Bees love purple, and so do I! Magnificent poppies and beautiful bees from rq. Click for full size.
© rq. All rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Bees love purple, and so do I! Magnificent poppies and beautiful bees from rq. Click for full size.
© rq. All rights reserved.
Xiaonan Sun is an amazing portraitist, you can see many beautiful pieces at The Portrait Art, and on their youtube channel. Don’t ask how the sugar thing works, I haven’t figured it out. Yet.
From Lofty:
I went for a bike ride today and stopped for lunch at a park bench in the weak sun. Imagine my surprise when I glanced at the GPS display and saw it had been replaced by a rainbow noodliness! I knew immediately what deity had sent the message, that old reprobate Yahweh only sends monochrome daubings of beardie weirdies these days. Anyway I managed to capture the message just before it faded from view. My new found guidance led me to spot one of the few flowering eucalypts out at the moment, and a fallen floret became my mascot for the day.
Click for full size.
© Lofty. All rights reserved.
November Sunset. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
By Elcobbola – Own work, Public Domain, Wikimedia.
Perfectly timed for Colonial Day, the people at Fox News decide to dip into the barrel bottom of stupidity, trying to figure out whether or not a statue could be transgender, based on the gender of the model. This level of stupid might require a brand new descriptor.
Fox News took time over the holiday weekend to assure viewers that a recent theory suggesting the State of Liberty was modeled after a man could not be true.
According to an upcoming Discovery Family channel program, French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi may have used his brother as a model for the Statue of Liberty instead of his mother as most historians believe.
[…]
But on Sunday, Fox & Friends spoke to New York University Professor Edward Berenson to assuage concerns that Lady Liberty could be a man presenting as a woman.
“Is Lady Liberty actually a man?” Fox News host Peter Doocy asked, sounding shocked.
“This guy [Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi], when he was in New York wrote his mother every single day,” Berenson insisted. “If he wasn’t going to do his mom and was going to do his brother instead, we’d have that in the correspondence.”
“This guy” … “If he wasn’t going to do his mother”. Hmmm, well that’s certainly some scholarly talk right there. They needed a professor for this?
“I just assume somebody was playing a prank on us,” Doocy opined. “Are we supposed to think this French guy was pulling a fast one the U.S., ‘Hey, I’m going to say it’s a woman but it’s really going to be a guy. And they’re not going to be able to figure it out for a really long time.’”
“I really doubt it,” Berenson comforted Doocy. “This was not a tongue-in-cheek gift. This was a real serious business. He loved the United States, he loved American liberty.”
“Is it possible the Statue of Liberty transcends both masculinity and femininity?” co-host Anna Kooiman wondered. “That it’s just a symbol of liberty?”
“I think there’s no question she’s a woman,” Berenson replied. “But she’s very powerful woman.”
“There’s no question that she’s a tough lady,” he added. “She’s a lady.”
There just isn’t enough facepalm. Fox News is a symptom. Going by the symptom, uStates is halfway down the drain. In related news, New low: Gallup poll says only 52% are ‘extremely proud’ to be Americans. What a surprise. :eyeroll:
A House Sparrow reaches for the good stuff. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
From Giliell. Click for full size.
© Giliell. All rights reserved.
It’s that time of year, a time of colonial, drunk explosions, whee! I’m not a fan of Independence Day, but I could deal with it much better if I didn’t have to cope with window-shaking explosions going off for months. I have a difficult time coping with it for a day or two. I have PTSD and hyper-vigilance. A lot of people have those problems. I have pets. A lot of people have pets. Pets who are absolutely terrified by all the explosions. If you’re one of those explosion loving people, it would be truly great if you could consider other people before getting settled into your revelry. Would it be that terrible to pack up your gunpowder toys and take them a bit away from residences, so all the boom is at least muted? That would make for many less terrified pets, and much less ragged people hanging on by their fingernails. It would also be considerate of those who might want to get some sleep before 2 a.m., because some people still have to work. Or maybe they are just serious tired and want to sleep. If you are, or decide to be a considerate exploder, be sure to choose a place that won’t set half your state on fire, because that’s not fun for anyone.
On the lighter side of Colonial Day, Vincent Schilling has a fun column up at ICTMN: Native Humor: 7 Ways Natives Can Celebrate the Fourth of July.
Set off the fireworks display early in the day.
KA-BOOM! Oh, it’s only 2pm? (iStock)
Use the bullhorn after. Then tell everyone, “This isn’t what you expected was it?” Well for Native people, you aren’t what we expected either! Happy Independence Day!
Following on the heels of the not-so-progressive Canadian update on gay blood donation (gay men are allowed to give blood only if they have abstained from sex for a year. There’s incentive. :eyeroll:), Canadian Blood Services has now targeted trans women from donating if they are pre-op and sexually active with men.
But many activists are upset with the policy because it focuses on whether or not a trans person has undergone gender confirming surgery.
Goldman says the criteria will create a countrywide, streamlined mandate for all trans blood donors.
According to Canadian Blood Services, there has been an increase in potential trans donors and this prompted the organization to implement criteria for those individuals.
The policy specifically targets trans women and is similar to Canadian Blood Services’ updated guidelines for gay blood donors. On June 20, Health Canada announced that gay men would be allowed to donate blood if they had abstained from sex for at least one year.
Trans women who undergo gender confirming surgery will have to wait one year before they can donate blood. After the wait period, Canadian Blood services will also identify them by their reconfirmed gender. “If a trans woman has not had [gender confirming surgery], that person would be considered as a male having sex with a male,” Goldman said.
Canadian Blood Services says there are regulations specific to trans women because that demographic is at high risk for HIV.
According to the Interagency Coalition on AIDS and Development, an estimated 27.7 per cent of trans women in Canada are living with HIV.
“There is a very high HIV prevalence rate in trans women,” Goldman said. “So we are obliged to treat (them) as a high risk group.”
No one wants to end up with a disease because they needed blood, but the CBS is raising the old spectre of the ‘gay plague’, and they’ve based policy on some shoddy research. [In the comments, Siobhan points out it’s considerably worse than shoddy reasearch: “Actually they did something even more impressively incorrect. They based their policy off research that directly contradicts their logic.”] Siobhan at Against the Grain has an intensive breakdown of this new policy, and what it means. As for this nasty clod dropped in the pool:
“If a trans woman has not had [gender confirming surgery], that person would be considered as a male having sex with a male,” Goldman said.
I highly recommend Siobhan’s What trans people mean when we say “misgendering is violence”.
Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and renowned Holocaust survivor — Shutterstock
Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Elie Wiesel died on Saturday the age of 87, reports Haaretz.
The Nobel Peace Prize recipient is best known for keeping alive the the memory of the Holocaust with his memoir “Night,” based upon his experiences as a teenager in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
[…]
Wiesel received numerous awards and honors over the years, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Grand-Croix in France’s Legion of Honor as well as being knighted as Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in speaking out against violence, repression and racism.
Night shook up my internal world when I first read it. Thank you, Elie, for that, and your tireless efforts to make the world, and the people inhabiting it, better. We have lost one of our warmest and brightest lights. If every day, we could be a bit more mindful, a bit kinder, it would be the best possible tribute to Mr. Wiesel.
Via Raw Story.
Red works by Vincent Castiglia are made with the blood of the artist himself. You can see much more of Castiglia’s work at vincentcastiglia.com.
Last Sunday was the first anniversary of marriage equality. Right Wing Watch has a comprehensive look at all the dire predictions made by the religious right, none of which came true. We’ll start with a video, of American on Fire, Oh No!
On to the predictions of dire woe!
1)War’s A-Brewin’
Many “mainstream” Religious Right leaders said that if the Supreme Court were to strike down state bans on same-sex marriage, Americans should prepare for a revolution.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, for example, said there would be an anti-gay “revolution” that would “just break this nation apart” if marriage bans were overturned, warning that such a ruling would “literally split this nation in two and create such political and cultural turmoil that I’m not sure we could recover from it.”
Mat Staver and Matt Barber of the Religious Right legal group Liberty Counsel made similar statements, with Barber declaring that “revolution is at hand” and Staver claiming that there would be a “new American Revolution” resisting marriage equality. Former House GOP Leader Tom DeLay insisted that “all hell” was “going to break loose” if the court sided with LGBT activists on marriage.
“We’ve got to fight to our deaths to save this great country,” said Cliff Kincaid of the conservative group Accuracy In Media, while Vision America’s Rick Scarborough vowed that he was willing to “burn” in defiance of gay marriage, which he said would “unleash the spirit of hell on the nation.”
One year later, no anti-gay revolution has occurred and Rick Scarborough has not self-immolated.
Oh, the colours! Exquisite. Garden Poppies from rq. Click for full size.
© rq. All rights reserved.
