Really, Walmart?

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Walmart is selling a Thug Life Mask with Bandana. FFS, whoever the people are who do the stock buying for Walmart all need to be rounded up and given a serious talk about ethics, sensitivity, and how not to demonstrate they are bigoted assholes. As bad as this is on the part of Walmart, it’s even worse on the part of all those who bought this damn thing. If you purchased this piece of bigotry, you really need to ask yourself, what in the fuck is wrong with me? and don’t move until you come up with an answer.

With all that is going on in the world with Black Lives Matter, police brutality, Donald Trump, and etc, you would think companies would have some sensitivity towards certain issues. Considering that innocent people have lost their lives, now is not the time to be “funny”.

But no, Walmart has decided to sell a Black Thug Life Mask. What message is this suppose to send? How are black people suppose to respond to this? Why is the mask sold out? I guess it is becoming clearer and clearer as to how white america feel about black people. However, I think it is time for black people to send a message back!

Whenever someone pose a threat or say something insensitive to the LGBT community, they unify and then affect that business. They will boycott them and other companies will support that movement. I think it is time for black people to unify and send a message to Walmart. The message should be we ain’t shopping there, PERIOD! If you are down with this movement, share this post and make this GO VIRAL!

I’d happily boycott Walmart, if I shopped there, which I don’t. I haven’t set foot in a Walmart store for over 10 years now. I know it simply isn’t that easy for a lot of people, but if you can’t boycott, then make your voice known, loud and proud. Write letters, send emails, spread the word! This is really beyond the pale.

Via Urban Intellectuals and Black Lives Matter.

Art Spacesuit Done by Cancer Patients.

Kate Rubins wears a space suit decorated by patients at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the International Space Station. All images courtesy of NASA.

Kate Rubins wears a space suit decorated by patients at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the International Space Station. All images courtesy of NASA.

Surely one of the only downsides to living on the International Space Station (ISS) is the lack of apparel options when it comes to functional space suits! But now, thanks to a collaboration between NASA and the folks at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center, an astronaut on the ISS has a little extra flair in her space wardrobe. The Space Suit Art Project is headed up by director of MD Anderson’s Arts in Medicine Program Ian Cion and resulted in astronaut Kate Rubins donning a vibrant space suit decorated by cancer patients. As Cion tells The Creators Project: “There are many parallels between the lives and experiences of astronauts and the lives and experiences of patients going through cancer treatment—isolation, physical changes to the body, one’s life being at risk, to name a few. This project was not only designed to motivate and inspire patients to make art, but to think about their experience through a different perspective, to acknowledge that many of the qualities of character that make astronauts pillars of heroism are also present in even the youngest patient fighting cancer.”

HOPE on display.

HOPE on display.

The Space Suit Art Project consists of three suits: HOPE, COURAGE, and UNITY. The first suit, HOPE, was constructed from over 500 canvases that were painted and then quilted together by patients, families, and MD Anderson staff. This suit acts as a sculptural representation of the project that stays on the ground for display.

COURAGE, the second suit, features striking decorations created by cancer patients with acrylic paint on a NASA-grade flight suit. “During the creation of COURAGE, NASA astronauts, including Kate Rubins and Nicole Stott, visited the hospital to work on the suit with patients and families,” explains Cion. “Retired Astronaut Nicole Stott was the first person to ever make a painting in space, and Kate Rubins, currently on board the International Space Station, wore the hand-painted flight suit in a live video conversation with MD Anderson pediatric patients who were able to talk to her from Mission Control.”

A patient decorating COURAGE with acrylic paint.

A patient decorating COURAGE with acrylic paint.

In the collaborative spirit of the ISS, the third suit, UNITY, will be produced from a combination of collaborations that took place in cities around the world, where Cion and Stott traveled to present the project. “Each suit was made with the direct participation of patients, families, and staff. The first two were made exclusively at MD Anderson, while UNITY was made with MD Anderson patients and families as well as other hospitals and space stations around the globe,” says Cion.

While the Space Suit Art Project certainly succeeded in creating unique and beautiful garments through collaborative efforts, Cion explains that the project is much more than just an exercise in participatory creativity: “I began working on a series of projects that were collaborative and large scale with patients, so that their art was not just something we taped to the walls of their rooms, but something that connected them to each other, that formed relationships between patients and connected them to the community in a way that celebrated them not as cancer patients, but as artists.”

Keep up with The Space Suit Art Project on their Twitter account, as well as NASA and the MD Anderson Cancer Center’s social media accounts!

This is such an awesome project. Click on over to The Creators Project for more!

Standing Rock: Winter Wish List.

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Oct 14, 2016 — Winter is approaching fast here in North Dakota – and we’re not going anywhere. Dakota Access may think that they can simply wait us out, but we are here for the long haul.

That being said, we need supplies and support to survive here at camp. Dakota winters are no joke! We have created an Amazon wishlist with all sorts of gear for sleeping, staying warm, lighting our camp, and organizing our group. We’re hoping for tents, lanterns, phones for communicating between groups, and more. Take a look and see if there’s anything you can purchase and send to help us out: http://amzn.to/2dLiG1G

Thank you as always for your generosity!

Anna, Bobbi, and the Oceti Sakowin Youth.

Via Change.org. I will add my thank you thank you thank you to anyone who can help out. As usual, I’ll say that you don’t need money to help – spreading the word and signal boosting is incredibly important, so if you’re a social media person, please, pass this on, with all my gratitude.

At Play.

When your body is uncooperative, and your brain insists on staying on vacation, it is time to play. I’ve been wanting to use the Sharpie Fabric Markers I got on Wednesday, so I raided Rick’s closet, what with him being the T-shirt King and all. I’m even using colours he likes, gosh, I’m so sweet. ;D (I really wanted to run amok with purple.) Sharpie makes much larger packs, with many more colours, but I got the small pack of nine markers, because $20.00 for them. All in all, right now I favour paint, because I have lots more paint, so I can do more, but the markers are fun to use, and work well. They are bleedy, especially when running across the grain. If you don’t mind that too much, go full blast and have fun! I would tack on a serious caution if you’re going to use these on a fine weave, or high thread count. I suspect the bleed might get out of control. Definitely test first, always test first.

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© C. Ford.

The Arctic Death Spiral.

The sharp decline in Arctic sea ice area in recent decades has been matched by a harder-to-see, but equally sharp, drop in sea ice thickness. The combined result has been a warming-driven collapse in total sea ice volume — to about one quarter of its 1980 level.

I first asked creative tech guru and programming analyst Andy Lee Robinson to make this ice cube volume chart (updated below) after the record-setting sea ice melt in 2012. The European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe had just confirmed modeling by the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center that it wasn’t just ice area that had shrunk to a record low.

Robinson wanted to improve the visualization of volume collapse through 3D animation, which requires serious programming chops and computing power (more details here). Here is his most recent version of the video—with piano music composed and played by Robinson himself.

The full story is at Think Progress. I don’t have the heart to comment, we humans, so destructive, so uncaring.

Socialist ideology in partnership with homosexual demons.

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Hat tip to Pierce Butler for alerting me to this. I think. Right Wing Watch (their site has had a makeover!) reports on the current panic of those inhabiting the sewer of hate and conspiracy, Barbwire. One Julio Severo is very upset about the Bisexual conference which took place at the White House, as part of Bisexual Awareness Week in September. Now, as most of you know, there’s a growing awareness of Two-Spirit peoples among native communities, and there was an Indigenous Two Spirit person at the conference who spoke, Victor Raymond, a Rosebud Sicangu Oyate Lakota. Rosebud is in Sdakota, and not terribly far from me. There is a complete fucktonne of wrong coming up, so grit those teeth and get your cussing brain in gear.

BiNet organizer Victor Raymond introduced himself “as an out bisexual two-spirit man” and a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe. “Two-spirit” is an Indian term for a male-female spirit.

“Today, we are here at the White House, and I call upon the ancestors to witness our presence, and for the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, to guide our words and thoughts so that we can speak true and strong,” he said.

Raymond continued, saying, “As bisexual people, we have always been here. Amongst my people, the Lakota Sioux, two-spirit people, bisexual, gay, lesbian people, as they are now known, transgender people, were given the gift of medicine to share with the members of the tribe. It was Wanka, a mystery. But it was proper and it was part of our community.”

“Now we are faced with new times, when bisexual people, two-spirit people, others that we now know as LGBQ, are not recognized and our place in the community questioned. But bi and trans people — and particularly now amongst many tribes and communities, by bisexual, transgender, Native American women in particular — face challenge and discrimination. We stand with them and with all people whose place is no longer recognized.”

Raymond also said members of the bisexual community need to support Black Lives Matter (a black-oriented socialist movement) as part of standing for “other communities.” Socialist ideology in partnership with homosexual demons.

Okay, for the most part, that’s straight up recounting of what took place. Well, except for that bit about homosexual demon infested social ideology.

An interaction between spirits of homosexuality and Indian religions is not uncommon. In Brazil, the most prominent homosexualists are adherents of African and Indian religions, very similar to voodoo. These religions embrace all forms of homosexuality as a gift from their “gods.” Such deities are considered demons in the Christian worldview.

In Christianity and Judaism, homosexuality is accepted only when there is apostasy in those religions. But in Indian religions, heavily affected by witchcraft, no apostasy is necessary for a homosexual presence in their practices, because homosexuality is active among their witchdoctors and other adherents.

Uh…oh FFS, I haven’t even had a whole cuppa tea yet, and it still hurts to sit. What little brain function I have right now does not need this utter isht. Will no one rid me of these meddlesome purveyors of ignorance? This isn’t fractal wrong. This isn’t even beyond wrong wrong. This is wrong spit out from the denseness of a black hole of Christian hate. These people hang onto ignorance like it was their baby. So now we have generic African religion, some Brazilian beliefs thrown in for good measure, and there’s us Indians tacked on. As I have mentioned before, Lakota people do not have deities, we don’t worship them. Please, read John Trudell on the subject. Most indigenous peoples don’t have deities. So, no demons. Also, Indigenous people (in uStates) don’t have witch doctors. We don’t have shamans, either. We also aren’t looking to convert or recruit. It’s difficult enough to stop non-Native people using various bits of Indigenous culture and tradition to scam other non-natives. I’ll also point out that the term two-spirit originated with one particular nation, but now it has been adopted out for more general use among Indigenous people. I’ll also point out that LGBTI people are not wholesale accepted and embraced throughout different Indigenous cultures. There are plenty of Indians who hold onto a bigotry in that regard. That’s also true for a lot of African peoples as well. And people all over the planet, actually. As for what might constitute a “prominent homosexualist”, someone will have to educate me. No idea at all.

A homosexual culture is a culture of demon possession.

No, no it isn’t.

Has the White House turned into a haunt of demons?

No, no it hasn’t.

The first step for a “visitation” of such spirits is invocation — which was made at the White House. Homosexual spirits heard. Their presence is in the place where they were invoked, until their expelling, which can be done only by people who know and use the authority of Jesus’ name.

Okay, really, dude, you’re upset because it wasn’t a Christian invocation. Things would be much simpler if you’d just say what you mean. The ‘Great Spirit’ is a mistranslation from the Lakota language. Russell Means spoke about this at length. Wakan Tanka is more properly translated as Great Mystery. There’s no deity hanging about waiting to be invoked, there’s no demon, either. Basically, you’re invoking the universe, if it could be said you’re invoking, which we are not.

This is getting into what would God need with a starship territory. That nasty El Shaddai of yours can’t manage some gay spirits?

The Bisexual Community Briefing focused on “policy and cultural issues of significance for the American bisexual community.” Spirits focused on the invisible, lethal and destruction.

No, spirits didn’t focus on anything, invisible or visible. I do see an upside here though, if you all are so darn scared of those gay spirits coming to get you, perhaps you’ll keep your distance from the political center of uStates. One can only hope.

Via RRW and Barbwire.

The Senators Standing with Standing Rock.

Bernie Sanders (Good Morning America).

Bernie Sanders (Good Morning America).

Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and four other senators on Thursday called on President Barack Obama to order a comprehensive environmental review of a pipeline project that has stirred widespread opposition from Native Americans and environmental activists.

After a U.S. appeals court on Sunday night denied a request to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the senators asked Obama to direct the Army Corps of Engineers to complete a full environmental impact statement for a contested part of the route that includes stronger tribal consultation.

“The project’s current permits should be suspended and all construction stopped until a complete environmental and cultural review has been completed for the entire project,” said the letter by Sanders and Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein, Ed Markey, Patrick Leahy and Benjamin Cardin.

In recent weeks, protests against the Dakota Access pipeline led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota drew international attention, prompting the U.S. government to temporarily block its construction on federal land.

[…]

On Tuesday, anti-pipeline activists in four states closed pipeline valves to halt the flow of crude through arteries transporting 15 percent of U.S. oil consumption..

When fully connected, the 1,100-mile (1,770 km) pipeline would be the first to carry crude directly to the U.S. Gulf from the Bakken shale, a vast oil formation in North Dakota, Montana and parts of Canada.

The $3.7 billion project is being built by the Dakota Access subsidiary of Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners LP, which has vowed to complete construction.

“There must be a serious consideration of the full potential climate impacts of this pipeline prior to the Army Corps of Engineers approving any permits or easements for the Dakota Access pipeline,” the senators said.

Experts say that the full environmental review requested by the senators could take several months.

The U.S. appeal court’s ruling was the second time the federal judiciary rejected the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s request to halt construction of the pipeline. On Sept. 9, a U.S. judge rejected a similar request.

Oh, so scrutiny would take a couple of months, golly, the agony for those poor, poor billionaires. Cry me a river, oil wašichu, cry me a river of clean, untainted water. Once again, we see just how much, and how easily Indigenous concerns are brushed aside, and treaties broken, again. And again. And again. My thanks to Senators Sanders, Feinstein, Markey, Leahy, and Cardin. Please, please keep the pressure on. I think everyone should remind the President of his visit to Standing Rock two years ago. How can it possibly be, in any way, to turn away from people who keep asking for justice? How long for people to wake the fuck up to all the lies, all the crimes committed by DA and Energy Transfer Partners? Remember when they swore up and down that the oil running through this travesty of a pipeline was “sweet and light”? The only people pointing out that that was a lie were Indigenous people who live in the Dakotas. I posted about that, and heard arguments and “oh no, you’re wrong.” No, we aren’t wrong. Oil lies, and it would be great if people would wake up to that fact, and stay woke. This is a disaster waiting to happen, to all of us.

Via Raw Story.

Michelle Obama Addresses Sexual Assault.

Our First Lady, a forthright, courageous woman who is unafraid to face the ugliest of human behaviours, and I thank her for speaking out, for not turning away, as so many have done.

“The fact is that in this election, we have a candidate for president of the United States who, over the course of his lifetime and the course of this campaign has said things about women that are so shocking, so demeaning, I simply will not repeat anything here today,” she told a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire. “And last week we saw this candidate actually bragging about sexually assaulting women. And I can’t believe that I’m saying that. A candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women and I have to tell you that I can’t stop thinking about this.”

It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. So while I’d love nothing more than to pretend like this isn’t happening and come out here and do my normal campaign speech, it would be dishonest and disingenuous for me to move on to the next thing like this was just a bad dream.

This is not something we can ignore. It’s not something we can sweep under the rug as just another disturbing footnote in a sad election season. Because this was not just a lewd conversation. This wasn’t locker room banter. This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior. And actually bragging about kissing and groping women. Using language so obscene that many of us are worried about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV. To make matters worse, it now seems clear this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s one of countless examples of how he has treated women his whole life.

I have to tell you that I listened to all this. And I feel it so personally. And I’m sure that many of you do too. Particularly the women. The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman. It is cruel. It is frightening. And the truth is, it hurts. It hurts.

The video is via CNN. Full article at Raw Story.

Cool Stuff Friday.

On this episode of Monster Lab, Ed Edmunds shows you how to sculpt a very cool-looking alien zombie head to be cast as a 3/4 Halloween mask. A 3/4 mask fits farther over your head than a half-mask, so no elastic string or tie is needed.

First off, Ed goes over the sculpting tools you’ll need, most of which are basic things you likely already have around the house or shop (brushes, bucket, knife, spray bottle) and a few carving tools that are easily acquired. For the sculpting medium, he recommends WED clay. You can get 50 lbs of it for around $25 (minus shipping). After he runs through the basic tools, he goes over some nice-to-have tools if you enjoy your intro to sculpting and decide you want to dive in deeper.

Below is the only exotic tool he highly recommends that you may not be able to get at your local craft store, a serrated double wire sculpting tool that has a triangular wire on one end and a circular wire on the other. The steel wire is serrated and this tool is used for cutting, shaping, and digging out clay material around places like the eye sockets.

One thing I like about this video is that Ed tried to keep all of the tools required as minimal as possible so that newbies could try their hand at it. On that note, for the armature, rather than using a professional head/bust form for modeling, he made a crude one out of 2x4s and a piece of plywood. He also recommends a Lazy Susan, but it’s not required.

Another thing I love about this video, and all well-done instructional videos, is that it makes the process look approachable, very doable. Even if you have no sculpting experience or don’t see yourself as particularly artistic (stop that!), if you create a set-up like he has, gather the basic tools, and carefully follow along, I can almost guarantee that you’ll surprise yourself and end up with something that’s pretty darn impressive.

This is only Part 1 in the series. In the next installment, Ed promises to show us how to cast the alien zombie sculpt into a wearable mask. Monster Lab is hosted by the prop and F/X company, Distortions Unlimited. You can peruse their website here.

Also at Make: 8 Seriously Scary Halloween Costumes / 5-Minute Glowing Ghost Eyes – A ghost with glowing eyes hovers in the window. Watching. Always watching. /

The Octopod Interview:

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And, a whole slew of Rubber Band toys to make:

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All via Make Magazine. I’m a Maker, don’t you want to be a Maker too?