From Kengi, some spectacular beetles! And the Goldenrod beetle is on Goldenrod. Click for full size.
© Kengi. All rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
From Kengi, some spectacular beetles! And the Goldenrod beetle is on Goldenrod. Click for full size.
© Kengi. All rights reserved.
Another edition of Rats Past. Agnes, Amelia’s sister, was firmly in the Wicked Smart McSmartypants category. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t figure out, and it never took her very long to figure anything out, either. Agnes was also a generally happy, affectionate girl too. She would raise the ire and jealousy of all the others every Ratmas though, because she was the only one who figured out the easy way to get the mineral chews – you just cut the thread!
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
A Brolga who has settled into working life. Brollie’s story is here.
Kim Ryu.
Near Cannon Ball, N.D. — It is a spectacular sight: thousands of Indians camped on the banks of the Cannonball River, on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Our elders of the Seven Council Fires, as the Oceti Sakowin, or Great Sioux Nation, is known, sit in deliberation and prayer, awaiting a federal court decision on whether construction of a $3.7 billion oil pipeline from the Bakken region to Southern Illinois will be halted.
The Sioux tribes have come together to oppose this project, which was approved by the State of North Dakota and the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The nearly 1,200-mile pipeline, owned by a Texas oil company named Energy Transfer Partners, would snake across our treaty lands and through our ancestral burial grounds. Just a half-mile from our reservation boundary, the proposed route crosses the Missouri River, which provides drinking water for millions of Americans and irrigation water for thousands of acres of farming and ranching lands.
Our tribe has opposed the Dakota Access pipeline since we first learned about it in 2014. Although federal law requires the Corps of Engineers to consult with the tribe about its sovereign interests, permits for the project were approved and construction began without meaningful consultation. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation supported more protection of the tribe’s cultural heritage, but the Corps of Engineers and Energy Transfer Partners turned a blind eye to our rights. The first draft of the company’s assessment of the planned route through our treaty and ancestral lands did not even mention our tribe.
The Dakota Access pipeline was fast-tracked from Day 1 using the Nationwide Permit No. 12 process, which grants exemption from environmental reviews required by the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by treating the pipeline as a series of small construction sites. And unlike the better-known Keystone XL project, which was finally canceled by the Obama administration last year, the Dakota Access project does not cross an international border — the condition that mandated the more rigorous federal assessment of the Keystone pipeline’s economic justification and environmental impacts.
The Dakota Access route is only a few miles shorter than what was proposed for the Keystone project, yet the government’s environmental assessment addressed only the portion of the pipeline route that traverses federal land. Domestic projects of this magnitude should clearly be evaluated in their totality — but without closer scrutiny, the proposal breezed through the four state processes.
Perhaps only in North Dakota, where oil tycoons wine and dine elected officials, and where the governor, Jack Dalrymple, serves as an adviser to the Trump campaign, would state and county governments act as the armed enforcement for corporate interests. In recent weeks, the state has militarized my reservation, with road blocks and license-plate checks, low-flying aircraft and racial profiling of Indians. The local sheriff and the pipeline company have both called our protest “unlawful,” and Gov. Dalrymple has declared a state of emergency.
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Transcript, copied from Daily Kos:
Dakota means friend…friendly. The people who gave that name to the Dakotas have, sadly, never been treated as friends. The people whose language was used to name the Dakotas and Minnesota, Iowa, Oklahoma, Ohio, Connecticut, Massachusetts and other states, the Native American tribes, the people who were here before us… long before us, have never been treated as friends. They have been treated as enemies.. and dealt with more harshly than any other enemy. In any of this countrys’ wars.
After all of our major wars we signed peace treaties and live by those treaties. After world war II when we made peace with Germany we then did everything we possibly could to rebuild Germany. No Native American tribe has ever been treated as well as we treated Germans after World War II.
Donald Trump and his supporters now fear the country being invaded by foreigners who want to change our way of life. A fear that Native Americans have lived with, every day,… for over five hundred years.
The original sin of this country is that we invaders shot and murdered our way across the land killing every Native American that we could, and making treaties with the rest. This country was founded on genocide before the word genocide was invented. Before there was a War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.
When we finally stopped actively killing Native Americans for the crime of living here before us, we then proceeded to violate every treaty we made with the Tribes. Every. Single. Treaty.
We piled crime on top of crime against a people whose offense against us was simply that they lived where we wanted to live.
We don’t feel the guilt of the crimes because we pretend they happened a very long time ago, in ancient history. And we actively suppress the memories of those crimes.. but there are people alive today whose grandparents were in the business of killing the Native Americans. That’s how recent these crimes are.
Every once in a while there is a painful and morally embarrassing reminder, as there is this week in North Dakota near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation where hundreds of people have gathered and camped out in opposition to an interstate pipeline being built from North Dakota to Illinois.
The protest being led by this countrys’ original environmentalists. Native Americans.
For hundreds of years they were our only environmentalists. The only people who thought that land and rivers should be preserved in their natural state. The only people who thought a mountain or a prairie or a river could be a sacred place.
Yesterday a federal judge heard arguments from the tribes against the federal governments approval of the pipeline and said he will deliver his decision on whether the pipeline can proceed next month.
There are now over ninety tribes gathered in protest of that pipeline. That protest will surely continue even if the judge allows construction to proceed.
And so we face the prospect next month of the descendants of the first people to ever set foot on that land,.. being arrested by the descendants of the invaders who seized that land.
Arrested for trespassing.
That we still have Native Americans left in this country to be arrested for trespassing on their own land is testament, not to the mercy of the genocidal invaders who seized and occupied their land, but to the stunning strength and the five hundred years of endurance and the undying dignity of the people who were here long before us. The people who have always known; what is truly sacred in this world.
Bison on the Bluestem Ranch.
Yesterday media mogul Ted Turner officially transfered ownership of his 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch to the Osage Nation. The tribe’s $74 million purchase restores a portion of the roughly 1.2 million acres that the tribe owned until 1906, when the reservation was allotted to individual tribal members, according to Chief Geoffrey M. Standing Bear. The Osage Reservation once covered the entirety of Osage County.
The Osage Nation is filing applications for federal trust status to protect the land from future sale. “We are the boss of our lands. The federal government is here to assist us,” Standing Bear told Fox 23 News.
Turner likewise intends for the land to remain under tribal ownership: “It is my sincere hope that our transaction is the last time this land is ever sold,” Turner wrote in a letter to Standing Bear, “and that the Osage Nation owns this land for all future generations.”
Turner, the founder of CNN and Turner Broadcasting, ran a bison-raising business during his 15-year ownership of the land. He will continue to run his bison operations in a more centralized area, primarily in Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota.
The Osage Nation plans to continue the bison business. The tribal council has additionally received at least a dozen applications already for additional proposals for the open fields, involving, fishing, hunting and more to turn a profit, while preserving the wildlife and the land. “We are trying to organize ourselves on a preservation side and the profit-making side, and also with the cattle operations to support it,” Standing Bear told Fox 23 News.
The tribe celebrated receiving the land with drums and song on Wednesday.
In a January 21 letter to Turner explaining what regaining even a small portion of the Osage’s original homelands would mean, Chief Geoffrey M. Standing Bear wrote:
“Until 1906 we owned nearly 1.5 million acres in one contiguous parcel of what is now Osage County. Then, our ownership was fragmented into thousands of individual parcels and the mineral estate handed over to control of the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. As a result of these actions we now own only five percent of our original land in scattered parcels.”
I am very pleased the Osage Nation got a small portion of its land back, but it’s still distressing that it costs such an outrageous sum to get stolen property back.
Via ICTMN.
The French beach ban on Islamic garb has caused controversy over women’s rights and secularism and confusion over what constitutes a burkini (AFP Photo/Raymond Roig).
This whole snarl of nonsense has been one massive facepalm from the beginning. There was absolutely zero reasons for choosing a single type of beach wear and banning it. Hello, racism! And no, none of the supposed “reasons” made a damn bit of sense. Buzzfeed had a very good response to this idiocy. Some people at any beach anywhere will be covered up in one way or another, and it’s never been any sort of big deal. Oh, but Muslim women? No, no, nope. Can’t have that, expose your body for no good reason, or no beach for you!
France’s highest court has suspended a ban on the “burkini” in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet, in a decision likely to lead to the overturn of 30 more such bans in towns across France.
The French League of Human Rights this week asked that the Council of State, a top French court, overturn the ban. The Council of State’s judgment, released Friday afternoon, quashed the earlier ruling of a Nice court that on August 22 said the ban was legal.
The Council of State judgment said that the ban had breached “fundamental freedoms.”
Human rights league lawyer Patrice Spinosi told reporters that the decision should set a precedent, and that other mayors should conform to it, the Associated Press reported.
Amnesty International welcomed the decision, saying in a statement: “By overturning a discriminatory ban that is fueled by and is fueling prejudice and intolerance, today’s decision has drawn an important line in the sand.”
The bans, put in place throughout August by local authorities citing security concerns and issues of cultural cohesion, have been locally decided and enforced, but were backed by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who said the burkini was not welcome in France.
I’m having trouble believing this actually had to go to court. Hey, France, when you do this sort of isht, you’re becoming a lot more like Amerikka. Don’t do that.
Full story here.
Current Midland City, AL Mayor Patsy Skipper’s swearing-in photo from February (Twitter.com).
Yet another person who doesn’t seem to understand that posting on FB or other social media is akin to shouting from the rooftops. “I lost. The nigger won”. I am so glad you lost, Ms. Skipper, it’s the very least that could happen to you.
The Republican mayor of Midland City, Alabama got nasty on Facebook after losing her seat to a black candidate in this week’s mayoral election.
“I lost. The ni**er won,” griped Mayor Patsy Capshaw Skipper when someone asked her how the election turned out.
WTVY said that Skipper was defeated by Jo Ann Bennett Grimsley, former assistant city clerk and an employee of the Dale County government for 27 years. She has previously served as the city’s water clerk and county court clerk.
Mayor Skipper was named interim mayor last February when her husband — former Mayor Virgil Skipper — retired for health reasons. County officials voted 3 to 1 for Patsy Skipper to take over her husband’s position.
Voters, however, preferred to see Grimsley at the city helm, casting 233 votes for Grimsley as opposed to Skipper’s 148.
Congratulations to Ms. Grimsley! I’m sure she will do a great job, although doing better than Ms. Skipper is a low bar.
Via Raw Story, where you can see a screen capture of the post.
“In Trump We Trust.” Yes, that’s really the title of Ann Coulter’s latest book, a paean to what she calls the great orange hope. Christ. Well, if that wasn’t enough to get the facepalm going, this certainly is:
She also attempts to answer for his past mistakes, including when he mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a musculoskeletal disorder.
Coulter, in a chapter entitled “Disabled Reporter Joins Media Effort to Create More Disabled Americans,” writes that Trump wasn’t making fun of Kovaleski’s disorder; he was just doing an impression of a “standard retard”:
Trump denied knowing that Serge was disabled, and demanded an apology, saying that anyone could see his imitation was of a flustered, frightened reporter, not a disabled person. It’s true that Trump was not mimicking any mannerisms that Serge has. He doesn’t jerk around or flail his arms. He’s not retarded. He sits calmly, but if you look at his wrists, you’ll see they are curved in. That’s not the imitation Trump was doing—he was doing a standard retard, waving his arms and sounding stupid: “’Ahhh, I don’t know what I said—ahhh, I don’t remember!’ He’s going, ‘Ahhh, I don’t remember, maybe that’s what I said!’”
Right. Well, that clarification makes it…much, much worse. There’s an old saying that’s apt here: with friends like these, you don’t need enemies.
Via Jezebel.
Euros (AFP).
Switzerland may have voted against the controversial idea of paying all its citizens a guaranteed income, but Finland indicated Thursday it plans to try out a monthly basic payment of 560 euros ($600).
The government said it had chosen the figure for an unconditional basic income in line with a manifesto pledge by centrist Prime Minister Juha Sipila, who took office 15 months ago.
Former businessman Sipila wants to see if the measure can boost employment and simplify the welfare benefits system, and plans to test the idea on a 2,000-strong sample of randomly selected working-age residents.
“The primary goal of the basic income experiment is related to promoting employment,” said the health and social affairs ministry, adding that it also aimed to simplify the complicated benefits system in a sustainable way regarding public finances.
Amid a growing debate on the subject, Finland now wants to be the first European country to test the idea nationwide.
In June, voters in Switzerland decisively rejected a far more generous proposal to pay a monthly 2,500 Swiss francs (2,300 euros/$2,500) to each adult and 625 francs for each child.
The idea has support on the political left and right with the former wanting a guaranteed safety net while some liberal voices feel that money for nothing can dissuade some jobless people from seeking work.
I am seriously envious of any country socialized enough and stable enough to give this a try. I think of how great this would be here in uStates, how it would not only help a vast amount of people, but it would go a very long way in stabilizing people mentally and emotionally, allowing people to ease up on feeling a constancy of anxiety, stress, and anger. That said, I don’t even want to imagine this being proposed in good ol’ Amerikka, we’d all go deaf from the screaming.
Via Raw Story.
Wow! I so love this, I love everything about it, because it breaks my heart to see people being so callous about bees, even here in farm country. Bees are vital, and we should all be working for healthy bees and a healthy environment.
In an effort to raise awareness about the plight of the humble honey bee, New York-based artist Matt Willey founded the Good of the Hive Initiative, an ambitious project to personally paint 50,000 bees in murals around the world. The number itself isn’t arbitrary, it takes about that many bees to sustain a healthy beehive. So far Willey has completed 7 murals including a large piece at the Burt’s Bees headquarters, and he keeps meticulous notes about the number of bees in each piece which he shares on his website.
For more info you can read an interview with the artist at the Center for Humans and Nature website, and follow his progress on Instagram.
Via Colossal Art.
I really should get out from under my rock more often. Star Trek! And the panel line up looks pretty good.
September 2 – 4, 2016
Javits Center • New York
Star Trek Missions. The Panel line up. Stay Connected With #StarTrekNY!
Current Hours: 1,019. Skeins Used: 147. Click for full size.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.