Once a year, every April 12, on the steps of the capitol buildings in all the states that seceded from the United States, the Confederate flag should be burned. The ceremony should be attended by all the legislators, all the state's Supreme Court justices, and the governor. Then, when the embers are dying, a black man or woman, chosen by lottery, should be brought up to piss on the ashes. Every year. Just to remind anyone who supports it what the value of the garbage flag is.
People who try to justify the display of the stars and bars of the Confederacy always try to say the same things: "It means something else to people" or "What about this symbol [usually something Muslim]? Should we ban that?" Well, sure. In that case, you could make a case to ban the cross because of all the times it was burned by KKK jerk-offs to intimidate black Americans.
The difference, though, is that the Confederate flag exists as a symbol only because a group of traitors tried to break up the United States because they wanted to keep on owning slaves. That's it. You can say it means something different to you; you can say it means "Southern pride" or some such bullshit, but you are at best ignorant, at worst a liar, probably both. It speaks volumes about how much power we give fools in this nation that the Confederate flag would still be seen as a valid expression of anything other than hatred for black people.
When you're white in the South, you are often tested by other whites. Do you think the South will rise again? What do you think about the Confederate flag? For most people, it's just a background thing that they don't notice until someone says, "Why the fuck is there a rebel flag on your hat?" You see it everywhere - on license plates, on t-shirts, on buildings, on motherfucking official government property, as if somehow, appeasing the fools is a noble goal. No. The noble goal is telling the fools to stop being foolish. Everything that "honors" anyone from the Confederacy, from the flag to the generals, should be wrecked.
Antebellum matron Lindsey Graham declared that the Confederate flag is "part of who we are." In that case, you may as well hang a noose from a flagpole in front of the statehouse in Columbia and call it your heritage. It'd be less dishonest than the rebel flag that's padlocked in place now.
Let's put this as clearly as possible: If you believe there is some good in the symbol of the Confederate flag, if you think that your nonsensical faith in your history is more important than what it means to the black people, then you are a traitor, like the traitorous bastards you're descended from. Dylan Roof is another traitor. He is your inheritance, Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy. His actions were because of you.
Oskar Zapirain's photographs capture eerie forests cast in thick fog, hazy light descending upon the foliage in the same green shade that blankets the floor in moss. Zapirain has been attracted to this landscape for years because of the homogenous light as well as the way it forces the viewer directly into a mystical atmosphere.
The forest Zapirain features is a beech forest in Oiartzun, Basque Country in Northern Spain. This particular forest is unique due to the history charcoal production within the region. Instead of clearcutting like we do today, the trees were instead pruned to preserve the trees and maintain the integrity of the forest across generations. The trees have since regrown with short trunks and dramatically long limbs that shoot outward like arms from almost every angle, adding a ghostly feel to each of Zapirain’s photos. You can explore more of his work on Flickr.
They warned of a chilling effect on academics’ freedom to speak their minds after Sir Tim was forced to resign his honorary post at University College London amid pressure from social media users.
Sir Andre Geim, of the University of Manchester who shared the Nobel prize for physics in 2010 said that Sir Tim had been “crucified” by ideological fanatics , and castigated UCL for “ousting” him.
Oh, no! There might be a “chilling effect” on the ability of coddled, privileged Nobel prize winners to say stupid, demeaning things about half the population of the planet! What will we do without the ability of Tim Hunt to freely accuse women of being emotional hysterics, or without James Watson’s proud ability to call all black people mentally retarded?
I am so sorry to hear that Tim Hunt was nailed up on a cross until he suffocated. How tragic. How sad that “ideological fanatics” used hyperbole to cause him such mortal suffering! And by “ideological fanatics,” of course, we mean anyone who complained about women being stereotyped. That is a right that every man possesses, and Nobel prize winning men possess to an extreme degree!
Others described the response on social media as a “global firestorm”. Nice. Mocking Nobelists is as serious and devastating as setting human beings on fire. They are very delicate and thin-skinned, don’t you know, so that #DistractinglySexy hashtag was exactly the same as dousing Tim Hunt with napalm.
Tragically, this response also has the effect of making millions of ideological fanatics around the world realize that winning a Nobel prize does not grant god-like wisdom, which means they’re almost certainly going to wither and die at a revelation that diminishes a bit of the respect they’ve been getting.
The happy promoters of giant space projects are at it again. “Should we terraform Mars?”, they ask — to which I reply that we aren’t even close to being able to implement such an undertaking, so your fantasies are silly, and worse…why do you always express it in such palpably stupid ways?
Before we talk about terraforming another planet like Mars, we have to talk about Earth—and whether we should be spending our resources trying to save it, or moving on to another pale blue dot. It’s a grim debate that some scientists say it’s time to have.
“Some scientists say…” is one of those grossly dishonest constructions bad journalists use. I can well image some dunderheaded engineer might say such a thing, but I hope it’s not representative of the scientific community at all.
But also, what the hell are you talking about? The rest of the article is about slamming meteors into Mars and other such tedious tropes, but nowhere do they talk about the problem of transporting billions of people to this distant world, along with training people to live in an artificial environment (note that they’ll have to be transported at a rate faster than the birth rate, too); there’s no talk of building habitats for polar bears, elephants, whales, pygmy marmosets, tuataras, ants, salmon, whooping cranes, sequoias, or baobabs. Implicit in these delusions is the idea that almost the entirety of humanity, less a tiny lucky elite that reads science fiction novels, will die, that every biome on the planet will be trashed in favor of a tenuous, constructed environment, and that the vast reserves of planetary biodiversity will be sacrificed.
I will be blunt: fuck no, we won’t be moving to “another pale blue dot.” It’s impossible. There is no technological solution even imaginable, and it’s especially not possible when proponents of uprooting humanity can’t even consider the magnitude of the problem.
One sign of progress, though, is that they’re now emphasizing an alternative excuse: figuring out how to terraform Mars would help us figure out how to fix the Earth, they say. Bullshit, I say.
It’s true: Discussions about terraforming Earth, not Mars, are becoming more and more common. It’s almost as if the science of making Mars livable could actually inform repairing our own. In an essay called Terraforming Earth, the scifi author Kim Stanley Robinson—who described terraforming the Red Planet in his beloved Mars trilogy—argued that we should be thinking about using similar techniques to fix our own planet, like carbon capture and even shooting sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays. “Geoengineering,” he writes, “has become our ongoing responsibility to life on this planet, including all human generations to come.”
Oh, god. Geoengineering. Let’s do radical experiments on our own home — big projects to modify our atmosphere or oceans, for instance, and hope they are sustainable and don’t lead to even bigger problems. Please don’t “help”.
Here’s the deal. The solution does not lie in mucking up our planet any more; it lies in changing ourselves. These solutions ought to be doable.
Someone wants to mine the tar sands? Fine. Part of the cost has to involve restoring the terrain to a livable, fully repaired, sustainable ecosystem afterwards — none of this poisoned moonscape crap — and you have to have a plan to compensate for the release of all the fossil carbon into the atmosphere. If that means the project is no longer economically viable, then so be it. You don’t get to subsidize your profits on the back of the environment.
You want to increase pork production on your factory farm? Even setting aside the ethical concerns, you don’t get to pump pig sewage into vast fecal lakes that will be there for your grandchildren to deal with. Instead, you’ll manage it now, and that will be part of the cost of production. Maybe that factory farm will look a little less cost-effective if you have to pay for the environmental havoc you’re wreaking.
You have a plan to reduce infant mortality? That’s a good thing, I approve. Can we also simultaneously have a plan to educate the population and improve their economic opportunity so that their will be a concomitant voluntary willingness to have fewer children?
All this geoengineering nonsense is about making desperate efforts after the fact to compensate for the bad behavior of humans. Maybe we ought to spend a little more effort not doing destructive things in the first place.
Also, maybe it’s too much to ask, but the self-congratulatingly clever community of science fiction fans needs to learn to think bigger, and stop settling for a universe in which humans live alone in flying sterile tin cans.
My daughter, her friend, and I had fun taking this non-scientific color brightness vision test. You have to identify the one square that has a different brightness level within a grid of similarly colored squares.
Please don’t spread the name and face of the Charleston shooter, call him a white terrorist because that’s all he is, don’t give him the respect of learning his name or recognizing his face. All he wants is to be famous, now he will be infamous. He only deserves to be known as a white homegrown terrorist and imagined as a monster because that’s what he is. Instead learn the names and faces of the victims, they deserve to be remembered not the monster.
Remember:
Clementa Pinckney
A Democrat state senator who was also the pastor at the Emanuel African Methodist Church.
Cynthia Hurd
A librarian at the Charleston County Public Library. She’d been working there for 31 years and was a manager as St. Andrews Regional Library.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
She was a revered and a mother of three, she was also the coach of the track team.
Tywanza Sanders
A recent graduate from Allen University in Columbia. He was recently working as a barber. It is said that he died trying to save one of his family members.
Please, if you hear about more of the victims, add their names and a little about their life.
Go to this link to learn more about these victims. What I posted is only a short summary.
Also if anything like this happens again, do this instead of showing the shooter/terrorist. This is a tragedy and I will do my best to raise awareness, I hope you will too. Thank you.
How long before any font that comes pre-installed with an OS or word processing program is unacceptable for anything?
Here’s an interesting brief article about authors discussing their favourite fonts. In a couple of cases it reveals more about the author than I think they meant to give away.
Photographer Marc Simon Frei snapped these interesting photos by arcing objects to a Tesla coil. He’s also been experimenting with different kinds of LED-illuminated clouds (not unlike what we’ve seen from Richard Clarkson), and some fun shots of wool clouds sprouting tiny lighting storms. You can see more over on his Google+ page. (via The Awesomer)
I used to come home with the lunch menu for the month. It was always bright orange or green or blue. My mother would take it from my hands and circle the days that the school was serving something with pork in it. She’d tell me, “Amjad, I’ll make you sandwiches to take to school these days.” And I’d get really excited because bringing lunch from
Home was considered cool in the 2nd grade.
On days they served pork or a meat my mother wasn’t too sure about, she’s wake up early and rush to the kitchen. She’d smear a generous helping of hummus in khubiz. Fry up some falafel. Cut up some veggies and throw in some olives into a plastic container. She’d put all these in my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunch box with some juice. I’d carry it with pride knowing I’d be eating my favorite foods and everyone else would be eating the gross lunch.
Lunch would come and I’d sit down with my friends and open my lunch box, all the kids eyeing me with jealously and admiration. I’d lay out all my food in front of me and start to dig in, smilingly, because everyone’s food looked like it was already digested.
Then someone would lean over and yell “ew what’s that?? Are you eating a poops sandwich.” All the kids would laugh and snicker and point. “What are those balls? Ew that looks gross!” More laughter. More giggles. More pointing.
I would eat anything. I’d stuff everything back into the box, humiliated.
I’d come home, crying. Telling my mother how could she embarrass me like that. “Why can’t I have regular American food?”
She’d be confused. She didn’t understand. At home, I’d devour her food like it was my last meal. But now, standing in front of her, my 7-8 year old self knew what humiliation felt like.
The next time pork was served at school, she put Bologna and cheese on white bread. Packed chips into my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunch box. No one laughed at me when I pulled out my American lunch. No one pointed at my American sandwich.
