Anton Yelchin Dead, 27 Years Old.

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From left, Anton Yelchin as Chekov, Chis Pine as James T. Kirk, Simon Pegg as Scotty, Karl Urban as Bones are shown in a scene from, ‘Star Trek.’ (Photo: Paramount).

Star Trek star Anton Yelchin has died at age 27 following a tragic and strange car accident early Sunday morning.

His publicist Jennifer Allen confirmed the news in a statement on Sunday.

“Actor Anton Yelchin was killed in a fatal traffic collision early this morning,” the statement said. “His family requests you respect their privacy at this time.”

Yelchin was pinned by his own car leaving his Studio City residence Sunday at 1:10 in the morning, Jenny Hauser, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department, said.

“A fatal traffic collision occurred, it was the result of the victim’s own car rolling backwards down his steep driveway, pinning him against a brick mailbox pillar and security fence,” Hauser said.

Full Story Here.

Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians

9780870718526Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, by Patricia Whereat-Phillips.

Myrtlewood is most often thought of as beautiful wood for woodworking, but to Native people on the southern Oregon coast it was an important source of food. The roasted nuts taste like bitter chocolate, coffee, and burnt popcorn. The roots of Skunk Cabbage provided another traditional food source, while also serving as a medicine for colds. In tribal mythology, the leaves of Skunk Cabbage were thought to be tents where the Little People sheltered.

Very little has been published until now on the ethnobotany of western Oregon indigenous peoples. Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians documents the use of plants by these closely-related coastal tribes, covering a geographical area that extends roughly from Cape Perpetua on the central coast, south to the Coquille River, and from the Coast Range west to the Pacific shore. With a focus on native plants and their traditional uses, it also includes mention of farming crops, as well as the highly invasive Himalayan blackberry, which some Oregon coast Indians called the “white man’s berry.”

The cultures of the Coos Bay, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw are distinct from the Athabaskan speaking people to the south, and the Alsea to the north. Today, many tribal members are reviving ancient arts of basket weaving and woodworking, and many now participate in annual intertribal canoe events. Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians contributes to this cultural renaissance by filling an important gap in the historical record. It is an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to learn about the indigenous cultures of the central and southern Oregon coast, as well as those who are interested in Pacific Northwest plants and their cultural uses.

The Melding of Ethnobotany with Language and Story.

If you’ve ever studied a second language, you’ve probably heard, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” While some people may feel unaffected that they no longer remember the language they learned in secondary school, entire cultures suffer when the last speaker of that language dies and the language is lost. There is a great importance behind understanding cultures and their practices. This includes how the culture connects with the environment around them. Today Patricia Whereat-Phillips discusses her introduction to research focused on indigenous languages and how she became interested in ethnobotany. In her new book, Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, Whereat-Phillips documents the ethnobotany of western Oregon indigenous peoples.

Growing up in the hills near the eastern shore of Coos Bay, I spent much of my childhood playing out in nature – playing in the stream at the bottom of the draw, watching deer eat apples in our yard, helping mom fill the bird feeders, and spending all summer wandering the land around our house picking berries. As a child, I learned that I was descended from the Milluk people of lower Coos Bay. I wondered what the old language was like, but no one seemed to know. The last fluent speaker of Milluk died before I was born, and the last speaker of its sister language, Hanis, died when I was 2 ½ years old. I never met her.

For years my research focused on indigenous languages – mostly the Coosan languages of Hanis and Milluk, and Siuslaw, and traditional legends. My interest in ethnobotany began when I received a letter from an undergraduate who was researching medicinal plants of Oregon Indians. It wasn’t a question I’d looked in to before, and I began to do some research. I found a few mentions of medicinal plants, and answered her letter. By now, my curiosity piqued, I tried to do some more research and found (probably as this student did) that there is little published on western Oregon ethnobotany (unlike the rest of the Pacific Northwest and California).

So I spent years trying to research the ethnobotanical knowledge of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw. Not only did I gain a greater appreciation of the beauty and diversity of the temperate rainforest that I had grown up in, but a greater appreciation of the breadth of indigenous knowledge of the landscape and the melding of ethnobotany with language and story.

You can read more here. I don’t have my copy yet, but I am looking forward to it, and learning more about these peoples. The book can be ordered here.

The Face of A GOP Convention.

Protesters clash with Chicago police after grand jury decisions in police-involved deaths in December 2014. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Protesters clash with Chicago police after grand jury decisions in police-involved deaths in December 2014. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

For security reasons, Cleveland spokesman Dan Williams said he can’t get into the details of what the city has bought or borrowed, and if all goes well during the convention, we will likely never see much of it. The Cleveland police did not respond to a request for comment. They will oversee security in much of the “event zone” where rallies, marches and other protests are allowed to take place.

The thing about the LRAD, and other devices like it, is that more and more cities have them. And things haven’t always gone smoothly — which is what has activists, civil liberties groups and others in Cleveland concerned.

Much like the federal programs that many Americans only learned of after they saw images of police in tank-like vehicles trying to quell protests and riots in Ferguson, Mo., those $50 million national special security event grants are changing the way America’s cities are policed. They have supplied the funds for cities across the country to obtain devices that some have described as dangerous — or, at the very least, unsuitable for urban settings.

[Read more…]

Sunday Facepalm

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Didn’t have to go far for this Sunday Facepalm, they are all over, and epic. Epic failures in humanity. We start with one John Stemberger…

The Florida Family Policy Council’s John Stemberger wrote in an email to his group’s members today that in the wake of the massacre at a gay club in Orlando on Sunday, he wants to see greater “unity” among Floridians in the form of more American flags and fewer “special interest rainbow flags” in memory of the victims:

The Pulse nightclub is right next to a Dunkin Doughnuts, Wendy’s, Radio Shack and a 7-11 store where I often buy gas and get my children Slurpees. I ride my bike through this area of town often. This is in part why this tragedy has affected me so deeply. This is my community. These are our streets and neighborhoods. The people that were killed and injured are not just “gay.” They are human beings! They are my neighbors! They are fellow Americans! Honestly, I am really tired of seeing special interest rainbow flags and wish we could see more American flags, as we stand together in unity against our greatest mutual enemy, radical Islamic jihadists!

He responded to criticism of conservative Christian LGBT rights opponents in the wake of the attack, saying that “Christians should be prepared to be attacked and persecuted if they do not bow down and pledge allegiance to the gay pride flag and all it supposedly represents.” LGBT rights advocates’ strategy, he said, is to “manipulate and bully Christians into submission to the new orthodoxy of the moral revolution.”

Christians should be prepared to be attacked and persecuted if they do not bow down and pledge allegiance to the gay pride flag and all it supposedly represents. In stunned disbelief, I was listening to CNN at 1:30am on Sunday night and I heard the leading gay-rights activist from Los Angeles being interviewed. She openly said you don’t need to find a terrorist cell to find this kind of hatred. All you need to do is look right here in America at fundamentalist Christians. The CNN anchor did NOTHING at all to challenge her or question her about her outrageous claim.

We need to be prepared for the stunning and false narrative of the Left which is that all major world religions, including but especially Christianity, breed hatred and create a hostile environment which “causes” the kind of violence we saw in Orlando. The goal of gay-rights activists is to try and get Christians to stop proclaiming God’s design for marriage, gender and human sexuality. And they are not playing fair. The goal to simple. If you disagree in any way, no matter how gentle, loving or respectful they will call you a “hater” and a “bigot.” They will scream at you publicly and test how committed you are to your beliefs. Their strategy is to manipulate and bully Christians into submission to the new orthodoxy of the moral revolution. Please know that as for me and “our house” at the FFPC, we will never be moved by this attempt at intimidation.

Just a fine example of a good person, eh? Well, there are more examples.

Timothy Buchanan of the far-right outlet BarbWire responded yesterday to the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando by urging members of the LGBT community to go back into the closet and stop provoking people to commit violent acts by kissing in public: “It’s worth considering that homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals might be safer returning to the closet. Flaunting gross immorality and defiant wickedness that is hideous, odious and wretched to an overwhelming majority of people is a foolish and dangerous course of action.”

“Those who come to the United States from other cultures — some of which are infinitely more moral than our own — are going to be offended and repulsed by the rampant depravity that has become a defining characteristic of our culture,” he added. “No amount of education, sensitivity training or political indoctrination will change that.”

Diversity, Buchanan said, is destroying American culture and society, along with the liberal policies of the “evil” Democratic Party and its support for “murder, sexual depravity, lust and rebellion.”

Unfortunately, there’s more of this at Right Wing Watch. Next up, Kevin Swanson, who thinks a whole lot of us should just be put to death because that would make life so much better:

Yesterday, Colorado-based pastor Kevin Swanson addressed the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando by arguing that homosexuality and Islam are both inherently violent because God gives gay people and Muslims up to their dishonorable ways and other sins like murder.

“Why do homosexuals murder homosexuals?” he asked. Because, according to Romans 1, “God gave them up to vile passions.” “Violence” and “murder,” he said, are deeply tied to homosexuality. […] Swanson hosted an event last year with GOP presidential hopefuls including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, where he repeated his longtimebelief that a just government would put gay people to death.

More of this upstanding gent at Right Wing Watch. Onto Sam Rohrer, who explains the intense biblical foundation of uStates, and how the queers are chasing god away:

American Pastors Network president and former Pennsylvania lawmaker Sam Rohrer linked Sunday’s mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando to Supreme Court decisions securing rights for LGBT people, telling conservative talk radio host Steve Deace this week that Supreme Court decisions involving marriage equality and “God’s order for human sexuality” have helped to cause God to remove “His hand of protection” from the country.

[…]

“God has made very clear,” Rohrer explained, “that every nation that He has established — and He establishes all nations, we’re told that all nations are established by God, even the very geographical boundaries of the nations are determined — that when a nation, any nation, does what God says, meaning that they fear Him, that they uphold and enforce God’s moral law and God’s design for the family and for the family and for civil government, all of those are His, when those things are done, then God will bless a nation.”

“One of those blessings are the increase of wealth, one of those things is a security and protection from the neighbors around them,” he continued, “even the enemies will be at peace with them, we’re told in a number of places in Scripture. But when a nation backs off of that, particularly a nation such as ours that has a very biblical basis in an understanding of biblical principles — that’s where our Constitution came from, Declaration of Independence before that came out of that. When those things were there and put in place, when a nation turns their back on those things as we have and [are] increasingly, arrogantly doing, then at that point the justice of God says ‘I cannot any longer bless’ and these things which you’re doing will lead to not His lack of blessing, but insecurity and so forth.”

More of Sam at Right Wing Watch.

There’s also Rick Wiles: Orlando Massacre Was God’s Judgment On America and Dave Daubenmire: Gays Murdered In Orlando Were On The Devil’s Team

That should get your Sunday started in all the right wrong ways.

Balanced Art.

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There’s something beautifully surreal about seeing inanimate objects, be they playing cards or matches, precariously stacked on top of one another. Over the years, it’s actually been developing into its very own genre of art, “balanced art,” inspiring creative minds all over the world to start stacking. Artist Ishihana-Chitoku is but one of these creative minds who’s spent years working to imbue the serene sensation into his balanced rock sculptures. Chitoku’s catalogue is filled with mind boggling assemblages of stacked rocks that you won’t believe were made by human hands.

More at The Creators Project. Check out more rock sculptures from Ishihana-Chitoku on Instagram, and keep abreast of new projects on his website. I have been picking up rocks for decades. Now I’ll have to get them all out and play.

Los Angeles Launches City-Wide Exhibits on Water.

Geentanjal Khanna/Unsplash.

Geentanjal Khanna/Unsplash.

Los Angeles (and greater California) has a complicated relationship with water. Diminishing sources, droughts, and overuse have troubled the city since its inception. “Current: LA Water” seeks to address these issues through public art installations.

The project was born from a $1 million dollar grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge, which, in June 2015, challenged cities across the country to create temporary public art projects that celebrated creativity, enhanced urban identity, encouraged public-private partnerships, and drove economic development. “Current LA: Water” was one of the projects selected.

[…]

“Los Angeles is the creative capital of the world, a place where we appreciate how art inspires us to see the world through new eyes,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti. “’Current: LA’ will make Angelenos rethink our relationship with water, and better understand how the L.A. River connects the diverse communities and cultures that make our city great.”

No. No, LA is not the creative capital of the world. American exceptionalism, it’s everywhere. And inside that exceptionalism, there’s state and city exceptionalism. Stop that.

Work will be available to view for one-month at 14 different sites throughout the city. “A narrative about our relationship to water and its allied systems will be demonstrated through the voice and visions of the ‘Current: LA’ artists, an exciting group of internationally recognized and emerging talents that are as culturally diverse as the inhabitants of Los Angeles themselves,” said Felicia Filer, DCA’s Public Art Division Director.

If you happen to be in this particular area of the world at the pertinent time, have a look. Via Out.

First Legally Non-Binary Person in the US.

Courtesy of Jamie Shupe

Courtesy of Jamie Shupe.

An Oregon judge has ruled that 52-year-old Jamie Shupe can legally identify as neither male nor female.

Shupe was assigned the sex of male at birth and began transitioning to female as an adult, all while married to a woman and raising a daughter.

“I did this because we desperately needed a legal way to be trans for those of us that exist outside of traditional male and female boundaries,” Shupe told Out after the historic ruling. “And I was in a position to make that legal option happen.”

A decorated veteran, Shupe acknowledges that their (Shupe uses the pronoun they) position is one of privilege, not shared by much of the trans community. “The government puts money in my bank account every month. I’ve been able to exist in this bubble where I’ve mostly avoided abuse,” Shupe said.

Overall, the reaction to Shupe’s case as been encouraging: “Besides a few religious figures calling me the Antichrist, the response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive and incredible,” they added.

[…]

Shupe’s landmark ruling is a major turning point in the legal rights of gender non-conforming people.

Via Out.

There are times I think uStates would be utterly lost without Oregon. Thanks for leading the way yet again.