firehose

Canberra, Australian Capital as planned and as built.

	Courtney shared this story from Shakesville:
	Weirdly enough, states other than FL are capable of being disgustingly racist.

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[Content note: Racism, trans* phobia, violence, rape]

This seems to me like as good a time as any to remind folks that CeCe McDonald is still in jail.

Two years ago, McDonald and her friends were attacked on a Minneapolis street by people yelling racist, homophobic, and transphobic slurs. One of the attackers stabbed McDonald in the cheek, leaving her with stitches. One of her attackers died after being stabbed with a pair of scissors, although McDonald and her attackers differ in their accounts of what happened.

CeCe McDonald is black.

CeCe McDonald is a woman.

CeCe McDonald is trans*.

While one of her attackers was charged with assault and sentenced to 6 months in jail, CeCe McDonald was charged with second degree intentional homicide. McDonald pled down to a manslaughter charge, and is currently serving 41 months in jail. In a men's jail.

I've seen a lot of the people in the media (and otherwise) imply that what happened in George Zimmerman's trial a) had nothing to do with race, and b) was largely a function of Florida's conservative laws. I call bullshit.

--

For more information on how you can support CeCe, click here.

Thanks to @crunkfeminists for the reminder.

togifs:

[boburnham]

It’s the one year anniversary of scifiinterfaces.com! On 18 July 2012 I posted the Overview to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. So let’s take a little break from the review of Ghost in the Shell to celebrate with a challenge.

Both while coauthoring Make It So and here at scifiinterfaces.com, I spend a lot of time looking at of sci-fi for patterns and waiting for that moment when my brain tells me, Hey, You’ve Seen This Thing Before.

While posting The Fifth Element review to the blog, I had another of those moments: As the camera pans away from the empty starfield of the opening title, we’re treated to a first view of a planet. Could be Earth, could be Alternate-Earth, could be Exoplanet X572. This most beloved trope acts as an establishing shot to tell you, yes, you’re in the right cinema or on the right channel. Enjoy your popcorn. This is where you want to be.

Still, over a long time they can start to look similar. Can you identify all of these intro planetscapes? Some were sent in by readers of this humble blog responding to a post back in March. And to Compost Creative, Pete Williams, Paul Thompson, and Al Taylor (though that was technically a starscape), and all of my regular readers, thanks so much for making this first year so awesome.

The Challenge

Find below 10 intro planetscapes from movies and television shows. Drop your enumerated guesses into the comments. Be sure and use the full IMDB.com title of the film or television program. The first commenter to get all 10 right will win a free copy of the book to read or give to a friend.

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Kudos to the New York Post for calling a story about Kosher lube "The Oy Of Sex."

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Afrika Bambaataa donated his vinyl to Cornell University Library's Hip Hop Collection. (Professor Bambaataa is a Visiting Scholar there.) But before the wax goes on its way, you can watch it being sorted, organized, and, yes, spun, at Gavin Brown's enterprise gallery in NYC's West Village. There are "Lunch Breaks" shows this week with Crazy Legs, Joe Conzo, Grandwizzard Theodore, and Break Beat Lou, and the collection will remain on view until August 10. Unfortunately, no digging!

"Spend Your Lunch Break with Afrika Bambaataa's Legendary Record Collection" (Paper)

More details on the exhibition at Gavin Brown's enterprise.

As I wrote earlier today, the corporate brass at McDonald's seem to believe that in order to survive on what they pay their restaurant workers, you need a second job. And hey, credit where it's due: they're probably right. Fast food wages are terrible. If you're relying on a minimum- or near-minimum-wage check each month, it means you're living life on the financial precipice. 

Since this out, however, I've gotten a few angry responses from readers, the gist of which was captured pretty well in this tweet by Vincent from Chicago (I assure you, I'm the one getting yelled at):

@JHWeissmann @binarybits You're an idiot. McDonald's IS NOT a career!

-- Vincent (@VCON29) July 16, 2013

Tone aside, Vincent is actually hinting at a fairly sophisticated set of arguments you tend to hear from people who don't worry too much about minimum-wage workers, in particular. In brief: There aren't that many them; the jobs are mostly occupied by "suburban teenagers, not single parents," as the Heritage Foundation puts it; and people don't earn minimum wage for very long.

Or again, nobody makes a career as a cashier at McDonalds. 

And there's something to all that. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were about 1.68 million workers earning the federal minimum wage in 2011, accounting for about 2.3 percent of the workforce. About half were below the age of 24, and as the Heritage Foundation notes, the vast majority of those minimum wagers were enrolled in school. Moreover, one study by the Employment Policies Institute estimated that, between 1977 and 1998, more than 65 percent of minimum wage workers managed to land a raise within a year of starting their job. 

So with all of that in mind, here's my quick case for why you should still be worried about what companies like McDonald's pay their employees. 

The Working Poor Are Real, And Some Earn More Than Minimum Wage
According to the Census bureau, 7.2 percent of American workers live below the poverty line. In other words, they far outnumber the ranks of minimum wage earners. Remember, even McDonald's cashiers earn closer to $7.72 an hour on average, according to Glassdoor. 

Fast Food Workers Are Not All Suburban Teenagers
No, not every low-pay worker is a kid assembling Big Macs between classes. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median fast food worker (technically referred to as a combined food preparation and serving worker) is about 29. A full 40 percent of minimum wage-earners, meanwhile, are in their prime working years of 25 to 54. Sure, some are married moms working part-time so they can see more of their kids. But plenty aren't.

Promotions Don't Mean Much If You're Still Poor
Yes, low-pay workers might get raises, but they're not necessarily big. The Employment Policies Institute found that the median annual pay hike for minimum-wage earners was 10 percent. About a third didn't get any kind of raise at all. And this was during the 90s. In today's slow economy, the situation is presumably worse.

McJobs Are Probably the Future
During the recession, the economy shed millions of middle-income jobs in fields like construction and manufacturing. During the recovery, they've mostly been replaced with low-wage service work, exacerbating a trend that dates back to the turn of the century. As shown on the graph below, the the food services industry now accounts for 7.6 percent of all jobs, up from about 7 percent pre-recession, and about 6.2 percent around 2000.

And, in all likelihood, they'll account for even more in the future. The BLS projects that food services will be among the fastest growing source of jobs for Americans with no more than a high school degree -- right behind retail and home health aides. So maybe working at McDonalds doesn't usually amount to a career today. But it might tomorrow. 

skindeeptales:

Harlow by Kimberly Millard

The full title of this item is “A Young At Heart Man Playing A Game Boy In A Double Exposure With The Codes On The Computer.” The best part is not the guy’s haircut, or the fact that he’s not holding a gameboy, but the fact that it’s available in infant sizes.

Today’s endless, undeclared and increasingly secret use of U.S. force is exactly what the founding fathers feared most. By Gregory D. Foster

The Air Force was ready to drop the RQ-4B Block 30, but a Northrop Grumman lobbying campaign convinced Congress to resuscitate it. By Richard H.P. Sia and Alexander Cohen

Although more then 13 percent of the U.S. population is black, only 1 percent of the Senate is.

WHEN America faces an immensely important question with dramatic racial and social overtones like whether the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager in Florida was murder or self-defence, we have an established way of handling it: we pluck a bunch of random people with no special legal training off the street, make them listen to two heavily biased and diametrically opposed versions of the evidence for a few weeks, and then abide by whatever decision they make. This isn't necessarily a crazy way to handle the process; we and other countries that share our legal heritage have been using it for centuries, so it's clearly workable, at a minimum. But you have to admit it's kind of weird. People who come from countries that use Napoleonic-style systems of investigating magistrates often find the idea of having their guilt decided by an arbitrary collection of six or twelve of their fellow citizens discomfiting.

That said, it's not immediately clear that being tried by independent legal experts is any better. Functionaries ensconced in the judicial system may be more susceptible to "capture" by the police or prosecutors, or simply to developing consistent organisational biases they can't even recognise. There probably isn't any truly unbiased way to decide whether people are guilty of murder, in a fashion that eliminates social prejudice. The role of trial-by-jury in...Continue reading

Burzum frontman and Euronymous killer Varg Vikernes has been arrested in France for allegedly plotting a massacre. Vikernes was pinched at his farm near Salon-La-Tour, France, and the police are currently in the process of searching his farm for weapons. Motives for the alleged murder plot are unclear, but numerous French sources are pointing readers to an open letter he wrote in 2011 to Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Oslo that same year.

This is, of course, not Vikernes’ first brush with Johnny Law. He stabbed Mayhem guitarist Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth to death in 1993, receiving a sentence of 21 years in prison for the murder in 1994. Vikernes was released in 2009, after having becoming affiliated with both Germanic paganism and what he calls Odalism (and others call neo-Nazism) in prison. He's also suspected of burning down at least three Norwegian churches in 1992, but he ...

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Barking Bad

MWD channels his inner Heisenberg in anxious anticipation for the final season of Breaking Bad, premiering August 11th. 

Reflecting upon the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, I’m struck by the expectations so many in mainstream and social media held for the six women jurors who found Zimmerman not guilty 0f second-degree murder. This jury was more often “gendered” than they were “raced.” Many of us—whatever “side” one took in this controversial high-profile case—assumed that the very biological determinism of their femaleness would engender maternal empathy for Trayvon Martin, the murdered victim, and trump other identities these women held (five of whom were white, one of whom was Hispanic).

There was another narrative that Zimmerman’s defense attorneys conjured up for the jurors that we need to consider, one deeply embedded in the intersections of race and gender: Essentially, his attorneys feminized Zimmerman as they simultaneously criminalized Martin.

It’s curious to me, if we look back to when this case first received national attention, how we as a nation were fairly united in believing the death of the 17-year-old Martin deserved an arrest and a trial. During those early conversations, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that this death, whether based in racial profiling or self-defense, resulted from an unjust confrontation involving an older, heavier, armed man against an underaged, unarmed teen. At the most, Zimmerman was a cold-blooded killer; at the least, he was a coward.

But then President Obama entered the fray and tried to humanize Martin by commenting that, if he had a son, he would probably look like this now-deceased teenager. It was after that moment that Trayvon’s posthumous image was denigrated. Instead of magnifying his humanity, Obama’s comments of paternal compassion deepened the political will of his opponents to demonize this teen.

What unfolded in the wake was what I consider a two-fold demonization. On the one hand, the narrative of a young black teen walking through a middle-class neighborhood in a hoodie deemed him a threat, even though he was only armed with Skittles and iced tea. Those who wanted to conjure an image of the criminalized “thug” could spin this tale however they wanted; Trayvon Martin was dead and rendered forever speechless.

The other narrative, the one less talked about, is perhaps the more enraging: the hypothetical “black president’s son.” This symbolic trespass is sacrilege for some.

The double-reading of “threat” applied to Trayvon Martin’s body propelled enough citizens to raise funds for Zimmerman’s defense, and his defense team did the rest: from ridiculing star witnesses such as Trayvon’s friend Rachel Jeantel to wrestling with an effigy representing Travyon (in the infamous “dummy” demonstrations) to the block of concrete that Trayvon was supposedly “armed with” (when defense attorneys argued that Travyon supposedly slammed Zimmerman’s head in the sidewalk, thus representing life-threatening danger). I thought I was watching theater of the absurd and not a legal court system at work.

I was holding out hope that the jury of women would see through the absurdity and, as prosecutors urged, use common sense. But what  is common sense when one is told that the heavier, older George Zimmerman is just a “scared, inept and cowardly Mr. Softy,” while the 17-year-old deceased is a super-scary black man, so dangerous and so embodied with superhuman strength that he could literally “arm himself with pavement” to the point that Zimmerman had no other choice but to use deadly force to save his own life?

That six women believed such a narrative, enough to constitute reasonable doubt, speaks volumes—less about their lack of maternal empathy for Sybrina Fulton’s son walking home, only to be killed by an armed stranger, and more about the gendered powerlessness, combined with racialized fear, that certain women are conditioned to understand. Never mind that Zimmerman has had a history of domestic violence and assaulted a woman while working as a bouncer—nformation that was never brought up in the trial.

I have a hard time believing that, had there been men on this jury, the defense team would have portrayed an armed “Mr. Softy” threatened by an unarmed teenager. Such a portrait violates the codes of masculinity that they have learned since the playground (i.e., who has the upper hand, which is always, always the guy with the gun). Granted, the attorneys might have tried an altogether different strategy had their been men on the jury, but somehow the feminine, powerless Zimmerman narrative was enough—and could only be convincing (at least enough to create reasonable doubt) if one accepts that Trayvon is the more powerful and violently oppressive of the two. Given his unarmed and underage status, this narrative can only be convincing if one believes, however subconsciously, in the stereotypes of black masculinity.

What bothers me about the gendered and raced narrative that feminized Zimmerman and criminalized Martin are the assumptions made about the women jurors—and white women in particular, most of them mothers. This isn’t just biological essentialism but also the assumption of loyalty to white supremacy. In the past, and perhaps even today, women were often appealed to because of the belief in their “inherent” compassion and empathy—based in motherhood, of course.  This was especially demonstrated during the antebellum Victorian era, when women abolitionists constantly appealed to white women’s common bond as mothers in empathizing with powerless, enslaved black mothers: from Angelina Grimke’s “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South” to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Frances E. W. Harper’s “The Slave Mother” to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

But think also of the white women who, when they failed to be included in the 15th amendment, which extended the vote to black men but not to white women, fell back on racist outrage and eventually rallied around white supremacy and supported groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which lynched black men to “save” white women’s virtues. White supremacy had become a system worthy of their loyalty.  Indeed, just from listening to Juror B37 in her interview with Anderson Cooper, her ability to sympathize with a George Zimmerman while dismissing the likes of Martin and his friend Rachel Jeantel as “those people,” indicate where her loyalties lie. No wonder Jeantel, in her interview with Piers Morgan, had to sum things up the way she did: “They old! That’s old-school people.” (Translation: based on the age, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds of the jurors, they’re woefully clueless about the lives of others.)

Adrienne Rich said it best in “Disloyal to Civilization” when she argued that white women could not form important connections with other women across the planet—the kinds of connections that would advance women’s collective power and overturn patriarchy—if they remained forever loyal to a white supremacist system. This year we’ve seen women like Abigail Fisher try and overturn affirmative action in a Supreme Court case, much like Barbara Grutter before her, even though white women as a group have benefited more than anyone else from affirmative-action programs. And now, another group of women have failed to give Trayvon Martin justice. These instances suggest that white privilege, power and dominance outweigh any notions of gender justice and solidarity.

Despite white privilege, this loyalty to the same oppressive system that would gladly run roughshod over our rights to choose or not choose motherhood, as has occurred in states like Texas, is woefully misguided. If feminism is to have a future, as Rich noted, “disloyalty [is now] urgent necessity.”

Picture of Rachel Jeantel taken from Youtube

In 2004 during the British Library Silk Road exhibition, I showed this wooden implement from Niya (Cadota) on the Southern Silk Road and described it as a mousetrap following M. Aurel Stein's description. In Ancient Khotan (376) he says that it 'was recognized by the men from Niya as a mouse-trap, similar to those still in use.' However, I have long been puzzled as to how it functioned, but Janken Myrdal, Professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, has sent me a plausible explanation. He writes:

‘The narrow end has a small hole, probably for the peg which held the bowstring, the peg that was connected to the bait and thus was released when the prey tried to take the bait. The bow was probably attached to the four small holes just before the round opening. The arrow was arranged under the bow, and run in the channel (as suggested by Stein).

The bait must have been placed over the opening, so the mouse (or probably a rat, as diameter of opening is c. 5 cm) had to stick its head into the opening. The small holes on the other side of the opening were probably for the stand holding the bait, with a connection to the peg that held the bow-string.

A guess is that the arrow had a tip with a straight end. Then this trap would function as a guillotine chopping off the head of the rat quickly and silently – there was no time for the mouse/rat to squeal. This would explain the opening where the rat has to place its head and the channel where the bow had to run an exact path.’

‘I found mention of a similar trap (the arrow did not go under the bow though) used in Japan, and because the rat made no sound at all on its death the author had caught as many as seven rodents in an evening – but had to remove the bodies fast. If other rats realized that it was a trap they would not try to take the bait.’ (John Batchelor. Ainu Life and Lore. Tokyo: Kyobunkwan 1927).

Many thanks to Janken for this. He also suggests that testing could be carried out for traces of blood in the hole.

welcome to Boston

(via Sea monsters on medieval maps - Brainiac)

nic0cacola:

Our puppy recently had an operation and got the cone (or lampshade haha), so we decided to do this.