Zephyr Dear

note the author rated this experience four out of a possible five stars

There was one point I got wrong yesterday in my post about the Auschwitz death certificate. The Nazis wanted to eradicate the Jews, yes, but not their memory. In fact, the Nazis apparently planned to build a museum about the extinct Jewish 'race' in Prague - though there seems to be some historical dispute about these plans. In any case, TPM Reader P(hilip) G(ourevitch) reminds us of this other critical dimension of the Final Solution ...

Moving post - and very good question: why the record keeping? When I saw your tweet linking to this, my first thought was - "they issued death certificates?"

Thinking about it - the answer may lie in your observation that this was "a whole people, being sent into oblivion, to be erased from the earth and from memory." I think you're right about erasure from the earth, but not from memory. The Germans didn't want to forget about the Jews. I think they wanted and intended to take credit for erasing them. They only kind of hid some of what they were doing while they did it - but mostly they were wide open about it, almost boastful. All the photography and diary keeping by Nazis engaged in extermination operations -- this isn't seen as stupidly self-incriminating swagger, the way the documentation done by the soldier-photographers of Abu Ghraib is typically seen.

One key to understanding the double-determination to exterminate and remember is to wrap one's mind around the idea that the Nazis planned, once they got done with the Jews, to make a big Jewish museum in Prague. They were collecting artifacts and warehousing them for this grand exposition: torah scrolls and Sabbath candelabras and other ritual and/or folkloric objects. I guess they had something in mind like the American Indian collections and exhibits at the Smithsonian and the Natural History museum. I think the current Prague Jewish museum even has some of the stuff the Nazis stockpiled. So the point is they definitely wanted to remember.

As for the death certificates at Auschwitz: did they issue them for people they killed, in the crematoria say, as well as those like your wife's ancestor, who died of disease? In any case, there was also always an air of creepy scientific purpose to the Nazis' extermination record-keeping. Like the doctor you quote who was preserving organs for study. They were studying, with the purpose of remembering as a new field of knowledge, just what it takes to do away with people/a people like that - this would be a contribution to Western civilization.

In a way the record-keeping is more sinister than the impulse to leave no trace: it suggests total confidence in the success of the utopian project of genocide.

The fate of North America's native population and European Jewry are such vastly different stories that I hesitate to get into discussing possible parallels. But there is one that seems inescapable to me. If you look over the swath of four centuries of North American settler history there is an unmistakable change in settler or white American perceptions of Native Americans before and after they become a totally militarily defeated people and largely vanish from the physical landscape of North America. Before they range from frightening to literally satanic to a permanent 'other' counterpoised against America's civilizing, industrializing mission. But after the Indian becomes part of the past, in the American national psyche, there's a great change. The image and memory undergo a profound transformation. The idealized figure of the Indian warrior - as opposed to the marginalized and impoverished Native Americans pent up on reservations - becomes something like a mascot for the American character, supposedly embodying various American national virtues.

Remember, the US Army has a tradition of naming all its aircraft after Native American tribes. We take these things for granted. They're natural somehow in the texture of American national memory. From an historical perspective, though, there is something a little odd and paradoxical about this. It is frightening though I must confess interesting to consider how a victorious Nazi regime might have remembered an annihilated Jewry.

anticonfluentialist:

The best of #foxnewslitcrit, Twitter’s response to the mortifying Fox interview with Reza Aslan (author of the new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth)

I'm very excited to be able to launch the trailer for graphic novelist Paul Pope's new book Battling Boy, a major release from FirstSecond that hits shelves in October. Here's what First Second says about Battling Boy: "After 13 years, author Paul Pope has written his first major graphic novel, called Battling Boy. Clocking in at 208 pages in full color, Battling Boy is Pope's first work aimed, like Jeff Smith's Bone, at an audience of all ages. EW calls Pope's Battling Boy, 'A new generation superhero.' Battling Boy is set on the planet Arcopolis, a world where monsters roam the streets at night (and sometimes during the day as well). Only one man stands against the ever-growing monster tide -- the genius vigilante Haggard West. Haggard West dies in the first chapter. All hope seems lost: Arcopolis is desperate. But when its salvation comes in the form of a twelve-year-old demigod, no one is more surprised than Battle Boy himself."

Click through for a preview of the first ten pages, courtesy of First Second.

So it turns out that the University of Toronto is launching something called the Toronto Science Festival — a “three-day, public celebration of science–with keynote speakers, panel discussions, as well as a variety of performances, activities, film screenings, exhibitions and events” at the tail-end of September. This year’s theme (for indeed, the intention is to make it an annual event) is “Life in the Universe”. And apparently I’ll be contributing in a small way; I’m told I’m slotted into a panel discussion on the subject of First Contact as explored by Star Trek, following a “half-marathon” of episodes from various iterations of that franchise. Not sure exactly what episodes we’ll be looking at; I’ve seen a tentative list, but apparently it’s still open to discussion.

It has got me thinking, though.

Genre “reboots” have been all the rage for so long that by now even the backlash is suffering a backlash. The success of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot (well, except for that last part) was little short of miraculous given the derivative dreck it was based on. The success of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek is decidedly mixed (whatever you may think of the storylines, there’s no denying the movies are box-office gold). The cinematic Spiderman reboot itself got rebooted while the derision over that third Raimi outing was still echoing in our ears. And the less said about that 2011 The Thing reboot, the better.

You may remember that I wrote — well, not exactly a “reboot”, but at least an alternative take on that whole Thing riff a few years back. And I was a major Star Trek fanatic, pretty much from sixties-era classic right up to grad school. I read every one of those atrocious little novelizations (Joe Haldeman wrote one of those, did you know that?). I got the Constitution-class blueprints and the concordance and the medical reference manual, the galactic maps and all the tech manuals. I reread Gerrold and Whitfield’s behind-the-scenes books endlessly. Alan Dean Foster’s fleshing-out of the animated series. I even got, I shit you not, the Star Trek Cooking Manual by Nurse Christine Chapel. I still have most of them around, somewhere.

I hung on with grim loyalty through the first two seasons of Next Gen, hoping that it might someday get good — and sighed in ecstatic relief when, finally, it did. I gave up on DS9 a few seasons in — before it found its feet and, according to many, turned into the best Star Trek iteration in recorded history. (I suppose I should go back and revisit that series some time).

Voyager is what killed it for me. I didn’t even last through a single season of that travesty. And, thus inoculated, I had little patience and no residual loyalty at all when Enterprise came down the pike. I had standards, is what I’m trying to say. I may have been a fan but I was by no means a mindless fan; even back in the sixties, still suffused with whatever glimmers of innocent wonder survived in my ten-year-old-brain after a decade of Baptist family dysfunction, I knew that “Plato’s Stepchildren” was absolute shit.

So when I tell you that all this Toronto Science Festival and Reboot and Thing fan-fic stuff got me thinking about what classic Trek episode I might choose to reboot if given the chance, the answer that occurred to me almost instantly may surprise you a bit.

“Spock’s Brain”.

No, really.

Bear with me here. Yes, I ‘m talking about an episode widely regarded as the worst hour of Star Trek — possibly the worst hour of television — in recorded history. But if the quality of the original had any relevance, Moore’s Galactica reboot would be utter shite and that 2011 Thing prequel would have cleaned up at the Oscars. If template and reboot did show any significant correlation it would probably be negative, insofar as the better the original is, the less reason there’d be to reboot it in the first place. So the issue here is not past legacy, but future potential— and man, here at the dawn of the Neurological Renaissance, “Spock’s Brain” is brimming with the stuff.

Consider the premise: a humanoid brain interfaced with the control infrastructure of an underground city, performing many of the same functions it always has, but for a vastly different “body”. What happens to the sense of self when the cognitive circuitry remains intact, but the body it’s connected to changes utterly? Presumably the medulla oblongata doesn’t care whether it’s maintaining blood or water pressure, doesn’t care whether those pipes are metal or tissue. What about the neocortex? “Spock’s Brain Rebooted” could give the whole embodied-cognition paradigm the sweatiest workout it’s ever had in public. Not to mention the subtler issues raised by that magic salon hair-dryer that the Eymorgs used to boost intellect and expertise; remember the bit where McCoy went under the helmet himself, to learn how to stick Spock’s brain back into his body? Remember what happened when that expertise faded, halfway through the operation? Star Trek anticipated Neuromancer‘s “microsofts” by over a decade— but think about how much more it could have been. Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” is a classic example of the intimate dramatic potential to be wrung from the premise of lost enlightenment, of an enhanced intellect degrading by degrees. (Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside doesn’t do a half-bad job either, although its focus is on telepathy rather than sheer brainpower) “Spock’s Brain” could have stretched the mind and wrenched the heart, if only it had been done right.

For all the ground it broke back in its day — for all the impact it’s had on cultures both genre and pop — Star Trek was, and continues to be, about people who push buttons for a living. The switches may have migrated to iPads sometime between TOS and NG, the ship’s chronometer may have gone from analog to digital, but the essence of a ship piloted through control panels, commanded by the movement of fingers on surfaces, persists to this day. (Compare that with Delany’s Nova, written during the original Star Trek‘s tenure; people in that tale piloted starships in their sleep, via direct neural interface.) Poor ol’ Captain Pike ended up locked into a chair he could barely move with his brainwaves, his fully-functional mind unable to communicate beyond one beep yes two beeps no. We had better brain-interface tech than that back in the last century. We’re already using mind-reading machines to play games, for Chrissakes.

In a very weird, utterly accidental way that should imply no credit at all to screenwriter Gene Coon, “Spock’s Brain” might be the only vintage ep to retain any kind of technological relevance— because alone among all those 79 episodes it showed us a kind of command interface that isn’t already obsolete and isn’t about to be. It showed us the kind of mind-machine integration that remains science fiction, if only for a little while longer. And it provided a vessel — left tragically unfilled — through which one could have explored the profound and essential question not merely of what it means to be human, but what it means to be conscious and intelligent. It could have explored the impact of the corpus on the soul. It could have been better than trash.

Maybe next time.

Four-time Hugo award winner Frank Wu writes, "Revolution 60 is a highly cinematic game developed by Giant Spacekat, a mostly-female team of game developers based out of Boston. In the game, you play as Holiday, a female assassin for Chessboard, a black ops organization, that has to discover why an orbital weapons platform has malfunctioned. Now, the game is being developed for PC and Mac, completely DRM-free!"

They're looking for $10,000; $20 gets you a copy of the game.

Revolution 60 is an intense, movie-length story - told cinematically with gorgeous 3D animation and full voice acting from stars like Amanda Winn-Lee. You play as Holiday, an assassin for Chessboard, tasked with discovering why an American orbital weapons platform has malfunctioned. This indie game topped the list of best games of PAX East, and has been called, "One of the best games you've never played," by MSN.

Now, the team needs your help bringing Revolution 60 to PC and Mac. The advantage of using the Unreal engine is the ability to port a completed game to other platforms with relative ease. For an indie team like Giant Spacekat, this is extremely important, allowing us to get our game into as many players' hands as possible.

Bring Revolution 60 to PC and Mac! (Thanks, Frank!)

There's a problem with reporting on the Fed chair race: Janet Yellen's supporters will talk on the record. Larry Summers's supporters, by and large, won't.

That's in part because his key supporters are concentrated in and around the Obama administration, and they stay out of the media almost as a matter of course. But their reticence has led to a real imbalance in the debate. The case for Yellen is clear, and made often. Here, most recently, is Alan Blinder's persuasive salvo. The case for Summers is largely being made behind closed doors — though in the rooms that really matter.

This post is the product of numerous conversations with Summers's supporters who, to my continuing frustration, typically refuse to be quoted even when they're just saying nice things about their former colleague. Given the centrality of their testimony to this process, however, it's important to know what they're arguing. So here are the key points they make — points I'm passing along, to be clear, without endorsement:

— Summers is a better dove because he's a better hawk. Everyone agrees that Summers and Yellen both believe the Fed needs to keep supporting the economy for some time to come. But Summers's supporters believe he'll be able to keep that support going longer, if necessary.

There are two versions of this argument. One is that Yellen will tighten prematurely, because her reputation as a dove will make it harder for her to convince the market that she really will begin tightening when the time comes, and so she'll need to move from promising future tightening to actually tightening sooner than Summers would. Another is that investors won't trust Yellen's promises to tighten, and so the market will lose some confidence in the Fed and a risk premium will begin building — which would be even worse than an actual tightening.

To put it another way, Summers's supporters think the fact that he's a more credible hawk will let him be a better dove.

Yellen's supporters, it's worth saying, scoff at this argument, which they consider too clever by much more than half, and they particularly note that Summers's sparse record on monetary policy and the controversy surrounding his appointment will unnerve the market, leading to the exact risk premium that his supporters fear.

— Summers will be a more engaged regulator. This is the most surprising feature of the case for Summers. Outside the White House, the knock on Summers is that he's a tool of the banks — he helped with the financial deregulation of the 1990s, and he was skeptical of the Volcker rule during Dodd-Frank, and he's taken millions of dollars in consulting and speech fees from Wall Street.

This drives his supporters crazy. They see the 1990s as basically irrelevant. They think Summers made good points about the difficulty of enforcing the Volcker rule. They think his Wall Street experience is a plus, as it means he actually understands the industry. They say he was a strong supporter of aggressive bank regulations inside the Obama administration.

And they see Summers as an informed, confident and engaged financial regulator — something they worry Yellen wouldn't be. The argument here isn't that Yellen's heart wouldn't be in the right place, but that her focus would be elsewhere. Yellen is a monetary economist. She's at the Fed because she loves monetary economics. Summers, meanwhile, has a broader range of demonstrated interests, including financial regulation and the housing sector. There's no chance Summers is going to let those areas languish, as past Fed chairs have done.

— Summers knows how to manage a crisis. This White House is particularly attuned to the idea that the economy can fall apart at any moment. Summers, they think, knows what to do when that happens. He was at the center of the Clinton administration's efforts to fight back the various emerging-markets crises of the 1990s (remember "The Committee to Save the World"?). He was core to the Obama administration's efforts to fight the financial crisis in 2009 and 2010. Few people on earth are as experienced at dealing with financial crises — both of the domestic and international variety — as Summers.

Yellen was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco during the worst of the crisis, a voting member of the all-important Federal Open Markets Committee in 2009, and she became vice chair of the Fed in 2010. So she's hardly a stranger to crisis managements. But Summers's supporters don't think her experience quite matches Summers's role as a key player in multiple financial crises across more than two decades.

— He's really brilliant. Yes, you've heard this before. But it's worth fleshing out what people mean when they say it.

In 2008, Brad DeLong — who favors Summers for the Fed — wrote a blog post about working with Summers that tracks closely with the testimony I've heard from others.

You can bring him up to speed on anything in fifteen minutes. And if you can be interesting enough to keep his attention for half an hour, he will start throwing out hypotheses and what-ifs and suggesting connections you would never have thought of.

Summers rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But the part of Summers that rubs people the wrong way — or at least one part of Summers that rubs people the wrong way — is exactly what his admirers love about him. The experience of taking an idea to Summers, they say, is the experience of having the smartest person you've ever met focus intensely and seriously on what you just told them and then give you 10 reasons you never thought of for why it's idiotic or won't work or needs revision. And those 10 points are good points. And if you absorb them, and integrate them, you end up with something much better. The people who enjoy that process quickly come to rely on it as a necessary step in their work.

Some people hate the Summers experience. But those who don't find it exhilarating, even addicting. It breeds a loyalty far stronger than what's typical in government. Summers's supporters don't just like him. They think he's special, a once-in-a-generation mind that makes the minds around him better.

That's not to say he's smarter than Yellen, of course. What Summers has is an unusually aggressive, outward facing, broad intelligence. The disagreement between the two camps is whether the better guide to how Summers will perform at the Fed is the many people who don't enjoy the Larry Summers experience or the many people who do enjoy it.

— Backlash to the gender issue. This isn't part of the case for Summers, exactly, but it's part of the psychology of his supporters right now. People involved in the White House's Fed search really, really don't like the implication that they're sexists. They see the allegation that gender is playing a role here as absurd and offensive and an effort to back them into making a choice based on political correctness rather than the merits. It's a bit hard to gauge this, but my sense is the intense anger over the allegations is hardening people's positions, as they don't want to submit to a pressure campaign they consider deeply unfair.

Update! A Summers admirer goes on the record! When people tell stories of Summers' abrasive qualities, they sometimes mention his relationship with Lee Sachs.

Sachs, a top Treasury official from 2009 to 2010, was one of the administration officials Summers managed to "alienate," reports Noam Scheiber. "Summers favored a distinctly unbecoming approach—including a need to taunt his sparring partners as they went back and forth. 'Lee, you're losing this argument!' Summers would thunder. 'You're getting crushed!'"

But Sachs left the administration with deep respect for Summers. He thought Summers improved the quality of his work, even if he could be a bit abrasive doing it. He even hired Summers as a consultant to his firm Alliance Partners. And he e-mails:

We all worked quite well together. Sure, we argued sometimes strenuously. But at the end of the day, whether you agreed with him or not, the group almost always came to a better conclusion for having had those debates with Larry. And once a decision was made, he was loyal to it and supportive of the conclusion. I and most others who worked with him have the utmost respect for Larry and consider him a friend to this day.

Tales of Summers' abrasiveness are legion. But Sachs isn't alone in believing the good of working with Summers far outweighs the bad.

Looks like Time Warner is preparing their next big superhero for a TV series and an upcoming movie franchise. And it's...The Flash?

I really like The Flash. I think he's a character whose powers are well-suited to the comics medium, and he's had some great talent on his book over the last seven decades. But come on. Come on, people. The next choice for a superhero movie should be obvious: Wonder Woman. She already had a successful TV series. She's the most high-visibility superhero to not have a movie in the works. There's presumably a Justice League movie on the horizon. Why wouldn't Time Warner be putting her on the fast-track? Is it because the conventional wisdom dictates that female-led superhero movies don't succeed? The three superhero movies that I can think of off the top of my head that starred women didn't fail because they starred women. They failed because everything about the movies were terrible, from top to bottom. If you put top-notch writers, directors, and stars on a Wonder Woman movie, you'll make money. I assume that Time Warner wants to make money. So what's the problem?

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It's been 10 days since George Zimmerman's acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin. Although I was disappointed by the verdict, I don't believe Zimmerman woke that day wanting to kill anyone. He's another pathetic man who caused a needless tragedy with a gun in his hand. We've seen that before.

I've been more horrified by Zimmerman's race-conservative defenders than I've been by the defendant himself. Their post-trial reaction suggests amazing social distance from African American communities. Many Americans don't understand what's happening in minority communities, or why many residents of these communities are so angered by this verdict.

That same lack of familiarity informed widespread fears that there would be rioting — a danger some claimed was heightened by President Obama's measured but critical reaction to the verdict. Such fears misread the vibe of black communities, and overlook the positive cathartic impact in these same communities of hearing the president of the United States calmly express what many people were thinking and saying at home.

Last Saturday, I stopped by Chicago's "Justice for Trayvon" rally downtown. A few thousand people filled Federal Plaza to see the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Reps. Danny Davis and Robin Kelly, the Rev. Michael Phleger and other local notables. Dozens of similar events took place throughout the country.

Maneuvering within the throng, I found a good spot and was about to snap a picture when a beefy hand thwacked down on my shoulder and rested there. I swiveled to stare straight into the chest of a conspicuously large man in a white tee and White Sox cap: "Professor Pollack, how's it going?" he asked. He's one of the violence prevention workers I've met around town.

A few far-left organizations hung around the periphery. One guy from Chicago Anonymous walked the crowd in an unnerving Guy Fawkes mask. Another group raised a sign: "Break with the Democratic Party of Imperialist War and Racism!" For the most part, though, these onlookers were politely ignored.

A police helicopter hovered overhead. A few dozen bored cops hovered nearby, too. The only time they were needed was to help one woman with heat stroke. The event was serious and calm. Maybe that's why coverage was relegated to a short, page-25 story in the Trib.

The cursory coverage was unfortunate. Many people would have learned something if they had seen it. They would certainly have heard much about the disproportionate rate of violence committed by and against African American youth.

Many conservatives are claiming that black leaders choose to downplay these problems. "Black-on-black crime widely ignored, say African American activists," blares one headline in the Daily Caller. Rich Lowry put things more sarcastically in Politico:

Let's not talk about the 90 percent of black murder victims killed by other blacks. Why should we get worked up about something that happens on the streets of Chicago literally every night? If you are bothered by routine slaughter, sadly, you just don't get it.

Bill O'Reilly spent much of last week delivering impassioned "talking points memos" on this theme. As Foxinsider.com put things, O'Reilly "tackled the race problem facing America and the lack of leadership by the president to solve these issues." Confronted with social pathologies such as high rates of violence, "the civil rights industry looks the other way or makes excuses," O'Reilly says. "When was the last time you saw a public service ad telling young black girls to avoid becoming pregnant?" He hammered away at the (genuinely juvenile and misogynist) hip-hop lyrics of Lil Wayne and others. O'Reilly then harangued the head of the venerable National Urban League to "Stop the BS! on Black Crime."

O'Reilly's comments could hardly be more distant from everyday life in minority communities. Stern messages of sobriety, personal advancement and moral uplift are pervasive at school, on talk radio, in churches and at after-school youth programs. Ironically, some of the most emphatic messages against violence, teen pregnancy and school failure are delivered by people such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Minister Louis Farrakhan and others outside "The O'Reilly Factor's" usual demographic.

Youth violence may be the most talked-about issue in black America today. It's a rite of passage for prominent black leaders from Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama to speak at length regarding this problem. Whatever politically correct code might once have constrained the discussion is well behind us. How could things be otherwise, when violence is such an intimate reality?

Such leaders talk about crime policy differently from outsiders, not least because they are more likely to feel obligations to the people most affected by punitive criminal justice policies. Yet if they place more emphasis on anti-poverty measures and social services, and gun control, this hardly means they care any less about the crime happening in their own communities and to their own constituents.

I asked Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau and senior vice president for advocacy and policy, about these issues. He noted that the NAACP has always supported "swift and certain prosecution," and has sought to increase police clearance rates for such crimes. He also noted the NAACP's support for community watch, the Brady Bill and assault weapons bans, work of local NAACP chapters seeking to avert violence by "meeting with gang members and trying to steer them in a different direction away from gang life:"

We've seen the issue of black-on-black crime as a scourge on our community for a long time WEB DuBois recognized these problems in the early 1920s. [But] this issue is being raised the way it is now to distract attention from the obvious racial justice problems in the Zimmerman case.

We also know, from the work we've done, that poverty is a major purveyor of violence in our society. Violence is at its heaviest in poor communities regardless of race. And we know that our members are disproportionately poor. Averting crime, for us, is also the work we've done to create more jobs.

I posed similar questions to Rev. Jesse Jackson. He, like Shelton, noted that most crime is intra-racial. He also noted economic hopelessness as a key factor in promoting crime:

In 31 cities, unemployment among black males is above 40%. In six cities, it's above 50%. Add that to the arrest pattern, with 500,000 blacks arrested a year for marijuana, which wrecks your record for the rest of your life. Can you imagine if whites faced a 40% unemployment rate?

Jackson scoffed at the idea that he has ever downplayed black-on-black crime: "We were marching in the community with Father Phleger against the violence last Friday." Sure enough, a moment's Googling yields a 1984 headline, "Jesse Jackson decries black-on-black crime," a 2012 headline, "Jesse Jackson rallies to stop black-on-black carnage," and many similar entries in between.

Asked whether the Martin/Zimmerman case received disproportionate attention, Jackson responded that "Trayvon is the canary in the coal mine. He is a symbol of a national pattern:"

Because of the history of racism, there's something about white-on-black crime that has the impact of arousing fears and anger and hurt. It's Oscar Grant in Fruitvale in Oakland. It's Diallo shot forty times in his doorway in New York. It's Michael Mineo It's Stephon Watts, a 15-year-old autistic kid. We've had 57 police shootings in Chicago, 93% black and brown.

Various sympathetic accounts of Zimmerman's apparent racial profiling sound even stranger. Richard Cohen wrote in this newspaper:

Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment. It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life. We all know about it and take appropriate precaution but keep our mouths shut.

This might seem superficially street-smart. It's actually rather crazy when applied to a 17-year-old whose main suspicious behavior was to be tall, strong and black heading home from the convenience store.

Of course, young men of color are responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of crime. The grim statistics do not undermine a basic truth. Everyday fears of black youths reflect much ignorance borne of social distance, and vastly exaggerated fears of their individual criminality. My neighborhood is filled with young men who faintly resemble Trayvon Martin. They are my daughters' classmates, the kids shooting baskets in my driveway.

Many of us walk around believing that we are in much greater danger than we are. So we are much more frightened than we need to be. Chicago is reputed to be a tough town. Our annual homicide rate among non-Hispanic whites is actually three per 100,000. That's less than one-fifth the risk of death in an auto crash.

I spend much time in low-income minority neighborhoods affected by crime and violence. I try to be careful, and I've had some scary moments. No one has placed an unfriendly hand on me in 20 years.

When I wandered Chicago's "Justice for Trayvon" rally, I saw surprisingly few youths who might resemble Trayvon Martin. I saw many more people who might have been Trayvon's parents or his older siblings. From the podium and in the crowd, people angrily noted experiences of teenage sons being profiled by police or facing everyday suspicions in their daily lives.

These middle-aged parents are not rioters; they are not to be trifled with, either. Some are frightened by what could happen to their son or daughter in some tragic misunderstanding on a street corner. Others simply resent having their precious children continually viewed by others through the lens of their potential for violent behavior. They are angry. I can hardly blame them.

Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross professor at the School of Social Service Administration and co-director of the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago. He is a nonresident fellow of the Century Foundation.

About four songs into the Flaming Lips' set at Edgefield this past weekend, Wayne Coyne paused for a moment to do some math. Perched high atop his futuristic conductor's podium bursting with lights and fiber optic wires, he arrived at the conclusion that we were all indeed sharing one of the most beautiful nights of the year, a Saturday night no less, in Portland, Oregon. Once that was settled, he instantly became a bit perplexed at the audience as a whole for not being nearly fucked-up enough. Coyne urged the crowd to alter this by the time the next song ended, and then launched into the 2009 Embryonic cut, “Silver Trembling Hands,” complete with stunning background visuals, during which he really drove home the “When she’s high” refrain.

Directly following the smoke out, Coyne enlisted us showgoers for a bit of help with the next tune. He told us it was going to be a sad song, and that the band was going to need some help getting pulled up midway through it. The band then eased into a desolate, slowed down version of The Soft Bulletin classic, “Race for the Prize.” They eventually built it up, and blew it out into the explosion of noise, lights, and confetti that you might expect from a Flaming Lips’ show. It really didn't matter what sort of state you were in at that moment. The sheer energy on display was more than enough to uplift anyone in attendance. From that point on the band could do no wrong, they were in full control, and the spectacle of it all only served as a backdrop for the honest and cathartic music being played.

One of the many mid-set highlights came in the form of a cover. The band delivered a forceful and inspired rendition of Devo’s “Gates of Steel,” driven by Steven Drozd’s psych-rock guitar freakouts and Coyne’s passionate fist-pumping and epic vocals. After the song ended, Coyne gave it up big time for fellow freak flag flyers, Devo. He then gave a shout out to all the costumed freaks in attendance (with pink spandex guy getting a well deserved special shout out) and you could tell that he was genuinely touched by the enthusiasm on display at Edgefield.

The main set closed with another fan favorite off The Soft Bulletin, “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton,” and the band left the stage to the booming echo of the song’s final lyric, “Love,” being broadcast over the speakers and upon the lights display. Eventually, the stage began to show sparks, and Coyne and company returned and settled right into one of their most moving and emotional hits, the official rock song of Oklahoma, “Do You Realize??” The anthem took on a bit of a sing along, with plenty of smiles bouncing all around the amphitheater, and was followed by “Always There, In Our Hearts, the last track off this year’s release, The Terror, before the band left the stage again. The audience wasn't budging, so a second and final encore brought the set back to life again. This time the band dug all the way back to 1987 and closed the night in perfect form with “Love Yer Brain,” the final track off their second album, Oh My God!!!

Coyne’s signature human hamster ball and megaphone cheerleading act were nowhere to be found this time around. That being said, the stage-design and lighting extravaganza alone provided plenty of jaw dropping moments, and I’m pretty sure that the focused, heartfelt, and career spanning set delivered everything a Lips’ devotee could have asked for in a show. Well, almost everything, I did pass one cross-armed girl on the way out who spat out a bitter, “Yoshimi Noshimi!” as she stomped across the Edgefield lawn. I guess even The Flaming Lips can’t please everyone all the time.

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This announcement is part of our 2013 Burger Week (Aug 5-11), where we team with local restaurants and vendors to bring you $5 gourmet hamburgers!

White Owl Social Club, the rock and roll restaurant, bar, venue, and million-acre-outdoor-patio brainchild of the unstoppable guys behind Sizzle Pie, completely owned Burger Week's vegan angle. With a full menu that's at least half vegan and gluten-free, their meatless items are flavor-tested by omnivorous cooks to ensure they're not missing any savory umami. Their brilliant vegan burger, built with beets, crushed Oregon hazelnuts, seaweed, quinoa, and flax, looks like an actual burger, and has the varied texture and rewarding richness such patties usually lack. In order to completely nail the concept to the floor, they top this $5 masterpiece with creamy buttery Daiya jalapeno havarti, "misonnaise," the legendary New Mexican roasted Hatch chilies, onion rings, and chimichurri sauce. The team at White Owl is serious about meeting all of Portland's dietary needs, and goes to great lengths to make sure their alternative fare gets the royal treatment in both development and execution. If you live vegan, this burger is a must-try, and it will only be $5 August 5th-11th.

White Owl Social Club
1305 SE 8th Ave
Mon-Sun 3 pm - 2:30 am

Portland Mercury Burger Week on Facebook

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They did it in uniform. Amy Lange with Fox 2 News Detroit:

A Good Samaritan snapped photos of what appeared to be two men impersonating police officers involved in a pistol-whipping and robbery outside a Citgo gas station on Detroit's east side on July 21. Once Fox 2 aired those photos, an even more disturbing picture developed. ... Now under arrest are two police sergeants, a 47-year-old officer and 20-year veteran.

Don't worry, everything will be ok, they have a Robocop statue.

albinwonderland:

_{I am in here because I am no different from anybody else in here. I made bad choices. I committed a crime. And being in here is no-ones fault but my own.}

so anyone following my twitter knows how obsessed I am with this show right now
obsessed

obsessed

You just answered your own question but I’ll reinforce it again, NO not a good idea. Never take it your first time around people you don’t know, don’t trust or are going to get weird vibes from. Just wait until the environment is right and you are ready. Trust me it will be worth it. And stop over thinking it so much, you have to be relaxed and mentally prepared but worrying about irrational things won’t help. You’re already off to a good start by knowing how important the environment is and doing your research just don’t feel pressured to take it when you’re not 100% comfortable. 

“Can a horror film lead people to God?” asks the Religion News Service article responding to Warner Bros. aggressive bid to lure evangelical and Catholic audiences to see The Conjuring.

Filmmaker brothers Chad and Carey Hayes say their film isn’t your typical “Christian” movie fare, but it nonetheless carries a strong religious message that can appeal to faith-minded audiences.

It is, they say, a “wholesome horror film.”

The Conjuring centers around the real-life Ed and Lorraine Warren, a pair of ghost-hunting “consultants of demonic witchcraft.” In 1971, they were called to a 19th-century Rhode Island farmhouse where things had gotten downright spooky.

“To have two characters that were so strong in their faith, we didn’t have to preach it, we didn’t have to thump it, we just had to show it,” Carey Hayes said in an interview. “Their faith was the sharpest tool in their toolbox.”

The word “faith” has to do a lot of heavy lifting in those paragraphs, but it’s not clear what the Hayes brothers mean by the word. For a clearer sense of Lorraine Warren’s faith, check out the beginning of this recent interview she did with Devin Faraci for Badass Digest:

I wanted to talk about ghosts and demons and the way she and her husband fought them.

Whether you believe in these things or not, Lorraine does. Very much so. I have no question that everything she told me is genuine. Whether any of this stuff happened — whether she has psychic abilities, whether she can communicate with the dead, whether she has ever exorcised a family — she firmly believes it did. She is not a faker, she is not a phony. She is not running a scam. That is the spirit with which I approached this interview.

But the first thing I had to do was get myself a free psychic reading. I hoped she didn’t sense anything malicious hovering around me – my luck the last few weeks indicated that could be the case.

… I was told I had to open up by asking what you saw in my aura.

OK, let me see. I have to look at you a while. There’s something blue around you, but I don’t know what that really means. [stares intently] Decision? Do have a decision-making thing?

I’m at a crossroads.

There. That’s what the blue is. You have to really weigh. Don’t move too fast. Don’t move too fast at all. You have to give it a lot of thought, pros and cons, before you make the decision. Because the decision is going to be maybe lasting … if you do the right one.

Faraci is convinced that Warren is convinced — that she “firmly believes” in her own psychic abilities. But this initial response — “Do you have a decision-making thing?” — is such a lazy, half-hearted bit of perfunctory cold reading that it seems to undermine Faraci’s belief in the genuineness of her belief.

The faith on display there is Lorraine Warren’s abiding faith in the credulity of her audience. And just like the producers of The Conjuring, the Warrens learned how to repackage their paranormal woo in order to sell it to “faith-minded audiences.”

The Warrens’ shtick is a Gothic Catholic variation of the same con Mike Warnke and Bob Larson have long used to fleece evangelical Protestants with a propensity for “spiritual warfare” ideology. This racket is contemptible at just the basic level of any con that preys on gullibility and fear to separate vulnerable people from their money. But it’s also far worse than that, because it reinforces the very worst impulses of its audience, fueling a hate-filled, self-righteous crusader mentality. Whether that mentality is framed in terms of Lorraine Warren’s crypto-Catholicism or Bob Larson’s circus-tent Pentecostalism, it always ultimately winds up in one place: A fearful hatred of imaginary Satanic baby-killers, an evil that can only be combatted by punishing non-imaginary women.

It’s tempting to dismiss the Warrens and Warnkes as fringe characters with little influence on the larger culture. But consider this: American Christianity and American politics today are both shaped by the very same impulse fed and fed-on by these fringe hucksters. American Christianity and American politics today are based on a fearful hatred of imaginary Satanic baby-killers and the impulse to combat them by punishing non-imaginary women.

None of this is new. It was already an ancient pattern long before it was embraced by the “divines” who executed innocent women in Salem.

And lest you think I’m stretching there to tie these attitudes back to the days of the witch-hunt, please note that this is precisely what The Conjuring does. It harks back to Salem and takes the side of the witch-hunters, as Andrew O’Hehir explains in his review for Salon:

Here’s the real “true story” behind The Conjuring: Any time people get worked up about a menace they believe in but can’t actually see – demons, Commies, jihadis, hordes of hoodie-wearing thugs — they’re likely to take it out on the weakest and most vulnerable people in society.

… Without getting too deep into spoiler-hood, the Perrons’ house turns out to be inhabited by a demonic female spirit. She preys on the living, yearns to possess a delicious and vulnerable young female body, etc. Nothing new here in terms of horror movies, or borderline Judeo-Christian theology, or generalized male panic. But along with the overall tone of hard-right family-values messaging, The Conjuring wants to walk back one of America’s earliest historical crimes, the Salem witch trials of 1692, and make it look like there must have been something to it after all. Those terrified colonial women, brainwashed, persecuted and murdered by the religious authorities of their day – see, they actually were witches, who slaughtered children and pledged their love to Satan and everything! That’s not poetic license. It’s reprehensible and inexcusable bullshit. …

In American Christianity and American politics, such reprehensible and inexcusable BS is regarded as “wholesome.”

And this wholesome demonization of marginalized women is expected to “appeal to faith-minded audiences.”

And it does.

 

In March 1998, in the Bordeaux region of France, it was uncommonly hot. That was followed by a cold wet April and May, an erratic June, a cool overcast July, and an epic August heat wave. Fifteen years later, some horrible person paid $41,500 for a case of the fermented grapes that resulted.

That is the record-high price paid at auction in London last week for a case of 1998 Chateau Petrus, among the finest vintages from perhaps the finest wine producer in the world. Or that's what they say, anyway. I drink a lot of wine, and sometimes even pay a lot of money for the privilege, but as is the case for nearly all humans on earth, Chateau Petrus is out of my price range.

Among the plutocrat class, particularly in emerging Asian nations, the big name first-growth Bordeaux wines have an appeal that is out of whack with any fundamental analysis of the quality of wine. Compared to the very best Californian or Australian or Italian red wines, great Bordeaux may be different, but it isn't necessarily any better — and certainly not 20 times or 30 times better, as the recent auction price for the '98 Petrus would suggest. (Or at least that is what I gather from reading wine critics with better palates and bigger budgets than my own).

But the biggest-name Bordeaux houses — Petrus, Lafite-Rotschild, Latour and a couple others — have a history and brand name appeal that transcend boundaries. Suppose you're trying to impress someone, say a businessperson you're looking to make a deal with, or a woman you're trying to seduce. They may not know a Barolo from a Barbaresco, no matter how delicious the Italian red might be. But they are more likely to know that the Chateau Latour label should really, really impress them.

Now with a lot of other luxury goods where the name brand matters, a rising global wealth translates into more production. The luxury conglomerate LVMH is ready and willing to make as many $1,000 Louis Vuitton handbags and $5,000 Tag Heuer watches as the market will bear.

But wine is different. They're not making any more land in Bordeaux. Yes, more efficient agriculture has increased crop yields in the region over the last generation — there are 900 million bottles of Bordeaux produced each year, up from 500 million in the late 1960s. But the universe of global ultra-wealthy has increased a lot faster than that, and the big-name producers whose bottles attract four-figure price tags account for less than 5 percent of total production.

Which means that instead of being channeled into increased production of Chateau Petrus, increased demand for the juice is channeled into ever-higher prices, as at last week's auction. If it seems like the price tag of the first-growth Bordeaux is disconnected from any rational analysis of its quality or the enjoyment that the buyer will get from it, well, that's because that is exactly the case.

There are a number of other goods that fit the same pattern: Apartments overlooking Central Park, houses in London's Mayfair neighborhood, artwork by Damian Hirst. Supply is more or less fixed. Demand rises so long as the number of people among the global ultra-wealthy keeps rising, and so long as those peoples' tastes don't shift.

On one level it's harmless. If people with billions of dollars want to overpay for creepy dead-shark-centeric artwork, or a bottle of Petrus, that's fine. The latter even creates some benefits for ordinary shmoes; the astronomical price paid for first-growth Bordeaux surely incentivizes vineyards around the world to try to step up their game to claim a piece of the lucre, making wine-drinkers with more modest budgets better off.

But morally, it's a different equation. If you are about to drink a $3,500 bottle of wine, you have to think for just a minute about this option instead: Drink a $100 bottle of wine that is about as good, but from a less renowned chateau. And deploy the other $3,400 to pay for malaria-preventing mosquito nets in Africa that, by one charity's calculations, would be enough money to save about 1.5 human lives.

If you lack the moral imagination to figure that out, well, you're really kind of a monster.

As they've done in the past, Regal Entertainment is offering a marathon-style screening leading up to a new film—but unlike their excruciating, 700-hour-long endurance test of "Every Single Marvel Movie Ever Made Leading Up to a Midnight Screening of The Avengers," or their surprisingly unsuccessful Dead Man/Chocolat/The Lone Ranger event, this one seems like something reasonable people might actually want to attend and have a good time while doing so: Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost's complete Cornetto Trilogy, with 2004's Shaun of the Dead and 2007's Hot Fuzz followed by their latest, The World's End, which comes out in America on August 23. Basically: That sounds great, I'd do that, excellent idea, etc.

Via Pegg's twitter, the details are on Regal's site; locally, there'll be screenings in Portland and Tigard. Tickets are $20—which certainly isn't terrible for three movies, though if you're already planning on waiting to see The World's End until it's at a beer theater (which really does feel more appropriate), there might be cheaper ways to replicate the whole thing.

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mikkelhed:

Found on Imgur, perf.!

A pair of crooks in Oklahoma made more than $400,000 with a whisper-thin gas-pump credit-card skimmer that they installed in Wal-Mart gas stations, using rental cars while they were doing the installation. Kevin Konstantinov and Elvin Alisuretove allegedly harvested their skimmers every two months or so, creating bogus credit cards with the data and then withdrawing cash at ATMs or sharing it with crooks in Russia and the former USSR. Brian Krebs details the technology, as well as a series of next-gen gas-pump skimmers that use tiny, unobtrusive Bluetooth bugs to harvest credit-card data.

Pump skimmers can be fairly cheap to assemble. The generic gas pump card acceptance device pictured left in the image above (Panasonic ZU-1870MA6t2) can be purchased for about $74. The pump skimmer scammers must love this model: It almost looks like it’s designed to hold additional electronics.

Investigators say the individuals responsible for these pump scams are able to ply their trade because a great many pumps can be opened with a handful of master keys. In the end, it comes down to a cost decision by the filling station owners: This story from Fox News about a rash of pump skimmers discovered earlier this month in Minnesota that it costs filling stations about $450 to re-key eight pumps.

Don’t Get Sucker Pumped

How can I describe my response to the following simple words:

“There’s a lot of talk about the gay lobby, but I’ve never seen it on the Vatican ID card … When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized. The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem … they’re our brothers.”

Let’s parse this as conservatively as we can. What does it mean to be part of a “gay lobby”? In the context of the curia, I think it means that a group of cardinals or Vatican officials saw their sexual orientation as what defined them as a group, and operated as a faction within the Church’s center. I find that as repellent as any other kind of lobby that places a particular human characteristic ahead of the only quality necessary for a church official: dedication to God, God’s people, and the Church. But even then, Francis is making light of the hysteria: “I’ve never seen it on the Vatican ID card.” Not since John XXIII has a Pope deployed humor quite as easily and effectively as this one.

But so far, so banal – if utterly different than the panicked, tightly-wound homophobia of the last Pontiff. Then the revolutionary part:

“When I meet a gay person, I have to distinguish between their being gay and being part of a lobby. If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn’t be marginalized. The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem … they’re our brothers.”

The tendency to homosexuality is not the problem. This is a direct rejection of the last Pope and his predecessor. The key letter was issued in 1986 and the key, horrifying directive issued in 2005 barring all gay men from the priesthood – however they conduct themselves and regardless of their gifts and sincerity. Here’s Ratzinger’s CDF statement on homosexuality, which walked back the previous, much more inclusive, position taken in 1975.

In the discussion which followed the publication of the [1975] Declaration, however, an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral, or even good. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

This is the new doctrine Ratzinger introduced into Catholicism: that gay people are uniquely inclined toward an intrinsic moral evil, that there is something inherently immoral about us, that we are in a special class of sub-humans, because our loves – when expressed fully with our bodies as well as souls – are intrinsically evil. This doctrine was so contrary to the Gospels, so callous, and so grotesquely unjust – barring any gay man from entering seminaries solely because of something he cannot change – that it was, for me, one of the low points of my spiritual life in the church. Not only was the Pope attacking the souls of an entire class of human beings, he was deeming them unfit for priestly authority. Child rapists could be tolerated; sincere, celibate gay priests were intrinsically disordered unlike any other group in society. I wrote on this page at the time:

Some of the basic principles of the Catholic faith – treating each individual as equally worthy in God’s eyes, judging people by what they do, not who they are – are being violated by this policy. The astonishing work of gay priests across the centuries and across the globe is being denied and stigmatized and ignored. This is a huge stain on the church – reminiscent of its long, terrible history of anti-Semitism.

And so in a few off-the-cuff remarks, Pope Francis returned the Church’s leadership to the spirit and love of the Gospels. This does not mean a change in the doctrine that all non-procreative non-marital sexual expression – from masturbation to foreplay to homosexual or contracepted sex – is immoral. But what it does is explicitly end the Vatican’s demonization and marginalization of gay people made in the image of God, people who have served the Church from its very beginnings, in ways large and small.

It says a lot about the cramped, fearful, nit-picking dead-end of the last Pontiff that simply asserting human dignity should bring such joy. But it has been clear for a while now that the Holy Spirit and the intercession of Saint Francis are opening the windows of the church again – so that sunlight and transparency and simplicity can flood the previously darkened rooms of a retreating reactionary Vatican.

We have a Pope. By God, we have a Pope.

frolicingintheforest:

Sauron made friends with a Toad!
At first, I thought he was going to kill it. But he just started petting it. Not, swatting at it, and not trying to hurt it at all. They ended up just layin’ and chillin’ together for awhile. Then the toad went on his merry little way. Too cute haha! 

Amy Harmon is one of the best long-form, investigative reporters working today. (You might remember her recent stories about adults with autism navigating independent lives and finding love.)

Harmon has a new story up at The New York Times that delves into the nuance behind the often very un-nuanced public debate about genetically modified foods. It's a story about orange growers in a race against time to find something that can save America's orange crop (and orange juice supply) from a deadly bacteria. It's also a story about the debates those growers have amongst themselves as they decide to try funding GMO research that might solve their problem — and might not. All while creating new PR problems that they aren't entirely prepared to handle.

I think this is a particularly great lens to examine the science and risk/reward perspective on GMO foods, because it takes us beyond some of the particularly volatile points in the debate — points that often have nothing to do with the actual safety or benefits of GMOs. Monsanto is not involved in the development of these GMO oranges. And what the growers and scientists are trying to do has nothing to do with increasing pesticide use. In fact, if they succeed, they'll be able to reduce the amount of pesticides used on oranges. It's a long read, but a worthwhile one.

Image: Orange Shine, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from zlakfoto's photostream

mediamattersforamerica:

This stunningly terrible interview with religious scholar Reza Aslan puts Fox’s ignorance and Islamophobia on full display—and it’s an ideology that comes straight from the top. 

There's a fantastic long read up at Aeon Magazine about the science of child development and the ethics of running scientific experiments on vulnerable populations. Virginia Hughes goes to Romania to follow a long-term study comparing children placed in orphanages with children placed in foster homes. The catch: Scientists already know that foster homes are better for kids than institutions. But that fact isn't well-known or accepted in Romania. So scientists had to ask — is it ethical to run an experiment involving kids when you already know the answer if there's a chance that it might help other kids in the future?

This video made the rounds over the weekend, of a Fox news anchor who can't wrap her head around the fact that Reza Aslan, who is Muslim, wrote a book about Jesus:

Aslan came across about as well as one could in the situation—it's clearly not the first time he's had to defend his credentials—but the worst part is that he hardly talked at all about the book itself. I heard him on Fresh Air a couple weeks ago and he had fascinating stuff to say about Jesus as a historical figure and about his own conversion from Islam to Christianity and back again. (Here's the transcript of that conversation.)

You can hear it for yourself tomorrow night: Reza will be at the downtown Powell's at 7:30 to read from Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

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Redditor Tufflaw has been running a central air-conditioning system "24/7" during the New York heatwave. But the bills were offset by 26 home solar panels by Sharp that took three days to install and were subject to state and federal tax-credits, and will take 7-8 years to pay for themselves. Here is the most recent bill: $6.05. Tufflaw says that there are sometimes months that go by with no bill at all (and one year generated a $20 rebate from the power company!), and adds, "There's also an intangible benefit, feeling good about using a free renewable source of power."

Been running my central air 24/7 lately, especially with the recent heat wave. This is my most recent electric bill. Damn I love my solar panels.

WHOA HEY THIS IS HAPPENING Y’ALL

I haven’t offered commissions for over a year but THIS IS HAPPENING. 

PLEASE READ ENTIRE POST CAREFULLY BEFORE EMAILING

I will draw any character you desire! I can put them in a fancy outfit if you want, or interacting with simple props! I will draw OCs if you provide plenty of reference, but please no family members/friends/you.

YOU WILL GET: A high-res 8x11 image file FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY! For $25 extra, I will print, sign, and ship your commission to you!

EXAMPLES:

I will draw two characters interacting in any way you want! Again, I can dress them up or include simple props based on your preferences. OCs okay with reference, please no family members/friends/you. 

YOU WILL GET: A high-res 8x11 image file FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY! For $25 extra, I will print, sign, and ship your commission to you!

EXAMPLES:

Cheap and fast! I will draw a doodle for you of whatever you want, taking up to ten minutes to do so. Feel free to get crazy here, but nothing too complicated or I might not be able to complete it in ten minutes. I may add spot color or values if I have time.

YOU WILL GET: A high-res image file FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY!

EXAMPLES:

Okay, this is the only place I will draw from photos of you/family members/friends. Shoulders up, simple colors, either white or solid color background depending on your preference. Please provide plenty of reference.

YOU WILL GET: A high-res 5x5 image file FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY! Suitable to be used as icons for Tumblr, Twitter, or whatever!

PICTURE THIS, BUT WITH YOU:

Have you read everything up there carefully? Awesome! Shoot an email to me at gingerhazecommissions@gmail.com!

I accept payment through PayPal only, so please make sure that you know how to make that work!

And full disclosure, I assume you know what will happen if you request a commission of either a horse or porn. It won’t be pretty is what I’m saying.

Feel free to shoot me an email for freelance opportunities or commissions that fall outside the above guidelines, and I’ll see what I can do for you!