I Am SherLocked

Sharks have been discovered to be living in the acidic waters of an active volcano. “ The sharks were observed with the use of disposable robots, underwater cameras, and National Geographic’s deep-sea Drop Cam—divers who have tried to go near to the crater when it is not erupting have suffered acid burns, or backed away simply because of the heat. But in this inhospitable environment, there are numbers of hammerhead and silkly sharks, hanging around and going about their business.”

So, sometime last year (?) science invented Vantablack, which is the darkest possible shade of black. Art world got incredibly excited. But as it needs to be very carefully made in a lab, it’s hard to get a hold of, and is extremely expensive. Enter Anish Kapoor, aka FuckFace McGee. Anish Kapoor buys the rights to Vantablack. He is the only human being on the planet that can legally use it, and he’s kind of a prick about it.

Art world is not thrilled with that.

Enter Stuart Semple.

Stuart Semple is an artist, and also makes pigments to sell in his free time. Stuart Semple is astoundingly pissed about this Vantablack nonsense, and Anish Kapoor’s dickery. Stuart Semple makes a new pigment, the brightest shade of pink ever, called Pinkest Pink, and puts it for sale on the internet. To be bought by everybody except Anish Kapoor. Literally, to purchase, you need to confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, do not associate with him, and will not sell or give the pigment to Anish Kapoor or his associates. Art world has a good laugh, everyone buys Pinkest Pink because it’s awesome, and damn it we deserve something.

Anish Kapoor however is a penis, and will not take this lying down, because HOW DARE he not have literally everything.

Anish Kapoor gets his London associates to buy him a thing of Pinkest Pink, and being such a classy human being, posts a picture to instagram of him with his middle finger covered in Pinkest Pink, captioned with “Up yours. #pink”

Everyone flips shit, because. Y’know. Fuck that guy. Especially Stuart Semple. For context here, Anish Kapoor is one of the richest artists on the planet, and has repeatedly been referred to as everything wrong with the art world, and the epitome of the art worlds elitism problem. He’s a giant douchebag. Meanwhile Stuart Semple makes pigments just to get them out there. He turns 0 profit from his now enourmously popular pigments.

Stuart Semple launches an investigation as to who the fuck leaked Pinkest Pink, and plans to strike back. He does so by releasing two new products. First is Diamond Dust, which is a glitter made from glass, so that a painting is still visible after it’s applied, but glitters like a mofo. It’s the most reflective glitter out there, and is available to everyone who isn’t Anish Kapoor. And it being made of glass, if you stick your finger in there, it’s going to hurt quite a bit, so that was Stuart Semple’s way of saying “shove your middle finger in this, asshole, see what happens”. Except without saying that, because he can get an insult across while still being fucking classy.

He also releases Black 2.0, created with the help of over a thousand artists worldwide.

Black 2.0 is the answer to Vantablack. Black 2.0 is a slightly less black black, but looks functionally the same to the human eye. It’s completely safe, smells like cherries, and costs four pounds. Vantablack is highly toxic, potentially explosive, needs to be applied in a special laboratory and sealed properly, can’t be moved across borders, can reach 300 degrees celsius if you’re not extremely careful, and costs thousands of dollars. Anish Kapoor is the only human being who can use Vantablack. He is the only human being who cannot use Black 2.0.

So I think we can guess who got the better deal.

And thus the feud ends, Kapoor defeated.

…But not quite.

Kapoor, in this entire afair, has made exactly two comments to the public. The first being his charming message about aquiring Pinkest Pink, the second being claiming to Buzzfeed that he and his small army of lawyers will be suing Semple, an extremely poor artist who cannot afford a lawyer.

No lawsuit has been made yet, fyi.

The point is, Kapoor is a prick, and doesn’t like talking to the lower classes. So one day in July 2017, he decides he needs another floor on his London studio apartment, and starts making arrangements to have it built. His neighbors are fucking pissed, because this will ruin the light of their apartments. They call to Semple to save them, or at the very least piss Kapoor off some more.

Semple answers to the call, and releases two new paints, Phaze and Shift, as always, banned to Kapoor. They change colours, Phaze with temperature, and Shift is just iridescent. Shift needs to be painted over Black 2.0 to work, and Phaze just works on its own.

So that’s been the art world for the last two years.

1. “Anish Kapoor is however a penis” is the best line in this post.

Stuart Semple: gonna make an anti-government t-shirt with it.

Me:

WARNING: This post contains references to gruesome human rights violations. It is not for everyone.

76 people in a cell designed for 12.

155 people in a cell designed for 35.

41 in a cell for 8.

Don’t look away.

900 people total, or or more than seven times the 125-person capacity of the El Paso Del Norte immigration processing center.

If it weren’t for the white boxes shielding the faces of dozens of men and women stuffed into the overcrowded cell, it would be difficult to count the people in the photograph, since their overlapping limbs make it impossible to see where one body ends and another begins.

Standing room only cells, where people are held for weeks. Limited access to showers and clean clothes, resulting in those held wearing soiled clothing “for days or weeks.”

People standing on toilets just to find air to breathe. 24 deaths while in ICE custody.

Johana Mediana Léon, 25 years old. Transgender. Passed away four days after release from custody after complaining of chest pains.

Mergensana Amar, 40 years old. Removed from life support after committing suicide in custody.

Efrain De La Rosa, 40 years old. Committed suicide in custody by self-inflicted strangulation.

Roxana Hernandez, 33 years old. Transgender. Passed away in custody after experiencing cardiac arrest.

300,000-500,000 individuals per year in custody. Acting ICE director Mark Morgan’s response? Plans to increase large scale raids.

Don’t look away.

They’re not “centers.” They’re not “facilities.” They’re not “processing areas.” Let’s call them what they are.

The United States government is operating concentration camps. And we must act.

Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

Two weeks ago, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

Don’t look away.

It’s certainly been helpful for the Trump Administration that nobody has called them concentration camps until this week, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came under great fire for doing so.

It may well be a testament to the media machine that is the Trump administration. Look away! He wore an ill-fitting tuxedo to meet the Queen! Look away! He won’t acknowledge that the Central Park Five are exonerated! Look away! He fired pollsters for giving him numbers that he didn’t like!

Don’t look away.

It’s helpful to the President that the media covers these human rights abuses intermittently instead of as what they actually are: proof of a racist administration, unchecked by the law. It’s helpful that there’s so much else to look at right now. But more than anything else, it’s helpful that the places where these people are being tortured and left to die are hidden. They’re locked away from the eyes of journalists and concerned members of the public. They’re misleadingly named.

That’s what a concentration camp is. And the immediate outrage to AOC calling them that is the right response. Hearing that the government is running concentration camps is something one should feel scrupulous towards. A concentration camp isn’t the same as a death camp. We don’t have those yet. But when Hitler ran his, they started as the former, extending to the latter.

Don’t look away.

Hannah Arendt, imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote about the levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.” All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

Is that not what we were doing?

I hesitate to speak for my own ancestry, for my family members killed at Neuengamme camp along with more than 43,000 others. But I can’t hesitate long enough to sway my thinking away from confirming what AOC already said.

It’s easy to think of the Holocaust only in terms of the final outcome. But there was a beginning.

Don’t look away. It started with fear mongering. It started with ghettoization. It started with hidden camps. Then, the pogroms. Then, the extermination camps.

Mass detention isn’t new. But this president has made it a centerpiece of his rhetoric and his agenda. He’s perfected the extreme language that dehumanizes immigrants. At a rally in Florida last month, Trump was bemoaning migrants’ legal protections when someone in the audience suggested they should be shot. The president laughed and made a joke.

Through overcrowding and dehumanization, concentration camps became self-fulfilling prophecies. The culture of abuse leads to frustration and violence, thus “justifying” their incarceration after the fact. Other citizens become desensitized to the dehumanization of a group of people and thus implicitly give approval for concentration camps by our lack of pushback.

Do you see it?

It’s happening now.

->Twitter thread reads:

IF YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT TRUMP IS DOING AT THE BORDER, you need to read and share this thread. @jacobsoboroff @JuliaEAinsley please read this. I have just gotten off the phone with a friend who is a legal volunteer in Border Patrol facilities. Don’t look away. 1/

My friend has done two tours now volunteering as a legal advocate inside CBP facilities. She passed along information about what is happening there that indicates that the Trump Administration is violating every basic human right, and is moving toward military “solutions.” 2/

So that folks understand the process: CBP has outposts on the border. Refugees seeking asylum travel hundreds of miles on foot, including with infants and small children, and turn themselves in at these outposts *on foot.* Here’s what happens next. Don’t look away. 3/

CBP then transfers these human beings to a facility called “the Dog Pound.” (Here, my friend started crying.) The “Dog Pound” is comprised of cages, outside and on dirt, with no protection from the elements. Don’t look away. 4/

There are dozens of teen moms there. There is no baby food. While there, my friend saw a CBP agent take a baby from her teenage mother, strip the baby of its clothes, hand the baby back to the mother, and send them outside to the “Dog Pound” to sleep in the dirt. 5/

The “Dog Pound” has no running water, no covers, no tarp, no care, no safety from the elements. It is freezing at night, and deathly hot during the day. Everyone is sick. My friend said she saw a baby on this trip that was so sick “I thought it would be dead by morning.” 6/

Toddlers in the “Dog Pound” who had been eating solid food are given only infant formula. Moms are trying to start breast feeding again so their children don’t starve. These moms are dehydrated, sick, & have walked miles through desert with no water. CBP gives them nothing. 7/

It gets worse. Don’t look away. From the “Dog Pound,” these human beings are moved to an area called “The Freezer.” The Freezer is kept at 55 degrees. Some of the refugees who are moved there are still wet from their journey, and are put in The Freezer wet. 8/

CBP is keeping human beings in “The Freezer” for weeks at a time. WEEKS. Including critically ill people, disabled people, sick children, teenage mothers with babies. The floor of The Freezer is made of dirt or very rough concrete. There are no beds. Keep reading. 9/

From “The Freezer,” refugees are supposed to be moved to ICE facilities that are designed for residential care. They have beds, food, bathrooms. However, (keep reading) THOSE FACILITIES ARE EMPTY. ICE IS SHUTTING THEM DOWN. Don’t look away. 10/

What our government is doing instead is moving refugees to MILITARY INSTALLATIONS. The announcement about Fort Sill, which was used as a Japanese internment camp, is only the start. So why would our government be doing this? 11/

Here’s why These concentration camps (let’s call them what they are) will be under the control of the Department of Homeland Security, but within the Department of Defense. 12/.

Unlike ICE facilities, which allow site inspectors inside, there will be no inspection of military-run camps. The military will be able to deny access to anyone it chooses. No media. No oversight. 13/

Lawyers will not be allowed in. Human rights monitors will not be allowed in. The camps will also be protected airspace, meaning that no drones can fly over them to take pictures of what’s going on inside. 14/

The Trump administration will be able to conduct itself in whatever way it wants to without anyone knowing what’s going on inside. Think about what that means. Think about why they would want that. This is happening RIGHT NOW. 15/

ICE facilities with beds and food are EMPTY, because the Trump administration is moving refugees into military-run concentration camps where they can do ANYTHING THEY CHOOSE without oversight, media scrutiny or advocate access. 16/

This administration is already committing atrocities at CBP facilities. Border Patrol agents at the facility where my friend was working refer to these human beings as “bodies.” Not people. “Bodies.” They are denying medicine, toilets, beds, food, shelter and clothes. 17/

My friend said that “Flores is on very tenuous ground.” We’re days away from being met with “we’re not going to let you in, no matter what.” 18/

What is coming is crimes against humanity. America is already perpetrating mass human rights violations, and this administration is setting it up so they can do far worse, in secret, under military supervision. 19/

Military forces are already been shifted to CBP. My friend saw *coast guard agents* (read that again) working for CBP at this facility. If we do nothing, there will be blood on our hands. 20/

If Pelosi does nothing, there will be blood on her hands and the hands of every Democrat who refuses to act to end this administration’s reign. Fascism is here. 21/

If this enrages you, devastates you, frightens you, share this thread. Then call your member of Congress and read it to them. Then call @SpeakerPelosi and ask her why she sits silently by as our government does this. 22/

We’re on a fast train to hell. There’s only one way to stop it. Trump must be removed from power immediately, by any legal means, using every weapon in our arsenal. 23/

This is where we are. This is WHO we are. Look reality in the face. Don’t look away. Fight like human life depends on it. It does. It does. It does. /end

PS. I have been asked to tag @AOC in this thread with an urgent plea that she read it. What is happening at the border mandates immediate action and revolt in the Democratic party. PPS. My friend has photos of the facility. This is real. It’s America, right now.

Last tweet: please donate to @RAICESTEXAS. Please do it immediately and as much as you can. Please donate to the @ACLU. Please fight against this administration with everything you’ve got.

Texas Monthly is covering similar conditions in this piece. My friend told me there are multiple “Dog Pounds” and “Freezers” at other CBP facilities than those my friend has been inside and this is common practice.

->The poster then goes on to link multiple corroborating media articles.  I’m linking them here:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/border-patrol-outdoor-detention-migrants-el-paso/

https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/national/-it-s-inhumane-what-they-re-doing-says-mother-separated-from-daughter-at-the-border

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/my-son-is-not-the-same-new-testimony-paints-bleak-picture-of-family-separation

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-adelanto-immigrant-detention-20190408-story.html

https://truthout.org/video/dhs-watchdog-confirms-horrific-conditions-at-immigrant-jails/

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article228933679.html

https://www.thecut.com/2018/12/what-are-las-hieleras-iceboxes-used-by-cbp-at-the-border.html

The “excuse me, I’m passing behind you” touch men give you when they read you as female:

The “excuse me, I’m passing behind you” touch your friends give you: