at least nine refrigerated cargo boats. The company said it is not involved with the fishermen.
“We only carry the shipment & we are hired in general by clients,” said owner Panya Luangsomboon. “We’re separated from the fishing boats.”

The AP followed the Silver Sea Line by satellite over 15 days to Samut Sakhon. When it arrived, workers on the dock packed the seafood over 4 nights onto more than 150 trucks, which then delivered their loads around the city.
 
One truck bore the name & bird logo of Kingfisher Holdings Ltd., which supplies frozen & canned seafood around the world. Another truck went to Mahachai Marine Foods Co., a cold storage business that also supplies to Kingfisher & other exporters, according to Kawin Ngernanek, whose family runs it.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” said Kawin, who also serves as spokesman for the Thai Overseas Fisheries Association. “Kingfisher buys several types of products.”

When asked about abusive labour practices, Kingfisher did not answer repeated requests for comment. Mahachai manager Narongdet Prasertsri responded, “I have no idea about it at all.”

Every month, Kingfisher and its subsidiary KF Foods Ltd. sends about 100 metric tons of seafood from Thailand to America, according to US Customs Bills of Lading. These shipments have gone to Santa Monica Seafood, Stavis Seafoods — located on Boston’s historic Fish Pier — & other distributors.
 
Richard Stavis, whose grandfather started the dealership in 1929, shook his head when told about the slaves whose catch may end up at businesses he buys from. He said his company visits processors & fisheries, requires notarized certification of legal practices & uses third-party audits.

“The truth is, these are the kind of things that keep you up at night,” he said. “That’s the sort of thing I want to stop. ... There are companies like ours that care & are working as hard as they can.”

Wholesalers like Stavis sell packages of fish, branded & unbranded, that can end up on supermarket shelves with a private label or house brand. Stavis’ customers also include Sysco, the largest food distributor in the US; there is no clear way to know which particular fish was sold to them.
 
Sysco declined an interview, but the company’s code of conduct says it “will not knowingly work with any supplier that uses forced, bonded, indentured or slave labour.”

Gavin Gibbons, a spokesman for National Fisheries Institute, which represents about 75% of the US seafood industry, said the reports of abuse were “disturbing” & “disheartening.” ”But these type of things flourish in the shadows,“ he said.
 
A similar pattern repeats itself with other shipments & other companies, as the supply chain splinters off in many directions in Samut Sakhon. It is in this Thai port that slave-caught seafood starts to lose its history.
 
The AP followed another truck to Niwat Co., which sells to Thai Union Manufacturing Co., according to part owner Prasert Luangsomboon. Weeks later, when confronted about forced labour in their supply chain, Niwat referred several requests for comment to Luangsomboon, who could not be reached for further comment.
 
Thai Union Manufacturing is a subsidiary of Thai Union Frozen Products PCL., the country’s largest seafood corporation, with $3.5 billion in annual sales. This parent company, known simply as Thai Union, owns Chicken of the Sea & is buying Bumble Bee, although the AP did not observe any tuna fisheries. In September, it became the country’s first business to be certified by Dow Jones for sustainable practices, after meeting environmental & social reviews.
 
Thai Union said it condemns human rights violations, but multiple stakeholders must be part of the solution. “We all have to admit that it is difficult to ensure the Thai seafood industry’s supply chain is 100% clean,” CEO Thiraphong Chansiri said in an emailed statement.
 
Thai Union ships thousands of cans of cat food to the US, including household brands like Fancy Feast, Meow Mix & Iams. These end up on shelves of major grocery chains, such as Kroger, Safeway & Albertsons, as well as pet stores; again, however, it’s impossible to tell if a particular can of cat food might have slave-caught fish.
 
Thai Union says its direct clients include Wal-Mart, which declined an interview but said in an email statement: “We care about the men & women in our supply chain, & we are concerned about the ethical recruitment of workers.”

Wal-Mart described its work with several non-profits to end forced labour in Thailand, including Project Issara, & referred the AP to Lisa Rende Taylor, its director. She noted that slave-caught seafood can slip into supply chains undetected at several points, such as when it is traded between boats or mingles with clean fish at processing plants. She also confirmed that seafood sold at the Talay Thai market — to where the AP followed several trucks — can enter international supply chains.

“Transactions throughout Thai seafood supply chains are often not well-documented, making it difficult to estimate exactly how much seafood available on supermarket shelves around the world is tainted by human trafficking & forced labour,” she said.
 
Poj Aramwattananont, president of an industry group that represents Thai Union, Kingfisher & others, said Thais are not “jungle people” & know that human trafficking is wrong. However, he acknowledged that Thai companies cannot always track down the origins of their fish.

“We don’t know where the fish come from when we buy from Indonesia,” said Poj of the Thai Frozen Foods Association. “We have no record. We don’t know if that fish is good or bad.”
——————

The seafood the slaves on Benjina catch may travel around the world, but their own lives often end right here, in this island village.
 
A crude cemetery holds more than graves strangled by tall grasses & jungle vines, where small wooden markers are neatly labelled, some with the falsified names of slaves & boats. Only their friends remember where they were laid to rest.
 
In the past, former slave Hla Phyo said, supervisors on ships simply tossed bodies into the sea to be devoured by sharks. But after authorities & companies started demanding that every man be accounted for on the roster upon return, captains began stowing corpses alongside the fish in ship freezers until they arrived back in Benjina, the slaves said.
 
Lifting his knees as he stepped over the thick brush, Phyo searched for 2 grave markers overrun by weeds — friends he helped bury.
 
It’s been 5 years since he himself escaped the sea & struggled to survive on the island. Every night, his mind drifts back to his mother in Myanmar. He knows she must be getting old now, & he desperately wants to return to her. Standing among so many anonymous tombs stacked on top of each other, hopelessness overwhelms him.

“I’m starting to feel like I will be in Indonesia forever,” he said, wiping a tear away. “I remember thinking when I was digging, the only thing that awaits us here is death.”

"Unemployed Robots" by Jimmy Margulies

"Unemployed Robots" - Jimmy Margulies, NY, US

Canada sells arms to African countries

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, that how developed countries of the West & especially, the members of the UNSC (UN Security Council) are largest exporters of arms & weapons around the world, I won't say much here about them.

I will pose couple of questions here, though:

1. How & why do we (primarily, Canadians) still think that Canada still flies the banner of peace around the world?

2. When countries like China, Russia, US, Canada, France, Germany etc. actively hawk their military wares to the developing countries around the world, then how can we expect any peace around the world, & how can we expect developing countries to ever get out of poverty cycle?

In light of my second question above, it seems like the strategy of keeping a majority of countries (& hence, their citizenry) underdeveloped around the world, by the developed countries is working perfectly. Developing countries keep fighting, either each other or rebel groups or multinational terror networks, with the multi-million $$$ of weapons bought from the developed countries.

Besides, owing developed countries money for these weapons, developing countries also borrow & owe lots of loans (infrastructure, development etc.). The same loans that developing countries borrow from developed countries are paid back to developed countries in the form of payments for military wares. But that payment doesn't count towards loans repayments & interests. Developing countries still need to pay developed countries' financial institutions (IMF, World Bank etc.) for those loans & interests.

So, developed countries get repaid twice, while developing countries lose their citizens' money twice. So developed countries always get richer at the expense of widespread poverty in developing countries. Those developing countries can never get out of the poverty cycles.

And if we look at the chaos & social upheavel in the developing countries, we see a common pattern among the groups which are causing that chaos. All those groups (Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Indian Maoist rebels, Joseph Kony's LRA etc.) came into being because of citizenry's poverty, e.g. ISIS came out of discrimination against Sunnis in Iraq, in official government & in getting employment; essentially realizing that their voice will never be heard. (I am not defending ISIS here, but just saying how it came into being).

So, the West wants chaos & upheavel in developing countries. Why?

Two Reasons:

1. Money is power. More money you have in this world, more power you have in this world. If developing countries start using those IMF loans to develop their own countries, by investing in education, infrastructure, industries, economy, healthcare etc., they themselves & their combined power will overwhelm the currently developed countries. Those formerly developing countries will easily take the reins of the world from formerly developed countries.

So, the strategy of developed countries: don't let the developing countries use their own citizen's money (taxes) & international loans in investing in their own countries. Keep these countries indebted to us. Debt is slavery.

2. When these countries have chaos & upheavel in their countries, their citizens, especially the ones who are intelligent & smart, will try to emigrate out of their countries, in search of a better future for themselves & their families. They will then settle in one of these developed countries. This way, the developing countries also lose "brains" of their countries (while also losing finances, as explained above).

Those people who immigrate to a developed country are then treated as inferior in those developed countries, & are discriminated against, based on religion, race, ethnicity, education etc. Those immigrants become similar to compliant slaves of the slavery era. They provide the low-wage workforce, which silently toils away at the bottom of the corporate & social hierarchies, while the native residents of the developed countries enjoy the fruits of their labour (i.e. become rich).

So, the developed countries get multiple benefits from selling weapons of mass destruction to the world:
1. get intelligent people out of developing countries (so they can't develop),
2. get a low-wage compliant labour force,
3. increase their country's tax base,
4. a large, intelligent labour force works in factories, making products to sell, worldwide, which helps exports & national GDP,
5. more exports & an increasing GDP helps boost economy,
6. working immigrants also increase the consumer base of the country, &
7. loans to developing countries are also repaid so money also comes in the country through that way (besides, exports)

On the other hand, you can imagine what developing countries lose (pretty much opposite of those 7 points above). So, developing countries get hit with multiple whammies on financial, economic, & human resources level.

So, more people will definitely fight for a decreasing share of resources in those developing countries, to the point that people start killing each other.

Then, we all say, the residents of those developing countries are so "uncivilized" & "barbaric".

By the way, if someone is thinking those developing countries are poor because of government corruption, then, here's my answer:

A corrupt government is indeed one of the factors why developing countries stay in "developing" mode. But we do have to keep in mind that those corrupt government officials are in power, thanks to the blessings (i.e. constant political interference) of the developed countries.

For instance, the developed countries bombed Libya & Iraq. Didn't invest in them to build these countries. Result is both of these countries became a haven of terror networks. Fractured political landscape is in such a shape thanks to the developed countries' interference. Well, as we can see, residents of these countries are all over the world as refugees & immigrants, while those countries & their neighbouring countries are buying weapons from these same developed countries, which created those conditions from their abhorrent actions, in the first place.

My final questions: who are the real barbarians in this world? Who are the real merchants of death in this world?
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canada-selling-arms-to-african-countries-in-boko-haram-fight/article23470116/

With global arms sales surging, Canadian companies have joined the booming business by selling armoured vehicles to Nigeria & Cameroon for their fight against Boko Haram, a new study says.
 
Canada is among a growing group of countries selling arms to the West African nations for the military campaign to recapture territory from the radical Islamist militia, according to the report ... by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
 
Most Western governments have been reluctant to sell weapons to Nigeria because of widespread concerns about well-documented atrocities by the Nigerian military, including the mass murder of civilians & detainees. The US, for example, cancelled the proposed sale of Cobra attack helicopters to Nigeria last year. But those restrictions don’t seem to apply to private companies.
 
Nigeria & Cameroon, seeking weapons to fight Boko Haram, have in the past year purchased helicopters from China & Russia & armoured vehicles from China, South Africa, Ukraine & the Czech Republic, along with armoured vehicles from Canadian-owned production lines in Nigeria & the United Arab Emirates, the report said.
 
... Nigeria has spent large sums on major weapons purchases in recent months. Its political leaders say the government went to the black market to buy weapons because the US & other countries would not sell to Nigeria. Hundreds of foreign mercenaries have also reportedly been hired to fight Boko Haram for $400 (USD) in cash per day.
 
The Nigerian deals are part of a worldwide boom in weapons sales. Global arms sales have jumped by 16% over the past 5 years, compared with the previous five-year period, the SIPRI report said.
 
The report showed that China is now the world’s third-biggest weapons exporter. China’s arms exports have soared by a stunning 143% over the past 5 years, allowing it to overtake Germany, France & Britain in global sales, although it still remains far behind the two biggest exporters, the US & Russia, which together account for 58% of arms exports. In the past 5 years, US exports have increased by 23%, while Russian exports have risen by 37%, compared with the previous five-year period.
 
Canada was the world’s 13th-biggest arms exporter over the past 5 years, according to the SIPRI report. In the previous five-year period, it was the 14th-biggest weapons exporter.
 
The SIPRI database identifies the sale of 40 armoured vehicles to Nigeria from Canadian companies in 2013 & 2014. Streit Group, founded in Canada in 1992, has publicly confirmed that it has recently sold its Spartan armoured vehicles to Nigeria. The company says it has sold 12,000 armoured vehicles worldwide since its foundation.
 
Peter Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm institute, said another Canadian-based company, INKAS, has sold light armoured patrol vehicles to Nigeria from a production plant in Nigeria. Retired Canadian general David Fraser, who commanded Canadian troops in Afghanistan, is a director of INKAS.
 
Mr. Wezeman, in an e-mailed answer to questions from The Globe and Mail ..., said Canada should ensure it “understands the risks involved in arms exports” & should try to help Nigeria to deal with Boko Haram “in a way that involves the minimum amount of violence needed.” He added: “Just allowing the supply of weapons is not enough.” He said he was speaking in his personal capacity, not on behalf of the institute.

Sweden's prostitution solution

Liked the op-ed piece. A woman in the western world may get into prostitution business, willingly, but mostly, through coercion & sex slavery (human trafficking) & stay in the business, thinking she has no other choice.

A business / industry only thrives for as long as there's demand & supply. Prostitution or sex work is such a lucrative business that there's always demand for it, & hence, there will always be supply, which in turn, hurts women, since it involves human trafficking.

If you curb the demand somehow, supply will dry up by itself, since a human trafficker will take his product (women) to markets where there's enough demand to make him/her enough money.

So, what Sweden did is commendable, but it won't solve the problem completely. It may, in fact, drive the problem underground in some places, where chances of sexual abuse is even more. Some may say that Swedish demand went to Denmark or any number of poorer Eastern European countries (Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia etc). In the end, women are abused a lot in this business, from East to West, & from North to South. And there is no consensus of which method works best to completely rid of this world of prostitution.

To completely end this business of prostitution & related human trafficking business, a society needs religion where people know that there are no loopholes to get out of their vices. That society also needs a lot of other things to do to keep women safe, & build a thriving & strong society, centered around family & its values.

On a side note, it's funny usually how people say that this is a modern world & we humans have evolved now. How is it modern? Prostitution is considered one of the oldest profession (or more correctly, business). So how is it that we humans of 21st century have become modern when one of the worst business of yore is still thriving today, at the expense of dignity, respect, & life of other half of the humankind (i.e. woman)?
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/swedens-prostitution-solution/article23482528/

Here in Canada, most progressive people hold an enlightened view of prostitution. Since fighting it is futile, we ought to legalize & regulate it. Legalizing prostitution would destigmatize sex-trade workers & increase their safety.
 
Sweden went another way. In 1999, it passed a law to criminalize the buyers of sex, but not the sellers. Sex-trade workers were encouraged to report abusive clients to police, & given assistance to help them find other lines of work. (Or, in the case of migrant women who’d been trafficked, to return home.) The law is not unlike Canada’s new law, which has been widely derided as unworkable, unconstitutional, dangerous to women & hopelessly reactionary. But then nobody ever accused the Harper government of being progressive.
 
So how are things going in Sweden? Pretty well, it turns out. Last week, a thick report published by a government agency in Stockholm found that street prostitution has been cut by more than half since 1995. Other studies also indicate that the sex trade has shrunk substantially.
 
In Stockholm’s red-light district, “there’s hardly anyone there,” says political science professor Max Waltman, an expert in prostitution policy at the University of Stockholm who spoke to me by telephone. Nor is it true that the street trade has simply moved indoors. Prof. Waltman estimates that the total number of sex workers in the country has dropped from 3,000 in the mid-1990s to about 600 in recent years.
 
At first, public opinion over the new law was sharply divided. Its biggest support came from the greens, the feminists & others in the left-left wing. But today, it has overwhelming public support. Many Swedes view prostitution not as a choice or a moral offence, but a form of male violence against women. They compare it to serial rape & slavery. Last year, when Amnesty International said it planned to lobby for legalization, Swedish women’s rights organizations were outraged.
 
Nadine Bergquist is a volunteer with Rosenlundstodet, a small group of women who help get prostitutes off the streets. “We think it’s a great law, very necessary, crucial,” she told me. “The women who’ve left prostitution say that without this law, it would have been very much harder for them.” She dismisses the notion that the law stigmatizes them. “They were stigmatized already.”

Across the bridge from southern Sweden is Denmark, which chose to go the other way & decriminalize prostitution. The two countries form a sort of natural policy experiment. By 2007, according to Prof. Waltman, Denmark had about 15 times more prostitutes per capita than Sweden did – many of them migrant women trafficked from Romania & Nigeria. Now that Sweden is a hostile climate for traffickers, they tend to stick to more lucrative countries.
 
Iceland & Norway – two other progressive, feminist, northern countries – have adopted the Swedish model. But in Canada, the ideologies are flipped. Here, conservatives applaud the Swedish model, while progressives, academics, feminists & the media overwhelmingly ridicule it.
 
Prof. Waltman, who has been following Canada’s debate closely, thinks these people are seriously wrong. Decriminalization is a failed experiment, he argues. “When the German parliament decided at the end of the nineties to decriminalize, the idea was to make prostitution safer. Women would sign onto social security, & they would be destigmatized, & they would work in brothels & be safe.”

But no one signed up for social security, the sex trade was not destigmatized & brothels, he says, are not particularly safe. Worst of all, prostitution has exploded. “Most women are obviously not doing it by choice,” he says. “Most of them have been profoundly traumatized & want to get out. If you legalize it, it’s legalizing slavery, because they have no real choice.”

That’s the argument that sticks with me. I honestly don’t care if Terri-Jean Bedford operates her house of pain out of her nice suburban bungalow. Most sex workers aren’t her. Nor are they strapped co-eds working toward their masters’ degrees. They’re women at the bottom of the heap, too often aboriginal, who’ve been badly damaged & believe they have no other options.
 
As Ms. Bergquist says, “Anyone who believes there is such a thing as a happy prostitute should walk down the street with us one night & look these women in the eye. And then I’d like to see if they still believe that’s true.”

Genetic testing at home is risky business

Like the world didn't have enough ways to discriminate against our fellow human beings, that now we have "genoism" ... discriminate based on one's genetics. Besides discrimination, companies now can exploit your DNA info for their own nefarious purposes, like they didn't have enough of our personal info, already.

“This is being marketed as a fun thing to do,” says Bev Heim-Myers, chair of the Canadian Coalition For Genetic Fairness, an organization advocating for legislation banning discrimination based on genetic test results. “But it can go from fun to devastating. This information can then be shared & used against the person. Until we have laws protecting genetic information, this is a dangerous thing.”
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http://www.macleans.ca/society/health/d-i-y-dna-genetic-testing-at-home/

On a midweek morning last month, Tim Cottee clicked shut his office door, woke his computer & girded himself for a piece of life-changing news. Weeks earlier, the 42-year-old executive at a Winnipeg financial services company had signed up with 23andMe, a California-based company that provides DNA testing & health information to Canadians over the web. His results were now in ... & he was feeling a mix of excitement & dread: 6 years ago, his mother had died at 69 of Alzheimer’s disease, & these results would reveal whether Cottee was carrying a mutation of the APOE gene known as the e4 variant, the strongest hereditary risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
 
Cottee is not the first person to suspect a Trojan horse is lurking in his DNA. The atavistic fear of flaws in our biological coding is an inescapable feature of the genetic era, going back to the mapping of the human genome in 2003. What’s changed is the ease with which we can put those misgivings to the test. Cottee is one of about 20,000 in this country who have swallowed hard & clicked on their 23andMe health results since the firm took advantage of a gap in Canadian laws 5 months ago & began offering its health profiles to members living north of the border. For $199, the company couriers its members a “collection kit”—essentially, a test tube into which you spit—which goes back to the company’s laboratories in the US for genotyping. Within weeks, members can log on to the company’s website to view a raft of information ranging from the amusing (are you predisposed to hate cilantro?) to the soul-crushing (are you predisposed to Parkinson’s disease?).
 
Not everyone is psychologically prepared—especially those who had been tested so they could trace their genealogy, the other arm of 23andMe’s thriving online enterprise. “I had a bit of a cry,” said Candace, a 47-year-old mother of two from Brantford, Ont., who learned she has one copy of the e4 variant (she asked that her identity be withheld). “It’s like, whoa, I didn’t know this was in me. Oh my god, what if I pass it on? It’s very jarring, at first.” So weighty are the findings, & so challenging to place in proper perspective, that in November 2013, the US Food & Drug Administration sent a letter to 23andMe asking it to stop providing health results to its American members. The service amounts to a medical diagnostic device that the FDA had not yet approved for marketing, the letter said. 23andMe quickly complied.
 
The company has faced no such roadblock in Canada. Here, direct-to-consumer DNA testing has fallen through the yawning chasm known as the constitutional division of powers. Health Canada says the service falls under the jurisdiction of the provinces, while the provinces show little interest in regulating testing that is done outside their borders (a spokesman for the Ontario ministry of health said they don’t consider it their jurisdiction). No surprise, then, that 23andMe has ramped up efforts to market its genetic health service north of the border since the FDA clipped its wings. Canada, in the meantime, remains the only G8 country without some sort of law governing how genetic test results can be used by insurers & employers, despite warnings that people who receive bad news could face discrimination when they try to obtain coverage or get jobs.
 
All of which suggests the country is no more ready for the new era of genetic health testing than the thousands of Canadians on whom 23andMe has been dropping eye-opening &, in some cases, heartbreaking information. “This is being marketed as a fun thing to do,” says Bev Heim-Myers, chair of the Canadian Coalition For Genetic Fairness, an organization advocating for legislation banning discrimination based on genetic test results. “But it can go from fun to devastating. This information can then be shared & used against the person. Until we have laws protecting genetic information, this is a dangerous thing.”

We can’t say we weren’t warned. Long before the Human Genome Project charted almost all of the three billion base pairs of human DNA, ethicists & futurists sounded alarms about the potential misuse of genetic information, as testing became cheaper & more widely available. The term “genoism”—unethical discrimination based on genetics—was coined by Andrew Niccol, director of Gattaca, a 1997 movie that portrayed a society driven by eugenics rather than merit. The film’s foresight, alas, proved greater than its cultural impact. Canada, for one, has been drifting for years toward the world it depicted.
 
The plunging price & ready availability of genetic testing is a key part of that new reality. The price to fully sequence all three billion base pairs has been driven down to about $2,000, from the billions spent on the Human Genome Project. But the real game-changer has been Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google billionaire Sergey Brin (the two are now separated), who realized the true value of genetic testing lay in aggregated data that could, in turn, be sold for medical research & development. In 2006, she founded 23andMe with her partner, Susan Avery, naming the company after the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a human cell. The following year, they began offering $999 genotyping—a process that identifies about 750,000 of the genome’s DNA base pairs. By late 2012, the firm was offering $99 tests to its American members, while asking them for consent to share their genetic data, stripped of identifying personal information & lumped in with hundreds of thousands of others’, for the purposes of medical & pharmaceutical research.
 
The company has since shared that information with partners ranging from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer & the US National Institutes of Health, to advance research into everything from obesity to Parkinson’s disease. Last week, the firm announced it is launching its own research division to develop drug therapies.
 
The company’s growth is part of a gold rush occurring at the nexus of big data & Big Pharma, with Silicon Valley players such as Apple developing apps that encourage customers to self-report personal health information in the name of advancing medical research. And it’s not as though 23andMe, which is financially backed by Google, keeps its real line of business a secret. The firm notifies its members about every new collaboration, while encouraging them to participate in online surveys about their traits, tastes & histories. The customers, meanwhile, receive a downloadable file containing their raw DNA data, which they are free to share with doctors or genetic counsellors, along with a report of 110 traits, inherited conditions, drug responses & genetic health risk factors.
 
Reading the report can be a strangely out-of-body experience—like learning secrets about a friend you thought you knew well.
 
Of greater concern to genetic experts, though, are the heavyweight indicators such as those for Alzheimer’s, breast cancer & Parkinson’s. Before disclosing them, the 23andMe site requires members to open a printed primer explaining the results & their limitations. In the case of the Alzheimer’s APOE variants, they can also watch a video presentation by a Harvard Medical School doctor, Robert Green, who assures members he’s not being paid for his appearance. “Finding you are at somewhat higher risk might cause distress,” Green acknowledges in the clip. “So give it some thought. If you think this information might distress you, you can simply decide not to view it. Or feel free to discuss it with a doctor or a genetic counsellor before you unlock & view your results.”

Such notes of caution litter the site. But critics complain they aren’t enough, because the thought of revelatory news a couple of clicks away is too tempting for most people to pass up. Adverse findings can trigger panic, while an absence of indicators provides false reassurance, warns Allie Janson Hazell, president-elect of the Canadian Association of Genetic Counsellors. Furthermore, putting the information in perspective requires expert understanding of the limitations of a genetic test, as well as a person’s family history, she says. Janson Hazell points to 23andMe’s tests for 3 mutations associated with breast cancer, which are most prevalent in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. “If I, a person of non-Ashkenazi ancestry, get a normal result back, I might feel reassured, even if there’s lots of breast cancer in my family,” she says. “This is where the potential for harm comes in.”

As you might expect, what is framed in Canada as “potential for harm” takes the form of direct accusation in the US. Less than a month after the FDA fired off its warning letter to 23andMe, the company was fending off a class-action lawsuit alleging that its health reports were scientifically meaningless marketing tools allowing it to build up its inventory of saleable gene data. One commentator on Forbes.com warned that quality control is an issue at 23andMe, accusing the company of extrapolating from “a few reports about specific populations.”

Emily Drabant Conley, 23andMe’s director of business development, brushes aside the knocks, saying the company strives to strike a balance, presenting scientifically accurate information in a way that non-experts can understand. “We’re seeing with our customers that they do understand the information, & they do find it relevant,” she says from 23andMe’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. At the root of the model, she adds, is an individual’s right to obtain information about himself so he can make healthy adjustments to his lifestyle. “There are many cases where this information really changes the trajectory of someone’s health,” says Drabant Conley, who has a doctorate in neuroscience. “He or she can find out a piece of information he or she didn’t know, that you could really only ascertain through genetics.”

Company officials are also quick to note that the FDA recently eased its stance on 23andMe’s marketing, allowing it to advise customers whether they have markers for Bloom’s syndrome, a rare condition associated with short stature, sun sensitivity & increased cancer risk.
 
Whatever the criticisms, direct-to-consumer DNA test results appear to be good enough for the insurance industry. 5 years ago, knowing that many Canadians would soon be able to afford the tests, the association representing the country’s life & health insurers issued a statement claiming the right to ask applicants if they’d had genetic testing done. If so, they’d ask for the information before agreeing to a policy, they said, just as they would demand disclosure of other medical records.
 
The point, says Frank Zinatelli, vice-president of the Canadian Life & Health Insurance Association, was to ensure equal footing between insurer & client: Insurers don’t demand genetic testing from anybody who hasn’t already had it done, he stresses; nor can they reopen existing policies based on newly discovered adverse results. But people who knew they had genetic indicators for degenerative diseases like Huntington’s could conceivably rush out to buy policies, Zinatelli argues, upsetting actuarial calculations & ultimately costing everyone. “Let’s remember the definition of insurance,” he says. “It is financial protection against unanticipated loss”. [emphasis his]

Maybe. But that hasn’t stopped critics from citing the insurers’ position as proof that Canada is hurtling toward a Gattaca-like society, where the genetically flawed live diminished lives, cut off from important opportunities or benefits. In 2009, researchers at the University of British Columbia published a survey in which 40% of 233 people with family histories of Huntington’s disease reported they’d experienced some sort of discrimination based on their risk of developing the devastating hereditary brain disorder—especially when it came to getting insurance. Fully 29% said insurers had rejected them, increased premiums or asked them to take genetic tests. (The highly predictive Huntington’s mutation, it should be noted, is not part of 23andMe’s health results package.)
 
And doctors warn that fears of discrimination are discouraging people from obtaining genetic tests that could head off life-threatening diseases. At a Senate committee hearing last fall, Dr. Ronald Cohn, chief of clinical & metabolic genetics at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, told the story of a 12-year-old girl whose parents delayed getting her tested for a hereditary connective-tissue disorder because of concerns about the entire family’s insurability if the results became known. The girl could have one of two conditions, Cohn said, for which the treatments are vastly different. Without the test, “I can’t manage the child’s care,” he added. “I have her come back frequently for echocardiograms to make sure everything is in place, until the family moves forward and I know which disease I’m going to deal with.”

Disturbing as their anecdotes are, advocates such as Cohn & Bev Heim-Myers have had a hard time getting attention on Parliament Hill. In 2013, James Cowan, a Liberal senator from Nova Scotia, tabled a private member’s bill in the upper chamber prohibiting anyone from demanding a genetic test, or the results of a genetic test, as a condition of providing goods or services. Bill S-201 would have amended the Canadian Labour Code to stop employers from requiring workers to take or disclose the results of genetic tests, while adding genetic characteristics to the Canadian Human Rights Act as a prohibited ground of discrimination. It carried the power of criminal law, with fines as high as $1 million & prison terms as long as 5 years.
 
23andMe counted among the bill’s most enthusiastic supporters. But the law’s key provisions were voted down in February by the Conservative majority in the Senate—in part because the Harper government promised in its 2013 Throne Speech its own legislation against genetic discrimination. A spokeswoman for Justice Minister Peter MacKay said in an email last week that the government still intends to act on the file, but she did not specify when. And the fear factor is running high. When Cohn & the staff at Sick Kids recently offered free full-genome sequencing to 330 children in care at the hospital as part of a study, more than 100 of the families refused, citing concern about genetic discrimination.
 
Curiously, few of 23andMe’s Canadian members seem to share those qualms. Several contacted over the past few weeks told Maclean’s they welcomed the health results, & some bristled at the idea of government interference in the service. “I’m fine with the Canadian lack of regulation here,” said Davis Simpson, a 45-year-old Calgarian who signed up to do genealogical searches & regards the health findings provided later as a bonus. “I strongly oppose any action to deny me access to my own health information.”

Most, including Simpson, saw the need for some control of genetic discrimination, but they tended to view the issue mostly as a matter of personal choice. “No one has a right to my body, with or without my explicit consent,” said Nancy, a member from Minden, Ont., who asked that her identity be withheld. “Logically, that includes my personal genome.”

Still, even savvy users like Cottee admit that opening the results unleashes a flood of unforeseen implications, raising as many questions as it answers. After drawing a breath & clicking through to his APOE findings, Cottee was stunned to find that he carried neither copy of the e4 variant. He then took his raw data & loaded it onto a website that screens it for 15 other, less reliable genetic mutations connected to Alzheimer’s. Again, nothing.

“It was a weird thing, because I didn’t actually feel the sense of relief I thought I was going to,” Cottee recalls. “I’d had this feeling of inevitability all along. So why wasn’t I feeling more positive?” It was then that the limitations—or was it the value?—of his tests hit home. Alzheimer’s is a multi-factoral disease, he knew, linked to everything from genetic mutations to obesity. If, for example, his mother never had the APOE gene, then something else had made her vulnerable to Alzheimer’s. She was overweight, & her unhealthy lifestyle had led to diabetes, he notes. But Cottee has already taken steps to avoid those risk factors, which leaves him in the same boat as the rest of us at the onset of the genetic era: awash in information, yet woefully short on certainty—& a little afraid of what he might learn next.

"Movie Labelling" by Jeff Koterba

"Movie Labelling" - Jeff Koterba, Omaha World Herald, Omaha, Nebraska, US

The problem with French immersion

Everywhere in the world, everyone is trying to play "one-up"; how do I make my life & my family's life better than other? Even if it means being discriminatory & unfair.

Now, here's an article, in which it is shown, how parents who think their kid is the brightest kid in the world (which parent doesn't think so?), will do everything & anything in their power (the whole family jamming up the French immersion school's phones on an call-in enrolment night is one way or lining up outside your kid's future school, for 3 nights, to get him/her enrolled is another) to get their kid enrolled in a French immersion school ... even if it means, another kid who is equally intelligent gets "bumped down" to an English-only school. Why?

Because, apparently (I didn't know this & never thought of it of myself), French immersion schools are like private education quality at the public education cost. Who wouldn't want that? You need to be missing a piece of your brain if you don't want a better quality product at a lesser cost.

Problem is though, as the article explains, it starts to discriminate & starts to make & perpetuate socio-economic disadvantages. Parents & their kids who are bilingual are of course going to earn more & have better job opportunities than unilingual families.

The most affected (with this discrimination) are immigrants & families from disadvantaged socio-economic classes. For immigrants, as the article suggests, French immersion schools admission authority will point out to factors like "you are having enough problem with English, since English is not even your first language, then forget about French immersion, & stick to English only."

Slowly & surely, kids from advantaged socio-economic classes gets clumped in together in French immersion schools, & eventually study & grow up together to the point that their strong network gets them to some nice places in employment. Those kids from disadvantaged background (immigrants, Natives etc.) gets clumped in together with all other kids from similar backgrounds & their network for life becomes people of similar disadvantaged groups. Boom !! You just got your two social classes ... & it will keep perpetuating for lives on end !!!

Are the kids from those disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds any less intelligent? Don't they have the right to be considered & treated same as those kids who are / will go to French immersion school?

Be it in a developing country or a developed country, like US or Canada, society keeps discriminating & creating social classes based on socio-economic, educational, income, ethnic etc. factors. This is why the world is in such a chaos.

In developing countries, parents have a choice of private or public school. Socio-economic status defines that choice. Obviously, most parents go for private education for their kids, to the point, that if a poor family has 4 kids (2 boys & 2 girls), then both boys may get private education, at the cost of their own sisters not getting any. Then, the uproar in the West becomes that girls are not getting educational opportunities. How can a poor family does that? That poor family is merely trying to increase the chances of breaking out of poverty cycle by getting their boys educated, who will of course, make more money than their girls will ever earn (even if they also get private education).

Similar to that, in US, for instance, many high-profile individuals in the country, have had a privileged background, from early educational opportunities to all the way to very nice employment opportunities. In Canada, we have this French immersion school system is apparently helping in the creation of social classes, & that's on top of the fact that there is a private school system (religious & secular), which of course, has its education quality just on a separate level than the public school system.

Where is that oft-spoken fairness & justice in this world???
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http://www.macleans.ca/education/just-say-non-the-problem-with-french-immersion/

Hannah Spencer isn’t the kind of mom who leaves anything to chance. When she wasn’t keen on her child attending the English-only school in their zone of Salmon Arm, B.C., preferring her daughter study French immersion at Bastion Elementary, she sent out her husband, Cody, one Saturday night in 2012 to wait by the district’s education centre to check if anyone had lined up already. With limited enrolment, registration was first-come, first-served & Cody was early. Sign-up started on Wednesday.

“We heard about other years with the lineup forming & finishing within an hour,” Hannah says. “If you didn’t get there fast enough, you would miss out.”

Cody slept in the family vehicle that night & the police noticed him parked outside the centre. When he told the officer of his wife’s request, the response was apt: The officer called a few RCMP colleagues, who also wanted their kids enrolled in French immersion, & warned them the lineup was imminent. When Cody decided to start the line around 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, right next to him was a local RCMP parent.
 
Pretty soon, the news had spread to Chantelle Prentice, 25 km away in Enderby, B.C. Looking at the Fraser Institute’s elementary school rankings, she figured the two top schools her son could attend were Bastion Elementary or the private school King’s Christian, but the latter wasn’t ideal for the non-religious family. The only way to get her son into her school of choice was to sign him up for French immersion—& quick. “The anxiety level was huge,” Prentice remembers. “When I was driving into Salmon Arm, I should have got a speeding ticket.”

Prentice arrived at 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, 3 days before registration opened, & was the seventh parent in line for the 17 kindergarten openings. By 5:50 the following morning, all the spots were spoken for. That’s if everyone stuck around. Only a family member was allowed to relieve someone from waiting.
This was especially stressful for Hannah Spencer, who covered 13 hours of waiting during the day while her husband was at work. She was 9 months pregnant with their third child & hoping the baby could wait until at least Thursday. After all, if she got her first daughter, Alyvia, into the French immersion program, her younger son Pierce & the then-unborn baby could later enroll automatically without the wait. “We camped out for 3 days,” she says. “That’s only a day per kid.”

French-English bilingualism rates may be on the decline in Canada, but when it comes to getting kids into French immersion programs—which have come to be seen by many as a free private school within the public school system—there is nothing, it seems, that a Canadian parent won’t do.
 
Alyvia is now in Grade 2 & loving French classes. But for every student who graduates from French immersion, there’s at least one other who has been bumped out of the program & put into an English-only stream that many deem inferior. Well-meaning parents may feel that French immersion is the answer for every child. In reality, it has become an elitist, overly restrictive system, geared to benefit a certain type of student.
 
Decades worth of French immersion studies can testify to its benefits. Children learn another language without any detrimental effect to their English skills. Working memory, used in activities like math, is improved, especially among those aged 5 to 7. Even reading scores in English are significantly higher for French immersion students than non-immersion students, according to a 2004 study, which noted the higher socio-economic background of French immersion students alone could not account for the stark difference.
 
Plus, there are the added work opportunities later in life, not to mention better pay. Outside Quebec, bilingual men earn on average 3.8% more than their unilingual counterparts, according to a 2010 study out of the University of Guelph. Bilingual women, meanwhile, earn 6.6% more on average. Within Quebec, those numbers are even more pronounced.
 
In 1977, more than a decade after French immersion’s introduction, the program enrolled 45,000 students across the country. That number steadily increased to more than 342,000 students by 2011. “I’m not even sure that number even accurately reflects what the real demand is, because the constraint on availability is classroom spaces, teachers & resources,” says Lisa Marie Perkins, former national executive director of Canadian Parents for French, a non-profit volunteer advocacy group. “If there weren’t things like lotteries & caps, I think you’d actually see the numbers being greater.”

Pierre Trudeau had a vision of a unified, bilingual country when he pushed for the first Official Languages Act, which passed in 1969, but the school system has not kept up with the challenge. A dearth of French teachers causes school divisions to spend extra resources on the hunt for those who are qualified; community schools get uprooted if they push out the English program to make it French immersion-only; & the program loses a staggering number of students.

“What a program like French immersion does is it siphons off those kids who have engaged families who make sure the kids do all their homework,” says Andrew Campbell, a Grade 5 teacher in Brantford, Ont. “Because of that, the opportunities in the rest of the system are affected because the modelling & interaction those kids would provide for the other kids in the system aren’t there anymore.”

The immersion program creates division along lines of gender, social class & special needs students, wrote a 2008 study from the Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy looking at French immersion in New Brunswick. Girls are more likely to be enrolled than boys & the French stream has fewer kids in need of extra help. All things being equal in New Brunswick, every class—French or English—should have 3.4 students with special needs. But when a school offered French immersion, the average number of special needs students ending up in the English stream was 5.7. This kind of segregation is not unique to that province.
 
The richer the family, the more likely their kids will be immersed in French, according to figures from a Toronto District School Board study. In 2009-10, 23% of all French immersion students came from families in the top 10% of income. Meanwhile, only 4% of French immersion students came from the bottom 10% of family income.

“The program is open to lots of people, but it gets whittled down,” says Nancy Wise, a French immersion educational consultant & former special education teacher in the York region, just outside Toronto. “If you can’t cut it, you probably fall into one of these categories: [you’re a] new Canadian, this is your third language, you’ve got some learning challenges, or there’s a socio-economic factor. They jump on it in the schools & show them the door—& it’s just not right.”

Over the past 20 years, on average approximately 235,000 immigrants have come to Canada each year, & more than 80% of them speak neither French nor English as a native tongue, according to Statistics Canada. One-third of allophone students—those whose mother tongue is neither French nor English—reported their school discouraging their enrolment in a French second-language education, according to a 2008 study commissioned by Canadian Parents for French.

“New Canadians, or those who speak languages other than English at home, are told something along the lines of: ‘English is enough of a challenge for you & your family. Why don’t you stick to the English language program?’ ” Wise says. “There’s no research evidence to support that kind of discouragement.” But it happens.
 
In Vancouver last year, more than 34% of kindergarten to Grade 7 students in the English core program were ESL students, according to data obtained by the Vancouver Sun. For French immersion, ESL students accounted for 2% of the classes. Vancouver students with special needs, meanwhile, accounted for 8% of enrolment in the English-only stream last year; French immersion had lower than half that percentage.
“The special ed people who can handle those with learning challenges are far fewer in French immersion schools—& that’s because of the disproportionate number of children with those needs in English,” Wise says. “It all goes round & round & we keep perpetuating this elitist characterization of French immersion.

“If we’re going to offer this program,” she adds, “how can we justify it if we don’t give kids—from whatever background—the tools they need to succeed?” For all of French immersion’s successes among its pupils, when it comes to embracing all Canadians, the system is far from incroyable.
 
If registration into French immersion is limited, who gets in? “I do think it’s unfair—& I also think it’s not unfair—to do this lineup thing [in Salmon Arm],” Chantelle Prentice admits. “Who can take 3 days off work? What are you going to do with your children?”

Other school divisions register over the phone to avoid the annual sit-and-wait, though parents inevitably find ways to better their odds with tactics like “calling parties,” which involves multiple family members flooding the enrolment centre’s phone lines at the same time once registration opens. A lottery system, while evening the odds, boils down a child’s opportunity at French immersion to the luck of the draw. And it’s not always an unlucky 2 or 3 left out. At École Whitehorse Elementary, in the Yukon this year, there were enough kindergarten students on the wait list for French immersion to fill up an entire classroom. The territory’s education minister has promised to find them all room.
 
In some districts, however, there is no cap on enrolment, but that’s causing other headaches. In the Halton school district in Burlington, Ont., Margo Shuttleworth’s two boys are very happy studying French at Pineland Public School, but she’s not so thrilled with the school’s recent conversion to a single-track French immersion program to keep up with demand. Neighbours who wanted to see their toddlers one day study in the English-only stream no longer have Pineland as an option. “They’re taking a walk to school away from the communities who live here & busing them to another school, so they can bus other children into school for French immersion,” she says. “I don’t think French immersion should take precedence over a community school.”

Meanwhile, in Winnipeg’s south district, enrolment at the French immersion-only École LaVérendrye is “bursting at the seams,” says Winnipeg School Division board chairman Mark Wasyliw. The school was built for 300 students, but is projected to have more than 360 students come September. “Music rooms, art rooms, all those things you take for granted in a modern school system, they’ve all been converted into classrooms,” Wasyliw adds. “It’s affecting programming. These kids aren’t getting the quality & level of education they need.”

One solution can be found a few blocks away at the century-old Earl Grey School, which has fewer than 250 students enrolled but can accommodate a few hundred more. Some parents at LaVérendrye are lobbying for a school swap. Students at Earl Grey could easily fit within LaVérendrye’s walls, while LaVérendrye’s student population could continue to grow in Earl Grey’s building. Simple switch, right? It’s not.

“Earl Grey, demographically, is poor,” Wasyliw says, adding it has a lot of students from single-parent families & a high Aboriginal population. It houses a nursery, & there is a community centre next door for at-risk youth. “We move, we lose that proximity to the [community] centre,” says Darryl Balasko, the parent advisory council chair at Earl Grey.
 
Some Earl Grey parents, meanwhile, have suggested it become a dual-track French immersion school—hosting both French immersion & English-core students—to take some pressure off LaVérendrye’s capacity, but therein lies another problem. “You don’t want the English kids mixing with the French kids because that dilutes the whole purpose of being in an immersion setting,” Wasyliw says.
 
Yet the dogma of speaking French exclusively in the classroom may hinder some learning opportunites, says Jim Cummins, a University of Toronto professor & expert in second-language acquisition. For example, if a word like accélération comes up in French class, teachers could highlight its similarities to the English word, such as the “-tion” suffix. “It’s not a mortal sin to say: ‘Does this word remind you of anything in English?’ ” Cummins says. “Pointing those things out to students increases their sensitivity to language & increases their competence in both languages.”

In Oakville, Ont., Amanda Lee’s son, Conan, was struggling in early French immersion. The school had little support for him in French, she says, & paying for a tutor at home didn’t help him keep up. By Grade 2, “one of his teachers recommended we pull him out,” Lee says. A year later, they did. “It got to the point where we thought that we were burdening him too much,” she adds. “If he was struggling in two languages then we felt we need to take some of that load off him.”

While Conan’s story may resonate with many parents, research suggests pulling a child from French immersion is not always the solution. “These kids who struggle in school, they do just as well in an immersion program as similar children in a non-immersion program,” says Fred Genesee, a leading researcher on dual-language education at McGill University. “The additional challenge of doing all this in a second language doesn’t seem to be harder for them than doing it in a first language. At the same time, they become bilingual.” In effect, if a child is struggling with math in French, the problem might simply be with math, regardless of the language.

“If French immersion is really that good, let’s offer it to everyone. Let’s put it in every school,” says Campbell, the teacher. “The fact that we don’t do that says something about what the cachet of the program really is.”

The perception of weaker students being filtered into the English-only program then becomes more of an incentive for parents who consider their children among the best & brightest to enroll in French immersion. But at what cost to the English-track schools?

“Kids that are in low-income areas use French immersion as a way to get out of those schools,” Campbell says. “When I taught in Toronto, there were kids who lived in Lawrence Heights who would take a 35-minute [transit] ride to a French immersion school because the parents didn’t want their kids going to a school in that neighbourhood.”

Denise Davy, a mother from Burlington, says she pulled her daughter out of Pineland, where French immersion was prioritized, because the English program was so bad. “There were no supports, nothing available for my daughter who was struggling,” she says. “I’m not against bilingualism,” but she does take issue with “the ripple effect the [French immersion] demand is having on other programs.”

Parents who first enroll their kids in French immersion are quick to boast about their little ones speaking both of Canada’s official languages one day, but odds are they don’t think about their child being one of the many that drop out. “You start out with a school that has five classes in Grade 1, & by the time you hit Grade 8 there are two classes,” says Nancy Wise, the French immersion educational consultant.
 
For the 2007-08 school year in B.C. public schools, 4,281 Grade 6 students were part of the French immersion program, thanks to an influx of late immersion students. By the time that age group reached Grade 12 last year, approximately 2,230 remained. Meanwhile in New Brunswick, Canada’s only officially bilingual province, of the 1,469 anglophone students that entered early French immersion back in 1995, less than half (only 612) stayed with the program into Grade 12, according to a 2008 report.
 
From those Grade 12 students who then took an oral proficiency test, 99% achieved at least an “intermediate” score, but only 42% reached the mark of “advanced or higher.” So, what about dreams of fluently bilingual kids with the perfect accents? “I think we were naive,” says Genesee. “It can’t happen if you’re only using a language five hours a day, five days a week for 10 months of the year.”

What happens after high school graduation? Turns out native English speakers living outside Canada’s sole francophone province are rather poor at keeping up their French skills as they get older. In 1996, 15% of 15- to 19-year-old anglophones outside Quebec could conduct a conversation in both of Canada’s official languages. Fast forward 15 years & the bilingualism rate for 30- to 35-year-olds in 2011 was 8%.
 
Many of today’s youngsters are part of Canada’s second generation of French immersion students, the children of those who themselves took French immersion. The first wave, however, didn’t produce a giant pool of French teachers. In Winnipeg, Wasyliw says his division is running out of qualified teachers to keep up with demand. “We’re in the middle of budget discussions now & we’re going to spend money on recruitment teams that will be going to Quebec & eastern Ontario to basically start convincing native francophone teachers to immigrate to Manitoba.”

If only things were perfect in La Belle Province. Last November, when the alternative French class of an English-language high school in Châteauguay, Que., saw three teachers go on parental leaves & a fourth teacher didn’t work out, students were left with the computer program Rosetta Stone as the substitute teacher, with a non-French teacher supervising.
 
Canada’s French immersion system was once a model for the world, but it now lags behind countries in Europe where the European Union’s “mother tongue plus two” benchmark—hatched during a 2002 summit—set an ambitious goal for students to learn their native tongue plus two foreign languages. In a 2012 survey of 14 European countries, 42% of 15-year-olds could keep up a conversation in at least one foreign language. The European Commission’s goal is to boost that to at least 50% by 2020. The commission also set out to have at least 75% of students in lower secondary education studying at least two foreign tongues by 2020, compared to the 61% at the time of the report.
 
Credit Europe’s geography, which offers a multitude of cultures & languages in close proximity. Or the Internet & Hollywood for pushing English to the forefront globally. Regardless, Europeans will have plenty more than just one language on their CV in a global economy. According to EU data, more than half of all Europeans are already able to hold a conversation in a second language, while a quarter are able to do so in a third language. Even 10% can keep up a conversation in a fourth language.

“The world is going global & wanting to learn other languages,” says Genesee. “In Canada, we’ve been doing this for 50 years, but rather than expanding these programs, we’re putting a lid on them.”