Main Blog Randomness

Happy Neil Banging Out The Tunes day to those who celebrate.

I found him an audience while I was hunting my collection for the best bricks.

Please enjoy and reblog this little Lego build.

If anyone wants a parts list, I will deconstruct and take progress photos .

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

Please give anything you can offer. Money, coping mechanisms, resources, information, emotional support, e-sims, you could probably even donate any disability aids you don't use anymore to refugees in your home country. I know a lot of us are unable to protest right now. Sharing information is also extremely important. There ARE things we can do. Protesting is only one aspect of activism. Sending emails, making phone calls, directly supporting Palestinians in one of the ways I said above.

Just like covid is a mass disabling event, a genocide is a mass disabling event. Please do not forget this and remember, you CAN make a difference.

The sound you hear comes from surveillance aircrafts that roam the skies of Gaza with three main purposes: specific strikes, guiding missiles and the obvious, tracking every move of the people in Gaza.

People call it الزنّانة (zannana) which is attributed to the sound it makes that is similar to the buzzing noise of mosquitoes.

The use of the Zannana by Israel has been ongoing for many years leading up to the current aggression and it is constantly going for 24 hours of the day nonstop. People have always reported suffering from insomnia, being anxious all the time because of the ongoing noise, inability to study and focus and a complete loss of privacy and feeling of safety. It has a foreboding effect on people given its historical use in Gaza.

Israel uses this surveillance aircraft to gather information and determine targets, while placing the people of Gaza in a constant state of distress. This is of course just another piece of Israel's ongoing psychological war that it imposes on Palestinians every day of their lives.

A few years ago, there was a situation where Israel released years worth of mail from warehouses to the West Bank. A lot of packages and letters were damaged. Some were moldy. They were kept in horrible conditions. One of the things that stood out was a wheelchair. Someone bought a wheelchair and Israel just kept it in storage for 3 years instead of delivering it. There was medicine there too. Things people bought and ordered online.

This is old news, from 2018.

It’s plant-based diets and regenerative livestock farming and insect protein and lab-grown meat.

It’s electric cars and reliable public transit and decreasing how far and how often we travel.

It’s growing your own vegetables and community gardens and vertical farms and supporting local producers.

It’s rewilding the countryside and greening cities.

It’s getting people active and improving disabled access.

It’s making your own clothes and buying or swapping sustainable stuff with your neighbours.

It’s the right to repair and reducing consumption in the first place.

It’s greater land rights for the commons and indigenous peoples and creating protected areas.

It’s radical, drastic change and community consensus.

It’s labour rights and less work.

It’s science and arts.

It’s theoretical academic thought and concrete practical action.

It’s signing petitions and campaigning and protesting and civil disobedience.

It’s sailboats and zeppelins.

It’s the speculative and the possible.

It’s raising living standards and curbing consumerism.

It’s global and local.

It’s me and you.

For added context, people who don’t remember the 1980s, there were a serious of deadly shootings carried out by postal workers against their coworkers.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

UT has removed two TAs from their positions and refused to give them a spring assignment, for emailing their class (with the support of the professor) offering support and mental health resources, and acknowledging the anxiety which must be felt by the Palestinian students.

attached to the tweet are two images.

first image has the text: UT AUSTIN TAs REMOVED FOR OFFERING SUPPORT TO PALESTINIAN STUDENTS.

second image has the text: PARHAM DAGHIGHI AND CALLIE KENNEDY, GRADUATE STUDENTS AT THE STEVE HICKS SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK, WERE APPROACHED BY A STUDENT ASKING THAT THE COURSE ACKNOWLEDGE THE MENTAL HEALTH OF PALESTINIAN, ARAB, AND MUSLIM INDIVIDUALS AMIDST THE ESCALATION OF THE PALESTINIAN GENOCIDE WHEN THE UNIVERSITY FAILED TO. PARHAM AND CALLIE BROUGHT THE STUDENT'S CONCERN TO THEIR SUPERVISING PROFESSOR. WITH THE PROFESSOR'S INPUT AND PERMISSION, PARHAM AND CALLIE THEN SENT A MESSAGE OUT TO THEIR CANVAS COURSE PAGE. THE MESSAGE INCLUDED FREE AND AVAILABLE RESOURCES FOR MENTAL HEALTH AND ACKNOWLEDGED THE LARGELY UNADDRESSED TRAUMA THAT STUDENTS WERE EXPERIENCING DUE TO THE ESCALATION OF THE PALESTINIAN GENOCIDE.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, PARHAM AND CALLIE WOKE UP TO A LETTER FROM THE DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK, ALLAN COLE, REMOVING THEM AS TA'S AND BARRING THEIR REHIRING IN THE SPRING.