From Saad, The hilltop town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun in Morocco. Gorgeous! Click for full size.
Photo © Saad. All rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
From Saad, The hilltop town of Moulay Idriss Zerhoun in Morocco. Gorgeous! Click for full size.
Photo © Saad. All rights reserved.
Remember Dartboard Jesus? Well those wailing “persecution!” won, naturally. Does it ever go any differently? The reasoning for removing it are transparently specious, to say the least.
The artwork was removed from the library on April 21 by campus officials following the slew of complaints.
“The artwork in question was removed from the exhibit because it did not meet Rutgers University Libraries policy, which requires art exhibitions and their pieces to be based on university events, curricular offerings and topics of interest to the university community,” Jessica Pellien, director of communications at Rutgers University Libraries, told NJ.com.
The dartboard was not the only questionable piece of art up for display in the Rutgers Art Library.
Other pieces included a condom-covered stack of coins and a milk carton featuring Anne Frank titled “Cute Kids Make Good Advertising,” NJ.com reported.
No names are attached to the art pieces and University officials did not out the artist.
So, no one is going to feel persecuted over the tower of babel? (That’s the title of the condom covered stack of coins.) For as much as the grotesque imagery of a [temporarily] dead guy onna stick looms large in all things Catholic, you’d think a dead guy on a dartboard wouldn’t be so bothersome. It’s still their dead guy, right? How easily is faith shaken. Tsk.
The full article is here.
Of course, an idiot from Fox just had to spill with pompous persecution puffery:
I’ve often wondered why the artistic class seems compelled to denigrate and desecrate the Sacred.
Remember the exhibit that featured the Mother Mary smeared in elephant dung? Or what about the crucifix submerged in a bottle of urine?
And yet, the God of the Islamic Radicals is off limits. It’s as if there is some sort of unwritten rule – thou shalt not profane the prophet.
I suspect the fear of a fatwa plays a significant role in their editorial process. And I can understand that.
Nobody wants to be blown to smithereens – event an idealistic, starving artist.
But I have another theory.
Maybe, just maybe American artists give the God of the Islamic Radicals a pass out of mutual respect. The enemy of my enemy…
One wages jihad with a sword. The other wages jihad with a paint brush.
A person gets the idea that Todd Starnes doesn’t pay much attention to what artists do at all. In fairness, paying attention to what artists (and people in general) do, including all the artistic commentary on Mohammed would be work. And it would require a working brain. The brainless commentary is here. Now I feel like I should dip my computer in bleach.
Walls is a story of a strong Woman raising a young boy, and how he learns through her that we all need to have equal opportunity.
I wrote this song about my 88 year old grandmother who still has an effective impact on me. Thanks for raising me right. – Johnny Saga.
Published on Dec 8, 2015
Today Ottawa announced it’s inquiry into MMIW in Canada. [MMIW – Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women]
This is a song I wrote for the short film of the same name, directed by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs. Which is being submitted to film festivals in the new year.
Please read up on this issue and share the song.
Miigwetch.
First up, Thunder Valley CDC, working to build a community at Pine Ridge rez, one that fulfills the concept of community and tiospaye, which means extended family. This is a very important project, and one dear to my heart. If you can be tiospaye by helping out, there aren’t words enough for appreciation.
Thunder Valley CDC – explore, read, and if you can help, pilamayaye.
Indigenous Environmental Network. IEN is an alliance of Indigenous Peoples whose mission is to protect the sacredness of Earth Mother from contamination & exploitation, maintaining and respecting Indigenous teachings and natural laws. Have a look around, and get involved if you can.
Have a look around, read, get involved if you can.
It’s all about tiospaye – we are all extended family, and it’s past time we act like it.
Beautiful photos from Lofty. I’d love to be out on a bike if I was there, too. Click for full size.
Photos © Lofty. All rights reserved.
I’m a cyclist who loves the variety of the Australian bush, and sometimes I remember to take along my old Sony Cybershot. Sometimes I ride alone, sometimes with a group of mature aged reprobates like me. The first picture is of a pine forest lunch stop, just a rotted stump for furniture and the gentle sighing of light breezes in the tree tops for company.
The second is of a road sign that may indicate where your antipodean spirit hides.
The third is a juxtaposition between native and introduced forests of the region. The pine trees are “Pinus Radiata” or Monterey Pine, picked 120 years ago for great swathes of monoculture crops of building timber in the wetter areas of the state.
The last picture is of my cycling gang resting against a pipe line in the curiously named Beetaloo Valley, in the Flinders Ranges.
A Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula), being beautiful. Click for full size.
Photos © C. Ford. All rights reserved.
North Carolina state Sen. Buck Newton (R) (NC Channel)
Republican candidate running to become North Carolina’s attorney general faced criticism on Tuesday after saying “we must fight to keep our state straight” while discussing a law that restricts transgender bathroom access and gay rights.
[…]
State Senator Buck Newton made the comment while concluding a speech at a rally on Monday and welcomed the idea of being considered a poster child for the law, dubbed HB 2. … “Go home, tell your friends and family who had to work today what this is all about and how hard we must fight to keep our state straight,” he said to applause.
So, it’s not about people simply wanting to pee. It’s certainly not about “protecting” people from the spectre of Chester Bathroom Molester. It would seem that treating LGBT peoples as humans deserving basic rights will…turn the whole state gay! Goodness. I had no idea of this imminent threat to NC and to uStates in general. It must be the fault of that damn Gay Agenda. Perhaps Buck can introduce legislation that every single person residing in NC must have one of these:
www.facebook.com/HeteroAwarenessMonth (Via Buzzfeed).
In other non-surprising news, Ted Cruz thinks transgender people should only pee at home.
If Ted Cruz had to use the bathroom after stealing his daughter’s cherry, he could use the one right there in the ice cream parlor, but a transgender person enjoying a sundae, he thinks, should have to go all the way home.
“Every one of us has the right to live our lives as we wish,” he said. “If any one of us wants to dress up as a woman or man and wants to live as woman or man and believes that we might be something other than what we were born, God has made each of us with free will and the ability to choose to do that if man to wants to dress as a woman, and live as a woman, and have a bathroom at home.”
A reporter sought clarification on the remark: “So then they shouldn’t use the bathroom out in public?”
Cruz then confirmed just that. “You don’t have a right to intrude upon the rights of others because whether or not a man believes he’s a woman, there are a lot of women who would like to be able to use a public restroom in peace without having a man there — and when there are children involved, you don’t have a right to impose your lifestyle on others.”
The Detroit chapter of the Satanic Temple (Screenshot/YouTube)
Anti-abortion activists were met head-on in Detroit by the city’s chapter of the Satanic Temple, who trolled them by dressing up in baby gear and decrying “fetal idolatry.”
According to the Temple’s Detroit chapter leader, Jex Blackmore, “the anti-choice movement’s obsession with, and mischaracterization of the fetus obscures medical reality and a woman’s constitutional right to choice.”
…
According to Slate, this gap in American health care has created an opportunity for unregulated religious facilities posing as mental health clinics to take a dangerous role. Slate’s Jennifer Miller interviewed 14 former staffers, ex-clients and families for Nashville-based Mercy Ministries — recently renamed Mercy Multiplied.
The charity serves as an in-patient setting for exclusively female clients, aged 13 to 28. An insight into the philosophy behind the program can perhaps be gleaned from a speech by its founder, Nancy Alcorn, who in 2008 said,
“If there’s demonic activity, like if somebody has opened themselves up to the spirit of lust or pornography or lots of promiscuous sexual activity, then we’ve opened the door for demonic powers. And secular psychiatrists want to medicate things like that, but Jesus did not say to medicate a demon. He said to cast them out. And that’s supposed to be a part of normal Christianity.”
One former patient, Hayley Baker, suffered from a plethora of diagnoses, including major depression and an eating disorder. She also suffered a history of child abuse when she entered a Mercy facility in 2009.
Baker says she was denied prescription Xanax by staffers while suffering nighttime panic attacks, and instead given a sheet of paper saying, “Peaceful Sleep,” bearing a line from the book of Psalms: “He grants sleep to those he loves.”
Baker, like other patients, was told prayer could cure her problems. In fact, staffers approached all problems with this one-size-fits-all religious approach. When one facility experienced an outbreak of mononucleosis, residents were made to walk through the halls and call for banishing of the evil spirits that were causing it.
Baker, who was molested as a little girl, said part of the treatment she was expected to perform was to imagine Jesus being present during a traumatic event in her past and absolving her of guilt associated with it.
“I couldn’t make up Jesus saying something to me,” Hayley told Slate. “I didn’t blame myself for the abuse.”
I’ve had mono. By the time I was diagnosed, I’d had it for some time, and my spleen was enlarged, a common situation with mono. You need to have care, so you don’t rupture your spleen, which is a life threatening situation. “Banishing evil spirits causing mono”. What in the effety eff do you say about that? What happens when the “evil spirits” result in a spleen rupture? This is willful stupidity. It’s dangerous stupidity. It’s devastating to think of all the women who are being so maltreated, especially when they have troubles enough weighing them down.
Their rating at Charity Navigator is 85.97. The recent name change to Mercy Multiplied reflects on how much this fake clinic is branching out. They have even set up in Canada. There’s some very good insight into this travesty of so-called mental health help here. A lot of women end up at MM because there’s simply no other option – they don’t have the money for proper care. There’s more information here and here. There’s also Mercy Survivors.
Nahko and Medicine for People. Nahko Bear is Apache, Puerto Rican and Filipino.
Note: The song tells the tale of Nahko’s personal journey to forgiveness as he makes a trip to San Quentin State Prison to meet the man who murdered his father.
Whitehouse.gov
Andrew Johnson took office April 15, 1865. He established Thanksgiving as a holiday, and spoke of the need to relocate Indians to “reservations remote from the traveled routes between the Mississippi and the Pacific.”
Andrew Johnson: Racist Determined to ‘Relocate’ Indians.
In his third annual message to Congress, in December 1867, Johnson spoke of the need to relocate Indians to “reservations remote from the traveled routes between the Mississippi and the Pacific.” Calling the Plains Indians “warlike” and “instigated by real or imaginary grievances,” Johnson said the territories should be exempt from Indian outbreaks and that hostile tribes should not be allowed to interrupt construction of the Pacific Railroad.
“These objects, as well as the material interests and the moral and intellectual improvement of the Indians, can be most effectually secured by concentrating them upon portions of country set apart for their exclusive use and located at points remote from our highways and encroaching white settlements,” he said.
Johnson also oversaw three treaties signed in the spring of 1868 at Fort Laramie, in the Dakota Territory. The Sioux, Crow, and Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho signed treaties calling for peace and friendship with the United States.
In June 1868, the U.S. signed a similar peace treaty with the Navajo at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The agreement ended the four-year forced exile of the Navajo and allowed them to return to their homeland.
By the fall of 1868, however, warfare again broke out as Gen. George Armstrong Custer led the 7th U.S. Cavalry in a surprise dawn attack of the Southern Cheyenne village of Washita. Hailed as one of the first substantial American victories against the Southern Plains Indians, the massacre left as many as 100 Cheyenne dead.
Johnson did not mention the massacre in his final message to Congress, in December 1868. Instead, he encouraged the “aboriginal population” to abandon their “nomadic habits” in favor of agriculture and industry.
Also of interest today is whether or not The U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) will actually get around to doing a critique of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery issued at its 13th Session in May 2014: “Study on the impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery on indigenous peoples, including mechanisms, processes and instruments of redress.” [UN Doc E/C.19/2014/3], instead of burying it once again.
The Permanent Forum—like most conventional bodies—avoided naming the religious basis of the Doctrine. But the Study itself took aim at the root: “the presumption of racial superiority of Christian Europeans.” The Doctrine “originated with the papal bulls issued during the so-called Age of Discovery in Europe. It was compounded by regulations, such as the Requerimiento, that emanated from royalty in Christian European States.”
The Study showed how the Christian presumption of superiority embodied by the Doctrine of Discovery fuels colonial land seizures and genocide of Native Peoples. “In all its manifestations, ‘discovery’ has been used as a framework for justification to dehumanize, exploit, enslave and subjugate indigenous peoples and dispossess them of their most basic rights, laws, spirituality, worldviews and governance and their lands and resources. Ultimately it was the very foundation of genocide.”
The Study concluded with a realistic appraisal and recommendation:
Peter D’Errico has the full story here.
The East Coast Two Spirit society is crowdfunding to get a float into the march that is the climax to NYC Pride 2016. Courtesy East Coast Two Spirit society.
The East Coast Two Spirit Society is crowdfunding to get a float into the march at the end of NYC Pride 2016. ICTMN has the full story.
