This is fun. One of these days, I’ll have to mix up proper paints and all that, try to do it right. (Not that I’ll ever be able to do that.) For now, play is good. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
This is fun. One of these days, I’ll have to mix up proper paints and all that, try to do it right. (Not that I’ll ever be able to do that.) For now, play is good. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Self explanatory, I think. :D Photos 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
I thought of Arlington National Cemetery. Would they allow this young man to “play through” there? (David Rooks)
That was the last line in a post about remembering those buried at Hiawatha Asylum. The ceremonies and remembrances were carried out early this month, but there is a weight of unbearable sadness. Not just over the crime of locking people up in the asylum. Not just over the maltreatment of those locked up in the asylum. Not just the terrible weight of grief borne by those who suffered the poisonous touch of the asylum. Yet another weight is the ever ongoing disrespect shown to Indigenous people across Turtle Island. Where are the dead of Hiawatha Asylum? In between the fourth and fifth fairways of the Hiawatha Golf Club course. Golfers waited to play through while the 21 Arrow salute took place.
Sunday morning, June 5, this hallowed ground was fairly warm by 10 a.m. Standing by the lone granite marker, whose bronze plaque carries the names of 120 of those buried somewhere close beneath it, I heard a soft rustle behind me. Ten feet west of the split rails stood a young man with a golf club who appeared to be waiting, more or less patiently. Lying in front of him was a golf ball.
I exited the cemetery on the west side and stopped by a tree. After a few practice swings, the young man approached his ball and then struck it. It skittered beneath the rail, through the cemetery, and out the east end, headed for the fourth green. I thought of Arlington National Cemetery. Would they allow this young man to “play through” there? I then thought of the mass burial site at Wounded Knee, and how nice it would be if it were surrounded by Hiawatha’s manicured lawns and lush and well-pruned trees. But not if it came with golfers.
[…]
Before the salute, Dr. Erich Longie, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Spirit Lake Dakota Sioux Tribe in Spirit Lake, North Dakota spoke. Longie reminded everyone that it is the nature of tribal peoples to keep their ancestors with them always; in their hearts, their minds, and their prayers. Longie also pledged to go back to Spirit Lake and see if he could get his tribe to help fund the purchase and construction of a new fence around the cemetery.
Given the golfer earlier that morning, Longie’s pledge seemed timely.
At the close of the ceremony, a 21-arrow salute was given by an archery team of students from Nebraska Indian Community College.
David Rooks has an excellent 2 page article about the ceremony, and about Hiawatha Asylum: A 21-Arrow Salute: ‘Come See the Crazy Indians’
Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
This front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper ran with portraits of 11 Modoc Indians, who ended up as federal prisoners.
The four Modocs dangling from the gallows at Fort Klamath, Oregon, on October 3, 1873, had barely been cut down when the ghoulish souvenir-taking started. Soldiers auctioned off a hank of hair shorn from the head of Modoc leader Kientpoos (a.k.a. Captain Jack) to fit the noose around his neck, and they sold unraveled gallows rope for $5 a strand. Thomas Cabaniss, a physician from nearby Yreka, California, who had worked for the army during the Modoc War, claimed two halters. Other spectators snatched pieces and parts from the gallows. Meanwhile, in a nearby tent, military medical officer Henry McElderry was taking the army’s share of hanging-day mementos.
This image of Kientpoos (Captain Jack) was among those taken by Louis Herman Heller during and after The Modoc War. (Housed at: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
In 1868, George Otis Alexander, then assistant surgeon general of the United States Army, circulated an order among military physicians requiring them to help the Army Medical Museum’s effort to build its collection of Native crania. The museum had already amassed 143 skulls and wanted to add more.
“The chief purpose … in forming this collection,” Alexander explained, “is to aid in the progress of anthropological science by obtaining measurements of a large number of skulls of aboriginal races of North America.”
The official purpose for collecting Indian skulls was comparative study of racial differences. George A. Otis, MD, of the Army Medical Museum, after studying the “osteological peculiarities” of the skulls collected up to 1870, announced that America’s Native peoples “must be assigned a lower position in the human scale than has been believed heretofore.” Lewis Henry Morgan, a pioneering physical anthropologist who had sought unsuccessfully to be appointed Indian Affairs commissioner, wrote that Native Americans “have the skulls and brains of barbarians, and must grow toward civilization.” Thus did the crude, pseudo-Darwinist science of the time support herding Natives on to reservations to learn English and farming.
This image of Black Jim was among those taken by Louis Herman Heller during and after The Modoc War. (Housed at: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Army doctors in Indian country could augment the collection by gathering skulls and forwarding them to Washington and the Army Medical Museum. Accurate statistical analysis required as many specimens as possible: “… it is chiefly desired to procure sufficiently large series of adult crania of the principal Indian tribes to furnish accurate average estimates. Medical officers will enhance the value of their contributions by transmitting with the specimens the fullest attainable memoranda, specifying the locality where the skulls were derived, the presumed age and sex….”
The army’s medical officers responded enthusiastically, swelling the collection to more than 1,000 skulls by the time of the Fort Klamath hangings. Some remains came from ancient burial sites, such as the mounds of the eastern United States, others from tribal cemeteries captured during military operations. Epidemics were a boon for the collectors, since, besides felling Indians in droves, they tore apart Native societies and made it difficult for survivors to protect their dead against white grave robbers. And then there were the many battles and executions.
This image of Boston Charley was among those taken by Louis Herman Heller during and after The Modoc War. (Housed at: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Military medical officers enjoyed easy access to all these opportunities. Plus, they had the surgical skills to dissect away soft tissues and prepare heads for boiling in water or steeping in quicklime to leave only the bare bone the Army Medical Museum wanted.
The Army Medical Museum collection had grown to 2,206 skulls by 1898, when it was turned over to the Smithsonian Institution. The collection had fallen into disuse as academic anthropologists adopted different modes of study, and the museum no longer wanted to maintain it. Almost a century later, the skulls became part of the more than 6,000 individual human remains offered for repatriation by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History through federal legislation passed in the 1980s and 1990s. The Modoc skulls were among the remains repatriated.
Despite the federal government’s latter-day efforts to make this wrong right, the Army Medical Museum’s collection marks the United States as the only national government ever to officially use warfare to collect human skulls.
This image of Schonchin was among those taken by Louis Herman Heller during and after The Modoc War. (Housed at: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Full Story at ICTMN. And before anyone tsks, shakes their head and murmurs, thank goodness we’re past that now, we aren’t. We’re currently surrounded by so called ‘race realists’ and white nationalists who think this is great science, and we should probably do more of this sort of thing. Don’t go dismissing it, everyone thinks it can’t happen to them.
This Bushmaster ad ran in Maxim magazine, according to Mother Jones (Bushmaster)
While large ad agencies these days shy away from working for gun manufacturers, it turns out that they have a little secret to boosting sales. Gun manufacturers obviously and openly pander to toxic masculinity, appealing to every lousy, dangerous trope out there, shamelessly amping up male insecurity and fostering the idea that one can be a manly man if you just get yourself unnecessarily armed to the teeth. And of course, women can be a womanly woman right alongside their manly men, guns for all!
To entice potential customers to purchase its high-powered assault rifle, Bushmaster, one of America’s largest gun manufacturers, uses the slogan “Justice for All.’’ Its print ads tell prospective buyers: “Consider your man card reissued.” Sig Sauer, another major gun manufacturer, advertises its MCX rifle in a dramatic video of a single shooter, calling the gun the “start of a new era.”
In the wake of the massacre at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida, many politicians are demanding stricter gun laws. But a lot less attention is focused on the marketing tactics of American gun manufacturers, who can — unlike cigarette and alcohol companies — legally and freely market their products with little to no regulation.
“If you look at the gun industry’s advertising today, it’s militarized,” says Josh Sugarmann, the founder and executive director of the Violence Policy Center, an American nonprofit organization that advocates for gun control. “It’s focused on two things: assault weapons and high-capacity semi-automatic pistols.”
I was a around for the major societal shift and restrictions on tobacco and alcohol advertising. Those were considered to be good and necessary restrictions, but once again, it seems guns are exempt.
Ever since the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, put assault weapons back in the spotlight, the amount of money spent on gun advertising has increased dramatically. From 2012 to 2013, the amount spent by five of the largest assault weapons manufacturers on advertising their own brands leapt more than 33 percent, according to Kantar Media data.
Remington’s ad spending nearly doubled, from $740,000 to more than $1.4 million in those years; Sig Sauer’s soared from just $30,000 to $230,000, according to Kantar.
Source: Kantar Media Get the data.
Regardless of who’s writing the copy or executing the campaigns, these manufacturers are hardly reliant on ad strategy to drive sales; Smith & Wesson pulled in more than $551 million in revenue last year, thanks mostly to a dedicated, enthusiastic population of loyal gun buyers.
“If you focus on manufacturer advertising, you are missing the larger picture,” Terrence Witkowski, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, who has studied the visual language of gun culture. “American gun culture is a form of consumer culture where much influence flows from the grassroots, bottom up, not top down.”
The sad truth is tragedies like the ones in Orlando or Newtown are actually their own best advertising. While most gun manufacturers will never admit it, the demonization that is rained down on their products is good for business, as sales boom in the aftermath.
In 1993, reports that the weapon used in a mass shooting in San Francisco was a Tec-9 set off waves of people condemning the gun. To Intratec, the gun’s manufacturer, those howls of anger were music to its ears.
“I’m kind of flattered,” Mike Solo, Intratec’s marketing and sales director, told the New York Times. “It just has that advertising tingle to it. Hey, it’s talked about, it’s read about, the media write about it. That generates more sales for me. It might sound cold and cruel, but I’m sales oriented.”
“I’m sales oriented”. Yeah, who cares about all those dead people, there are sales to be made.
Via Raw Story.
Chris Murphy.
There’s a glimmer of hope that the tiniest shred of gun control legislation might pass the Senate in response to the Orlando shooting that left 49 people dead.
After nearly 15 hours of talking on the Senate floor, the filibuster held by Democrats on Wednesday and into the early hours of Thursday has apparently been a success, and there will be two votes on gun control measures.
The two ideas — stopping people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns, and requiring background checks even when someone purchases a gun online or at a gun show instead of in a store — will be allowed votes by the full Senate, Democrats say.
“We chose to ask for the two least controversial provisions possible that will still do a world of good,” said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, home to the Newtown mass shooting that killed 20 children and six adults. He spoke from the Senate floor and announced Republicans had agreed “on a path to get those votes.”
With the Senate controlled by Republicans, it’s essentially up to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky on whether any piece of legislation gets a vote. So Democrats, led by Murphy, filibustered an existing funding bill, called the Departments of Commerce and Justice, Science, and Related Agencies appropriations bill. It worked, and now they must focus on winning enough votes to pass the laws.
“Least controversial provisions”. I can’t get past that, nor can I muster up even a tiny bit of hope. Yes, this might help, a teeny, tiny bit, if these actually make it through, but I am so fucking sick and tired of every single sensible person in uStates feeling the need to walk on tiptoes on eggshells, so as not to upset all the gun fetishists. FFS, wouldn’t this normally be called terrorism, where people are scared to death of those with weapons? A good portion of uStates is being held hostage, and nothing is going to be done, unless it’s a tiny, marginally effective sop.
Ebru Art, by Garip Ay. I am overwhelmed by the art work, as well as the skill and talent it takes to produce such intense beauty.
History of Ebru Art
Ebru, which is generally known today as a decorative paper art, is one of the oldest Turkish arts, but exactly where or when it started remains unknown. Ebru is an art from the realms of history, presenting to us a beauty that is full of love. It can be described as painting on water. Patterns are formed on the surface of water which has had substances added to it to increase the viscosity; the patterns are then transferred to paper. The results of this process are unique and it is never possible to achieve the same design again.
Those who have traced the history claim that the many hued Ebru that we know today was born in Turkistan in Central Asia, a place that was the center for many cultures. From the 17th century on, it became known as Turkish Paper in Europe, and from here the art of Ebru reached the rest of the world.
The Turks started to make paper in the 15th century. With their sensitive souls and their mystic personalities they became very advanced in the art of paper decoration. Ebru paper, especially those of a fine design, was first used as the background to important official state papers, a variety of treaties and the records of important events. It was used as a means to prevent the alteration of the document. The same logic can be found in the use of complicated designs on banknotes, cheque books, deeds and bonds used today. In addition, the edges of commercial registers were decorated with Ebru in order to prevent the removal of pages. Ebru holds an important place in the history of Islamic art; it was used alongside calligraphy and in publishing. Moreover, its mystic nature, that is, “the search for religious beauty”, led to its being used in many tekkes as a reflection of sufi thought.
The captions are easier to read at full screen, but if you’re like me, you’ll be busy gawking. And getting ideas.
And in wide-eyed awe…Van Gogh on Dark Water Animation.
I could watch his channel all day, but Verizon would punish me severely.
From Ice Swimmer, the marshlands and the shallow waters and low-lying shores of the bay Laajalahti, west of Helsinki. Those colours! 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© Ice Swimmer. All rights reserved.
From D. Gregory. Love the colour! 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© D. Gregory. All rights reserved.
From rq. If you look closely, you’ll see a spider underneath the far right blossom. Well, a bit of spider anyway. 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© rq. All rights reserved.
Adult and baby Sparrows grabbing breakfast. All photos are 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
A most favourite subject. All photos 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
A very young Fox squirrel, willing to scold and fight me over what he felt was his right to the sunseeds on the deck. I was half way out the window taking these, so perhaps not as good as they could be. He was bouncing on the branch, flicking his tail, and going into a repeated “I’ll fight!” stance. Little asshole. 1500 x 996, click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.