Sophianotloren

The sprawling Navajo Nation that covers northeast Arizona and parts of southeast Utah and northwest New Mexico is a huge chunk of land that is beautiful, unique, and fragile. This largely high desert area can certainly sustain life but it’s dryness means that climate change makes it highly prone to long-term changes that severely limit that ability to sustain life. There was a major report on the impact of climate change on Navajo lands prepared last year that certainly covers these issues in detail.

Yet we have to be careful about how we lump all environmental change in with climate change. This article talking about how sand dunes have made one-third of the Navajo Nation uninhabitable and blaming climate change is a case in point. There’s no question that climate change is making this problem worse. But at the end of the piece, someone mentions overgrazing. And in this case, that’s the real issue. Ever since the return of the Navajo from the Bosque Redondo to a piece of their native lands in 1868, enormous herds of sheep have roamed this fragile landscape, causing widespread erosion and most of the problems mentioned in this article. Part of this return meant the Navajo had to give up their raiding ways and although their reservation was large and became larger, was not nearly the extent of land where they had previously lived. This all meant more emphasis on the sheep economy. As early as the 1930s, the erosion was clearly visible on the land. This is when John Collier, as part of his Indian New Deal, intervened and forced the Navajo to cull their herds. This was a total disaster. While Collier was a welcome change from the usually corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs for most tribes and the Indian New Deal a step in the right direction, with the Navajo, Collier had no idea what he was doing. As Marsha Weisiger details in her excellent book Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country, Collier’s methods in dealing with the erosion problem undermined women’s status in Navajo society, increased class divisions by favoring wealthy herders, and probably most significantly, created long-term suspicion of conservation methods as anti-Dine in Navajo society. So sheep herding grew again and continued almost unabated.

That’s what is primarily creating this desertification on the Navajo Nation. I don’t doubt that climate change is a factor. But this is largely a socioeconomic/colonialist creation.

This opinion piece by Catherine Fisk and Edwin Chemerinsky is quite interesting. Did the Supreme Court accidentally set a precedent to eliminate bans on labor picketing?

Reed v. Town of Gilbert’s reasoning makes it clear that restrictions on labor picketing can no longer survive First Amendment scrutiny. Sections 8(b)(4) and 8(b)(7) of the National Labor Relations Act prohibit speech, including peaceful picketing, if a “labor organization” or its agents is the speaker and based on the message. Section 8(b)(7) prohibits picketing urging workers to join a union or employers to recognize one if the picketing lasts longer than “a reasonable time” not to exceed 30 days. Thus, the National Labor Relations Board’s enforcement arm sought to enjoin workers affiliated with Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) from picketing with signs saying “Stand Up, Live Better,” “Walmart, respeta a los trabajadores” (Walmart, respect workers), and “Let Walmart Associates Speak Out.” And under 8(b)(7) fast food workers can picket outside restaurants with signs asking to be paid $15 an hour or that the city adopt a $15 minimum wage ordinance, but they cannot picket for more than a reasonable time urging workers to demand $15 and a union. Section 8(b)(4) prohibits picketing urging secondary boycotts, and thus prohibits members of a labor union from picketing at a retail store urging a boycott of the store because its low prices are the result of low wages paid by a subcontractor that produces goods sold in the store or that operates the warehouse whence the store’s goods are shipped. But a store employee would be allowed to picket to urge customers to shop at the store because of its low prices.

The 8(b)(4) and 8(b)(7) restrictions on picketing clearly violate the First Amendment as the Court interpreted it in Reed v. Town of Gilbert. They prohibit speech based on its content because they, as the Court explained, “single[] out specific subject matter for differential treatment.”

Therefore, the picketing restrictions in section 8(b)(4) and 8(b)(7) can be upheld only if they are narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest. In Reed v. Town of Gilbert, the Court assumed for the sake of argument that the government has a compelling interest in regulating aesthetics and traffic, but rejected the Town’s contention that the regulations were narrowly tailored to protect the Town’s aesthetic appeal or traffic flow because the law was under-inclusive – it allowed signs with some messages but not others. The government might argue that 8(b)(4) and 8(b)(7) serve the compelling interest of preventing unjustified work stoppages and consumer boycotts. Eliminating work stoppages and consumer boycotts is, in our view, not a compelling governmental interest. But even if it were, prohibiting picketing is both overbroad and under-inclusive. Any group other than a labor organization is free to urge a consumer boycott or that workers strike to demand higher wages, and even labor organizations are allowed to use leaflets (rather than picket signs) to urge boycotts or strikes. The picketing prohibitions are under-inclusive if the goal is to eliminate encouragement of boycotts and strikes. And 8(b)(4) and 8(b)(7) are over-inclusive to the extent that they prohibit peaceful advocacy rather than actually striking or boycotting.

I guess my views on this are like my usual belief about the Supreme Court–that the justices will create ways to enforce their own personal political preferences. This is quite the development and may create a path forward but it’s hard for me to believe that Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia care one whit for precedence when it might help a labor union.

Crackpot myths about gluten edition.

Paul Butler of Georgetown Law:

I have no respect for your ancestors. As far as your ancestors are concerned, I shouldn’t be a law professor at Georgetown. I should be a slave. That’s why they fought that war. I don’t understand what it means to be proud of a legacy of terrorism and violence. Last week at this time, I was in Israel. The idea that a German would say, you know, that thing we did called the Holocaust, that was wrong, but I respect the courage of my Nazi ancestors. That wouldn’t happen. The reason people can say what you said in the United States, is because, again, black life just doesn’t matter to a lot of people.

[HT]

classic spider faux pas — boy was there egg on my face

also i was on a man’s face, and i was crushed by his hand immediately after

breaktotheotherside:

just-shower-thoughts:

If I wear a shirt inside out, the entire universe would be wearing it except me.

Congratulations, you just explained Gödel’s theorem in a single sentence.

Hovertext: Also, that's not EXACTLY a circle.

New comic!
Today's News:

Come onnnn hatemail. Come onnnnn hatemail. 

mllescarlet:

but

Do you recognize these reasons that our queer families can take on unhealthy dynamics? Find out why you deserve to change it – and how.

This author's actually glad to have this conversation about the mistakes you're making as an ally – because learning is what it's all about. Here's to more growth!

After reading the script, we definitely felt that Blade Runner was of that film noir genre, and we looked back to the films of the 1940s for inspiration. Deckard was as much a gumshoe as Sam Spade. For Rachael’s character, our chief inspirations were the tailored suits that Adrian [the creative brain behind Dorothy’s sparkling ruby slippers, and Joan Crawford’s signature shoulder pads] designed in the late 1930s and early 40s. I liked the idea of combining different shades of suiting fabrics to create patterns. In this case I used amazing vintage suiting woollens in shades of grey and beige, with metallic threads that I was lucky enough to find, which created a subtle luminous quality. I wanted to create a futuristic heroine who was believable in the future, but with her feet firmly planted in film noir past. [x]

Blade Runner (1982) dir. Ridley Scott
costume design by Michael Kaplan and Charles Knode
production design by Lawrence G. Paull

We heard from so many of you after this author's last list exposed examples you'd never noticed before. That was only the beginning.

If you see a Buddha in the road, ask which gender pronouns they prefer and then kill them.

One day Atticus lay down in the snow, and called out, “Help me up! Help me up!” His mother came and gave him some cold-pressed juice. Atticus got up and went away because that’s how unschooling works.

What is your original personal brand before you were born?

If a minimalist curates a ten-item fall capsule wardrobe but doesn’t blog the experience and doesn’t count her Acne Pistol Boots as one of the ten items, has she really edited her closet?

A conceptual sculptor asked Tobias when he was weighing some flax at Whole Foods, “What is Buddha?” Tobias said: “Flax helped me lose three pounds. It’s also my daughter’s name.”

If a performance artist self-flagellates at MoMa while it’s closed and there are no guards or cameras there, does it still leave a laceration in the shape of a pentagram?

As the roof was leaking, a yoga instructor told two students to bring something to catch the water. One brought the landlord, the other a bucket with ice. The first was severely reprimanded, the second highly retweeted.

What is the sound of a pop star rapping?

A MFA student asked her professor, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” The professor reminded her that he was only an adjunct but alerted her to the fact that Starbucks does offer health insurance to part-time employees.

Have you noticed the feminist movement's race problem? You're not being “divisive” or “too sensitive” if you have – here's why.

so tired
of the
nearly-ceaseless assault
on my senses

the low-frequency pain
churning|rattling|pummeling
my viscera

diesel engines of road construction equipment all through the night on the nearby highway, smashing concrete and asphalt
garbage trucks, their compactors,  their motorized arms to lift and dump, their grinding engines and screeching warning tones
low-flying aircraft rumbling jet engine hell right through me
passenger cars speeding through the neighborhood with stereo blasting but especially the bass, can’t forget the bass, if it doesn’t set off other car’s alarms it isn’t shaking enough
commuter trains, freight trains yanking on the electric whistle like a toddler with a brand new toy for twenty minutes at a time

all of these are physical sensation to me, physical pain
like a
slow-motion
non-stop
gut-punch
symphony
and I am so tired of the same old song

I need silence, stillness, solitude, safety.

I need…
HOME.

Filed under: General

Even though liberal arts degrees are actually good for business, Matt Burriesci (author of Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World) believes that supporters of the humanities should lay that argument to rest:

A liberal arts education … may not teach you how to change your oil or program a website, but it prepares you to learn any skill, and most importantly, to question how any task is performed, challenge conventional wisdom, and introduce new processes.

This skill set will be invaluable in the technical revolution that is already underway, just as it was invaluable to the great thinkers of the Enlightenment who sparked the Industrial Revolution, he says.

Related Posts:

• The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Reading Don Quijote with My Mother
• Professors Are the Canary in the Coal Mine
• The Literary Underground
• Undergrads Beware
• The Right Balance

OSLO, Norway — What might for some artists constitute a proud moment, appears to be something of a jape for the Chapman brothers. The setting is a wooded hillside outside Oslo. The controversial artists are just about to join Rodin, Renoir, and Dalí in the Ekeberg Sculpture Park. But, despite the persistent rain, Jake Chapman is keeping his introductory speech light in tone. Older brother Dinos isn’t here.

When the tarpaulin is pulled off the sculpture “Sturm und Drang” (2014), the effect is like a dead rabbit from a hat. The work conjures horror rather than satisfaction; a clutch of child skeletons, dressed with goblin masks and writhing maggots, hang from a blasted tree. For further satire, this macabre scene is cast in bronze, an elevated material already much in favor here in the sculpture park. The cursed stump may evoke the cruelty of war and the black vision of Francisco de Goya, but don’t expect any quarter given to pathos.

“It’s an ongoing irony to us that our work keeps getting bought and put in museums,” Jake tells me back on a sofa in the lobby of the park’s modernist restaurant. “I quite like the idea that, actually, instead of trying to increase the number of things which have some sort of artistic merit, we’re actually producing things which don’t really deserve the place they end up in.”

“Sturm und Drang” is on a hillock of freshly laid turf overlooking an ornamental pond. The sculpture is one of two springtime acquisitions by businessman and collector Christian Ringnes. The other is a marble angel with exposed innards, by Damien Hirst. It’s arguable that work by neither of these shock-mongers deserves a place amidst the natural beauty of this park, with its view over the local fjord. But perhaps, given the temptations to romanticize this rugged setting, that’s why these sculptures need to be here.

And yet Jake rejects the notion of site-specific art: “I tend not to think about stuff like that; I tend to avoid thinking about it. I don’t want to think what I do has anything to do with such vast, monumental scales. It would be dangerous and off-putting for me to have to think about stuff like that.” “Sturm und Drang“ might draw its title from a proto-Romantic movement, but it is hard to imagine the Chapmans hiking around the misty peaks of old Europe. (Jake has come to this opening off the back of a family holiday in Disneyland Paris, an irony which the troublemaker appears to relish.)

Oslo is a small city, with three local sculpture parks, and a skyline filled with cranes. In 2019, both the National Gallery and the Munch Museum are due to move to new premises on the waterfront. Developments like this, in the infrastructure of art, inspire the younger Chapman to launch into a spot of verbose criticism: “I find it difficult to stomach an association between what I do and the scale of the liberal polity expanding to the point of universality. I think it’s a worrying thing.”

Civic museums would seem to have an unacceptable level of humanist aspiration for Jake and his brother. These are, after all, the pairs who grafted penises and anuses onto mannequins of kids and brought both grinning Nazis and visibly aroused members of the KKK into galleries. Both sets of fascists mingled with visitors and implicated the art world in mankind’s worst atrocities.

“We try to find things which are at the low level of human activity,” says Jake, quite plainly. The sculpture, in this case, may have a classical bronze finish, but its cast components have all been sourced in those poky joke shops which remind fully grown Brits of their schooldays. The artist describes the use of such humble materials as “sadistic materialism,” and the casting of joke materials in bronze, a “sadistic gesture.” He says, “the work is still pictorially within the realm of childishness.”

But the Chapmans are always ready to put aside childish things and talk theory. They value fun as a form of transgression. “The idea of humor, the idea of pleasure, the idea of laughter,” Jake begins, “It summons up an inhuman gap, between an affect and a response and an appropriate response.” This begs the question: how does one frame an ‘appropriate’ response to a war crime? The brothers may dwell on the ghoulish side of life but, when it comes to their sense of humor, things look rosy to them.

“I suppose,” ventures Jake, “in some optimistic way, if you can produce a response of laughter in a viewer, then you’re opening up a little area, a little gap for some sort of parasitical intervention.”

This may sound unpleasant, but, says the younger Chapman, “I guess if you’re asking the viewer to laugh at something, then you’re suspending their … normative sort of ways in which they can rationalize their response.” Looking back, this is a form philosophical culture jamming which might characterize the work of all the Young British Artists (YBAs).

You’ll find it here in the undermining of both material (bronze) and source material (Goya). But of course the Chapmans have previous experience with subverting one of Spain’s last great old masters. In 2003 their Turner Prize nomination was supported by a suite of prints from the Disasters of War series, which were defaced with exquisite cartoon faces. More than a decade after seeing these, I’m now able to tell one of the Chapmans how irritated their exhibition made me. It just seemed too taboo.

“We recognize that,” Jake says, without batting an eyelid, “And we wanted to demonstrate in some extreme didactic way that actually these things are the equivalent of Xerox pictures.” The artist tells me the obvious: that the series was made for distribution. “So the idea of drawing on them didn’t really feel to us like we were obliterating something which was of such scarce value.”

Transgression, that word again, was always an important gesture or, as Jake puts it now, “having something to say about the world in a way which is not just a seamless agreement with it.”

Might Goya himself have got the joke? “I think there’s an acerbic wit … and there’s a very fatalistic, misanthropic sense to the work, definitely,” says the artist. He and Dinos are stuck by a shortcoming in the typically humanist reading of Goya’s anti-war prints; there are, he maintains, “excess activities … going on in there.” Which brings us full circle to the artists’ addition to Ekeberg Park, this grim Disaster of War rendered in three dimensions.

“Drawing a picture of people hanging on a tree and, in some ways, making that reverberate with images of Christ on the cross — that takes a certain amount of pessimism and cynicism,” says Jake, concluding that, yes, Goya had a sense of humor. But if his original etching was a sight gag, the Chapmans’ bronze is an involved, bathos-filled pastiche. It must take more these days to really be amusing.

“Sturm und Drang” can be seen at Ekeberg Sculpture Park (0193, Kongsveien 23, Oslo, Norway). The author of this piece was on a press trip organized by the park.

Now we’re cooking with gas:

But at a press conference on Tuesday, in the midst of a national debate over the propriety of Confederate images, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell identified one place where Davis shouldn’t be: the Capitol building in his home state of Kentucky. A statue of Davis stands alongside former President Abraham Lincoln—his Civil War adversary—and other Kentucky-born leaders.

After last week’s deadly shooting at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, images emerged of the suspected gunman’s affinity for the Confederate flag, spurring debate over whether the Confederate symbol should be represented on state property. According to reporters at the news conference, McConnell said that a “more appropriate” location for the Davis statue would be a state museum. This week, McConnell expressed support for South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s call to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in Columbia.

This isn’t the first time that Davis’s place of honor in the Kentucky Capitol has been questioned. Earlier Tuesday, a Kentucky gubernatorial candidate called for its removal, and last year, a former state treasurer started an online petition to replace Davis’s statue with a memorial to boxer Muhammed Ali, who was born in Louisville.

That Ali was originally the namesake of Cassius Marcellus Clay makes him an even more appropriate replacement for Davis. Ali apparently doesn’t want a statue, but there’s probably room for both a two-dimensional representation of the Greatest, an a statue of the abolitionist leader Clay…

This claim that the ISDS courts in the Trans Pacific Partnership are unconstitutional is certainly an interesting one. I’m not a lawyer so I’ll leave the analysis to the experts. But I’m intrigued:

Under the TPP, the arbitrators will act like judges, deciding legal questions just as federal judges decide constitutional claims. However, unlike judges appointed under Article III of the Constitution, TPP arbitrators are not appointed by the president or confirmed by the Senate, nor do they have the independence that comes from life tenure. And that presents a significant constitutional issue: Can the president and Congress, consistent with Article III, assign to three private arbitrators the judicial function of deciding the merits of a TPP investor challenge?

The Supreme Court has not ruled on this precise question. But the collective reasoning in four of its recent rulings bearing on the issue leans heavily toward a finding of unconstitutionality. The Court has placed significant limits on the ability of Congress to assign the power to decide cases traditionally handled by the courts to people other than Article III judges, even when the judicial substitutes are full-time federal officials, such as bankruptcy judges or the heads of federal agencies. Moreover, in each case in which the Court approved of a dispute being taken away from federal judges, there was judicial review at the end of the process, which is not the case with TPP. Moreover, although the Justice Department issued a lengthy opinion in 1995 on when arbitration can be used to replace court adjudication, it did not then, and has not since then, defended the constitutionality of arbitration provisions like those in the proposed TPP.

As it presses for the passage of TPP, the administration needs to explain how the Constitution allows the United States to agree to submit the validity of its federal, state, and local laws to three private arbitrators, with no possibility of review by any U.S. court. Otherwise, it risks securing a trade agreement that won’t survive judicial scrutiny, or, even worse, which will undermine the structural protections that an independent federal judiciary was created to ensure.

Thoughts? My sense is basically that current U.S. courts will defer to most issues if they help corporations and hurt working people, which will almost certainly be the result of the ISDS courts.

foxmxlder:

ever wish you could just

“[American scenery] has its own peculiar charm — a something not found elsewhere,” the 19th-century painter Thomas Cole once wrote. The Hudson River School founder and his followers were given to romanticizing the North American wilderness: their paintings presented it as a verdant Canaan ripe for the taking, helping establish a mythical national identity that’s been hard to shake since.

In 2010, photographer Peter Croteau decided to revisit the landscape of one of Cole’s most famous paintings to compare how the folklore fares with the facts. He had been particularly drawn to “The Oxbow” — formally titled “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm” (1836) — while visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an undergraduate art history major, struck by the way it suggested dark consequences to westward expansion.

“The left side of the painting shows a stormy, wild, and unclaimed landscape, while the right side depicts the new landscape of man and its agrarian settlements along the Connecticut River,” he told Hyperallergic. “The broken tree in the foreground barely hangs on for its life, representing the fragile natural landscape.”

The prophetic nature of Cole’s painting became clear when Croteau reached the top of Mount Holyoke — a massive parking lot sat just 50 feet away from the spot where the artist had long ago positioned himself to paint. He decided to turn away from the Oxbow and document it instead. “The prescribed views of the landscape that our society reveres are no more important than any other space in the American landscape,” he explained.

Croteau continued recording similarly mundane scenes. He shot tract house suburbs, hidden dumping sites, and abandoned trailers — all from high vantage points in moody weather and otherworldly lighting conditions, tropes the Hudson River School used to provoke awe. “Construction Site” (2012) even mimics the composition of “The Oxbow” itself, with a tree in the left-hand corner entrapped by orange industrial netting.

“Paintings of the Hudson River School preserved the image of a place in all its glory but not the actual place itself,” Croteau said. By depicting the modern landscape realistically, his series The Road to Oxbow suggests a truer American national identity — one in which consumption and waste have a far more central place than nature.

Your computer is leaking information. It's not from the usual suspects: WiFi, Bluetooth or ethernet, but from radio waves originating from your processor. Researchers at Tel Aviv University and Israel's Technion research institute have built a $300 d...

When Google unveiled its urban improvement initiative, Sidewalk Labs, it left one big question: what was this new outfit actually working on? As of today, you should have a good idea. Sidewalk and a group of investors have bought and merged two key c...

 

 

 

 

High School was us and we. We learned our grammar there.
Became devised by bells sawing halls sharp as number two
pencils: we grew thin, grew dark as men in its hallways, we
grew up on men, our breasts their beards, their beards our
breasts, while we cracked open beer cans in the Girls’ Room,
swug down foam minutes before walking into Homeroom.
I was known to be dumb, detentioned, a kill myself kind of
girl, but it was you who shot herself in the head. What kind
of girl shoots herself in the head? You wanted a quality kill?
Take some sleeping pills, spare your mother the blood-grief.
You always took the hit for me. Turned around in your seat.
Did you hear what they said? Yes, some of us are intending
to go to college. Loser grief. Then the tarry hot of the parking
lot rose up, black, promising me any boy’s face bent to crack
against my face that was becoming a face: when we wanted
what we all wanted. To be pretty. Which then meant famous.

***

Reprinted from Oracle: Poems by Cate Marvin. Copyright © 2014 by Cate Marvin. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show #11: Cate Marvin
• National Poetry Month Day 24: “After Aftermath” by Cate Marvin

asksecularwitch:

vincentvangozer:

derinthemadscientist:

mickeyrowan:

having a flesh vessel is so annoying?????? like they have to be constantly watered, they have to be in specific temperature range to be comfortable, i’ve had a headache for like seven hours and nothing i do will get rid of it,

physical forms are so inconvenient??????????????

I knocked mine over yesterday and scraped off some of the outer barrier and it keeps sending me really annoying warning messages about it

blood.dll has caused an access violation exception

I still can’t figure off how to turn off the monthly compile time. It goes for like 7 days wrecks all the system and takes so much CPU time. 

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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