We kept playing with rocks last night. Starting with the 4th photo, those are Rick’s rock towers, and yes, that is a hammer (last photo). The small stone in the 2nd and 3rd photos is also a tool of some sort, the hollow fits my thumb perfectly. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
Zack Ford at Think Progress has an excellent article about the religious response and reaction to Orlando. I’m just going to include the last bit here:
Seek First To Understand
The LGBT community will not heal quickly from the Orlando shooting, and will be scarred for quite some time thereafter. Moore concluded his piece saying, “We can remind ourselves and our neighbors that this is not the way it is supposed to be.” If people who share Moore’s beliefs reach out to their LGBT neighbors now or in the future, they should consider that what they want us to feel might not be the same as what we actually hear.
If you want us to feel love, then do not tell us our sexuality is wrong or that the only way to be right is to be celibate. What we hear is actually that we are unworthy of love.
If you want us to feel equal, then do not try to justify refusing us jobs, housing, or goods and services in the name of your religious beliefs. What we hear is that we deserve to be treated as second-class citizens.
If you want us to feel community, then do not tell us that you cannot condone our marriages. What we hear is that our families are not welcome to share a neighborhood with yours.
If you want us to feel dignity, then do not tell us that we cannot be transgender or try to tell us what bathrooms we can or cannot use. What we hear is that you aren’t actually interested or invested in understanding who we are or supporting our wellness.
If you want us to feel safe, then do not accuse us of politicizing this tragedy by broaching the issue of new gun violence prevention measures. What we hear is that we should just ignore the one thing that has ever been proven to reduce gun violence and permanently accept the fear that this shooting has instilled in us.
And if you want us to feel hope, do not encourage us to demonize Islam or pass the blame onto terrorism. What we hear is that the only way to heal as victims is to victimize others — that the only way to respond to intolerance is with more intolerance.
There may come a day when we can weep together. In the meantime, sympathy without affirmation rings hollow; it is unworthy of our gratitude.
That not only needed to be said, it should be put up, proclamation style, everywhere. Particularly on church doors. The full article is here.
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI)
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) has had enough of the growing movement to drug test poor people who need government assistance. So on Tuesday, she’s introducing a bill that she says will make things fairer.
Her “Top 1% Accountability Act” would require anyone claiming itemized tax deductions of over $150,000 in a given year to submit a clean drug test. If a filer doesn’t submit a clean test within three months of filing, he won’t be able to take advantage of tax deductions like the mortgage interest deduction or health insurance tax breaks. Instead he would have to make use of the standard deduction.
Her office has calculated that the people impacted will be those who make at least $500,000 a year. “By drug testing those with itemized deductions over $150,000, this bill will level the playing field for drug testing people who are the recipients of social programs,” a memo on her bill notes.
Moore has a personal stake in the fight. “I am a former welfare recipient,” she explained. “I’ve used food stamps, I’ve received Aid for Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, Head Start for my kids, Title XX daycare [subsidies]. I’m truly grateful for the social safety net.”
Ten states require applicants to their cash welfare programs to undergo a drug test. States are currently barred from implementing drug testing for the food stamps program, but Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has sued the federal government to allow him to do so and has gotten some Congressional Republican support.
Moore has been frustrated to witness attempts to tie those who avail themselves of the safety net to drug use. “Republicans continue to criminalize poverty and to put forward the narrative, the false narrative in fact, that people who are poor and reliant upon the social safety net are drug users,” she said.
In fact, evidence from test results among states that test welfare recipients indicates that they are no more likely to use drugs than the general population — in fact, they may be less likely.
That didn’t stop House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) from using a drug rehab center as the backdrop while he unveiled his poverty plan last week. “I think this is what tipped me over the edge,” Moore said, “rolling out his poverty initiative in front of a drug treatment program to sort of drive that false narrative forward.”
[…]
Her bill will also help illuminate this very fact: that so much is spent on tax expenditures, not just on direct aid programs like welfare and food stamps. “We think it’s important to engage in some transparency and accountability around tax deductions,” she said.
[…]
She also wants to “engage the wealthy in this poverty debate,” she said. “I would love to see some hedge fund manager on Wall Street who might be sniffing a little cocaine here and there to stay awake realize that he can’t get his $150,000 worth of deductions unless he submits to a drug test.”
You go, Rep. Moore! I am all for this, even though this would be one tiny bit of accountability on the part of the filthy rich. Any accountability is better than none. As someone who gets the pleasure of the regular humiliation of drug tests, it would be nice to see the rich unable to dodge this little test the rest of us get hit with for the most basic things. There’s much more at Think Progress.
From Kengi and rq. Click for full size.
© Kengi. All rights reserved.
© rq. All rights reserved.
A beautiful tree fern from D. Gregory, with a close up of those gorgeous, hairy furls, a stunning peony from rq, so rich and satiny, and Buffalobur Nightshade from Kengi, a beautiful but dangerous plant. Click for full size.
© D. Gregory. All rights reserved.
© rq. All rights reserved.
© Kengi. All rights reserved.
Coyote remains. Click for full size. © C. Ford. All rights reserved.
A female Oriole enjoys an orange. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
From left, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, Chis Pine as James T. Kirk, Simon Pegg as Scotty, Karl Urban as Bones are shown in a scene from, ‘Star Trek.’ (Photo: Paramount).
Star Trek star Anton Yelchin has died at age 27 following a tragic and strange car accident early Sunday morning.
His publicist Jennifer Allen confirmed the news in a statement on Sunday.
“Actor Anton Yelchin was killed in a fatal traffic collision early this morning,” the statement said. “His family requests you respect their privacy at this time.”
Yelchin was pinned by his own car leaving his Studio City residence Sunday at 1:10 in the morning, Jenny Hauser, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department, said.
“A fatal traffic collision occurred, it was the result of the victim’s own car rolling backwards down his steep driveway, pinning him against a brick mailbox pillar and security fence,” Hauser said.
I can’t stop. Maybe I should take a pile of rocks and go outside for a while.
Click for full size.
Balanced Art is fun. I actually have to get some stuff done today, so I’ll see if I can crash more rocks later on.
As always, click for full size. And play with rocks, it’s good for you.
Okay, gonna stop now. Really.
Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, by Patricia Whereat-Phillips.
Myrtlewood is most often thought of as beautiful wood for woodworking, but to Native people on the southern Oregon coast it was an important source of food. The roasted nuts taste like bitter chocolate, coffee, and burnt popcorn. The roots of Skunk Cabbage provided another traditional food source, while also serving as a medicine for colds. In tribal mythology, the leaves of Skunk Cabbage were thought to be tents where the Little People sheltered.
Very little has been published until now on the ethnobotany of western Oregon indigenous peoples. Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians documents the use of plants by these closely-related coastal tribes, covering a geographical area that extends roughly from Cape Perpetua on the central coast, south to the Coquille River, and from the Coast Range west to the Pacific shore. With a focus on native plants and their traditional uses, it also includes mention of farming crops, as well as the highly invasive Himalayan blackberry, which some Oregon coast Indians called the “white man’s berry.”
The cultures of the Coos Bay, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw are distinct from the Athabaskan speaking people to the south, and the Alsea to the north. Today, many tribal members are reviving ancient arts of basket weaving and woodworking, and many now participate in annual intertribal canoe events. Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians contributes to this cultural renaissance by filling an important gap in the historical record. It is an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to learn about the indigenous cultures of the central and southern Oregon coast, as well as those who are interested in Pacific Northwest plants and their cultural uses.
The Melding of Ethnobotany with Language and Story.
If you’ve ever studied a second language, you’ve probably heard, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” While some people may feel unaffected that they no longer remember the language they learned in secondary school, entire cultures suffer when the last speaker of that language dies and the language is lost. There is a great importance behind understanding cultures and their practices. This includes how the culture connects with the environment around them. Today Patricia Whereat-Phillips discusses her introduction to research focused on indigenous languages and how she became interested in ethnobotany. In her new book, Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, Whereat-Phillips documents the ethnobotany of western Oregon indigenous peoples.
Growing up in the hills near the eastern shore of Coos Bay, I spent much of my childhood playing out in nature – playing in the stream at the bottom of the draw, watching deer eat apples in our yard, helping mom fill the bird feeders, and spending all summer wandering the land around our house picking berries. As a child, I learned that I was descended from the Milluk people of lower Coos Bay. I wondered what the old language was like, but no one seemed to know. The last fluent speaker of Milluk died before I was born, and the last speaker of its sister language, Hanis, died when I was 2 ½ years old. I never met her.
For years my research focused on indigenous languages – mostly the Coosan languages of Hanis and Milluk, and Siuslaw, and traditional legends. My interest in ethnobotany began when I received a letter from an undergraduate who was researching medicinal plants of Oregon Indians. It wasn’t a question I’d looked in to before, and I began to do some research. I found a few mentions of medicinal plants, and answered her letter. By now, my curiosity piqued, I tried to do some more research and found (probably as this student did) that there is little published on western Oregon ethnobotany (unlike the rest of the Pacific Northwest and California).
So I spent years trying to research the ethnobotanical knowledge of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw. Not only did I gain a greater appreciation of the beauty and diversity of the temperate rainforest that I had grown up in, but a greater appreciation of the breadth of indigenous knowledge of the landscape and the melding of ethnobotany with language and story.
You can read more here. I don’t have my copy yet, but I am looking forward to it, and learning more about these peoples. The book can be ordered here.
Protesters clash with Chicago police after grand jury decisions in police-involved deaths in December 2014. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
For security reasons, Cleveland spokesman Dan Williams said he can’t get into the details of what the city has bought or borrowed, and if all goes well during the convention, we will likely never see much of it. The Cleveland police did not respond to a request for comment. They will oversee security in much of the “event zone” where rallies, marches and other protests are allowed to take place.
The thing about the LRAD, and other devices like it, is that more and more cities have them. And things haven’t always gone smoothly — which is what has activists, civil liberties groups and others in Cleveland concerned.
Much like the federal programs that many Americans only learned of after they saw images of police in tank-like vehicles trying to quell protests and riots in Ferguson, Mo., those $50 million national special security event grants are changing the way America’s cities are policed. They have supplied the funds for cities across the country to obtain devices that some have described as dangerous — or, at the very least, unsuitable for urban settings.
Didn’t have to go far for this Sunday Facepalm, they are all over, and epic. Epic failures in humanity. We start with one John Stemberger…
The Florida Family Policy Council’s John Stemberger wrote in an email to his group’s members today that in the wake of the massacre at a gay club in Orlando on Sunday, he wants to see greater “unity” among Floridians in the form of more American flags and fewer “special interest rainbow flags” in memory of the victims:
The Pulse nightclub is right next to a Dunkin Doughnuts, Wendy’s, Radio Shack and a 7-11 store where I often buy gas and get my children Slurpees. I ride my bike through this area of town often. This is in part why this tragedy has affected me so deeply. This is my community. These are our streets and neighborhoods. The people that were killed and injured are not just “gay.” They are human beings! They are my neighbors! They are fellow Americans! Honestly, I am really tired of seeing special interest rainbow flags and wish we could see more American flags, as we stand together in unity against our greatest mutual enemy, radical Islamic jihadists!
He responded to criticism of conservative Christian LGBT rights opponents in the wake of the attack, saying that “Christians should be prepared to be attacked and persecuted if they do not bow down and pledge allegiance to the gay pride flag and all it supposedly represents.” LGBT rights advocates’ strategy, he said, is to “manipulate and bully Christians into submission to the new orthodoxy of the moral revolution.”
Christians should be prepared to be attacked and persecuted if they do not bow down and pledge allegiance to the gay pride flag and all it supposedly represents. In stunned disbelief, I was listening to CNN at 1:30am on Sunday night and I heard the leading gay-rights activist from Los Angeles being interviewed. She openly said you don’t need to find a terrorist cell to find this kind of hatred. All you need to do is look right here in America at fundamentalist Christians. The CNN anchor did NOTHING at all to challenge her or question her about her outrageous claim.
We need to be prepared for the stunning and false narrative of the Left which is that all major world religions, including but especially Christianity, breed hatred and create a hostile environment which “causes” the kind of violence we saw in Orlando. The goal of gay-rights activists is to try and get Christians to stop proclaiming God’s design for marriage, gender and human sexuality. And they are not playing fair. The goal to simple. If you disagree in any way, no matter how gentle, loving or respectful they will call you a “hater” and a “bigot.” They will scream at you publicly and test how committed you are to your beliefs. Their strategy is to manipulate and bully Christians into submission to the new orthodoxy of the moral revolution. Please know that as for me and “our house” at the FFPC, we will never be moved by this attempt at intimidation.
Just a fine example of a good person, eh? Well, there are more examples.
Timothy Buchanan of the far-right outlet BarbWire responded yesterday to the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando by urging members of the LGBT community to go back into the closet and stop provoking people to commit violent acts by kissing in public: “It’s worth considering that homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals might be safer returning to the closet. Flaunting gross immorality and defiant wickedness that is hideous, odious and wretched to an overwhelming majority of people is a foolish and dangerous course of action.”
“Those who come to the United States from other cultures — some of which are infinitely more moral than our own — are going to be offended and repulsed by the rampant depravity that has become a defining characteristic of our culture,” he added. “No amount of education, sensitivity training or political indoctrination will change that.”
Diversity, Buchanan said, is destroying American culture and society, along with the liberal policies of the “evil” Democratic Party and its support for “murder, sexual depravity, lust and rebellion.”
Unfortunately, there’s more of this at Right Wing Watch. Next up, Kevin Swanson, who thinks a whole lot of us should just be put to death because that would make life so much better:
Yesterday, Colorado-based pastor Kevin Swanson addressed the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando by arguing that homosexuality and Islam are both inherently violent because God gives gay people and Muslims up to their dishonorable ways and other sins like murder.
“Why do homosexuals murder homosexuals?” he asked. Because, according to Romans 1, “God gave them up to vile passions.” “Violence” and “murder,” he said, are deeply tied to homosexuality. […] Swanson hosted an event last year with GOP presidential hopefuls including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, where he repeated his longtimebelief that a just government would put gay people to death.
More of this upstanding gent at Right Wing Watch. Onto Sam Rohrer, who explains the intense biblical foundation of uStates, and how the queers are chasing god away:
American Pastors Network president and former Pennsylvania lawmaker Sam Rohrer linked Sunday’s mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando to Supreme Court decisions securing rights for LGBT people, telling conservative talk radio host Steve Deace this week that Supreme Court decisions involving marriage equality and “God’s order for human sexuality” have helped to cause God to remove “His hand of protection” from the country.
[…]
“God has made very clear,” Rohrer explained, “that every nation that He has established — and He establishes all nations, we’re told that all nations are established by God, even the very geographical boundaries of the nations are determined — that when a nation, any nation, does what God says, meaning that they fear Him, that they uphold and enforce God’s moral law and God’s design for the family and for the family and for civil government, all of those are His, when those things are done, then God will bless a nation.”
“One of those blessings are the increase of wealth, one of those things is a security and protection from the neighbors around them,” he continued, “even the enemies will be at peace with them, we’re told in a number of places in Scripture. But when a nation backs off of that, particularly a nation such as ours that has a very biblical basis in an understanding of biblical principles — that’s where our Constitution came from, Declaration of Independence before that came out of that. When those things were there and put in place, when a nation turns their back on those things as we have and [are] increasingly, arrogantly doing, then at that point the justice of God says ‘I cannot any longer bless’ and these things which you’re doing will lead to not His lack of blessing, but insecurity and so forth.”
More of Sam at Right Wing Watch.
There’s also Rick Wiles: Orlando Massacre Was God’s Judgment On America and Dave Daubenmire: Gays Murdered In Orlando Were On The Devil’s Team
That should get your Sunday started in all the right wrong ways.