Trump’s Border Wall Would Work, In All the Wrong Ways.

Javelinas in the creosote | Photo: Dave Hensley, some rights reserved.

Javelinas in the creosote | Photo: Dave Hensley, some rights reserved.

Chris Clarke at KCET has an excellent article up about the far reaching effects of Trump’s wall.

California’s border with Baja California is a complex region with unique environmental issues. Our Borderlands series takes a deeper look at this region unified by shared landscapes and friendship, and divided by international politics.

A female arroyo toad shelters under a streamside cottonwood in early March, twenty years from now. It’s unseasonably warm, and there’s something ancient stirring inside her. She listens. A male is singing. She finds his song beautiful. Everything in her wants to follow that sound, to find the male and mate with him. She would release her eggs for him to fertilize. Those eggs would grow in long submerged strings, until a new generation of arroyo tadpoles hatched from them a week later. Her drive to find that male is irresistable. But she cannot reach him.

A month and a half later, three hundred miles east, a small group of javelinas cools its collective heels in the shade of an ironwood tree. The engaging, pig-like beasts are hungry. A couple of them root in the soil of the wash, looking for tubers. Not far away, a mesquite hangs heavy with last year’s crop of pods. The javelinas can smell those pods, even after a season of drying on the branch. The one tree could feed the entire pack for two days, and the javelinas would disperse a few of the seeds elsewhere to make new mesquites. But that’s not going to happen. There’s something in the way.

In July, wild eyes scan and a pair of slitted nostrils sift the desert breeze. The jaguar finds no good news in the air. He curls back his upper lip and tries again, head held high. He’s not looking for food. Here in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona, game is plentiful enough to keep his ribs well hidden. It’s plentiful enough, in fact, to support a few more jaguars, to provide a launch pad for North America’s largest wild cat to reinhabit the southern Rocky Mountains. But that would require the cooperation of one or more female jaguars. And thanks to a project propelled by destructive politics and fear, there won’t be any lady jaguars in the Patagonia Mountains anytime soon.

In previous articles in this series we’ve looked at a some of the likely unintended environmental consequences of the gigantic border wall proposed by Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, from the climate impacts of such a massive construction project to the wall’s inevitable disruption of stream courses resulting in massive floods.

But some of the longest-lasting environmental consequences of the proposed border wall would result from the wall doing precisely what it’s supposed to do: stop migration across the border. The wall will impede a lot more than just human beings from migrating. It will stop animals as well, and their genes, and even the plant species they disperse.

This excellent, eloquent article can be read in full here. This is a discussion too few people are having, and it is a vital one. If humans are good at anything, they are absolutely great for being self-centered and consumed by the short term. Trump’s wall is a good example of that, but so is the complete lack of concern for just how far out such an abomination would ripple. Read up, learn, pass it on.

The 800 lb. Gorilla.

Judicial candidate Eric C. Grimm in a May 2016 campaign video. (Screenshot)

Judicial candidate Eric C. Grimm in a May 2016 campaign video. (Screenshot)

There’s no longer an 800 pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the room. There’s a herd of oliphants, trampling their way across uStates, and they white, angry, and bursting with hate.

MLive reports that Eric C. Grimm, a Muskegon lawyer and a judicial candidate for Muskegon County’s probate court, sent an email out to his colleagues on July 10, asking for their votes and criticizing sitting probate court judge Gregory C. Pittman for bullying the other candidates.

“I can understand why some of the other candidates may not want to speak up about the 800-lb Silverback Alpha Male in the middle of the Probate Court,” Grimm wrote in his email. “They are each considerably less free to walk away and refuse to have anything to do with this court if the bullying problem is not fixed.”

According to MLive, Grimm apologized for the bigoted remarks after backlash from prominent public officials including the county prosecutor and the chairman of the county board of commissioners.

The candidate claimed both in a statement and a television interview that he is redeeming himself by, “sentencing myself to 100 hours of community service, in the very same community most adversely impacted by my mistake.”

MLive notes, however, that Grimm refused to retract his broader statements alleging Judge Pittman’s bullying behavior, claiming that he merely “got carried away with the artfulness of a triple metaphor, and lost sight of the optics,” and that the resulting “so-called ‘outrage’ is overblown, insensitive in itself, and a charade.”

So much for that redemption. I wonder just how much that “very same community most adversely impacted” wants this assclown attempting to redeem himself in their neighbourhood. I wouldn’t want him in mine. On another level, it’s the statement about that most adversely impacted community that bugs me no end. I grew up with a couple of extremely bigoted relations. The rest were of the “we’re good people, not bigots” stripe, with heads full of stereotypes they accepted unthinkingly. Of course bigotry harms those it targets, that’s the principal aim, but it reaches much farther than that. Bigotry harms every single person it touches. It’s an infection of thoughtless hate, and highly contagious. It poisons every environment, it ends up in the heads of children everywhere, and so it keeps growing, keeps infecting one person after another, seeping through generations, a toxic mold which inhibits thought, the desire to learn, compassion, and empathy.

I expect it’s too much to hope that Mr. Grimm figures out what he did wrong, and actually tries to correct that, rather than loading up his brain with buzz word idiocy. You don’t need to concern yourself with losing sight of the optics, Mr. Grimm. You need to concern yourself with your loss of humanity.

Full story here.

Money-grubbing on Trump.

Oh, Ebay. Home of people who will do anything to make a buck, a lot of Trump wannabes. Here’s their idea of Trump-based art. Well, some of it. You’ll have to click over to see all of it, I’m afraid I don’t have much appetite for this stuff.

1

Donald Trump clown dress, $25,000.00.

2

Donald Trump LEGO Mosaic – Custom Build 20″ x 20″ (NEW), $990.00.

3

Donald Trump Art Collage,$2,400.00.

Click over to Gizmodo to see the rest, including a baby doll someone is trying to fob off as a baby Trump doll, for a mere $20,000.  There’s also a Trump towel, which I don’t want to explain. :Shudder:

Just a sec, let me get my tiny violin…

Okay, all set. An artist has set up a perfect commentary around Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Star.

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The miniature wall is quite detailed, as this Instagram user wrote: “Someone had built a 6″ tall grey concrete wall around it. Complete with ‘Keep out’ signs and topped with razor wire.”

Fusion has the story. I have no doubt that the commentary will have lots of commentary tomorrow, when all the cons start decrying this horrific act of vandalism. I have my teeny, tiny violin all ready.

Misogyny, GOP Style.

Merchandise on display outside the RNC. Credit: Kira Lerner.

Merchandise on display outside the RNC. Credit: Kira Lerner.

CLEVELAND, OHIO — Each day of the Republican National Convention, as tens of thousands of delegates, reporters, and curious onlookers pushed and shoved their way down a single narrow street leading to the arena’s main stage, a group of vendors hawked t-shirts and buttons attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Delegates and other convention-goers eagerly purchased items that called Clinton a “bitch” and a “tramp,” suggested she be imprisoned, and described her “fat thighs” and “small breasts.”

Mary Patterson, a guest of a delegate from Racine, Wisconsin, perused the merchandise on Sunday morning with her friend, Carol McNeill-Skorupan. Both women stopped in their tracks to buy pins featuring Clinton’s face and the words: “Life’s a bitch. Don’t vote for one.”

“This sums it up right here,” Patterson told ThinkProgress. “She comes off as a bitch, quite honestly. She doesn’t have a warm personality. She seems very cold. It has nothing to do with the gender.”

Her friend agreed. “She is just not a pleasant person,” McNeill-Skorupan said. “Her husband had some charisma, which allowed him to get away with a lot of things, obviously. But she does not have it and she does not have a winning personality. She is kind of a screamer. In my mind, if you’re just out there screaming, you’re negative, you are not positive, you’re a bitch.”

Interesting how screaming and being negative makes Ms. Clinton a bitch, but it makes Trump not only a viable candidate, but a good one. But that’s not anything to do with sexism, no. Nope, not at all.

A few paces down, wearing a rubber Hillary Clinton mask and holding a large neon yellow sign reading “Trump vs. Tramp,” sat Florida resident and longtime political gadfly Bob Kunst.

“Is this sexist? Go fuck yourself. Excuse my language,” he told ThinkProgress when asked about the sign.

“I could have said she was a killer, but this rhymed,” he continued. “This is the door-opener. This gets people’s attention. It works.”

Yes, sexism has worked remarkably well all these centuries, because there are always a wealth of fragile white men to latch onto it.

There’s much more on the not only embedded sexism in the GOP, but their most serious celebration of it at Think Progress. I need more tea.

29.

29th President Warren Harding promised Indians he would look out for their indigenous rights, but did little to that end. Whitehouse.gov

29th President Warren Harding promised Indians he would look out for their indigenous rights, but did little to that end. Whitehouse.gov

Less than three months before Warren Gamaliel Harding was elected 29th president of the United States, he stood on his front porch in Marion, Ohio, and promised Indians he would look out for their indigenous rights.

Harding, then a U.S. senator, announced his bid for president in June 1920 and subsequently gave hundreds of official and off-the-cuff speeches to audiences numbering in the tens of thousands—all from the comfort of his front porch.

This “front porch campaign” reached a total of 600,000 visitors who traveled to Harding’s crushed-gravel lawn “by car or chartered trains, representing Republican state delegations or farmers or veterans or businessmen or blacks or women or first voters, or, even, traveling salesmen,” David Pietrusza wrote in his 2007 book, 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents. “Each contingent, properly escorted by a brass band, would march up ‘Victory Way,’ festooned every twenty feet by white columns surmounted by gilt eagles.”

On August 19, Harding met on that porch with about 20 delegates of the Society of American Indians who, “arrayed in tribal feathers and beadwork,” attended the speech to plead “for extension of their racial rights,” the Lancaster Eagle reported. Harding, who would inherit a country still recovering from World War I, replied that the United States “might do well to bestow ‘democracy and humanity and idealism’ on the continent’s native race rather than to ‘waste American lives trying to make sure of that bestowal thousands of miles across the sea.’”

[…]

Eight months after taking office, Harding dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, a monument for service members who died without their remains being identified. Crow Chief Plenty Coos (or Plenty Coups) was invited to participate in the ceremony and, “attired in full war regalia, feathered bonnet, furs and skins of variegated colors,” was seated on the platform with Harding and military leaders from Europe, the Associated Press reported on November 14, 1921.

“Thus the uniform of the first American took its place with those of its Allied Powers in the last war,” the AP reported. “A group of Indian braves appeared in the audience, tiptoeing in their beaded moccasins down the aisle to their seats.”

Warren Harding meets with Indian chiefs in Washington D.C., the day before he dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Va., in November 1921. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

Warren Harding meets with Indian chiefs in Washington D.C., the day before he dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Va., in November 1921. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

After the burial ceremony, Plenty Coos laid a coup stick and the war bonnet from his head on the tomb. Although organizers had insisted that Plenty Coos remain silent during the ceremony, the chief addressed a crowd of about 100,000 spectators in his Native language.

“I am glad to represent all the Indians of the United States in placing on the grave of this noble warrior this coup stick and war bonnet, every eagle feather of which represents a deed of valor by my race,” he said. “I hope that the Great Spirit will grant that these noble warriors have not given up their lives in vain and that there will be peace to all men hereafter.”

Full Article at ICTMN.

I Don’t Need to Read.

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The Washington Post has done the regular quizzing about the reading habits of Presidential nominees. Turns out Donald doesn’t think he needs to read at all. Somehow, I am not at all surprised.

…He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

[…]

One day last month, Trump had a visit from a delegation of prominent executives in the oil, steel and retail industries, and one of the executives told Trump that the Chinese were taking advantage of the United States. “He said, ‘I’d like to send you a report,’ ” Trump recalled. “He said, ‘I’d love to be able to send you’ — oh boy, he’s got a lengthy report, hundreds of pages. . . . I said, ‘Do me a favor: Don’t send me a report. Send me, like, three pages.’ ”

Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”

Full story here.

Welcome to The Power Games!

A moment later, Stephen Colbert brightened and stared out at the assembled masses at the RNC. After quickly apologizing because he “blacked out,” he said “it is my honor to hereby launch and begin the 2016 Republican National Hungry for Power Games!”

However, security appeared to intervene, and as Stephen Colbert was escorted from the RNC stage, he yelled, “Look, I know I’m not supposed to be up here, but to be honest, neither is Donald Trump.”

Via The Inquisitr.

That’s not political correctness. That’s fixing inhumanity.

There is Hope: Time to Follow an Indigenous Model for Peace in America

There is Hope: Time to Follow an Indigenous Model for Peace in America.

Gyasi Ross has an excellent article up at ICTMN about these troubled times we find ourselves in. I’m just going to do a bit here.

[…] We’re progressing as a society, becoming more compassionate as a society.  Some folks call that “political correctness,” but I don’t think so.  Instead, it seems like it’s just a heightened humanity that holds certain behavior accountable.  Bullying.  The stuff that is making news today would not make news 100 years ago.  Heck, it may not have even made news 50 years ago.  The “tiny” little daily assaults against the dignity and bodies of so many people who were not white men—Natives, black folks, gay and lesbian folks, Mexicans, women—would not even be an issue some years ago.  That’s one of the reasons why Donald Trump’s Trumponian use of hateful rhetoric is so interesting; Donald Trump’s campaign really seems to be is the last stand of those white men who wish for the days when they could commit those assaults against all of those groups with impunity.

That’s not political correctness.  That’s fixing inhumanity.  And the stories that accompany them, whether “black man got shot by the police” or “Native man shot by the police” are no longer taken for granted.  And the subsequent protests and social media outrage over those shootings are likewise no longer taken for granted.

That’s good.  We’re evolving.

However, there is a genuine divide between different generations of people. Amongst those generations, let’s be clear, none of them are bad. Even Donald Trump. But many of us simply have fundamentally different worldviews and perspectives depending on how we grew up and the entanglements into which we were born.  Currently, there is an old guard oftentimes represented by those in power. Police. Law enforcement in this nation was constructed to protect property and not people; as such, it inherently favors the wealthy.  Certain communities have historically been intentionally and systematically kept out of wealth structurally because of many reasons (that’s a different conversation and I’d love to have that conversation with all of you someday; still that’s not the point now); those communities include pretty much all of the communities—black, Native, LGBTQ—who are catching hell from law enforcement today.

A genuine divide.

INDIGENOUS MODEL FOR PEACEKEEPING

I’m a disciple of John Mohawk, a dearly departed Seneca philosopher and professor.  He introduced me to the Great Law, a model for peacemaking and peacekeeping amongst warring nations—communities where there is a genuine divide.  I’m simply going to quote his 2004 take on the Great Law from “The Warriors Who Turned To Peace” and hopefully start a conversation about how we can heal some intergenerational wounds and provide our children a new start.

[Read more…]

Free to Pee at the RNC.

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Less than a week before the convention takes over Quicken Loans Arena, the Cleveland City Council Wednesday unanimously approved an update to the city’s antidiscrimination ordinance that will guarantee transgender people can access facilities that correspond with their gender identity.

The revision — which has been hotly debated for three years — specifically bans discrimination based on gender identity or expression, along with numerous other characteristics, in employment and public accommodations (including restrooms). The change approved Wednesday replaces old language that only referred to “protected classes,” without enumerating what those classes were.

I can’t imagine the repubs are all too happy about this, but it’s a great win. Even so, I think I’d be damn careful about using a public facility at the RNC. The Advocate has the full story.

peter-thiel-x750

In less pleasant RNC news, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, and apparently still mighty pissed about being outed, is going to speak. As if people needed yet another reason to hate PayPal.

Gay PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel is one of the nation’s 300 wealthiest people. He’s also an ardent Donald Trump supporter, so much so that he’s speaking at next week’s Republican National Convention.

Though the convention’s platform is described as the most anti-LGBT in Republican history — with calls for a reversal of marriage equality, restricted bathroom access for trans people, and legalized “conversion” therapy and religious-based discrimination — Thiel was happy to take part in the convention. Thiel will be one of only three openly gay speakers at the event and the first in 16 years, according to The Huffington Post.

[…]

Thiel will be joined at the convention by a calvalcade of anti-LGBT speakers, including Jerry Falwell Jr., Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, and Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. Click here for the full list of speakers. Former presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have declined to speak at the event.

Full story at The Advocate.