Sunday Facepalm.

Donald Trump and Wayne Allen Root (YouTube/screen grab).

Donald Trump and Wayne Allen Root (YouTube/screen grab).

There’s a bowlful of facepalm this Sunday. We’ll start with Smarm-master Wayne Allen Root, who has decided that all people who oppose Tiny Dictator Trump are mentally ill.

“There is not much that needs to be said,” Root declared. “They’re unhinged, they’re off the rails, they’re mentally ill. The Democratic Party has Trump Derangement Syndrome and they are no longer an opposition party or a leading party; they’re not willing to come to the table and work, they’re not willing to vote on Supreme Court nominees, they’re just looking to block and boycott. They’re crazy and so we have just got to run the country and ignore them … I think we have got to erase Obama like he was never there.”

Root went on to encourage the state of California “to leave the union” because “it would be the best thing to ever happen to America, conservatives, the Republican Party [and] patriots. My God, if California seceded with its fifty-plus electoral votes, we win every election for the rest of history.”

“We don’t want California as part of this country anymore,” Root continued, adding that he’d also love to see New York, Illinois, Maryland and all of New England likewise secede and “let this country be a nice conservative country run by people like Donald Trump and Wayne Root.”

Just the idea…*shudder*. You would either find me out of the country, or in a seceded state. Interesting, I suppose, that it doesn’t at all occur to Root what would happen to their dictatorship if California, New York, Illinois, Maryland and all of New England did leave all the conservative idiots on their own. Not only would their economy bottom out, but there would be one heck of a brain drain. RWW has the full story.

We now move on to Pastor Carl Gallups, who is railing on about immigration, and how it’s ‘god’s’ punishment. I wish these jackasses would be specific. Really can’t see Set or Dionysus or a host of other gods doing something so psychopathic and petty.

Insisting that this is all part of “spiritual warfare,” Gallups said, “What’s happening now is a big, heavy dose, a seismic shift of common sense, rule of law and human decency is beginning to come back in vogue and the left and their counterpart in the demonic realm, they are screaming, ‘Oh, it’s utter chaos, it’s utter chaos.’”

I haven’t been in any demonic realm, nor have I been screaming “oh, it’s utter chaos” either. I have been doing my best to wake people the fuck up, that’s a bit different. Fighting and Resistance are not the same as quivering in panic, just so you know.

He went on to explain that while “the world is so concerned about the flood of refugees and illegal immigrants that are violating our boundaries and borders,” it can all be traced back to God’s punishment on America for teaching evolution and allowing gay rights and legal abortion.

No, no, no, no, no. I’m not at all concerned about refugees. I am concerned about all the things which are forcing people to flee their countries. I’m fine with the people, it’s all the war, intolerance, and other nastiness I’m primarily concerned with, because it’s those things which need to change. No one has been violating boundaries or borders. It’s a fucking nonsensical concept anyway. Human imposed borders have been shifting for as long as there have been humans. Same thing goes with migration. People move. *Shrug*

“Here’s what I have been saying for years before this date,” he said, “and that was: Look, we have violated the borders of our children’s minds, for 100 years we have told them that they come from monkeys and that there is no God. We have violated the borders of their souls and their spirits. We have violated the borders of the womb in America and have destroyed 60 million children. We have violated the borders of sexuality, we have violated the borders of family, we have violated the borders of marriage, we have violated the borders of gender. And now, as a judgment from God or as discipline from God, our own geographical borders are now being violated.”

Oooh, yes, introducing children to the concept of thinking, then teaching them how to think, yeah, that’s evil. We don’t come from monkeys, you dipshit. We’re apes. It’s an ‘all in the family’ kind of thing. Can’t we have a law somewhere that prohibits idiots from spouting off about biology until they have had to study it? Yeah, yeah. I can dream.

“The borders of the womb.” :chokes: There’s no one uterus, dude. Individual uteruses are not parts of a hive-uterus. A uterus is a bodily organ, not an entity. A uterus is not an individual. Said organs are inside many individuals, who supposedly have control of them, just like the rest of their organs. Many individuals with uteruses aren’t remotely interested in you or anyone else’s opinion on them. As far as my uterus is concerned, consider it an undiscovered country. No one is welcome.

Borders, borders, borders. You’re boring me to death with this obsession. So Jehovah has gotten all pissy and decided to just now do this immigration thing, eh? So, you’re a dyed in the wool idiot, too. I have to say, ol’ El Shaddai has lost his touch. It got so bent out of shape over a lack of hospitality that he crispy crittered two cities, and turned a sorrowful woman into salt, for the great crime of grieving over her lost family and home. If continuing immigration is all it has, I think your god is past its used by date. Just sayin’. RWW has the story.

Last is right wing lawyer, Larry Klayman, who thinks he’s really onto something with suing our former president:

Right-wing attorney Larry Klayman appeared on Steve Malzberg’s Newsmax program today to discuss the lawsuit he has filed against former President Obama for allegedly inciting a protestor opposed to President Trump’s ban on refugees and immigrants from several predominantly Muslim nations to “assault” him at Los Angeles International Airport over the weekend. That “assault” apparently consisted of carrying a sign and yelling at passengers.

“Someone with an Arabic accent, a female, charged at me and others in a very aggressive and provocative way,” Klayman said, “causing us fear of immediate bodily injury or death—that’s the standard for assault. She was obviously egged on by President Obama after he left office, in his private capacity, when he was giving a call to arms, in effect, to protesters to continue this mayhem and destruction.”

Obama was likewise responsible for the violent protest at Berkeley University last night, Klayman said.

Klayman insisted that his lawsuit “has great merit” and that he looks forward to proving that Obama “is responsible … for assaulting me Sunday evening.”

I have run right out of comment. I am so tired of dipshit idiots. RWW has the story and video.

Sweet Marie.

Hundreds of women stormed City Hall in New York in 1917 to demand cheaper food prices. Credit Bettmann Archives, via Getty Images.

Hundreds of women stormed City Hall in New York in 1917 to demand cheaper food prices. Credit Bettmann Archives, via Getty Images.

Q. A hundred years before the Women’s March on Washington, another women’s uprising took place, in which Marie Ganz, known as Sweet Marie, played a leading role. Who was she and where did she get her nickname?

A. Newspapers of the day said Ms. Ganz, who was arrested in the food riots of 1917, was incendiary and cursed like a sailor. So naturally, cynical reporters called her “Sweet Marie,” according to Thai Jones, the curator for American history in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. In 1925, however, another reporter said that she had received the name “because of an intriguing smile and an engaging personality.”

In 1914, Sweet Marie carried a pistol into the Standard Oil Building in New York and threatened to shoot John D. Rockefeller Jr. Fortunately, Mr. Rockefeller, whom Sweet Marie blamed for brutalizing striking miners in Colorado, was not in.

“She spent 60 days in jail for it, and it was the main thing on her political résumé, if you can call it that,” Dr. Jones said, adding, “She was kind of a street-corner speaker and definitely a rabble-rouser.”

The food riots began on the morning of Feb. 19, 1917, when women who had gone to the food market area in Brownsville, Brooklyn, found that prices, which had already been rising, had gone up again.

The trouble began at 10 a.m., “when a woman who didn’t have enough cash to cover her purchases overturned a pushcart,” William Freiburger wrote on a CUNY web page about the episode.

“As the peddler protested and attempted to chase after her,” he continued, “hundreds of women surged in upon the hapless businessman.”

The police contended with a thousand rioters for two hours before order was restored, Mr. Freiburger wrote.

The next morning, The New York Times said, 400 mothers, many carrying babies, stormed City Hall to demand cheaper food. An official met with Sweet Marie and other protest leaders, promising a meeting with the mayor. The crowd began to disperse. Then Sweet Marie “harangued the crowd in bitter language, and soon everything was confusion.” She was taken into custody.

Outbreaks of violence continued into March, Mr. Freiburger wrote, and protests spread to Philadelphia and Boston.

In March, Eric Ferrar wrote on the Lo-Down website, the city helped to defuse the crisis by “securing thousands of pounds of low-cost produce,” which allowed wholesalers to lower prices.

[…]

“I was concerned almost entirely about the poor and the problems with which they had to contend,” she said, adding: “More than anything else, perhaps, it is an empty stomach that makes a real radical. This is a fact that should compel vital attention of all parties even today.”

The full story is at The NY Times.

Maintenance of Living History.

abgunstes-muiza-7-48470535

abgunstes-muiza-19-48470585

As rq explains: The story is simple, the family bought a run-down manor estate and are renovating it with their own hands and their own finances and they will make it into an artists’ enclave, for artists to stay and work essentially free of charge. The place used to be a school, and they’re also offering the local school children in older grades opportunity to assist in some of the woodworking and other easier jobs (extra credit).

There’s a guy and his wife doing something similar out where husband’s family has their farmhouse. They’re making the local manor (they’re all over the place, we were basically a summer-home territory for German barons back in the day) into a regional museum, to bolster efforts in the preservation of the local Latgallian dialect (some argue it’s a language). What makes it more difficult is the search for ‘original’ details – specific not only to the time, but to the region. Bit by bit, though, it’s coming together.
I admire people like this, because they’re not only bringing these places up to modern standards (which on its own is expensive and difficult and extremely slow, if you want to avoid major loans from banks) but they’re also trying to recover as much of the historical appearance in the furniture (or at least contemporary to that time).
I admire this effort too, greatly so. There are a ton of photos at the site, and I enjoyed every one of them – wish I was there with my camera! Have a look.

Women: An Epic Trolling of Trump.

Isabella Lovin / Swedish government.

Isabella Lovin / Swedish government.

The Swedish government just announced a new climate change law, requiring the country to end greenhouse gas emissions by 2045.

The proposed legislation has wide support in Sweden from almost all major political parties across the political spectrum. If passed it will require all future governments to provide updates on how they are tackling climate change and inform Parliament on whether they are on track to the meet the target of zero net greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades.
But many people noticed the all-female picture looks an awful lot like an attempt to troll Donald Trump, after pictures of the US president signing an executive order effectively restricting access to abortion while surrounded by male advisers went viral.

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images.

Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images.

Upon enquiry as to the possibly trolling in the photo, it was left up to the viewer to decide:

“You can interpret it as you want,” Lovin’s spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “It’s more that Sweden is a feminist government and this is a very important law that we just decided on.”

“We need climate leadership in the world today. And to make the Paris agreement happen we need climate leadership.”

“I would ask everyone to make their own interpretation.”

People have been busy doing just that:

This cheered me up no end. The Hill and Buzzfeed have this story.

Right Wing Views: Women? Ick.

we-read-breitbart-so-you-dont-have-to-750x

Some nice staffers at The Advocate are reading Breitbart and other fascist publications, so we don’t have to feel all filthy clicking on those sites, but can still know what’s happening. It’s still a very nauseous trip, reading the excerpts, so be warned.

In the current political climate — well, in any political climate — it’s good to know who your adversaries are and what they’re saying. For this reason, we’re initiating a weekly roundup of the highlights and lowlights from Breitbart and other right-wing news and opinion websites.

Our inaugural entry (in more ways than one) takes note of these sites’ coverage and commentary regarding the ban on entry to the U.S. from citizens of seven countries, the Women’s Marches, and Donald Trump’s swearing-in as president.

[…]

Breitbart featured several other defenses of  the Trump order, including a column by failed vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. She denounces “hysteria” over the order and says calling it a ban amounted to “fake news,” then concludes, “Trump’s executive action is a step in the right direction towards welcoming safe, loving, law-abiding, hardworking, patriotic people into our nation that was built on the backs of safe, loving, law-abiding, hardworking, patriotic people willing to assimilate into America’s exceptional melting pot.”

I, I…uh, oh fuck. For the life of me, I cannot figure out, at all, why anyone gives this person space to say anything. It’s nothing but word salad with shit dressing. uStates is a melting pot (not in the least exceptional) because of immigration. (After the genocide of those who were here first, natch.) FFS. All manner of safe, loving, law-abiding, hardworking people have been denied entry and re-entry into the Fascist States of America. What. An. Idiot.

The previous weekend was marked by Women’s March on Washington and sister marches all over the world. In case you think sexism isn’t alive and well, consider what the far-right sites had to say about the actions:

“Just another random protest march by the usual ragbag of leftist suspects, far too many of them blue hair, their whale-like physiques and terrifying camel-toes the size of the Grand Canyon.”

This isn’t from the comments section, folks. This sentence, grammatical problems and all, is from Breitbart contributor James Dellingpole. And wait, there’s more — after sharing his tweet saying men would probably have to fetch their own beers the night after the march, he writes:

“Very few of these shrieking munters — save the token celebrities — will ever find themselves in a position where they are able to fetch a man’s beer from his fridge because first they would have to find a man willing to share the same space with them.”

According to Urban Dictionary, “munter” is British slang for an ugly woman. Dellingpole finishes:

“Still, when all is said and done I think we owe those women who took to the streets across the world in their various pod groups a massive favour. They have reminded us what a Hillary presidency would have looked like every single day for at least four years. And they have swept away any reservations we may have had about the absolute necessity of having voted for Donald Trump.”

Ah yes, women, quelle horreur! Echoes from Euripides’ Hippolyta strike:

Go to hell! I’ll never have my fill of hating

Women, not if I’m said to talk without ceasing,

For women are also unceasingly wicked.

Either someone should teach them to be sensible,

Or let me trample them underfoot.

How little things change, literally, over centuries, when it comes to conservative authoritarians. In 195 bce, Cato the Elder declared:

If every married man had been concerned to ensure that his own wife looked up to him and respected his rightful position as her husband, we should not have half this trouble with women en masse. Instead, women have become so powerful that our independence has been lost in our own homes and is now being trampled and stamped underfoot in public. We have failed to retrain them as individuals, and now they have combined to reduce us to our present panic…It made me blush to push my way through a positive regiment of women a few minutes ago in order to get here. My respect for the position and modesty of them as individuals – a respect which I do not feel for them as a mob – prevented my doing anything as consul which would suggest the use of force. Otherwise I should have said to them, ‘What do you mean by rushing out in public in this unprecedented fashion, blocking the streets and shouting out to men who are not your husbands? Could you not have asked your questions at home, and have asked them of your husbands?

[…]

Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is not good giving her the reins and expecting her not to kick over the traces. No, you have got to keep the reins firmly in your own hands…Suppose you allow them to acquire or to extort one right after another, and in the end to achieve complete equality with men, do you think that you will find them bearable? Nonsense. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters. – Livy, The Early History of Rome, translated by Aubrey de Sélin-court, Penguin Classics, 2002.

Cato’s speech failed, and the Oppian laws were overturned in 195 bce. This was the first recorded protest movement ever organized by women. It’s now 2017 ce, and we have not yet achieved equality, and still find ourselves needing to protest in the streets, much to the displeasure of misogynists everywhere, who still carry the attitude and mores of Cato the Elder.

There were more right wing comments on the Womens’ March:

“Commentators on MSNBC bragged about the crowd size of the women’s marches but, as a fellow female, I couldn’t help noticing the size of some of the marchers. There is a big difference between crowd numbers and crowd size.” — Townhall columnist Susan Stamper Brown

“Never have so many hotness-challenged crones so vehemently rejected being grabbed while simultaneously being at so little risk of it.” — Townhall columnist Kurt Schlicter

And conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars site, which is one that really brings the crazy, approvingly posted a video of a conservative activist called Big Joe confronting a participant in the Women’s March in Los Angeles. “Planned Parenthood is a racist system,” he says. “Margaret Sanger [Planned Parenthood’s founder] thought very little of black people. She thought they were ignorant and shouldn’t exist and shouldn’t reproduce. … You want to be against racists? You should be against Planned Parenthood.” (Editor’s note: The assertion that Sanger and her organization were/are racist is a bald-faced lie, but many on the right believe it.)

Some things never change. The full article is at The Advocate.

Trump Shall Set Us Free…

CREDIT: AP Photo/Jay Reeves.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Jay Reeves.

On Thursday, internet racists celebrated another perceived victory: Reports that President Trump will soon remove white nationalist groups from a federal effort to study and neutralize extremist radicalization, and rebrand the program to focus solely on groups associating themselves with Islam.

The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program partners government agencies with community organizations in hopes of preventing people from being radicalized into various types of terror and hate groups. Its primary focus has always been in Muslim communities, but the Obama administration designed it to also encompass the American far-right groups that propagandize to people like Dylann Roof.

News of Trump’s plan to reverse that symbolic recognition of right-wing threats prompted a wave of celebration in white nationalist circles.

“Donald Trump wants to remove us from undue federal scrutiny by removing ‘white supremacists’ from the definition of ‘extremism,’” the founder and editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer (which takes its name from a Nazi propaganda publication) wrote in a post on the site. “Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.”

This interpretation overstates the scope of Reuter’s report somewhat. The meme-filled Daily Stormer post alleges that changing the CVE program and renaming it to focus solely on “Islamic extremism,” as Trump puts it, would also extend to to calling off FBI scrutiny and taking white supremacists and neo-Nazis off of extremist databases. That would actually require separate action from Trump.

But in Trump’s move to take even some measure of scrutiny off of far-right extremism, The Daily Stormer sees a direct parroting of their own writing and a reward for the far-right’s role in getting Trump elected.

“It’s fair to say that if the Trump team is not listening to us directly (I assume they are), they are thinking along very similar lines. We helped get Trump get [sic] elected, and the fact of the matter is, without Alt-Right meme magick, it simply wouldn’t have happened,” the post continues. “This is absolutely a signal of favor to us.”

And so it goes among the fascist nazi crowd all over. They are crowing, beyond happy, because they feel validated. They have been validated. Another excruciatingly clear message that killing “those” people doesn’t matter, it’s okay really, just don’t kill white people.

“Amazing my government no longer targets me as an enemy,” wrote one. “It’s now officially understood at the the highest levels that we are soooo much better than the kidnapper terrorist pedophile left,” wrote another.

I don’t, I just don’t have words today. Right now, I need more tea and a bout of dinosaur watching, just to assure myself we aren’t up in flames. Yet.

Full story at Think Progress.

Viewing Trump.

1

CBC has a brief, interesting collection of magazine covers. Having the fortune of having friends all over the world, I have a clear idea of how people in other countries view the U.S., especially now, with the Tiny Dictator installed. Might come as a bit of a shock to more insular peoples. We are not the good guys, and we never have been. We’re the obnoxious, swaggering bully; the interfering, corrupt cop. That’s how it’s been in the past. It’s worse now. America is worse, and even some Americans are figuring that one out now…

[Read more…]

Diableries.

From a group of 11 tissue-stereo views of Satan (1860s–70s) (all images courtesy Swann tiontion Galleries).

From a group of 11 tissue-stereo views of Satan (1860s–70s) (all images courtesy Swann tiontion Galleries).

Hyperallergic has a great story on some 19th century stereoviews, some of which will soon be up at auction. Hell doesn’t look so bad, rather playful!

As one group of 19th-century French artists envisioned it, hell was no desolate destination for the damned. Rather, it hosted boating races, witnessed parties with a “live” band, and even boasted a lavish boudoir for one “Madame Satan.” Such are the scenes they depicted in their series of humorous stereoviews produced in the 1860s that capture a vibrant underworld of devils, skeletons, and satyrs, each carefully hand-colored so the frozen figures came alive with glowing red eyes.

Titled Diableries, the series was published primarily by Frenchmen François Benjamin Lamiche and Adolphe Block, as told in a publication, also called Diableries, that chronicles the works’ history. Unlike most stereoviews, these images married sculpture and photography: sculptors (unidentified on the images) would craft small dioramas from clay that would then be photographed and printed on albumen paper. The artists then applied watercolors to the fragile prints, added a layer of backing tissue, and inserted the prints into cut-out windows of two cardboard frames. The tissue stereocards, therefore, offer two views: when seen with light hitting only their front sides, their images seem black-and-white; but when illuminated from the back, colors appear to render hell in vivid visions. The artists would also pin prick sections of the images and apply color to these markings so light passing through the holes would highlight details on costumes or settings, even making them sparkle slightly.

A full set had dozens of individually captioned scenes, guaranteed to provide viewers with a unique form of entertainment in 3D when placed on a stereoviewer. Stereoviews were highly popular in the 19th century, but the Diableries would have certainly stuck out from many other sets: collections of travel photos, artworks, and religious pageantry have quite a different tone from these scenes of skeletons riding bicycles, playing instruments in a bony band, and dancing in flouncy dresses.

[…]

Swann Auction Galleries is selling 11 cards (est. $600–900) as part of its forthcoming sale “Icons & images: Photographs & Photobooks.” A couple of these scenes show hell as you may expect it: in one, winged demons poke weapons at skeletons crowded in a massive cauldron while wide-eyed monsters gawk from dark corners; another shows the entrance to hell, governed by a three-headed beast and monsters holding pitchforks. Humor, however, is the clear, reigning mood in these Diableries: a sign above the beast in that latter image reads, “Speak to the concierge”; there’s also a skeleton lifting his top hat to a guard while a woman in the corner offers water for passersby to refresh themselves.

Much more to see and read at Hyperallergic.

The Materiality of Mourning.

Doris Salcedo, “A Flor de Piel” (detail) (2013), rose petals and thread (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mr. G. David Thompson, in memory of his son, G. David Thompson, Jr., Class of 1958, by exchange; purchase through the generosity of Elaine Levin in honor of Mary Schneider Enriquez; and purchase through the generosity of Deborah and Martin Hale, 2014.133. © Doris Salcedo, photo by Joerg Lohse, image courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York, and White Cube, London).

Doris Salcedo, “A Flor de Piel” (detail) (2013), rose petals and thread (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mr. G. David Thompson, in memory of his son, G. David Thompson, Jr., Class of 1958, by exchange; purchase through the generosity of Elaine Levin in honor of Mary Schneider Enriquez; and purchase through the generosity of Deborah and Martin Hale, 2014.133. © Doris Salcedo, photo by Joerg Lohse, image courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York, and White Cube, London).

Doris Salcedo’s The Materiality of Mourning is at the Harvard Art Museums (32 Quincy St, Cambridge, Mass.) through April 9.

Installation view of Disremembered IV (detail) in Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning, on display November 4, 2016–April 9, 2017 at the Harvard Art Museums. © Doris Salcedo. Photo: Harvard Art Museums; © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Installation view of Disremembered IV (detail) in Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning, on display November 4, 2016–April 9, 2017 at the Harvard Art Museums.
© Doris Salcedo. Photo: Harvard Art Museums; © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Hyperallergic has the full story on the exhibition. The Materiality of Mourning at Harvard Art Museums.

Also, go have a visit at the Center for Artistic Activism.