Sophianotloren

John Singleton Copley, “Brook Watson and the Shark” (1778), oil on canvas, 182 x 230 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington (image via Web Gallery of Art)

Today is Damien Hirst’s 50th birthday.

There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

—Ernest Hemingway, on The Old Man and the Sea in a letter to Bernard Berenson

What Wall Street and credit card companies are doing is really not much different from what gangsters and loan sharks do who make predatory loans. While the bankers wear three-piece suits and don’t break the knee caps of those who can’t pay back, they still are destroying people’s lives.

—Bernie Sanders

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

—Alan Clark

See the shark with teeth like razors
All can read his open face
And Macheath has got a knife, but
Not in such an obvious place

—Bertolt Brecht, “”Moritat von Mackie Messer,” translated by Ralph Manheim and John Willett

I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion.

—Nicolas Cage

Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I’d either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. Didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. When I was broke, I’d go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over. That’s the hardest part. Today everything is different. There’s no action. I have to wait around like everyone else. Can’t even get decent food. Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.

—Henry Hill

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
Where, glinting like little plowshares,
The blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
For the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.

—Elizabeth Bishop

Louie was furious at the sharks. He had thought that they had an understanding: The men would stay out of the sharks’ turf – the water – and the sharks would stay off of theirs – the raft. That the sharks had taken shots at him when he had gone overboard, and when the raft had been mostly submerged after the strafing, had seemed fair enough. But their attempt to poach men from their reinflated raft struck Louie as dirty pool. He stewed all night, scowled hatefully at the sharks all day, and eventually made a decision. if the sharks were going to try to eat him, he was going to try to eat them.

—Laura Hillenbrand

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them.

—Neil Gaiman

Cutting and pasting from the official release. Congratulations to the winners; this is a fabulous slate.

***

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America are pleased to announce the winners of the 2014 Nebula Awards (presented 2015), as well as the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Winners

Novel
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals; Fourth Estate; Harper Collins Canada)

Novella
Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)

Novelette
“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)

Short Story
“Jackalope Wives”by Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14)

•••
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Guardians of the Galaxy, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

•••
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Love Is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)

•••
2015 Damon Knight Grand Master Award
Larry Niven

•••
Solstice Award
Joanna Russ (posthumous), Stanley Schmidt

•••
Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service Award
Jeffry Dwight

As those of you who follow me on Facebook know, this is a sanitized version suitable for public consumption, but I’m damn proud of it anyway. (It still reads to me like someone took a 5,000 word draft and chopped it down to 1,500, but since that’s what I actually did, I’m sure I’ll always feel that way.)

I guess I’m just weird in my ability to just not give a fuck about so many things.

I drink — and enjoy — Coke and Pepsi, and diet versions of both, as well as plenty of other colas and other flavors of soft drink. I use Windows on my main computer, but I’ve used — and had both good and bad to say about — multiple versions of Mac OS, Linux, and a handful of other less-known and less popular operating systems. I don’t drive, but I also don’t see the sense in zealously clinging to one manufacturer and the bloodlust for anyone who doesn’t drive the same kind of vehicle. Sports team rivalries, fights about which genre of music is “the right kind of music,” or about which band is “actually good” within a certain type of music, seem strange to me.

And then there’s all the other false dichotomies I watch people set up, seemingly so that they have something to be “right” about (and so that those who disagree can be “wrong.”) Like, the completely bullshit division between “good” herbs and “natural” medicine on one hand, contrasted against “artificial” pharmaceutical drugs and “manufactured” treatments — or, if you’re on the “other side” of the made-up argument, the “benefits” of modern medical technology and the “backwards” attitudes of the people who “still use folk cures.” And similar to that is the artificial dicide between “good” medicine versus “bad” drugs / “fun” drugs versus “Big Pharma’s” pills.

Guess what, though? It’s all bullshit! You can totally take ibuprofen or Vicodin in the morning to help with your headache, if you partied hard the night before with lots of drinking and other drugs. Recreational use and therapeutic use work together just fine. You can boil some willow bark in the evening for a pain-killer tea, and take your prescription blood-pressure pills with it. Modern medicine and herbal remedies can go hand in hand. Or maybe, like I said, maybe I’m just a freak because I have no interest in picking an artificial “side” to stand on, and I’m happy doing whatever work in any given situation.

And I see the same thing play out in other areas, too. Articles crying about how “we’re addicted to technology” and how we need to start interacting with other people face-to-face “the right way” before it’s “too late!” Other people talking about how it’s critical to “move fully into the future” and how being able to connect digitally is essential, that we should strive to transcend the “limitations of” physical interaction as a thing of the past. I’ve heard passionate arguments about how “games with physical components” like boards and tokens are so much better than “those stupid techno-gadgets” and how we need to “get kids off of the computer” to play “real games” instead. And I’ve heard equally passionate arguments for “immersing kids in tech” from the earliest ages, making sure that they can “adapt to the new world” so that they don’t get “left behind.”

Again, bullshit. And I don’t understand why it is so absolutely critical for some people to cut themselves off from possibilities in order to fashion an enemy for themselves to hate. I’ll pick up my e-reader sometimes, and other times I’ll grab a paper book. I can enjoy shooting aliens on an Xbox, and have plenty of fun with Cards Against Humanity too. I can appreciate Carcasonne whether it’s played with physical tiles or digital ones. I can get out and take a long walk, smelling the flowers and trees… and taking some amazing photos of them with the camera/computer/communications device in my pocket. I can go play frisbee golf in the park, and use Facebook to organize a group of people to play… or I can play digital golf online, and happen to do so with some of the friends I was in the park with a few days before.

I know that people have their preferences, and that those preferences often not only inform their actions but dictate their worldviews. I just don’t get why so many people insist on creating such arbitrary and artificial distinctions, and adhering so closely to one “side” while loudly declaring how they abhor the other “side” of the division they’ve created…

VNGRAVITY - Dreamhouse

Online exhibition built with Unity features top net artists work in a reconstruction of ‘Casa Blanca’ (a Mexican presidential home):

This is an architectonic digital reconstruction of a place called “Casa Blanca ” in Mexicothis place (the house of the mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto) had international rosonance as a postcard about illicit luxury, thug practices of the elites. But the satiric tone makes it not a local issue, but a global view of squandering.
For this show Vmgravity is featuring the work of artists from USA, México, Sweden, Austria and Australia  wich works deal with this conceptual universe

- Katie Torn katietorn
- Birch Cooper [birchcooper]
- Alfredo Salazar-Caro [salazarcaro]
- Víctor Barragán [ytinifninfinity]
- Martin Onassis [martinolsson]
- Aoto Ooouchi [aotooouchi]
- Rachael Archibald [rachaelarchibald]
- Alejandro García Contreras [alejandrogarciacontreras​] + Josée Pedneault
- Edgar Silva
- Matthew Hillock

You can view the 3D exhibition online here

I was going to write something longer about this Ruth Marcus column, but Atrios largely beat me to the punch here and here. The obvious problem is that her argument relies on prosecutorial discretion, but then retreats into formalism to become selectively blind to factors it is perfectly reasonable for prosecutors to take into account.

If Marcus was arguing that the FIFA or Hastert prosecutions could not be squared with the letter of the law, I’d have no problem with that. Due process really does apply to everyone. If Jeffrey Skilling is convicted under an unconstitutionally vague statute, his conviction should be thrown out.  But that’s not Marcus’s argument. Her argument is that prosecutors should not, in these cases, choose to go after behavior that is in fact illegal under federal law. If that’s the road you’re going down, then it’s entirely reasonable for prosecutors to take particularly bad behavior and consequences into account. The fact that FIFA’s network of bribes and kickbacks produces results like “let’s hold the World Cup in a country where facilities will be built with slave labor, resulting in thousands of deaths” absolutely does matter in this context — if you’re ever going to apply these criminal sanctions, this would seem to be the case. Similarly, using bank reporting laws to indirectly go after a child molester is considerably more defensible than the more typical use of the laws — i.e. indirectly going after people involved in the drug trade. The idea that prosecutors should exercise discretion by declining to pursue particularly egregious offenders is very strange.

Are there too many criminal statutes? Yes. Is mass incarceration a serious problem? Yes. But showing concern for these problems only when rich guys are involved is counterproductive, and it’s even more problematic when said rich guys are guilty of genuinely bad acts with serious material consequences to other people. (This goes triple for Hastert, who bears more direct personal responsibility for the underlying problem than all but a handful of people.) One way to make sure that the problem of mass incarceration will never go away is to apply criminal statutes only to the relatively powerless and not to the powerful. If you don’t think Hastert’s behavior merits an arrest, get rid of the law rather than instructing prosecutors only to use it against less powerful people guilty of behavior that isn’t as bad.

I visited the Smithsonian U.S. history museum last week and was amazed at how corporate-controlled it has now become. I am working on a larger article on this topic that I’m hoping gets published somewhere with a larger audience, but in general, with major museums lacking the government funding they once had, the turn to corporate donors severely affects the stories they tell and undermines challenging visitors in any way. As the rest of the English-speaking world seems determined to follow the United States into a world of corporate-dominated right-wing government, it’s not too surprising to see corporate influence in those nations’ museums as well.

If you’d like to see how oil giant Royal Dutch Shell (one of the largest multi-national corporations in the world’s history) uses its corporate philanthropy to subtly change the core direction of potentially adversarial content at a renowned science museum educating millions, here’s your chance.

How Shell came to sponsor the London Science Museum’s “Atmosphere” program that, according to its director, emphasizes as much about what we don’t know about climate science as what we do know, is a story pulled straight from the well-established corporate public relations playbook.

When confronted with science, evidence and facts that aren’t especially helpful to your company’s bottom line – the playbook says to change the focus, or sow doubt about the certainty of the science. It worked for years for the tobacco industry. Big companies, like Shell, have clearly learned from its successes (and failures).

….

Science Museum and Shell officials talked about the need to agree on the “big changes” to the exhibit’s focus until it was finalized. “I’ve spoken to the (science) team and they will have a think about David’s comment,” a museum official wrote to Shell in one such exchange. “If there is a possibility of big changes, would you be in a position to indicate them now?” a museum official wrote to Shell in another instance.

In response to media coverage of its own internal documents on the Shell sponsorship, the museum’s director, Ian Blatchford, wrote in a blog post Monday that the public should be satisfied that it retained final editorial control over the exhibit. Shell made suggestions, yes, but museum officials made the final decisions.

But Blatchford’s response actually captures perfectly what Shell hoped it would achieve by paying for the exhibit. It talks about the science of climate change and what we know. But it also focuses on what we don’t know.

“Shell was a major funder of Atmosphere, our climate science gallery which provides our visitors with accurate, up-to-date information on what is known, what is uncertain, and what is not known about this important subject,” Blatchford wrote. “The gallery has been hugely popular since it opened four years ago and has now been visited by more than 3 million people.”

Naturally, if you are Shell, you are going to fund an exhibit that is beautiful and full of technology and over which you have editorial control that makes sure that visitors come away thinking there is so much we don’t know about climate change so why attack the oil companies. One can question how much influence museum exhibits have on shaping visitors beliefs, but for many visitors who do not follow the politics of climate change, this is one of the most intensive bits of exposure to the issue they will ever see. So of course Shell is going to target this exhibit to get its side of the story told.

Elastic Textures for Additive Fabrication

3D printing research into a method to design forms which change shape in a determined way when pressure is applied:

We introduce elastic textures: a set of parametric, tileable, printable, cubic patterns achieving a broad range of elastic material properties … Using a combinatorial search over topologies followed by shape optimization, we explore a wide space of wireframe-like, symmetric 3D patterns to obtain a small family. This pattern family can be printed without internal support structure on a single-material 3D printer and can be used to fabricate objects with prescribed mechanical behavior. The family can be extended easily to create families of anisotropic patterns with target orthotropic properties.

More Here

Beltway elites love the myth of the undecided voter. By which of course they mean white voters who lean conservative. That Hillary Clinton is following Barack Obama’s path of understanding the American electorate and focusing on getting out the base rather than appeal to voters in West Virginia and North Dakota who are going to vote Republican anyway is the topic of this fretting New York Times article.

This early in the campaign, however, forgoing a determined outreach effort to all 50 states, or even most of them, could mean missing out on the kind of spirited conversation that can be a unifying feature of a presidential election. And it could leave Mrs. Clinton, if she wins, with the same difficulties Mr. Obama has faced in governing with a Republican-controlled Congress.

Yes, clearly a spirited conversation is going to convince heavily gerrymandered districts in Texas and Pennsylvania and Georgia to vote for Democrats! That’s clearly the ticket for Democrats to retake the House. How come no one has thought of that one before?

To the architects of the Obama strategy, Mrs. Clinton’s approach is not mere homage: It is unavoidable, given that there are few genuine independents now and that technology increasingly lets campaigns pinpoint their most likely voters.

“If you run a campaign trying to appeal to 60 to 70 percent of the electorate, you’re not going to run a very compelling campaign for the voters you need,” said David Plouffe, a top Obama strategist who has consulted informally with Mrs. Clinton.

Yes. That’s because the people who ran Obama’s campaigns were not stupid.

Mrs. Clinton has said repeatedly that she does not want a lonely victory in 2016; she wants to elect Democrats down the ballot. A group of her senior aides met recently with officials at the Democratic House, Senate and governor campaign arms to brief them on the aides’ research and plans for her message and organization. And Senate Democrats are hopeful that she will lift their prospects, because there is considerable overlap in crucial states: The results in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin will almost certainly determine both who wins the White House and which party controls the Senate.

Oh, so this is a super smart strategy Hillary is using then?

“Go ask Al Gore,” Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said about the risk of writing off states such as his, where Democratic presidential candidates prospered until 2000. “He’d be president with five electoral votes from West Virginia. So it is big, and it can make a difference.”

Centrist Democrats also worry that focusing on liberal voters could lead to a continuation of the problems Mr. Obama has faced with a Congress elected by a vastly different subset of the nation.

“That’s not good for the country,” Mr. Manchin said, adding that he hoped Mrs. Clinton would “come to the middle” if she became president.

Of her campaign, he said, “If they get her too far over, it’s going to be more difficult to govern, it truly is.”

Other rural-state Democrats are sending not-so-subtle messages.

“I think that we always appreciate when people want to kind of talk to the whole country and listen to concerns, and I think farm country is critically important,” said Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota.

Yes, clearly Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp are the real Democrats Hillary should be listening to. After all, their states with a combined 8 electoral votes are clearly going to put Hillary over the top. I mean, sure Al Gore could have gotten over the top with West Virgina’s votes. And he could have also gotten over the top if Ralph Nader didn’t have an ego the size of Texas or if, I don’t know, the Supreme Court didn’t throw the election to George W. Bush. And note that none of this has anything to do with strategy. Manchin says “it’s not good for the country.” Why not? Heitkamp says “farm country is critically important.” To what? Certainly not to Hillary Clinton getting elected president.

“The president is the one person who potentially could be the unifying figure in the country,” said H. W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin. “And if the president or a presidential candidate basically writes off 40 states, then how in the world do the people in those 40 states feel like they have a stake in that person or that election?”

I’m embarrassed for my profession there. Who was the last president that unified America? Eisenhower? This is just lazy and ridiculous.

The rest of the article just goes on in this way. In the end, for all that Beltway pundits want to believe that Democrats convincing white conservatives to vote for them is the only strategy to victory because they are the real Americans, it’s just not the case. Hillary (or hey, maybe Bernie!) wins by motivating the base, focusing on winning necessary close states where they have inherent advantages, and maybe pressing to expand the map to North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia while holding on to Wisconsin and Ohio and Virginia. If I thought Hillary campaigning in Louisiana would actually lead to Democratic downticket victories there, I’d support it. But I just don’t see it. Better to focus on high voter turnout among the base.

The Allied Media Conference will be happening June 19th – 21st and for the second year in a row the Abundant Bodies Media track will be part of the conference for the weekend. I’m one of the coordinators of the track for the year and we are currently fundraising to support our track, session presenters and participants. We’re not only hoping to help people out with travel expenses but to also pay presenters for the knowledge and time they will be giving throughout the weekend.

We have a TON of amazing perks including a fearless craft-a-thon with Marianne Kirby, a gift pack from Re/Dress, tarot readings, a mental health / chronic illness chat and more!

Please consider supporting and sharing our fundraiser with your networks.

The track was created and continues to be primarily ran by Women of Color, our sessions are also primarily ran by People of Color. Here is some more information about the track,

This year at the Allied Media Conference 2015 (June 18-21 in Detroit, MI) we are coming back together to continue our conversations, share skills, experiences, stories, media, knowledge and strategies to build a more beautiful, body accepting and abundant loving future!

ln this track we will gather, share and celebrate the wisdom and abundance of our bodies. Abundant / thick / fat bodies are the target of so much hate, policing and negativity, even in our organizing communities. How do we unlearn mainstream ideas of what a body should look like and (re)-learn to celebrate the diversity, resilience, wisdom and beauty of all bodies? How can we work together to deconstruct fat stigma and other forms of marginalization while building a stronger inclusive fat community? How can we challenge ourselves to decenter whiteness, capitalism, ableism, cissexism, heterosexism and classism while we explore what it means to be fat?

This track will explore these questions and create spaces to challenge the ongoing ways mainstream media shames and harms abundant bodies. Our goal in our organizing and activism is to create media and practical strategies for resistance, healing and community building. We will broaden the conversation around fat activism by centering this track on the voices of Indigenous, Black, People of Color, Dis/abled, Super-sized, Trans and Queer fat folks. Through workshops, panels and skillshares we will transform mainstream ideas around abundant bodies and create resilient communities utilizing different forms of media such as zines, theater, oral histories, poetry, social media, dance, comics, and art.

You can view the entire AMC2015 schedule here and find out about all of the amazing sessions we will be having during the weekend.

And again, please consider supporting and sharing our fundraiser with your networks.

Find The Truth

Short one-take 360 video for a Japanese TV show released last month is great introduction to what the format can do for storytelling.

If you haven’t tried YouTube 360 video before, all you need is the latest iOS / Android YouTube app installed. Instead of seeing everything like in the examples above, the view will be based on the physical position of the screen, so look around.

Click on this link here to open the video through the app on your device

The Newspaper Bandit has been spotted in the backstreets of Nakano!
Can you put together the clues hidden in this 360° immersive movie?

Atlas Pizza, Division

keyframedaily:

Catherine Deneuve in Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (1970).

The recent spate of highly publicized killings of black men by police officers has driven many people to wonder how common such police violence is. Incredibly, no one knows—not even FBI Director James Comey. The federal government doesn’t track it, and until this week, no one else did either.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post and Guardian set out to catalogue the number of times people are killed by police—the Post focusing on firearms deaths, while The Guardian looked at all fatalities. They got the data by poring over news accounts, police reports, and other records, trying to get a full picture. Because they use different methods and track slightly different things, they also come up with two different totals—385 so far this year in the Post, 470 for The Guardian.

The federal government could theoretically compel local law enforcement to produce the information, guaranteeing reliable and uniform reporting. So why hasn’t it done so? Tracking and reporting these numbers provides an empirical basis for political debate, and shifts the focus from documenting the problem to proposing solutions.

Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey announced a bill Tuesday that tries to solve the problem. The Police Reporting Information, Data, and Evidence Act of 2015 (the name creates a ghastly backronym, the “PRIDE Act”) is a fairly straightforward bill: It creates grants to states and in return requires them to record and report to the Justice Department every case in which an officer shoots or causes serious bodily injury against a civilian, and every case in which a civilian shoots or causes serious bodily injury to an officer. They would also have to report basic demographic data for all victims. The text is short and simple.

The PRIDE Act covers some of the same territory as the Death in Custody Reporting Act, an old law that fell off the books but was renewed in late 2014. The reason the PRIDE Act is still necessary is that its predecessor is widely considered ineffectual. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear that the PRIDE Act will solve its problems, as Franklin Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley who has long studied police use of force, told me.

The new bill and the old law share two salient features: They rely on states to provide the information needed, and they use federal grants as the mechanism for compliance. The way they handle the grants is a little different, though. The DCRA threatens to cut existing federal funding to states if they don’t report their numbers. Withholding federal grants, however, hasn’t always been a successful tool to make states comply with laws they don’t like. The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which uses the same mechanism, has only enlisted 17 states. The PRIDE Act instead creates new grants, relying more on carrots than sticks to achieve its aims.

That seems to answer the concerns often raised by local law enforcement agencies. Last fall, James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, warned The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery that any proposal to gather data that didn’t provide money for its collection was dead on arrival. “Otherwise it’s an unfunded mandate,” he said. “About 80 percent of police departments have fewer than 10 officers. They don’t have huge data collecting operations. They don’t even have a single person in some of these departments who are dedicated to all the statistical work they have to do now.”

The PRIDE Act might solve that problem (though its cost to taxpayers is unclear), but Pasco’s qualms spotlight the other potential pitfall in the bill.

“The states employ less than 5 percent of the police officers and sheriffs that operate in the state. How are they going to get the information?” Zimring wondered.

It’s a real problem. The Bureau of Justice Statistics tallies more than 12,000 local police departments, and there are thousands of sheriffs, too. As Pasco noted, few of these departments have statistics sitting around, just waiting to be collected by the state. That means the states, in turn, also don’t have the statistics sitting around, just waiting for Congress to pass a law requiring them to send the data to Washington. From a legislative standpoint, it’s much easier to institute a mandate on the states than it is to design—and fund—a program that collects data from every local authority. But it also reduces the chances of harvesting reliable, comprehensive data.

This isn’t the first time that Congress has sought to scrutinize questionable practices in local policing. The last major national outcry over police brutality was in 1992, when riots broke out after Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, which had been videotaped. Those riots produced a huge amount of media attention, and they also produced calls for reform.

Then-Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, tried to pass a law that would allow the Justice Department to investigate local police departments and sue them for excessive use of force. The bill went nowhere. But in 1994, Waxman managed to get it included in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which did pass. The relevant bit, Section 14141, makes it illegal for police to “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct ... that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” There’s serious irony here: The act as a whole signaled a major expansion of incarceration and federal involvement in crime. It created many of the tough-on-crime policies that are often blamed for the current backlash against cops, and yet it also includes the tool that Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch have used to push back against abuses.

“It is the most important regulatory tool that the federal government now has for local police departments,” Zimring says. “That more than anything else is the most substantial legacy of the King case.”

For example, the consent decree that the Justice Department recently announced with Cleveland over a pattern of excessive use of force by officers sprung from an investigation conducted under the auspices of Section 14141. There have been similar agreements with Albuquerque, Oakland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. An investigation that Baltimore requested into its own police department also falls under the statute.

Section 14141 was effective largely because it allows the Justice Department to go directly to local police departments, investigate them, and force them to make concessions. When Section 14141 was passed, though, few expected the small piece of legislation to have a huge impact on a public debate 20 years down the road. If Congress can devise an effective mechanism for gathering data on police-related deaths, perhaps it can produce a similarly outsized impact. In the meantime, that hole in the data seems likely to remain a major obstacle to police reform.

This post originally appeared on The Atlantic.

navisis:

On Giving Life, 1975

Ana Mendieta

We all know our bodies are home to countless millions of bacteria and microorganisms, but without seeing them with our bare eyes it’s almost impossible to comprehend. This petri dish handprint created by Tasha Sturm of Cabrillo College, vividly illustrates the variety of bacteria found on her 8-year-old son’s hand after playing outdoors. The print itself represents several days of growth as different yeasts, fungi, and bacteria are allowed to incubate.

It’s safe to say almost everything you see growing in this specimen is harmless and in many cases even beneficial to a person’s immunity, but it just goes to show why we sometimes it’s good to wash our hands. Sturm discusses in detail how she made the print in the comments of this page. (via Ziya Tong)

(via cupcakes-and-lithium)

blodwymm:

secondalto:

gameboygirl:

allinternationalnews:

Colorado Lunch Lady Fired for Giving Kids Free Meals Says She’d Do It Again http://ift.tt/1JoLWZu

from the article:

…“I would have kids start crying when I told them they didn’t have money in their account because they were terrified of getting the cheese sandwich.”

The district’s policy is to give a student a hot meal and charge the parent’s account the first three times they forget lunch money, communications director Tustin Amole told ABC News today. The fourth time, the student is given a cheese sandwich – a single slice of cheese on a hamburger bun – and a milk.

…Curry felt she could not stand by and keep letting it happen.

“It’s not nutrition. It’s not healthy,” she said. “It’s wrong on so many levels, and I hated to see food go to waste. I hated to see food thrown away that could’ve been given to these children that are hungry.”

Curry was supposed to take the students’ food, throw it away and replace it with the cheese sandwich and milk if a student had exceeded the $7.60 debt limit, she said. Instead, she would cancel the transaction and remind the student to bring their lunch money.

Curry acknowledged that her actions went against the district’s policy and when asked why she did it, Curry said, “Because it was the right thing to do and sometimes doing what is right is not what is easy.”

once again, under capitalism, noncompliance with immoral rules means the employee loses her livelihood. and less children have food.

This woman is a hero.

I wanna know what heartless ass snitched on her so I can glare at them for the rest of their days.

For fuck’s sake, America. Maybe put your fucking gun down for a second and turn off Fox News and listen to me: if we, as a nation, think it’s okay to let fucking CHILDREN GO HUNGRY because they are poor, we are a completely fucking failure of life.

Greatest fucking country on Earth my ass.

(Oklahoma City Public Schools)

Teachers and students scribbled the lessons — multiplication tables, pilgrim history, how to be clean —  nearly 100 years ago. And they haven’t been touched since.

This week, contractors removing old chalkboards at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City made a startling discovery: Underneath them rested another set of chalkboards, untouched since 1917.

“The penmanship blows me away, because you don’t see a lot of that anymore,” Emerson High School Principal Sherry Kishore told the Oklahoman. “Some of the handwriting in some of these rooms is beautiful.”

(Oklahoma City Public Schools)

The chalkboards being removed to make way for new whiteboards are in four classrooms, according to the Oklahoma City Public School District.

A spokeswoman said the district is working with the city to “preserve the ‘chalk’ work of the teachers that has been captured in time.”

[WWI graffiti discovered deep underground. ‘All these guys wanted to be remembered.’]

A wheel that apparently was used to teach multiplication tables appears on one board. “I have never seen that technique in my life,” Kishore told the Oklahoman.

(Oklahoma City Public Schools)

The boards carry not just teachers’ work, but also that of students, and every room has a lesson on pilgrims, according to the district.

“Their names are here; I don’t know whether they were students in charge that day that got to do the special chores if they were the ones that had a little extra to do because they were acting up,” Kishore said. “But it’s all kinds of different feelings when you look at this.”

(Oklahoma City Public Schools)

(Oklahoma City Public Schools)

(Oklahoma City Public Schools)

(Oklahoma City Public Schools)

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We picked this guy from the airport and he made us cocktails! Rum old fashioned a with Anchor Reyes, El Dorado and Creole shrub. Not too shabby , professor!

If there’s one reason to study the 19th century, it’s to learn lessons on how to raise children. Today’s children are so spoiled, what with their education and not working and playing sports and 8th grade graduation parties and the like. Parents today pay for babysitters instead of just locking the kids in the bedroom for the night. Craziness. If the baby won’t go to sleep, why not dose it with opium? And if the child is in the way, how about hanging it in a cage outside your tenement house window?

Why study the past if we can’t learn lessons for the present?

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Sunday, I didn’t get much sleep. On Monday I only caught about 4 hours, and couldn’t get any more rest despite all efforts to do so, and wasn’t feeling all that great. Went out for a drink, and on the way back — about 11:30 — I asked Rabbit if she wouldn’t mind stopping for something along the way. Went to Wing Stop, since I knew they’d be open, and grabbed 20 “boneless wings,” half Atomic (AKA “Flaming Asshole in the Morning”) flavor, and half Teriyaki flavor. Since it came with a side dish I got fries, and as for the drink — I wanted to steer clear of caffeine, but I didn’t feel like whatever their lemon-lime offering was, so I went with orange.

Fast-forward to 9am Tuesday morning, and I was still awake, and frustrated, and wondering what had happened. Then I suddenly realized: I bet their orange soda was Sunkist! Caffeinated, no question. Oops! All that careful work to avoid it, wasted. It was almost noon on Tuesday when I did finally get to bed again.

So! My plans for Tuesday rather went out the window, then… but I got quite a bit of sleep. And when I slept, I had some intense and incredible (or perhaps incredibly frustrating) dreams!

When I woke shortly after 8pm, it was from a dream where I had been at my usual pub, making eyes at a very lovely young woman across the room, and she had been quite enthusiastically returning my glances. I can still see the low scooped neck of her blouse, thin blue and white stripes making plenty of room for her ample cleavage to show… I can picture the exact shade of her skin, the way her long hair moved around and with her…

Anyway, after a few moments of distant flirting, she stood up, walked over to me, and the first thing she said to me was, “Um, excuse me, but… are you trans*?”

Ouch. Not exactly the best opening line ever, but I tried to handle things gracefully, and I replied, “Pleasure to meet you! You’re quite lovely. You might keep in mind that your first words to me were to ask about what’s between my legs… now, I’m also quite interested in the potential for seeing your naked body [in the dream I paused briefly, took a pointed look down to her crotch, looked back up, then began speaking again] and I’m certainly flattered that you’ve expressed such an interest in mine. My name’s [I gave her my name] — what’s yours? Oh, and yes, I do have a cock.”

I woke just before she could reply. My brain, I tell ya — it loves teasing me! Grr. Even in my dreams things end before they get started.

I went back to sleep a few minutes later, and woke again around 10:45pm. This time, I had been walking around in public somewhere in my dream, and there was a guy leading a woman around on a leash, crawling on hands and knees. She wasn’t wearing much; I seem to recall that whatever she had on made room for her extremely large breasts to hang out in the open.  I moved closer to see what was going on, and by the time I got near, it was quite obvious that he was fucking her face, and doing so in the middle of the sidewalk. This wasn’t gentle fellation on her part, either, this was rough, throat-deep, how-does-she-not-have-a-gag-reflex fucking from him. He had just pulled out and left quite the load of cum in and around her mouth; she was licking herself clean and I stepped up to him to ask, “Pardon me, sir, do you mind if I have a go?” He shrugged, said simply, “Sure,” and handed me her leash, stepping to the side to watch. I lifted my skirt, slipped her head under, and just as her lips touched my skin…

I woke up. Seriously?! And yes, unsurprisingly, I was extremely erect when I awoke, and because everything was so noisy here and I needed to get to the bathroom to empty my bladder, I couldn’t do anything about it.

I really need sex. And soon. And more often than once every few months (it’s been since the beginning of October, and before that would have been maybe sometime in August.) Because at the moment, I’m dreaming my life away!

I am reminded that Scalia wrote the dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard. I have been trying to forget.

The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger…. The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific “fact,” since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or “guess.”… It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a “myth.”…

Shocking, isn’t it? Who would have thought a Supreme Court justice could be such a pompous ignoramus?

The occasion for this unpleasant reminder is that Scalia gave a commencement address at a high school recently, and offered some evidence that he hasn’t learned a thing in 28 years.

Class of 2015, you should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented. Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were.

at least some 5,000 years…multiply that by at least 20.

Somebody ought to let Scalia know that that 5-6000 year old Earth nonsense is a specifically Protestant idea, and not even all Protestants — just the particularly rabidly goofy ones. But maybe those are the people he identifies with.

Our Supreme Court. Once again, an international embarrassment.

“On the London Overground. I swear I didn’t get this guy to pose. This was just how he was sitting.”

karnythia:

Literally the only reason people think the past was all white is racism in Hollywood. All the images of the past that you think are accurate from TV shows & movies produced during Jim Crow are actually fictional representations of what racists wanted the world to be like instead of their reality. That’s why you have people arguing that Egypt isn’t in Africa and that Cleopatra looked like Liz Taylor. That’s why you have period pieces set in London with none of the Black Victorians, Chinese sailors in Limehouse, or Jewish communities. That’s why you don’t see the drag balls that were common in New York, Chicago etc. You don’t even see the diversity of Roman citizens or the Moorish Empire. Next to nothing about women of color at any point in history, despite them being inventors, pioneers, and artists who changed the world. Gee, it’s like media representation has an impact across time. Like, maybe producing media that isn’t inclusive contributes to ignorance, erasure, and perpetuating racist, sexist, homophobic propaganda. If you’re still producing these bland historically  inaccurate shows in 2015 that’s not about historical accuracy, that’s about your internalized bigotry. .

I had not realized it was so easy. But Dylan Saccoccio, author of The Boy and the Peddler of Death (The Tale of Onora #1), has discovered the formula and is well on his way to notoriety.

First step: write a book. It doesn’t matter how good it is.

Second step: find a negative review.

Third step: meltdown online.

See? Anyone can do it.

Here’s the demonstration. Someone named Cait read Saccoccio’s book, and did not like it. Then she dared to state her negative review on GoodReads.

This was just…so unnecessarily wordy and pretentious. I just did not enjoy it at all. … So how did I loathe this so entirely from page one? I don’t know.

The fun begins. Sacoccio responds to the review.

This review is not good for my business, so unless your desire is to ruin my dreams, it would mean a great deal if you could remove this review from my work and forget about it. But if it’s your desire to hurt me financially and ruin my business, then it’s understandable why you would post such a harmful review.

Yes. The only reason one might dislike a book is personal animus against the author, and a desire to snuff out his dreams and crush him economically. His reaction is to assume Cait hates him.

It escalates rapidly. Not only does Cait hate him, she is an evil person.

Do you have empathy? Do you know what it’s like to make something for a living? Are you human? Or do you just look at other people like they’re automatons that you can slander as though your actions don’t manifest consequences? Trust this. Me confronting someone that defaces my work says nothing about me other than the fact that I address it when someone goes out of his/her way to do so. But you left a 1 Star review on someone’s life’s work, someone who is trying to warn people what’s going on in this world so that they can protect themselves and help others, and think that is a moral action. 400,000 children go missing each year in the US alone. Do you know where they’re going? Do you know who’s behind it? Do you know why the media is silent about it? Do you know how much a person risks to confront the evil that’s running amok in this world? YOU don’t know right from wrong. And that’s what a review like this says about the person that wrote it.

To leave a one-star review of Sacoccio’s writing is to demonstrate that you are not human, and is just like someone who abducts a child. Who abducts 400,000 children.

It’s not just Cait. Everyone who agrees with her is waging war on the consciousness of humanity.

I’m not embarrassed at all. And all of you who are taking Cait S’s side, what you’re doing in the bigger picture is waging war on the consciousness of humanity. The end. If this interaction prevents you from reading my work, it’s okay. I’m not offended. I don’t want your money, nor do I want you having a bad experience by reading my books. What bothers me is when people that operated at a low level of consciousness defame the work of people that are trying to help humanity, and no one helps humanity better than artists.

Time to break out the random capitalization.

NO. I don’t want you to do anything because you’re immoral. Leave this up so that every person henceforth can see ALL OF YOU for what YOU ARE. DESTRUCTIVE to consciousness and humanity. What you’ve done to me, you do to YOURSELF, because if you KNEW anything about anything, you’d know we were all connected to each other, and instead of destroying each other’s work, you’d be supporting each other, which is why I will NEVER behave like ANY of you immoral people, and I won’t go seeing what you’ve written or done in the world so I can destroy that. No, I will only defend my work against EVIL.

And today, all of you see why EVIL IS KICKING HUMANITY’S ASS, and why the human condition is SLAVERY.

THAT’S what The Tale of Onora is about, and if you can’t grasp that, then BE GONE!

But now Saccoccio brings out the big guns. The reviewer called it wordy and pretentious, and loathed it from the first page…so he posts the first page of the book to prove that she is totally wrong.

“To you, that you may awaken to understand that the whole universe is a dance of energy, and that energy is God, and that energy is you. You are something that the whole universe is doing, that God is doing, just as a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. The real you, the energy, the soul, is not a puppet that life pushes around. The real you is the whole universe. The real you is God, destined to follow no one, destined to ignite the ether and experience life from an individual perspective and take part in the creation. So this is for you, my fellow creators, my fellow gods, and my fellow selves, that coincidence may never disguise itself with the mask of fate and torment you, that every moment be meaningful, and that no experience be lost.”

I gave up at the first sentence.

But his strategy was successful. Look, Dylan Saccoccio is now a FAMOUS AUTHOR.

Of course, no one is going to be interested in reading his books, but he’s famous.