Coal Comforts.

A “Coal Comforts” cupcake by Spencer Merolla (courtesy the artist).

Spencer Merolla is doing some great work, this time around, having a pop up bakery which has decidedly non-edible goodies, as they are made from ash. Just a bit here, the article is in-depth, with many links well worth following.

As the banks of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal continue to be developed, the legacy of pollution in its waters can be an uncomfortable narrative alongside gentrification. In conjunction with Gowanus Open Studios on October 21 and 22, artist Spencer Merolla is creating a pop-up bakery offering cupcakes, cookies, and other treats, all molded from coal ash. The inedible delicacies served from a mobile cart are meant to encourage conversation about the environment and climate change, especially on a weekend when many non-locals will be roaming the neighborhood.

“Gowanus is kind of a cautionary tale in terms of environmental degradation,” Merolla told Hyperallergic. “I love the work that is being done to clean up the canal and green the watershed, and it’s very exciting to think we can repair some of the damage we’ve inherited and be better stewards of this place in the future. But there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube, here or anywhere. We have to do a better job of preventing these kinds of catastrophes in the first place. Because they are happening right now, all over.”

…Merolla’s work with molding ash emerged around that time, with a piece called “Ashes in Our Mouth (Baloney Sandwich Series)” that suggested the bad taste many were left with after Trump’s election, as well as his support for the coal industry over cleaner energy.

“I’d wanted to work with ash for some time, given its association with grief, but it was the presidential election of last year that turned me toward coal ash specifically,” she stated. “Trump’s campaign relied so heavily on nostalgia in general and for the coal industry in particular, and it got me thinking about the many ways in which that nostalgia is toxic. It persuades people that because something is old-fashioned and familiar, it’s also benign.”

[…]

It’s worth noting that among the developers of Gowanus is the Jared Kushner-led Kushner Companies. The Gowanus Canal was designated an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund Site in 2010, thanks to its toxic cocktail of arsenic, radioactive material, and other pollutants. Lining the canal’s bottom is “black mayonnaise,” a concoction of coal tar, heavy metals, and other sludge from decades of industrial run-off. With rising tides of climate change, it remains vulnerable to flooding, even now pouring raw sewage into the streets in heavy rains.

During Gowanus Open Studios, Merolla plans to set up the “Coal Comforts” bakery cart outside the Gowanus Souvenir Shop at 567 Union Street. The tagline of the bakery is: “Can’t have your cake and eat it too.” By shaping the coal ash into food-like forms, Merolla references how much of the world’s population consumes poisonous air due to coal pollution, and the impossible balance between continuing the industry as it is and improving human life.

As she said, “The connection between food justice and environmental justice is only going to become clearer in the future — you can’t have one without the other.”

You can see and read much more at Hyperallergic, and you can watch a video by Ms. Merolla at the Kickstarter page for this show.

Targeting Twitter.

A man takes pictures of “hate tweets”, a part of the art project “#HEYTWITTER” created by Shahak Shapira, outside Twitter office in Hamburg, Germany August 4, 2017 in this picture obtained from social media. Youtube via REUTERS.

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German-Israeli artist who accuses Twitter of failing to delete hate speech tweets has taken matters into his own hands – by stencilling the offending messages on the road in front of the company’s Hamburg headquarters.

A post on video-sharing site YouTube showed Shahak Shapira and fellow activists stencilling tweets saying “Germany needs a final solution to Islam” and “Let’s gas the Jews” – clear references to the Nazi regime’s World War Two genocide of Europe’s Jews. [youtu.be/jzMTBINlLFU]

Shapira said he had reported some 300 incidents of hate speech on Twitter but had received just nine responses from the company.

“If Twitter forces me to see these things, then they should have to see it as well,” he said in the video, posted on Monday, describing the comments as violations of the social network’s community guidelines.

A very clever idea! You can read more about this at Reuters.

Sunday Facepalm.

The immaturity of so many conservative, christian white males is, at times, unbelievable. Like so many toddlers who never saw a reason to mature emotionally or intellectually, too many of them are in seats of power, or close to them, and happily enable swathes of equally immature assholes to continue in asshole behaviour and rhetoric. One leading the pack in the immaturity stakes is the ever noisy Wayne Allyn Root. Once again, he’s spitting and frothing about women, but specifically, liberal women. And liberal men, just the worst y’know.

On his Wednesday radio program, right-wing commentator, conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump–obsessed sycophant Wayne Allyn Root gushed about President Trump’s rally in Arizona the night before, rejoicing that Trump is “a real man” to whom liberals just don’t know how to respond.

Root said that he, like Trump, is also “a real guy’s guy” and was treated the same way by all the “liberal, spoiled brat, lucky sperm club pussycat” wussies he encountered while attending Columbia University.

Mr. Root never stays quiet over just how much he’s a “real man”, a “real man’s man”, and a “real guy’s guy”. Honestly, if he got himself a neon suit advertising his base insecurity, it would be more subtle. He makes sure to tell people, frequently, how efficiently he can beat people up, because that’s one of those markers of a real man. He makes sure to mention, often, that “locker room talk and vulgarity towards women is real man stuff, too. Now, those one the liberal and humanitarian side of life are assigned to people who can’t cope with a “real man.” I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, most of us know exactly how to deal with such types. They are commonly known as assholes.

“Liberal, spoiled brat, lucky sperm club pussycat” wussies. :Laughs: Sometimes, I really do think it’s a pity such men can’t genuinely hear themselves. This is almost painfully pitiful, and an old, old song.

Root said that liberal men “don’t know how to fight and they don’t know how to argue” and only pretend to care about issues “because you’re a guy and there are women in the room and you want to have sex.”

Lots of people want to have sex, it’s fun. Now, I’m privileged to know a whole lot of liberal people, many men among them, and they are excellent at argument, but I expect that wouldn’t meet Root’s definition, whatever it might be. Arguing is not compulsory in a relationship, which does or does not include sex. Lots of people don’t argue much, others do. I rather suspect that “argue” in Root’s lexicon means ‘be an obstinate asshole’. As for caring about issues, I imagine that matters on the other side of the camp, too, does it not? Those things tend to matter in whether or not people get together.

“It’s all B.S, is what it is,” he said. “All these liberal guys, they just want to win over women and look like a proud peacock in front of women because they know that liberal women want to hear this nonsense; ‘Oh my God, all I care about is poor people, that’s all I care about is poor people.’ And then they know, tonight they’re going to have sex with some stupid liberal woman who is ugly in the first place, because all liberal women are.”

:Laughs: I have never once, in all my long Hippie days, known a man who has said ‘Oh my God, all I care about is poor people, that’s all I care about is poor people.’ I have known men who do care about poor people, and that’s shown in their work and their actions, but they don’t pace a room packed with women, wringing their hands in refrain about the poor. That sort of idiocy seems to be the reserve of conservative christians, who are looking to make themselves rich while their flock gets poorer.

As for looking the proud peacock, I’d think the constant claims of being a “real man’s man, lookit my fists” and all that might just qualify, Mr. Root.

Via RWW.

The Violet Sister.

Louise Michel pictured at home in her later years, around the time she is presumed to have penned the piece translated below — Source.

A husky voice barked: “Entrez!”

Through a long, dim hallway, I followed the voice, until I reached a spare, curtained room. One empty chair stood near the entrance. Another, across the darkened space, was occupied by a slender, shadowed figure with erect posture, white hair long and flowing as in the fashion of the 1840s, in an elegant black suit, immaculate linens, a neckcloth of Persian design. A bright gaze set into a finely featured face pierced the gloom.

“Sit”, the figure commanded. As if under the influence of a powerful magnetizer, I sat without pause.

My host spoke sharply, gruffly. “Welcome, Mademoiselle. You have come to meet me, no? You wish to learn of my ideas, my thoughts. But should you not first know to whom you speak?” I nodded.

The figure straightened. “You wrote to Octave Obdurant. This is the name with which the person before you entered the Ecole Polytechnique. It is the name on my entrance papers to the Ecole de Ponts et Chaussées. It is the name with which I signed my first articles in geometry, my first statistical tables, as well as Free the Earth, which you were kind enough to notice.”

The voice was clear and occasionally guttural; there was a warmth beneath its unyielding syllables.

“But as you have certainly realized, this is not my true name.”

I felt my mind begin to spin. I was unsure of where I was, what I was doing here, in these isolated rooms. I stammered out:

“Excuse me, Monsieur. What, then, is your name?”

“I was baptized Tranchot.” Despite the pause which followed, the name meant nothing to me until it was repeated, with its prenames before it.

“Marie Violette Tranchot.”

I was moved by an emotion of shock and recognition at once. Some part of me had already realized that I was not in the presence of a great man, but rather a great woman — no wizened brother of the struggle, but a sister. Instantly, I felt myself uncannily at home, safe at last in a place I’d never been — truly at home, perhaps, for the first time in my life. This hero, epitome of the courage and intelligence the world saw as masculine, was a woman like myself.

Fascinating reading, from Louise Michel, in Le Libertaire, iii, 1895. She writes about the Scoundrel Laws, and the paucity of an overly-praised history, and her meeting with Octave Obdurant.

You can read the whole thing at The Public Domain. Highly recommended.

Adopt-a-Nazi (Not Really)!

In this Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017 file photo, white nationalist demonstrators walk into the entrance of Lee Park surrounded by counter demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va. (Credit: AP Photo/Steve Helber).

Leave it to lawyers to figure out a brilliant troll, which will help to fight hate and bigotry.

A group of Jewish lawyers in San Francisco has discovered a clever new way to fight white supremacy: adoption.

Of course, the Jewish Bar Association isn’t actually encouraging anyone to adopt or sponsor white supremacists. Instead, the group is asking the public to donate to its “Adopt-a-Nazi (Not Really)” GoFundMe campaign, which is being used to raise funds for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that monitors hate groups across the country and litigates on behalf of marginalized groups. So far, the campaign has raised more than $92,000—far beyond its original goal of $10,000.

The strategy is simple: according to the GoFundMe page, donors are encouraged to give some amount of money for each of the 300 expected attendees at an upcoming “free speech” rally put on by the right-wing Patriot Prayer group at Crissy Field on August 26. Many of the attendees will likely be white nationalists or members of similar hate groups.

According to the Adopt-a-Nazi campaign, no donation is too small.

“Two cents per attendee is a $6 donation,” organizers wrote. “A dime is $30. Why not a quarter? That’s only $75.”

You can read more about this at Think Progress, or just head over to the fund to donate or share. Yep, I donated, and now I’m sharing. :)

White Supremacy: Just Background Noise.

Tucker Viemeister.

It’s a forlorn hope, that republicans might stumble over a conscience, discover their humanity and embrace that of others. It really does not seem to matter what the Tiny Tyrant does, there are those who will squink all over, in an attempt to cover over the massive piles of shit left in the wake of the Tiny Tyrant. As we have all been witness to, Trump gets worse, week by week, day by day.

As CNN noted on Friday, in the last four weeks alone, President Trump has fired chief strategist Steve Bannon, fired Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, hired and fired communications director Anthony Scaramucci, publicly shamed his own attorney general and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, banned transgender troops via twitter, made up two phone calls, thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling American diplomats from the country, threatened nuclear war with North Korea, and defended attendees of a white supremacy rally.

And that’s not even half of it.

But Steve Cortes, a member of Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council, said on Fox News Sunday morning that if Republicans just cut taxes, all of that will be background noise.

“Clearly, he had a tough week. There’s no way around that,” Cortes said.

“All presidents have tough weeks,” Cortes said Sunday. “I believe that will become background noise once we get taxes done, and once this economy starts growing the way it’s capable of.”

Yes, a tough week, brought on by the defense of fucking nazis being “fine people”. You opened your mouth, and Trump obligingly shit in it, and you decided to swallow it. Nice.

[…]

“The economy’s already accelerating. There’s a lot of optimism out there in the country,” Cortes said. “If we can throw tax cuts into the mix, I think this economy can absolutely take off, and then I think we’d see those poll numbers rebound very, very quickly for the president.”

There’s a lot of optimism out and about? Where? Oh, yes, in the crowds of nazis, sure. Everywhere else, not so much. Perhaps you should get outside once in a while. People are not optimistic about an idiotic, ignorant, maniacal bigot being in control of things, for a given value of control. People are not optimistic about not being nuked. People are not optimistic about not getting into yet another fucking war. People are not optimistic about bigotry being elevated to “great america” status. People are not optimistic about the blatant slaughter of all things which could help us avoid the worst disasters of climate change. People are not optimistic about the economy. The list goes on and on.

Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) made similar comments last week, telling Bloomberg that Trump’s comments about white supremacists were “frustrating” because he wanted to start focusing on tax reform.

“[It’s] very frustrating for those of us who want to start focusing on the issues ahead—tax reform, infrastructure, the debt ceiling,” Ross said. “I wished we would start focusing on those issues, and we need to start healing and bringing people together—instead of peeling back the scabs.”

Right. Your idea of tax reform is handing tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, and you’ve made sure there are zero safety nets for everyone else. That will cheer everyone up for sure. You don’t start healing and bringing people together by announcing that nazis are “fine people” and everything was really the fault of those filthy liberals. The reason those scabs peel back so easily is that there is a massive wound underneath, still oozing blood, covered over, but certainly not healed. Healing does not take place by ignoring a wound. Now the Tiny Tyrant and his henchidiots, like you, Rep. Ross, have dumped toxic wasted in the wound, and you want to talk healing. Isolation, genocide, and subjugation are not things which heal. They do not unite. And those things are what you stand for, handwaving reality, because those people, they don’t actually matter to you.

Think Progress has the full story.

Sunday Facepalm.

Wallnau, again. Lance is the gift of never-ending eyerolls. Now it’s Jehovah playing with the stock market, just to fuck about with a few people.

Wallnau was outraged by the fact that several business leaders had resigned from presidential advisory councils in protest of Trump’s comments in the wake of the violence that had occurred at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, which ultimately forced Trump to disband the councils entirely.

“They insulted the president and his base,” Wallnau declared. “It doesn’t surprise me [that] the stock market had its first setback today. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a prophetic response to the uprising and insult that came from these CEOs.”

Uprising? Really? I wouldn’t characterize resigning as an uprising, those are different things, Lance. How is this a prophetic response? Has someone had a nifty prophecy about this, and what, just forgot to say? If there’s insult to be had, it’s on the part of the Tiny Tyrant and his base, asshole bigots, nazis, and your garden variety evil fuckers. Every single one of you is an insult to humanity, and to anyone with actual morals. You have all the benefit of a boil on the arse.

“When those CEOs mocked Trump and made this a political issue, the judgment would come where their pocketbooks are,” he continued. “How fast does God sometimes settle accounts.”

They didn’t make this a political issue, Lance. They simply could not walk past the “presidential” standard of hey, nazis are fine people! Naturally, the Tiny Tyrant could have kept his mouth shut, but no, he had come out with just how awful all those people of colour and their allies are, persecuting those poor nazis. I expect the stock market will be fine, it’s the nature of the beast to fluctuate. As for Jehovah being all speedy and stuff, I guess you don’t subscribe to The Mills of God. That, and the very old concept of ancestral sin is more Jehovah’s thing, y’know, just read your book of psychopathy. Not that any of it originated with your particular god, but it was certainly adopted with enthusiasm.

There’s video at RWW.

Squinkery.

I fell in love with a new word: Squink. It’s onomatopoeically delicious! I had expressed a desire to use this wonderful word, and PZ provided:

Here’s another good use that you’ll find opportunities for all the time: when someone throws out a cloud of incoherent obfuscations for something stupid they’ve just said, they’re squinking. Creationists, MRAs, and Republicans do it all the time — Just watch Jack Kingston or Jeffrey Lord or Kellyann Conway sometime. Nonstop squinking.

The conservative christians propping up the Tiny Tyrant are still busy squinking over the Charlottesville statement:

“I do not believe he was speaking of people giving a Nazi salute or giving racist chants,” Suarez, who is also an advocate for immigration reform, said. “I believe he was speaking of a few who sincerely would not like to see a monument removed, and were not participating in racist activities.”

[…]

Robert Jeffress — who made waves last week by making the highly disputed claim that God has given Trump the authority to “take out” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” and that the uproar over his press conference is “just more a style issue.”

Ah, a style issue. Right. It seems that the Tiny Tyrant’s style is to have a few Nazi uniforms hiding in his closet. You can read the full article at Think Progress.

Don Boys at Barbwire is squinking so hard you could hear him a mile away:

…I understand that sensitive Blacks might be offended at Confederate monuments; however, many of us are often offended by many things including their apparent desire to be offended, but we always get over it. They will too. However, they are being encouraged in their insanity by local and federal officials.

[…]

And once again, I will remind everyone that Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression against the genteel southland was not to free the slaves as Lincoln admitted, but he used it later as a “sales job” to prosecute the war. Taxes, tariffs, and states’ rights to nullification were the original reasons brother fought brother with over 600,000 dead. However, uninformed or dishonest people keep saying otherwise.

Hmmm, from where I sit, I see a white man with an acute sensitivity problem. No worries, Don, you’ll get over it. If you can stomach it, the full column is here.

Charting Confederate Symbols Alongside Social Movements.

150 Years of Iconography, courtesy of Southern Poverty Law Center. Sourced from their story, Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy (click to enlarge).

[…] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) began to catalog Confederate symbols around the country, stating: “There was no comprehensive database of such symbols…In an effort to assist the efforts of local communities to re-examine these symbols, the SPLC launched a catalog to study them.”

[…]

There were two major periods during which the dedication of Confederate monuments and other symbols spiked: the first two decades of the 20th century and, later, the Civil Rights movement. As they explain:

[T]wo distinct periods saw a significant rise in the dedication of monuments and other symbols. The first began around 1900, amid the period in which states were enacting Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise the newly freed African Americans and re-segregate society. This spike lasted well into the 1920s, a period that saw a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

The second spike began in the early 1950s and lasted through the 1960s, as the civil rights movement led to a backlash among segregationists. These two periods also coincided with the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War.

Take a look at the infographic. Note the massive cluster of dedications of monuments around the time the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was being formed, and the dedications’ continued persistence during the KKK’s resurgence. Check out the sudden rise in the dedication of schools, named in honor of Confederate soldiers, almost immediately following Brown v. Board of Education. Note that there were less dedications of Confederate symbols during race riots, even a significant dip during the Detroit uprising of 1943.

You can trace a clear spike in the dedication of Confederate monuments whenever black Americans organized in a concrete way; when they were made visibly vulnerable — such as in the instance of uprisings — the commitment to Confederate symbolism tapered off.

According to this data, it’s clear that once black Americans sought their own agency or publicly defended their rights, white supremacists and Confederate apologists became eager to crowd around these monuments in tender affection and homage, to espouse this history. The monuments had a purpose, newly reinstated again and again, to revive and cherish white history each time minorities, especially black people, made themselves visible. The common refrain in support of the Confederate flag (“heritage, not hate”) quickly dies on its own sword. There’s no pride, except for the kind rooted in a fear of white erasure.

After mining the data, it’s clear white panic is real.

The full article is at Hyperallergic, and it’s excellent, and necessary reading, as many people seem to not know the full history of these monuments to hate. Recommended reading.

Most Liked.

Barack Obama: “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…”

Barack Obama: “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love…”

Barack Obama: “…For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” – Nelson Mandela

Here’s a great example of the stark difference between this current presidency and the last: in the wake of Trump’s horrific response to the Charlottesville tragedy, Barack Obama tweeted a three-part quote from Nelson Mandela, the first tweet of which has become the most liked post in the site’s entire history.

Via Out.

The Intertwining of Trees and Crime.

Screencapture.

There’s been some very interesting research happening in Chicago, and it turns out that trees reduce crime. I don’t find this surprising at all, but I’m a “must be attached to the land” person. When your environment is bleak and desolate, you end up with bleak, desolate, desperate people. We need to be aware of our earth, we need to be connected to our planet. In urban environments, the best way to restore that connection is with trees. Yes, they are a long-term investment, but that’s good, because it means people are thinking the right way, generations ahead of themselves.

In June, the Chicago Regional Tree Initiative and Morton Arboretum released what they say is the most comprehensive tree canopy data set of any region in the U.S., covering 284 municipalities in the Chicago area. Now, that data is helping neighborhoods improve their environments and assist their communities.

“When we go to talk to communities,” says Lydia Scott, director of the CRTI, “We say ‘trees reduce crime.’ And then they go, ‘Explain to me how that could possibly be, because that’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard.’”

In Chicago, where more than 2,000 people have been shot this year, scientists are looking at physical features of neighborhoods for solutions. “We started to look at where we have heavy crime, and whether there was a correlation with tree canopy, and often, there is,” says Scott. “Communities that have higher tree population have lower crime. Areas where trees are prevalent, people tend to be outside, mingling, enjoying their community.”

The map revealed that poorer neighborhoods are often “tree deserts,” areas with little or no tree canopy. Trees reduce flooding, improve property values, prevent heat islands, promote feelings of safety, reduce mortality, and provide other significant social and health benefits. This means that when you live in, for example, the South Side, where trees are scarcer, you lose more than just green leaves overhead.

Never before have researchers been able to look so widely and deeply at this sort of data. The map is huge—it covers seven counties—and extremely detailed. That has allowed Scott and her colleagues to notice some startling patterns. For example, in the North Shore community—an affluent, lakeside, suburban area—canopy cover tends to be 40 percent or higher. On the economically depressed South Side, canopy can be as low as 7 percent.

That last is no surprise, either. As it goes with people, the poorer you are, the less of everything you get, including trees. There’s much more to the article, all the research, how it was conducted, and information about Blacks in Green, who are doing stellar work. Click on over to Atlas Obscura for the full story. Then see if you could help plant a tree. Or just hug one.

Need Another Reason to Denounce Nazis?

Here you go:

SCOOP: “Weev”, the system administrator for The Daily Stormer is planning on sending Nazis to #HeatherHeyer funeral. #Charlottesville.

“Yo, I need some research done,” Weev wrote. “What’s the location of this fat skank’s funeral.”

“Get on it, e-sleuths,” he added. “I want to get people on the ground there.”

This is appalling and shocking behaviour. Have we all become so damned weary and jaded that this too, is normalised? We cannot let this be. We cannot dare to enter the silence of complicity. We must keep standing up, we must fight, we must yell back. This cannot become acceptable. This cannot become tolerable, in any way.

Via Raw Story.