Bråvalla Canceled, No Men To Take Its Place.

The camping site of the Bråvalla festival. Photograph: Tt News Agency/Reuters.

A Swedish Music Festival is taking to heart the Michelle Obama mantra of “when they go low, we go high” with a gendered twist. A few days have passed since the organizers of Sweden’s four-day Bravalla festival announced their cancellation of next year’s event after news broke that four rapes and 23 reports of sexual assault happened at this year’s iteration of the fest. “Certain men … apparently cannot behave,” said organizers in a report. “It’s a shame.”

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Rather than go without a music festival next year, Swedish radio host Emma Knyckare tweeted that she wanted to see “a really cool festival where only non-men are welcome” that would go “until ALL men have learned how to behave.” Now, she’s making that dream a reality. She has since written on Instagram that a “man-free” festival will take place next summer. “In the coming days I’ll bring together a solid group of talented organisers and project leaders to form the festival organisers,” she told BBC. “Then you’ll hear from everyone again when it’s time to move forward.”

The “man free” festival idea follows the Womyn’s Musical Festival that was regularly held in Michigan for nearly four decades. That festival was a haven for lesbians and queer women, but ultimately shuttered after protests against its trans-exclusive policy. The Swedish festival hasn’t announced specifics in regards to how transgender communities will integrate into the man ban, but we’d expect them to be a bit more flexible.

Well, here’s hoping that transphobia doesn’t dominate the man-free festival, and I hope it’s a success.

The Guardian has the story on Bråvalla, Out has the story on the replacement.

Religious Shroomin’ and Snorting Chocolate.

Photograph: Fredrik Skold/Alamy.

Researchers are once again feeding shrooms of the magic kind to religious leaders, well, some of them anyway. I noticed a glaring absence of a representative of the Religious Reich. I have no idea why this is being done, it’s already been done, back in the psychedelic ’60s. Pretty much the same response of anyone who has their first experience with shrooms: “Cool, man, cool.” Of course, it if persuades any of the religious to mellow the fuck out, it’s all good. Shrooms have always had a mild effect on me, but it’s one of the sweetest rushes on the planet. We’d all probably be happier naked apes more likely to put energies into play rather than war, if we were all allowed a pocketful of shrooms. I wouldn’t mind a pocketful of shrooms.

The Guardian has the full story.

On the naked apes behaving stupidly department, we have a new thing, snorting cacao.

Now meet Coco Loko, a “snortable” chocolate powder being marketed as a drug-free way to get a buzz. The product, created by Orlando-based company Legal Lean, includes cacao powder, as well as gingko biloba, taurine and guarana, which are commonly found in energy drinks.

Nick Anderson, the 29-year-old founder of Legal Lean, says he heard about a “chocolate-snorting trend” in Europe a few months ago. He ordered a sample and gave it a try.

“At first, I was like, ‘Is this a hoax?,’” he recalled. “And then I tried it and it was like, okay, this is the future right here.”

Yeah, okay, whatever. All I thought when I first saw this was “fuck, that sounds messy.” Might give brown nose a whole new meaning. My second thought was “I wonder how many people are gonna die.” True chocolate allergies are rare, and most all of them involve raw cacao. Those allergies are most often anaphylactic in nature, also. I think everyone would be better off with a light menu of shrooms.

The Washington Post has the story.

DO NOT TOUCH.

SCREENGRAB.

Most of us learn early in life the delicious temptation of “Do Not Touch” and manage to get over not having license to touch every thing on the planet. Apparently, Mike Pence never got that particular lesson. He might have made an effort at a less obvious, furtive slide of the fingertips anywhere except under the note with “DO NOT TOUCH” on it. And here Pence thinks he’s the perfect model of morality in the christoverse. Tsk. For shame, Mikey.

The Guardian has the story, along with many of the reactions across Twitter.

God has raised up…a breaker anointing.

If anything is to be said for the nonsense to follow, it’s that it’s at least somewhat accurate. Not the “god” business, of course, but the extremely limited skill of the Tiny Tyrant.

“So, you know, North Korea, you’d better be on your toes because you’re up against a breaker anointing of God,” he said. “This isn’t about politics, this isn’t government as usual, this isn’t even militaristic, God has raised up…a breaker anointing. Anything that God opposes him against, he breaks up. He broke up the Republican Party…he broke up the Democratic Party, he broke up the news media. Everything that comes against him, he has a hammer against. So, I’m telling you, North Korea, you’d better stand down because you’re up against the breaker anointing of God.”

Does it really need to be pointed out, even to fundamentalist, conservative christians, that having only one tool that allows you smash, and nothing more, is not a good thing? Regardless of any “hammer”, it won’t stand up to nuclear weapons; nor will it stand against other nations coming to the conclusion that America no longer has any significant role to play on the world stage. Isolation is not the glory the Tiny Tyrant attempts to sell.

Bakker and Amedia then discussed the president’s volatile Twitter presence, which Bakker said was all part of the “gift of wisdom” that God had told him he gave Trump.

No matter how you slice it, Jehovah keeps winning the worst god ever dreamed up contest. The idiocy which keeps drooling out of Trump could not pass as wisdom under any definition. More than half the time, it barely reaches coherency.

Amedia offered that Trump tweets because he gets bored with nonconsequential things, part of his God-given gift of “discernment.”

Well, that’s, um, special. Pretty much all the Tiny Tyrant does tweet about is non-consequential crap, so I wouldn’t call that discernment, of any kind. For one thing, in order to be discerning, it certainly helps if you have knowledge of things first. We can definitely rule that one out.

“I believe he receives downloads that now he’s beginning to understand come from God,” Amedia said.

:Snort: Ah, it’s downloads now, is it? There’s always this terrible desperation on the part of fundamentalists to sound modern and relevant, and they never, ever get it right. That sort of thing will happen when you insist on believing in a god that would be too psychopathic and regressive for the stone age. If Donny’s receiving downloads, they’re coming in on a floppy disk in a worn out drive.

Right Wing Watch has the story, and video.

Cool Stuff Friday.

Alexey Kondakov.

Ukranian multimedia artist Alexey Kondakov flexes his Photoshop prowess to take characters from classical paintings and transport them into everyday  scenes in his series “Art History in Contemporary Life”. The ongoing project sees the artist take banal photographs of contemporary urban life — from subway cars to waiting rooms and trash-filled alleyways, and inserting figures from paintings by the likes of Bouguereau and Holbein. In doing so, Kondakov creates a playful meditation on the nature of time, overlapping époques and cultural contexts. See more of his work on his Facebook page.

You can see more at iGNANT.

File this under Want. As a whole house full of want. It’s a chair which is also a bookshelf, which is in turn, part of the larger bookshelf. This is brilliance. You can see much more and read all about it at iGNANT.

Danli Hu.

A thought-provoking project by interactive designer Danli Hu reminds us that reality has never been concrete. Made for Hu’s graduate program in Design and Technology at New York’s Parson’s the New School, Touching the Void allows users to feel objects that aren’t really there.

“Humans are visual animals; we rely on our eyes and believe the world is exactly like what we see. We think an object physically exists in our real world because we can perceive it with our eyes and feel it with our hands. Creating a virtual object, which is unseeable but provides physical sensations despite its invisibility, challenges people’s definition about virtual and reality,” explains Hu on her website.

You can see and read more at The Creators Project.