Republic of Cliven Bundy.

Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, speaks at an event Friday, April 10, 2015, in Bunkerville, Nev. Credit: AP Photo/John Locher.

Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy, speaks at an event Friday, April 10, 2015, in Bunkerville, Nev.
Credit: AP Photo/John Locher.

Cliven Bundy may be in jail, but he still has friends in Congress.

The U.S. House of Representatives next week is expected to vote on a proposal that would exempt 48 counties, primarily in the West, from the law that has been used for more than 100 years to protect archaeologically, culturally, and naturally significant resources in the United States, including the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty.

The counties that would be exempted from the Antiquities Act of 1906 cover more than 250,000 square miles — an area nearly the size of Texas. The amendment, which was authored by Rep. Stewart (R-UT) and Rep. Gosar (R-AZ), appears to have two main purposes.

First, it would block the efforts of local communities in Maine, Utah, Arizona, and elsewhere which have been asking President Obama to establish new national monuments in their states.

In southern Utah, for example, the president would not be able to respond to the requests of tribal nations that he protect the Bears Ears area, which is a hotbed of grave robbing, looting, and desecration of sacred sites. It would also prevent the president from protecting Gold Butte in Nevada, where Cliven Bundy illegally grazed his cows for decades, as a national monument.

Though Rep. Gosar argues that the bill prevents local voices from being ignored, in both of the above cases there is strong local support for these national monuments. Seventy-one percent of Utah voters declared their support for a Bears Ears monument and the same percentage of Nevadans support the protection of Gold Butte.

The bill would also block a grassroots call to protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining, the expansion of which would fall in Rep. Gosar’s district. The petition to protect the area has recently reached more than half a million signatures.

Second, the Stewart-Gosar amendment would make a major concession to the demands of scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy and his followers who argue that the U.S. government should have no authority over national public lands in the West. Bundy and his sons Ammon and Ryan were arrested and indicted in February for their involvement in armed standoffs with federal law enforcement officials in Nevada and Oregon.

Jesus Christ. Anymore, you have to stay buried in your news media of choice just to know what evil the conservative asshole party is up to day by day. This is awful. I haven’t read enough yet to know if there are ways to fight this, but if I find them, I’ll post.

Full story here.

The Whiteness of America’s Gun Laws.

Armed members of the Black Panther Party leave the Capitol in Sacramento, California May 2, 1967.

Armed members of the Black Panther Party leave the Capitol in Sacramento, California May 2, 1967.

…We cannot know if police would have reacted differently to the two allegedly armed men if Sterling and Castile were white, but simple fact is that deaths like these keep happening. And they keep happening to black men.

The whiteness of America’s gun laws, and of how those laws operate in practice, is nothing new. Indeed, when black activists took advantage of loopholes allowing them to rather extravagantly exercise their own gun rights, those loopholes were rapidly closed by an icon of white conservatism — the sainted Ronald Reagan himself.

Enter The Black Panthers

[…]

Yet the dramatic events that led to the Mulford Act becoming law also reveal how quickly white conservative lawmakers were willing to act when the face of gun rights was black. And this response stands in stark contrast to modern day conservatives’ reaction to similar antics by white activists.

When Gun Rights Are White

GW

[…]

Rather, the point is that, as the face of gun rights grew whiter over the last several decades, white conservatives grew increasingly more sympathetic to efforts to elevate these rights. The position Ronald Reagan took on guns in the 1960s would make him a pariah in today’s Republican Party. Even the National Rifle Association (which, admittedly, was a far less political organization in the 1960s) supported legislation like the Mulford Act. Indeed, they actually helped shape similar laws in many other states.

You can get white conservatives to enact gun laws in the United States, but it’s hard to do if the face of gun rights isn’t black.

An excellent article, and a nifty recap of how swiftly gun restrictions were made into law when it was the Black Panthers holding the guns. I remember all that happening.

Trans Guidelines: 10 More States Sue.

Shutterstock.

Shutterstock.

A second lawsuit has been filed by states objecting to the Obama administration’s call for schools to avoid discriminating against transgender students, including the recommendation that trans students be allowed to use restrooms and locker rooms matching their gender identity.

Ten states led by Nebraska filed the suit in federal court in that state, the Associated Press reports. The other states in the suit are Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Eleven other states, led by Texas and joined by some school districts and public officials, filed a similar suit in May. Both name the U.S. departments of Education, Justice, and Labor as defendants, plus the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The new suit uses much of the same language as the previous one and contends that federal government departments and agencies do not have the right to interpret the law as they did, declaring that a prohibition on sex discrimination in education also bans discrimination based on gender identity. The sex discrimination clause is in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

I knew this was coming, but it really hurts to see ND in that list.

The federal guidance document on treatment of trans students, issued in May, is not legally binding, but it does advise schools on how to comply with their legal obligations to students. Schools that do not comply may lose federal funding.

The new filing means that nearly half the U.S. states are challenging the Obama administration’s guidance, and doing so based on a “1972 understanding of sex,” notes Zach Ford at ThinkProgress.

They can’t go home to the 1950s, but they’ll take it as close as they can get.

Full story here.

Photographing the Radioactive Past.

Jeremy Bolen.

Jeremy Bolen.

Bolen’s featured works at Newspace include a series named after Vieques, an island belonging to Puerto Rico that was used for weapons testing by the United States between when the US bought about two-thirds of the island 1941 and when the military left the island in 2003.

According to Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, “More than 80 million pounds of chemical weapons, bombs and ammunition were dropped on the eastern portion of the island for a good part of the 20th century. Its soil still harbors bullets filled with radioactive depleted uranium and unexploded bombs.” In 2010, about 7,000 residents of the island jointly sued the US Navy claiming that military operations on the island were the cause of Vieques’ higher-than-average rate of cancer, along with a slew of other long-term medical issues. A Puerto Rican Federal District Court dismissed the lawsuit, and the US First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal in 2012 due to the Navy’s right to sovereign immunity.

Bolen went to Vieques—though not to the restricted-access area on the eastern side of the island—and buried some of his film in the soil before it was exposed to visible light. He later dug the film back up and developed it, finding chromatic irregularities in the resulting prints. The artist’s prints are accented by bits of dirt (occasionally painted or gilded), and accompanied by a photo of the location where he buried his film, hung behind swatches of window screen.

For Bolen, adding the dirt to his irradiated film elucidates the “tension between the visible and the invisible,” that comes with living at these sites, as many in Vieques still do.

Full story here.

Granite Claw Flower.

From Lofty:

I had a botanist friend over who identified this bush in our garden as a Western Australian native, “Calothamnus graniticus”, normally found in sandy soils derived from granite. It grows well in our garden, it was here when we moved in 20 years ago.

So fuzzy! Click for full size.

graniteclawflower

© Lofty. All rights reserved.

Heartsick

NC

This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you. – Joe Walsh.

No. No. Racism and guns cannot help. They can’t “win”. Racism, guns, and cops being allowed to murder people of colour got us here.  Rescue those shreds of humanity, please. Listen to Charles Blow:

“You can’t have selective outrage and selective grief” — @CharlesMBlow discusses the #Dallas shooting.

Holy F*ckin’ Smoke

HSCelebrating slaughter, even after your dead. Golly, doesn’t that just scream American? There’s a company in Alabama that will take the cremated remains of someone, and pack them into hollow point bullets or shotgun shells.

Several years ago I was talking with my friend and co-worker at work one evening. We were discussing the passing of one of our relatives and the topic of conversation turned to our own demise and whether we preferred burial or cremation.  I told my friend that I had some cost, waste of space and ecological issues with burials and that I thought I wanted to be cremated and in some fashion, have my ashes tossed into a river or spread through the woods.

My friend  smiled and said “You know I’ve thought about this for some time and I want to be cremated. Then I want my ashes put into some turkey load shotgun shells and have someone that knows how to turkey hunt use the shotgun shells with my ashes to shoot a turkey. That way I will rest in peace knowing that the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second.”

You’ll rest in peace, knowing the very last vestige of you will be used to cause the death of another being. Pity you couldn’t mange to rest in peace by letting another being rest in peace and aliveness.  All that shootin’, huntin’, and killing during your lifetime just isn’t enough, I guess. I’m, uh, just out of words.

Holy Smoke.

A Fuzzy Statement.

blm_4

#BLACK LIVES MATTER at the Craft and Folk Art Museum. | Photo: Courtesy Craft and Folk Art Museum.

Self described “knit graffiti collaborative” Yarn Bombing Los Angeles’ (YBLA) most recent bid to colorize and textualize our streets hangs directly to the east of the Craft & Folk Art Museum, two rows / seventeen characters worth of multi-hued text lashed to a grey metal fence and projecting north across Wilshire towards the La Brea Tar Pits.

The materials and phrase are both easily taken in in their entirety during a quick drive-by: “#BLACK LIVES” at rough eye level with “MATTERS” just below, all of it in pink, red, mustard, orange, blue and green knit (some shag carpet-like pile?) laid out on an area about the size of two tightly parked vans. The letters on Wilshire are part of Urban Letters, an ongoing project of YBLA’s where epigrammatic or gnomic texts “that might otherwise remain unsaid” are solicited online in order to be made softly manifest IRL.

Full Story here.