A lot of Nepalese people go abroad to work, to places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. After the earthquake, many of them very naturally wanted to go home to help family and friends. But there’s a catch…

Hundreds of thousands of Nepalese construction worker have been unable to go home, unable to check on their families and homes after last month’s massive earthquake. That’s according to the International Trade Union Confederation or ITUC. These are migrants working in Gulf states, and their jobs are controlled by a contract system that requires them to remain in the country where they’re employed for two years. Under the system of sponsorship called kefala, you can’t enter the country or leave it without permission from your sponsor. Last week, the ITUC announced it had written to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to ask them to suspend that system.

And of course Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all eagerly agreed, and rushed to help facilitate? No. They haven’t even replied to the ITUC. NPR’s Robert Siegel talked to Tim Noonan, the director of campaigns and communications for the ITUC.

SIEGEL: Have you received a response from any of the countries I just mentioned that the kefala system might be waived to allow Nepalis to go back home?

NOONAN: No. It’s been several days now since we took contact with the authorities in those three countries to ask them to suspend the kefala restrictions. Unfortunately, we haven’t heard a response, and the information that we’re getting on the ground is that there is a serious and growing problem.

SIEGEL: A problem of Nepali workers wanting to go home and not being allowed to by their sponsors, contractors say.

NOONAN: That’s correct. The law requires migrant workers to have permission from their employer to leave the country. No change or suspension to that kefala law has been made. We do understand that some larger companies have been allowing, even helping, Nepalese workers to go home, but it’s really only a trickle. We know that many more haven’t been able to get that permission from their employer, and the governments are leaving those rules in place.

How humane, how compassionate, how caring and empathetic and full of human solidarity. Not.

How many people is this? A million. Half a million in Saudi, more than 300 thousand in Qatar, 200 thousand in the UAE.

SIEGEL: Is there any precedent for the kefala system ever being suspended because of any particular emergency?

NOONAN: To our knowledge, in relation to these three countries, no. There have, however, been in other countries. For example, in Bahrain, where there are still a large number of labor-related problems, the government did reform the kefala system and do away with the exit permit system. So Gulf countries can do this. It’s just a matter of whether they want to live according to modern rules or whether they want to remain in a feudal employment situation, which is the case in these three countries at the moment.

Zakat? Isn’t that one of the 5 pillars? I’m not seeing much zakat here.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

IS says IS did it.

Islamic State (IS) has said that it was behind the attack on a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in the US state of Texas.

It said that “two soldiers of the caliphate” carried out the attack at a conference centre near Dallas.

My first thought was to wonder why they would demand credit for such a failure.

My second thought was how stupid am I. That’s exactly what I thought about the embassy bombings, too, and it turned out to be a staggeringly stupid thing to think. The fact that one adventure goes badly means nothing. It sure as hell doesn’t mean that the next one won’t go swimmingly.

Correspondents say that it is believed to be the first time that IS has claimed to have carried out an attack in the US.

“We tell America that what is coming will be even bigger and more bitter, and that you will see the soldiers of the Islamic State do terrible things,” the statement released by the group said.

I’m sure we will.

The BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner offers some analysis.

This is obviously not the first jihadist attack to take place on the US mainland, but if Islamic State is able to prove that it planned and directed it – rather than just staking a claim after the event – then that would be a significant development.

It is also possible that IS’s claim is one of convenience, that it played little or no part in the attack.

In some ways, it was a failure. The attackers did not get near the actual event organisers or speakers and the two gunmen ended up being the only ones killed, shot down not by a SWAT team, but by a traffic policeman.

But that would be to miss the point. For IS, this is all about publicity and the generation of fear. The message they want to give Americans is: “You’re not safe in your own backyard, this was just the beginning and there are more attacks to come”.

And why wouldn’t that be true? Especially in the US, where the citizens are steeped in a culture of violence from birth; where guns are a religion of their own; where religion is almost as popular as violence. How could IS fail to be hugely alluring here, with its throbbing combination of fanatical religion and bloodsoaked violence? Of course IS is going to be able to find thousands of eager volunteers to do the promised “terrible things.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

House Republicans vote to punish the women of DC.

Late Thursday night, the House of Representatives voted in favor of “H.J.Res. 43: Disapproving the action of the District of Columbia Council in approving the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Amendment Act of 2014.” If enacted, the legislation would make using employer-based health insurance for in vitro fertilization or birth control pills a fireable offense in Washington, D.C.

So women can have that kind of insurance, I guess, but if they use it, they can be fired. Mind you, people can be fired for any reason or no reason anyway, but there was a law making an exception of this very thing, which the Republicans voted to overturn.

When I entered the Gallery, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) was imploring her Republican colleagues not to use the federal authority vested in them by people from other states to overturn local laws in Washington, D.C.

I sat down near D.C. voting rights activists who were attending the hearing and began to take notes on a steno pad. A congressional staffer came over and informed me I was not allowed to take notes.

Not allowed to take notes? You can watch Congress in action but you can’t take notes? What kind of stupid rule is that? Stupid and undemocratic, that is.

Though its population is greater than that of either Vermont or Wyoming, Washington, D.C. (whose population is about 50 percent black) has limited presidential voting rights, no vote in Congress, and the inability to raise local revenues or pass local laws without Congressional permission.

For over a decade, for example, the U.S. Congress made it a federal crime for the D.C. government to spend locally-raised tax dollars for HIV prevention programming. Today, the District has one of the highest HIV rates in the nation.

Good job, Congress. Brilliant.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Padraig Reidy drew up a little list of talking points for the Garland shootings, to save everyone some effort.

Geller’s organization is racist, people have every right to this that and the other, people don’t have the right to kill.

The last two are less obvious and less invoked.

8. The people who attempt to shoot others for drawing cartoons do not do so in order to combat Islamophobia. If anything, they do so to encourage Islamophobia. Jihadists and Caliph-chasers have a vested interest in division between Muslims and non-Muslims
9. Well-meaning though it may be, casting jihadist attacks as a symptom of “Muslim anger” is to buy into stereotypes of Muslims as irrational and violent, and ignore the complexity of Islamist and jihadist politics

Here’s my addition: Pamela Geller is not an ally of secular liberals.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More on Mayweather’s history of beating up women and the way people are hiding it so that other people will pay lots of money to watch him punch a man.

Ignore the police reports, the court records, and his own plea deals, he says into the camera lens, never an ounce of doubt on his face, because there are no pictures. It’s a cliché of Internet life—pics or it didn’t happen—and one that Mayweather has leveraged into making it okay for millions of sports fans to plunk down $100 to watch him fight Manny Pacquiao without an ounce of doubt about putting money directly in the pocket of a misogynist.

To Rachel Nichols: “Once again, no pictures. Just hearsay and allegations.”

To Katie Couric: “Did I kick, stomp and beat someone? No, that didn’t happen. I look in your face and say, ‘No, that didn’t happen.’”

But, Diana Moskovitz reports, there are pictures, but we don’t get to see them.

In at least two cases of domestic violence, official records show pictures were taken. In one case, a police report explicitly says that the photos show a victim’s injuries. But authorities in Las Vegas, a city poised to make millions off Floyd this weekend, have either destroyed the photos or haven’t released them.

Because, after all, it’s just women. It’s not as if he hit anyone important.

We shouldn’t need to see the pictures. The overwhelming evidence should be enough. The guilty and no contest pleas should be enough. The words of so many women should be enough. But seeing pictures—in all their grotesqueness and horror—is unfortunately the only way to prove a man hit a woman. It’s part of why officers take these pictures, to show a judge and a jury what happened.

“When you’re in a front of a judge, you describe the injuries written in the complaint, the bruising, the swelling, the blood,” prosecutor Scott E. Kessler told the New York Times for a 2007 story about how digital cameras were changing domestic violence investigations. “But until a person sees another human being with those injuries, with the swelling, the blood, the bruising, it’s hard to get that point across.”

He was proven right last year, when TMZ published the video of Ray Riceknocking out his future wife, Janay, with one swift punch. Before the video was published, Rice was poised to return to football after a short suspension. Afterward, Rice was gone for an entire season and dumped by his team. He’s still searching for a chance to play.

There has been no elevator-tape moment for Mayweather, though, despite his long and well-documented history of beating up women, and there probably never will be.

Las Vegas has made sure of it.

It’s Chinatown, Jake.

H/t Marcus Ranum

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by AJ Milne on Refrain from laughter.

Philosophical documents on laughter, religious statements and mandates forbidding laughter–all these provide instructions on how and when and how hard to laugh. They designate the proper attitude one should take toward laughter, because laughter is our last “sense” to capitulate to authority…

… Imagine, then, being firmly seated in a position of authority and knowing that at any second the power to control and direct could be cut short by the lowliest peon–not with a Molotov cocktail or an Uzi automatic, but with riotous laughter…

(Barry Sanders, from Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History.)

… I figure it should be entirely unsurprising, whenever ‘prophets’ or the authorities who try to reuse their creed to cement their own power attempt to forbid laughter. Read the work of the former, and you have to figure that was the first reaction of much of the audience; initially, at least, they have hope it works out, and they get enough people to buy the line together to get a certain critical mass going. But ongoing laughter no doubt worries them, even once this is achieved. And the ‘prophet’ and their first followers, if still alive, I figure, are likely to remember this reaction bitterly. It takes them back to a very different world, when they had to be far humbler in their demands.

Religions prefer, I figure, therefore, generally to control it. Probably the only reason more of them don’t attempt so clumsily to ban it outright is this is a just a little too obvious. More subtle dissuasion will, however, do within communities, at least, once the creed is dominant enough. The rituals shall encourage a hushed, reverent attitude, or, if you are to smile, or perhaps holler or sing hallelujahs, it is to be done in a beatific, transcendent fashion. ‘Joyful’ may be okay. Leafing through the canon and cackling uproariously generally less so.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh what a surprise – two reporters who had talked about Floyd Mayweather’s history of domestic violence were banned from reporting on that big match. I’ve been growling for days about all the ridiculously excited and eager publicity for a boxing match, even from the BBC, and this item just adds to the disgust. Yay, folks, let’s get overjoyed about a “sport” that cuts out all the frills and folderol of trying to put a ball into a net and just goes straight to the part about guys punching each other. After that lets all go watch people torturing animals for amusement.

As the boxing world watches the hotly anticipated fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao—two fan favorites meeting for the first time—there are a few people who won’t be there: The sports reporters who’ve spoken openly about Mayweather’s history of domestic violence, and have publicly questioned or spoken out against supporting him as an athlete.

Does this sound at all familiar? Does it sound like Ray Rice for example? Does it sound like the long history of everyone looking hard in the opposite direction whenever people mentioned a football or basketball or boxing star’s history of punching women? It does to me.

Mayweather has had at least seven domestic violence incidents that resulted in arrests and citations against five women, including an arrest in 2010. He pled guilty in March 2002 to two counts of domestic violence for striking the mother of his children in the face with a car door in front of their family, and punching her repeatedly.

Yeah the BBC never mentioned that in its hyperventilating report on the approaching fight that I heard a few days ago. Nope; not a word.

But hey, it’s only women.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Loyalty is nice, but…

On April 30, Pastor Jim Staley plead guilty to multiple counts of felony wire fraud. The charges stem from Staley’s involvement in a complex scheme, which used phony life insurance policies, front companies, deceptive contracts and other dubious methods to defraud elderly investors out of millions of dollars. Many of those who were taken in by the scheme later said they believed that Staley was a ‘nice, religious man.’

The statements of Staley’s victims, the detailed federal indictment, even Staley’s acknowledgement of guilt in open court, seems to have had no impact on his religiously obsessed followers. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that:

“The courtroom overflowed with so many Staley supporters Thursday that some federal agents and court staff were relocated to open up more seats. After the hearing, Staley thanked members of the crowd for coming. They responded with applause.”

That’s from Addicting Info. Interesting, isn’t it – they “support” him despite knowing that he defrauded people of millions of dollars.

It’s almost as if people don’t always have good judgement.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

AQ in the subcontinent says they did it.

The leader of Al Qaeda’s branch in the Indian subcontinent has published a video claiming responsibility for the death ofAvijit Roy, an atheist Bangladeshi-American blogger who was killed by a group of men with machetes on Feb. 26 as he was leaving a book fair in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

In a nine-minute video posted on jihadist forums on Saturday, the leader of the branch, Asim Umar, said followers of his group were responsible for the killing of several people he called blasphemers: Mohammad Shakil Auj, an Islamic scholar fatally shot in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2014; Aniqa Naz, a Pakistani blogger; Rajib Haider, a blogger killed in a machete attack in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, in 2013; and Mr. Roy.

“They have taught a lesson to blasphemers in France, Denmark, Pakistan and now in Bangladesh,” Mr. Umar said in the video, which was translated and published by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online.

He went on to urge his followers to carry out more attacks, saying, “Where are those who would kill these blasphemers, wherever they may be found, even if it has to be done using a dagger or a knife, and by doing so record their names on the Day of Judgment among the devotees of the prophet?”

Nope. There is no record. There is no day of judgement. That’s all a fiction, just as Harry Potter is a fiction. The murderers won’t get any high fives from the prophet in the great hereafter.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

News from Malaysia:

An Islamic mufti has warned Malaysian comedians against telling jokes that cause excessive laughter. According to the mufti, Islam urges emotional moderation and refrain from excessive laughter, crying, or other emotional expressions.

How hellish. I can honestly not think of anything more calculated to make life grim. Maybe a rule that all food should be devoid of flavor, or a rule that sex should be like doing sit-ups, but other than that…nothing. “Excessive” laughter is a great thing, and that which causes it is a great thing. (Ok not if you’re one of those horrible people who laugh when someone falls.) If Islam urges emotional moderation then Islam is badly wrong. I’ve always disagreed with the Stoics about this, too.

Islamic law is largely based on the hadiths, which are the written narratives of Mohammad and his early follower’s lives, and Sunnah, which refers to the life and example set by the Prophet Mohammad.

The ban against excessive laughter appears to come from a statement made by Mohammad stating: “Do not laugh too much, for excessive laughter kills the heart [spiritually].”

Because it’s impure, right? Purity is being calm and dull and stable. The hell with that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It’s always so interesting to live in a time when people tweet their plans moments before opening fire:

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So not helpful.

Texas police shot dead two gunmen who opened fire on Sunday outside an exhibit of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that was organized by a group described as anti-Islamic and billed as a free-speech event.

It’s Pamela Geller’s group; Geert Wilders was there. It was a far-right event as opposed to a secular-left event. Not helpful.

The exhibit was organized by Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI). Her organization, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, has sponsored anti-Islamic advertising campaigns in transit systems across the country.

Organizers of the “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest” said the event was to promote freedom of expression. They offered a $10,000 prize for the best artwork or cartoon depicting the Prophet, as well as a $2,500 “People’s Choice Award.”

…

The mayor said the city had permitted the event even though officials knew its inflammatory theme could provoke an attack.

“There was concern, which is why we had heightened security in the area, but we all swear to uphold the Constitution, free speech, free assembly and in this case perhaps, free religion,” Athas said. “So in this case they were free to use the building.”

God what a mess. This is bound to strengthen mistaken people in their opinion that Charlie Hebdo is the same kind of thing as Geller’s contest.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

An article from the Spectator last August, by Andrew Brown…who has written many things I’ve disagreed with strongly, usually in a blog post. I think many of them were attacks on Richard Dawkins and defenses of religion.

His article contains a startling piece of information.

[T]he Richard Dawkins website offers followers the chance to join the ‘Reason Circle’, which, like Dante’s Hell, is arranged in concentric circles. For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a year — for the chance to attend an event where he will speak.

When you compare this to the going rate for other charismatic preachers, it does seem on the high side. The Pentecostal evangelist Morris Cerullo, for example, charges only $30 a month to become a member of ‘God’s Victorious Army’, which is bringing ‘healing and deliverance to the world’. And from Cerullo you get free DVDs, not just discounts.

But the $85 a month just touches the hem of rationality. After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive ‘Darwin Circle’ and then the ‘Evolution Circle’, he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins, and a reserved table at an invitation-only circle event with ‘Richard’ as well as ‘all the benefits listed above’, so he still gets a discount on his Richard Dawkins T-shirt saying ‘Religion — together we can find a cure.’

The website suggests that donations of up to $500,000 a year will be accepted for the privilege of eating with him once a year: at this level of contribution you become a member of something called ‘The Magic of Reality Circle’. I don’t think any irony is intended.

$100,000 a year or more.

Can he forgive sins? Knock a few years off the sentence in Purgatory?

That “offer” is no longer on the RDF website. I wonder if the Spectator article embarrassed them.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)