When an article starts like this, what could go wrong?

Democratic lawmakers couldn't believe their ears as they listened to Sen. Vicki Marble, R-Fort Collins, deliver a long soliloquy explaining that more blacks and Hispanics live in poverty, in part, because of fried chicken.

The exchange isn't quite as mean-spirited as you might you might expect from that intro. It's more just someone who goes on what Derek Smalls once called a free form jazz exploration/stream of consciousness soliloquy that just goes in all sorts of unfortunate directions.

An African-American Democratic Rep, Rhonda Fields, who was at the hearing went off thusly ...

"The title for this committee is the Economic Opportunity Poverty Reduction Task Force; and one of the things I will not tolerate is racist and insensitive comments about African Americans, the color of their skin. You mentioned what we eat -- I was highly offended by your remarks," Fields said, addressing Marble directly.

"I will not engage in a dialogue where I'm in the company where you are using the stereotype references about African Americans and chicken and food and all kinds of things. I will just not tolerate that," Fields continued.

"This is not what this committee is all about. So I will ask that you suspend your perceptions and judgments about African Americans, about poverty -- what we're trying to do is come up with solutions and it's not about chicken.

"It's not about eating chicken."

You can listen to the whole audio here.

I'm going on vacation for a week. Honestly, I really need it. But before I do I couldn't help leaving with you not with anything particularly insightful but something actually pretty obvious to anyone who has a brain and/or doesn't harbor a lot of racial animosity toward black people that needs to find some comeuppance or 'I told you so' about Trayvon Martin.

So here goes.

For the last week or so, the right-wing racial resentment-o-sphere has been aghast about the horrific murder of Chris Lane, 22, a young Australian in the United States on a baseball scholarship. Lane was jogging when three young kids (two black, one either mixed race or white) decided to follow and kill him. The really sociopathic nature of the crime was brought home by the fact that one of the accused assailants allegedly told the police, "We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody."

In other words, it's the Trayvon Martin case in reverse but now the liberal media is mum and President Obama isn't rallying his gangbanger peeps to get all up in arms about it. Except of course when you consider that unlike the Martin case -- where the press buzz and scandal was basically exclusively tied to the fact that George Zimmerman wasn't arrested let alone charged with anything -- two of the three boys allegedly behind Lane's killing were arrested and immediately charged with capital murder. So young thugs kill an innocent man in cold blood and then get to walk free to death row or life imprisonment in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.

Yeah, except that.

If you have any profile on the web and thought there was any problem with the Martin killing you've probably been inundated with a lot of emails or tweets or whatever jagging about the 'double standard' when the same thing happens and the races are reversed. And it's always a bit of a challenge to distinguish the people who simply are lazy or dimwitted and haven't considered the pretty obvious difference in the case that led to the media uproar in the Martin case and the majority of people searching for the 'anti-Trayvon' and hankering for evidence of the increasing struggle of white people to get a fair shake in America.

Stepping back from the projectile vomit of ignorant nonsense about this tragic murder, the response to it is part and parcel of the mass of writing on the right about the growing tide of black 'mobs' killing white people. Read World Net Daily and you'll find virtually every other issue has a Birth of a Nation-like story along these lines (actually a topic I've wanted to commission a piece on for some time and one well-mocked here.)

Young black men commit murders in this country at a vastly disproportionate rate to young white men. But murder victims of both races are overwhelming killed by members of their own race. 86% of white were killed by other whites and 94% of blacks were killed by blacks, from 1976 to 2005, a period that includes the highest murder rate era of the late 20th century. The differential today is likely lower since as murder rates have declined to historic levels over the last 20 years, the fall has been particularly sharp among black men - a small data point that among other things lends some additional credence to the theory that lead poisoning was a significant driver of crime rates in the late 20th century.

This is the part where this kind of article falls back to say, well, race is complicated. It's not as simple as it was in the old days. But actually, it's still not that complicated. This whole episode amounts to little more than another plea from the subsection of aggrieved white Americans who still crave both social dominance and to sit at the front of the racial victimization bus.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBmMU_iwe6U

(via #dadwizard)

Aug 22, 2013 by Roberto Cortijo

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The discovery in Peru of another tomb belonging to a pre-Hispanic priestess, the eighth in more than two decades, confirms that powerful women ruled this region 1,200 years ago, archeologists said.

The remains of the woman from the Moche—or Mochica—civilization were discovered in late July in an area called La Libertad in the country's northern Chepan province.

It is one of several finds in this region that have amazed scientists. In 2006, researchers came across the famous "Lady of Cao"—who died about 1,700 years ago and is seen as one of the first female rulers in Peru.

"This find makes it clear that women didn't just run rituals in this area but governed here and were queens of Mochica society," project director Luis Jaime Castillo told AFP.

"It is the eighth priestess to be discovered," he added. "Our excavations have only turned up tombs with women, never men."

The priestess was in an "impressive 1,200-year-old burial chamber" the archeologist said, pointing out that the Mochica were known as master craftsmen.

"The burial chamber of the priestess is 'L'-shaped and made of clay, covered with copper plates in the form of waves and sea birds," Castillo said.

Near the neck is a mask and a knife, he added.

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The tomb, decorated with pictures in red and yellow, also has ceramic offerings—mostly small vases—hidden in about 10 niches on the side.

"Accompanying the priestess are bodies of five children, two of them babies, and two adults, all of whom were sacrificed," Castillo said, noting there were two feathers atop the coffin.

Julio Saldana, the archeologist responsible for work in the burial chamber, said the discovery of the tomb confirms the village of San Jose de Moro is a cemetery of the Mochica elite, with the most impressive tombs belonging to women.

Original Source

Pair In Las Vegas Plotted To Kill Police RTT News Police have arrested two members of the anti-government group Sovereign Citizens for planning to kidnap and kill police officers, the Las Vegas Sun reports. Las Vegas Metro Police have charged David Allen Brutsche, 42, and Devon Campbell Newman, 67, ... and more »

Out of the hundreds of parked vehicles we passed, most had rectangular disabled permits hanging from rearview mirrors. In Portland, that means the drivers can stay put all day without dropping a single dime into the meter. Unbelievably, we encountered entire blocks of parked cars –five, six, seven in a row – all displaying disabled placards. Hours later, just before quitting time, nearly all of them were still there. They range from polished BMWs to beat-up pickups and a Nissan Leaf plugged into a charging station. But there wasn't one wheelchair-equipped vehicle. Not one. I want to be delicate here. So, I'll let City Commissioner Steve Novick, born without a left hand and missing the fibula bones in his legs, say what I'm thinking: "The idea that more than half of the people with business in the core area of downtown Portland have disabilities that preclude them from using parking meters or other forms of transportation frankly strains credulity." That's Novick in a letter sent last week to Portland's 4-year-old Disabled Parking Task Force, which was supposed to find a fix to this problem. So far, it hasn't, largely because it's afraid of somehow offending the city's disabled community. Ironically, it's the city commissioner with obvious disabilities, a renowned 4-foot-9 champion of the disadvantaged, someone fresh off his own shocking walk-along with a parking officer, who is finally pushing the group to get its job done. "If they can't come up with something," Novick told me, "then we're going to have to come up with a proposal on our own, possibly based on what's happening in other cities." Frankly, the fix is easy: Charge for parking. Portland estimates that it loses an estimated $2.4 million to disability-permit abuse every year. It's impossible to know how much cash isn't landing in the tills of downtown businesses, which rely on regular turnover in the city's scarce parking spaces.

A gay transgendered person who leaks U.S. military secrets -- Bradley Manning is like the final boss in a Republican videogame.

via http://annyas.com/1980s-horror-movie-poster-logos-typography/

Put down the pitchforks, restaurants; a new study proves you have nothing to fear from the city's proliferation of food trucks. Global information company NPD Group conducted a survey addressing awareness of respondents to mobile food options and also determined where people would eat if not at a food truck. Turns out that quick service restaurants like McDonald's or a local deli have more to fear from the mobile invasion than your corner bistro. [ more › ]

Abigail Brady, who edits the site as Morwen, explains the polite notes and not-votes behind the scenes.

Picture in Picture

Faced with credible accusations of gender inequality in the bylines of the august New York Review of Books — which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary — longtime editor Robert Silvers had two choices: publish more women or mansplain why The New York Review so obviously favors male writers. Lamentably, he chose the later. Guess how that's gone over.

Since 2010, an organization called VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has published a study called "The Count," which, in the organization's own words, charts "the rates of publication between women and men in many of our writing world’s most respected literary outlets." Many of our finest publications come off looking poorly, but The New York Review's bias appears to be especially flagrant:

 

And then came a recent issue of the Review that was almost hilariously absent of women (well, OK, there was an essay Joan Didion — but it was a reprint of an older piece, so...), which, according to a thorough Village Voice report, led VIDA members to send a letter to Silvers that led, in part:

We write to express our disappointment with NYRoB's editorial practices. Your organization's ongoing dismissal of women writers generally is exhibited yet again in your August 15th issue. That issue included 26 pieces by male writers and 1 by a female writer. Of the 29 books reviewed, only four were written or co-written by women.

...

In a country in which women represent the majority of literary consumers, this gender bias on your part has come to appear willful, or else weirdly tone deaf to the cultural conversation happening around you.

It should be noted that the preceding issue of The Review had elicited a similar outcry, with Salon positing that the publication has "a woman problem."

Silvers, according to The Voice, has responded to VIDA with a letter of his own, one that does not appear to have allayed concerns. Silvers wrote: 

In response to recent comments about contributions by women to the New York Review, I want to say that we certainly hope to publish more women writers. But I wonder if our critics have fairly considered the many reviews, essays, and poems by women that have appeared in the Review and on the Review's blog. A list of their contributions just during our last year of publication follows. No one who has read the work of these writers could say that the New York Review dismisses the work of women writers generally, or that the New York Review "believes women have little to add to our country's literary conversation." 

He then proceeds to list women who have written for both the print edition of the Review and the NYRblog. As The Voice notes, there's little reason to do so, since VIDA had already counted female contributors. Merely putting them in list form may look impressive, but it does not obscure basic facts. After all, a similar list of male contributors would be significantly longer.

Nor were others mollified by Silvers's response. This morning, The Daily Dot ran an item that said, flatly, "the NYRB has so far failed to get the memo that inclusivity matters to, well, most of publishing at this point." 

Twitter, too, has been aflame with indignation, a good part of it coming — refreshingly — from men:

NYRB's feeble response to the VIDA count: http://t.co/fwX5iXDhy8

— DanielleLaVaqueManty (@dlavaque) August 23, 2013

The editor of NYRB mancounts all those women he's published for the benefit of those who'd written to him http://t.co/KkRw1AVQEx

— Stephen Murray (@smurray38) August 23, 2013

WOW. Completely tone-deaf reply from editor of @nybooks on the # of women in its pages. http://t.co/xaYLAhilBJ

— Charlotte Prong (@CharsBooks) August 22, 2013

Sexism at New York Review of Books: It publishes mostly men, responds to criticism w/ condescending form letter. http://t.co/EgPEkv9vtS

— Michael Pilla (@michaelpilla) August 22, 2013

The New York Review of Books: Still practising cultural femicide: http://t.co/t7GdHPER9K via @bimadew

— Louise Pennington (@LeStewpot) August 22, 2013

Perhaps the greatest irony here is that The New York Review of Books was co-founded by Barbara Epstein. Writing of the female greats who once found a home in The Review (Didion, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy), Michelle Dean of Flavorwire argued, "every time they do something like this they are betraying a part of what made The Review the institution it now is: the women who formed it." Amen to that.

Original Source

BOSTON (AP) — Police in Boston are investigating fatal late-night shooting near Copley Square.

The Independent this morning published an article - which it repeatedly claims comes from "documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden." There's just one problem. Snowden says he's never worked with the paper.

Uber has squirmed its way through a number of obstinate legal blockades to continue offering its on-demand taxi services, and it looks like the effort is paying off: according to a public filing spotted by All Things D, Uber is now valued at around $3.5 billion. And it appears that Google has taken notice in a big way — both ATD and TechCrunch are reporting that Google Ventures, an investment arm of Google, has invested around $250 million into the startup. TechCrunch reports that it's Google Venture's largest investment to date, and it should give Uber plenty of room to grow. Neither company has publicly addressed the rumor yet however, and Uber tells us that it doesn't have anything to announce at this time.

Despite the pushback...

Continue reading…

"The mining town of Chiatura, Georgia, surrounded by steep cliffs, is criss-crossed by a network of aging Soviet-era aerial tramways that are still in use today. In the early 20th century, after the U.S.S.R. annexed Georgia, Soviet authorities were intent on extracting the vast manganese deposits beneath Chiatura. In the 1950s, planners began work on what locals call the 'Kanatnaya Doroga,' or 'rope road,' that still connects almost every corner of the town." Stalin's Rope Roads.

After almost three decades working the counter at Capone Foods in Somerville’s Union Square, Albert Capone has become a stranger in his own city. “It’s gone from townies to hipsters,” he said on a recent evening. “The hats, the tattoos, the tight skinny jeans — on the guys. It’s like they’re trying to out-hip each other.”

Green Day—and I say this as someone who has every note and every word of Dookie burned into my each of my neurons, where they will remain until I die—was never, shall we say, a bastion of admirable punk ideology, but it's still strange to see the proto-pop-punkers just... keep on milking as they barrel into their (holy shit) 40s. Next up: A documentary about their musical about their once-timely political rock opera.

Broadway Idiot, which chronicles the theater adaptation of Green Day's American Idiot, is set to hit the big screen on October 18, it was announced Thursday.

The documentary will begin a special theatrical engagement in New York on Oct. 11 before hitting theaters in the TheU.S. and Canada and video on demand a week later....

Directed by Doug Hamilton, the title looks at the challenges of adapting the multi-platinum punk-rock opera into the 2010 Broadway production. Broadway Idiot debuted at the South by Southwest Festival earlier this year. (Via.)

I was in college the one and only time I saw the Rolling Stones in concert, and they were far, far past their expiration date—seeing Jagger was still impressive, and it wasn't a bad show or anything, but it was also profoundly odd to be watching them while sitting behind a rich-looking fat dude who was wearing what had to be at least a $500 leather jacket emblazoned with the Stones' tongue logo. I remember thinking that it'd probably be kind of weird to see the bands I grew up with when, and if, they ever got to a similar point. Now I know, and yep, it's pretty weird.

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List of new or revised Library of Congress subject headings approved by the weekly editorial meeting of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Policy and Standards Division on August 4, 2010

Sam Treadway, the bar manager and co-owner of Backbar was feeling a bit of pressure as he prepared to debut his watering hole in December 2011.

Here are a few of Back Bar’s most popular recipes. “You’ll notice that I like to utilize rinses and floats to create an interesting aroma that is slightly different from the actual sip,” Sam Treadway says.

Wearable Mosques are clothes that can be fashioned into minimal Islamic prayer spaces. These portable religious devices represent ways of negotiating spatial relationships between Islamic traditions and modernity. While accommodating the ritual prayer of at least two worshippers, a wearable mosque functions both as a community-making device and as an intermediary between the material and the spiritual worlds. The design of wearable mosques is meant to express both the multi-layered identities of their users and the cultural context. As a form of cultural protest, they allow for claiming democratic rights to religious and cultural expression. Azra Aksamija, Ph.D., is the Class of 1922 Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor of Art in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. In her multi-disciplinary work, Aksamija investigates the politics of identity and memory on the scale of the body (clothing and wearable technologies), on the civic scale (religious architecture and cultural institutions), and within the context of history and global cultural flows.

FALMOUTH, Mass. (AP) — A bobcat has been spotted on Cape Cod for the first time in centuries, according to state and local wildlife experts who reviewed a video shot by a Falmouth man earlier this month.

Benedict Cumberbatch has left the cast of Crimson Peak, one month before his Julian Assange biopic opens the Toronto Film festival. Sources told The Hollywood Reporter the departure wasn’t caused by another project and the paper reminds us that many of Cumberbatch’s “completed films will hit screens” before year end. Guillermo del Toro’s ghost thriller — which currently boasts Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska (who replaced Emma Stone back in June), and Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam — doesn't begin shooting until January, giving the notoriously busy director plenty of time to find a replacement. There’s currently no word on who might take the British actor's role in the gothic horror story, but we’d like to suggest Matthew Goode.

Read more posts by Delia Paunescu

Filed Under: guillermo del toro ,crimson peak ,casting couch ,benedict cumberbatch

Bradley Manning, sentenced to 35 years in military prison for the biggest breach of classified U.S. documents in U.S. history, said in a statement on Thursday he is female and wants to live as a woman named Chelsea.

Man about to get on the T without a CharlieCard.Some MIT students (natch) say they've figured out how to build the guts of CharlieCards into stylish rings, which would let anyone, even a super hero in green tights, ride the T without fumbling for their plastic card.

They've set up a Kickstarter to raise funds for mass production of the rings via 3D printing - which they say will let them sell rings in a variety of colors and even with circuitry shaped into particular four-letter words (such as "EMMA" and "YOLO").

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Original Source

Francis Ford Coppola—director of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The Outsiders—is a big fan of Trapped In The Closet. That’s what Phoenix’s Thomas Mars says, anyway. Mars, who's married to Sophia Coppola and whose band recently released a remix with R. Kelly, told Pitchfork all about the time he showed his father-in-law Kelly’s magnum opus. Quoth Mars, “I remember him sitting there in silence for 10 minutes and then saying, ‘This is incredible.’” All this came after Mars described watching Trapped on French TV as the “best TV experience of [his] life,” saying he remembers “dreaming about the water drop,” and adding that “it stayed with [him] for a while.”

R. Kelly is, of course, flattered, telling Pitchfork he always wanted to be a director, and that Trapped was his way of showing the filmmaking establishment that people cared what he had to say ...

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It’s high time we cleaned out our studio.

This Saturday, we’re having a huge huge sale to clean out our fabric stash, prop closet, and… pretty much everything else.

I will be selling off a TON of vintage jewelery, purses, hats and other vintage bits and bobs we’ve used for photo shoots.

We’ll also be selling lots of fabric (some shown above).

Details:

Date: Saturday, August 24 2013
Time: 10AM – 4PM (please don’t show up before 10).
Location: The lobby of The Ford Building @ 2505 SE 11th Ave, Portland, OR

A small selection of the wares:

Lots and lots of jewelery.

And bags. These are just a few.

Several pairs of shoes, including these hardly worn Bloch ballet flats (size 9), and many other shoes left over from shoots, in a variety of sizes.

We’re also selling this adorable blue rug (4X6) and cute vintage coffee table.

And gorgeous rolls of vintage wallpaper, perfect for small projects and crafts.

There is way, way more stuff, but this should give you a taste. If you’re in Portland, come on down!