If your tastes run to the dark side, Stolen Innocence Photography is for you. I like most of the work, it’s interesting, evocative, and creative. I will admit to loving the blood dress, it’s grand. Hat tip to rq.
© Stolen Innocence Photography, all rights reserved.
You can read more about the Blood Dress here.
The tree that hides Jesus in better days.
The Jesus in question exposed.
SOUTH PORTLAND — The pine tree planted to hide what some call the googly-eyed Jesus may be dying.
The long, green needles of the Austrian pine, which obscures a controversial mural of Jesus Christ on the bell tower of Holy Cross Catholic Church on Cottage Road, have mysteriously turned brown in recent weeks.
[…]
“I think pollution is doing a number on it,” Roberts said Tuesday. “It’s got something going on.”
Roberts, who is a church member, said the tree also appeared to be dead a couple of years ago, but it rebounded after he applied a fertilizer and insecticide. Now, road salt and other pollution may be taking a toll once again.
“This time it may be gone,” Roberts said. “It may have to come out.”
[…]
On April 17, the Maine Sunday Telegram published a story about the tree and its strategic placement in front of the mural. At that time, the needles on the tree were green. In that story, Henchal said parishioners didn’t talk much about the mural, though the hidden Jesus is something of a legend among children who attend the parochial school next door.
At the high-traffic intersection of Broadway and Cottage Road, the enamel-on-steel mural was installed in 1980 to replace a deteriorating tile facade on the church, which was built in 1950. Titled “Spirit of the Matter: A Christian Triptych,” the mural was designed by Damariscotta artist John Janii Laberge at the direction of a church committee.
In the April story, Laberge admitted that he has often thought of cutting the tree down with a chainsaw to expose his artwork. On Monday, Laberge said he had noticed the tree’s failing condition last week when he was dog-sitting for a friend in South Portland, but he was quick to deflect any suspicion that he is responsible.
“I didn’t poison it,” Laberge volunteered. “It may not be dead. I’ve seen it that way before and it came back. It’s probably just going through its seasonal changes.”
The response to the mural has been mixed from the start, especially to the whites of the eyes, which stare woefully toward heaven in a pose suggesting medieval religious art. While some say it’s an apt representation of pain and suffering, others say it’s creepy or scary. Laberge says he delivered on the church committee’s request to depict a “powerful, working-class Christ.”
“I wanted a strong, drive-by presence,” Laberge said. “I made something bold and big that tells something about the crucifixion and what came after. I warned them that depictions of Christ are a touchy thing.”
When Laberge drives past the mural today, he questions the negative reaction.
“It’s not that bad,” Laberge said. “A person who died on the cross is not going to look pretty.”
[…]
The mural became the subject of community controversy in 2001, when church officials considered making changes to the artwork as part of building renovations. The renovations ran over budget, however, so the idea of altering the mural was dropped, church members said. Soon after, someone suggested planting a tree in front of the mural as a way to take care of the problem.
The plan seemed to be working until the tree started showing signs of stress in recent years. Whether it can be brought back from the brink a second time is unclear.
Full Story Here. So, no one suggested praying the tree back to life? I’m shocked, after all, it’s not a fig tree. After staring at that art work for what is probably too long, I think they need a much bigger tree. Much bigger.
Texas State Board of Education District 9 candidate Mary Lou Bruner (WFAA/screen grab)
Remember Ms. It’s A Theory, Theories Are Unproven Bruner? Well, she’s not going to be sitting on the Texas Board of Education this year. All I can say is that I’m grateful for the outbreak of sanity (no doubt temporary, but still) that ousted her.
Texas voters on Tuesday decided the state’s school board should not include a retired teacher who claimed President Barack Obama was a gay prostitute and said dinosaurs might still be around if Noah had more room on his biblical ark.
Mary Lou Bruner, 69, an arch-conservative with a penchant for conspiracy theories, lost by 18 percent to fellow Republican Keven Ellis in a primary race for the board that sets policies for the nation’s second-largest school system, unofficial Office of the Secretary of State results showed.
[…]
Bruner has blamed U.S. school shootings on the teaching of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in classrooms and said Noah loaded dinosaurs on the ark to escape the biblical flood. “The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce.
It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus,” she said on Facebook.
“Texas escaped an education train wreck tonight,” said Kathy Miller, president of the government watchdog group Texas Freedom Network, in a statement.
While the comments brought her ridicule in some parts of the country, in East Texas they also vaulted her to the top in a March primary, where she won 48 percent of the vote.
Bruner, who taught elementary school and special education for 36 years, had toned down the rhetoric recently and had been commenting only on her platform for the seat on the 15-member state school board that oversees the educational system and approves textbooks for some 5 million public school children.
A man reads tweets on his phone in front of a displayed Twitter logo in Bordeaux, southwestern France, March 10, 2016. (REUTERS/Regis Duvignau/Illustration/File Photo)
witter Inc said on Tuesday that user names and media attachments such as photos and videos will no longer count toward the length of a tweet but the 140-character limit will remain.
Twitter said the change, part of its efforts to simplify its microblogging service, will happen in the next few months.
“A few simple changes to make conversations on Twitter easier! And no more removing characters for images or videos!” Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said in a 115-character tweet. (http://bit.ly/1s78BmY).
[…]
Additional changes include the ability to retweet and quote-tweet a person’s own posts.
Nice changes for twitterers. Full Story Here.
Jed York, The CEO of the 49ers called HB 2 “bad for our employees, bad for our fans, and bad for business.”
Jed York, the CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, is calling for a repeal of North Carolina’s anti-LGBT House Bill 2.
The National Football League hosted meetings in Charlotte, N.C., this week. Chris Sgro, the executive direcctor of Equality N.C. and the only openly LGBT person in the North Carolina legislature, says it was during this time that York chose to meet with LGBT advocates and transgender North Carolinians to learn about the impact of the anti-LGBT law. Sgro announced that the 49ers were contributing a gift of $75,000 to the Equality North Carolina Foundation to support the work of the organization.
In a statement published Tuesday, York said the San Francisco 49ers are “deeply concerned” about HB 2 because the team believes that “discriminatory laws” are “bad for our employees, bad for our fans, and bad for business.”
[…]
HB 2 will “make it far more challenging for businesses across the state to recruit and retain the nation’s best and brightest workers and attract the most talented students from across the country,” said York, the CEO of the 49ers. York echoed a fear many North Carolinians have expressed, which is that HB 2 has and will continue to create loss in business for the state. The law will “diminish the state’s draw as a destination for sporting events, tourism and conventions, and new business activity,” the CEO said. York added that his team “prides” itself on inclusivity and will “strongly urge” Gov. Pat McCrory and the North Carolina legislature to repeal HB 2.
Perhaps the threat of no more new NC sports stars will get through to McCrory. Nothing else has worked so far. I am not remotely into sports, but a big Yay! for Jed York and the 49ers.
Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump had a nice little chat about that whole transgender business, which didn’t take long to devolve into the same old, same old. “Eh, this bathroom thing isn’t necessary”, “this isn’t human rights”, and “shockingly expensive”. I’ve run right out of eyerolls, they need new lines.
Trump told the Fox News host that he supports leaving the issue of transgender rights up to the states. “You know Obama’s getting into a very tricky territory,” he said, referencing the guidance issued by the Obama administration. “The amazing thing is so many people are talking about this now and we have to protect everybody even if it’s one person… but this is such a tiny part of our population.”
O’Reilly asked Trump if he provided gender-neutral facilities in his properties. “No, we don’t have that,” replied Trump. “I hope not. Because frankly it would be unbelievably expensive nationwide. It would be hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Trump did not elaborate on how he arrived at this estimate, nor did he acknowlege that in many cases, gender-neutral bathrooms could be established simply by removing gender-specific signs from doors. Additionally, allowing transgender people access to the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, as Trump previously advocated, costs nothing.
[…]
Trump said he wasn’t sure about whether trans rights are “human rights,” but providing gender-neutral restrooms would be “an unbelievably expensive thing to do,” he told O’Reilly. Instead, the country should be “spending money on other things,” said Trump. “Frankly, the number of people we’re talking about is really a small number. Again protect them — but it’s a very very small number,” said Trump.
Full Story Here. Watch Trump discuss transgender rights, begining at 4:09.
https://youtu.be/IUq70p-PnV0
As some of you know, The Washington Post recently ran a story on Thursday about a poll of 504 people which indicated that 90% of Native Americans are not offended by the Washington Redskins name.
Shortly after the article, I tweeted the hashtag #IAmNativeIWasNotAsked, which trended on Thursday night.
[…]
It’s true that some Native people say they are not offended by the Redskins name, but in my experience, they are rare. I have also been told on numerous occasions where I was asked to appear on television, online or on national radio to discuss the Redskins, the organizers and producers had an extremely difficult time finding a Native person who approved of the Redskins name.
The Washington Post says they spoke to a random selection of 504 Native American people. In a country with 566 federally recognized reservations (not including the Pamunkey up for Federal and the multitude of State or unrecognized tribes) this roughly equates to less than one person per federally recognized tribe.
According to the Post’s numbers, available here interestingly, the percentages reflected in 2016 are identical to the poll numbers from the National Annenberg Election Survey from 2004.
A Twitter Poll
I know this is not “scientific,” or acceptable standards for a national poll, but a simple Twitter poll I created Thursday evening at 11:59 pm est generated 200 responses in just a few hours. As of Friday afternoon, 83% of those people say they are offended by the Redskins name.
Full Article Here. Vincent Schilling talks about this specific issue in his ‘No I Won’t Just Move On’ Hashtag: Why I Made It, We Need It Column.
A Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) whistling. All photos 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Oh, my beloved Pye, the leucistic grackle. I’ve been putting out bread and other baked goods the past few days, hoping he’d show, as he has zero resistance to baked goods. Sure enough…
© C. Ford. All rights reserved. All photos are 1500 x 996, click for full size.
I have been paying attention to art of all kinds for most of my life, and Ikehata’s work is right at the very top of the most evocative works I have ever seen. Incredibly evocative. Thought provoking. Poignant. Emotional. A reminder of our mortality, our fragility. Staggeringly beautiful. Terrifying. Astonishing. Look at everything. Click on it all, see it full size.
Yuichi Ikehata works. Fragmented beauty: Japan’s Yuichi Ikehata – artist profile.
We live from moment to moment in a mix of truth and fiction that we consider to be reality. The distinction between reality and fiction is a relationship such that we require one in order to recognize the other, and at times they are so closely connected that we are unable to distinguish the two.
Fragment of Long Term Memory (LTM), an ongoing photographic series, conveys an unrealistic world through fragments of reality. My understanding of reality comes from its moments of beauty, sadness, fun, perfection, and those days when nothing special happens. Many parts of our memories, however, are often forgotten, or difficult to recall. I retrieve those fragmented moments and reconstruct them as surreal images.
I always feel an uncertain anxiety. I find it important to have this anxiety stimulated by negative factors and feelings surrounding the uncertainty of existence, because by feeling my own existence as small and unstable, this in turn will lead to my recognizing a vast world and being in awe of it.
Frank Amedia, an extremist asshole of the worst kind. Calling him a flaming doucheweasel would be a compliment.
Frank Amedia.
Donald Trump has appointed a “liaison for Christian policy” — a minister who has said AIDS is caused by “unnatural sex” and threatened to withhold relief from Haitian earthquake surviviors if they continued to practice voodoo.
Frank Amedia, pastor of Touch Heaven Ministries, arranged a meeting earlier this month between Trump and several other ministers, Time reports. They discussed the “erosion of religious liberty,” the magazine notes, along with Israel and immigration — the latter being a focus of Trump’s presidential campaign, with his call to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and his plan to deport all undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
Catering to the religious right, on the other hand, has not been a priority for the presumptive Republican nominee, and he has made some missteps in his references to the Bible. But now with Amedia, he’s joined up with a representative of the conservative Christian fringe.
[…]
In 2010, Amedia was in Haiti distributing food to earthquake survivors, but said he might make further aid contingent on Haitians giving up the practice of voodoo. “We would give food to the needy in the short term, but if they refused to give up voodoo, I’m not sure we would continue to support them in the long term because we wouldn’t want to perpetuate that practice,” he told the Associated Press in a story quoted by Right Wing Watch. “We equate it with witchcraft, which is contrary to the Gospel.” He later tried to walk back the comments, saying AP had not told “the full story,” but still appeared willing to cut off aid if Haitians did not embrace Christianity, according to Christianity Today magazine.
[…]
Go to Right Wing Watch for more on Amedia, including his role in the bribery case; he was never charged, but admitted to attempted bribery in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
Some other ministers who met with Trump have similarly extremist views. Rick Joyner of Morning Star Ministries has blamed gay people for Hurricane Katrina and likened Trump to Christ. Sid Roth has said homosexuality will cause a nation to “vomit out” its people. Mario Bramnick, pastor of New Wine Ministries Church in Florida and a representative of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, last year hosted a meeting that called for the “mobilization” of Christians in response to the “demonic shift” brought to the nation by the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling.
The Full Story is Here. Here’s a sample of Mr. Amedia:
Chester A. Arthur, 20th president of the United States, viewed cultural diversity as a threat to the country.
Chester A. Arthur viewed cultural diversity as a threat to America.
The 20th president of the United States, Arthur took office in September 1881, after the assassination of James Garfield. He inherited a country still wrangling over civil rights for African Americans, and bristling with anti-immigration sentiment.
The animosity was particularly pronounced in the West, where large populations of immigrants and Native Americans lived, said Tom Sutton, a professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University and author of a chapter about Arthur in the 2016 bookThe Presidents and the Constitution.
“The country was growing more diverse, more industrialized, and out West, we were starting to get to the end of the development of the frontier,” Sutton said. “Arthur wanted consistency in population. He had this idea that everyone needed to be assimilated into American society, and those who couldn’t assimilate were excluded.”
[…]
The federal government used similar anti-immigration language to exclude Native Americans, who were not considered citizens. Indians were required to go through a naturalization process similar to that of immigrants in order to qualify for the same rights and protections as other citizens.
“Arthur wanted what he thought was best for Native Americans—this idea that they needed to be assimilated into American society,” Sutton said. “In terms of citizenship, we continued to treat them as foreign nations, so they had to go through a naturalization process.”
This applied even to Indians born in the United States who voluntarily separated themselves from their tribes.
In 1880, a Winnebago Indian born on a reservation in Nebraska tried to register to vote. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1885, John Elk claimed he surrendered his tribal allegiance and was therefore a U.S. citizen. His claims were denied, and the high court ruled that Indians were not considered citizens until after they had been “naturalized, or taxed, or recognized as a citizen either by the United States or by the state.”
Arthur, who had natural empathy for the plight of American Indians, did little to protect them from oppression. Instead, he viewed assimilation as the answer to what he called the “great permanent problem.”
You’ve probably heard of the credentials M.D. and R.N., and maybe N.P. The people using those letters are doctors, registered nurses and nurse practitioners. But what about PSC.D or D.PSc? Those letters refer to someone who practices pastoral medicine — or “Bible-based” health care.
It’s a relatively new title being used by some alternative health practitioners. The Texas-based Pastoral Medical Association gives out “pastoral provider licenses” in all 50 states and 30 countries. Some providers call themselves doctors of pastoral medicine. But these licenses are not medical degrees. That has watchdog organizations concerned that some patients may not understand what this certification really means.
Thankfully, I have not run across this, and hadn’t heard of anyone with a PSC.D or D.PSc. They’d need heaven’s help if I ever do run into someone sporting a god badge. Healthcare is difficult enough without this depth of bullshit.
The good folks at the Pastoral Medical Association were too busy doing God’s work to have a deep discussion with those aggressively atheist elitists at NPR, only providing a statement “explaining it was founded by a group of Christians concerned with the increase in chronic illness. The association says it seeks to protect ‘the Almighty’s Health Care workers.'”
Lo, the association’s website (“optimized for Firefox”) is a wonder to behold. It comes complete with a constitution, which begins:
We of this mighty western Republic have to grapple with the dangers that spring from popular self-government tried on a scale incomparably vaster than ever before in the history of mankind, and from an abounding material prosperity greater also than anything which the world has hitherto seen.
[…]
So, how many members does the Pastoral Medical Association have? Screw you, that’s how many. According to the site’s awesome FAQ section, “policy prevents the PMA from releasing exact membership numbers, however we can affirm that the PMA family is many many thousands, growing at an average rate of over 3,000 new members monthly.” At that rate, it’s only a matter of time before we’re all members.
And in case you’re wondering if a PMA license is “recognized,” the answer is a resounding yes. See, “because of the nature of PMA license it has a very solid legal basis in all U.S. states and is also respected in a large number of other countries. The PMA is a well organized private ecclesiastical association operating in according with U.S. Constitutional provisions and overwhelming Supreme Court precedence.”
That’s good enough for us. The next time we feel a cold coming on, or lupus, we’ll eschew science and reach for the PMA directory and our comprehensive wellness quart.
Via Houston Press and NPR.