Art is the Weapon

mulative number of UNARMED Blacks killed by police, 2015 to mid-2018

Excerpt:

True love doesn’t always come easy, especially when you’re the last known member of your species. Just ask Romeo, a Sehuencas water frog who lives at Bolivia’s Cochabamba Natural History Museum. For the past nine years, Romeo has been emitting plaintive mating calls, but scientists fear that there are no mates left for the lovelorn amphibian. In a last ditch effort to help the little guy out—and hopefully preserve the future of his species—researchers are scouring streams and rivers for a lady friend for Romeo. As the BBC reports, they have come up with a creative way to draw attention to their efforts: they made Romeo a Match.com profile.

“I’m a pretty simple guy,” Romeo’s profile reads. “I tend to keep to myself and have the best nights just chilling at home, maybe binge-watching the waters around me. I do love food, though, and will throw a pair of pants on and get out of the house if there’s a worm or snail to be eaten!”

Romeo isn’t particularly picky about potential mates, though his profile notes that he has a preference for stocky builds and females who are between two and three inches tall. He is not interested in smokers, but is OK with moderate drinkers.

The frog’s profile links to a donation page, which is part of a campaign to raise $15,000 to help biologists search areas where Sehuencas water frogs were once plentiful. Match.com will match all donations made between February 9 and Valentine’s Day.

There are multiple advertisements doing this.  

I have yet to see one, but I will report any if they show up while I’m watching youtube. 

Basically, here is a quick timeline of current related events which make this propaganda campaign terrifying:

60,000 far-right nationalists march on Poland’s independence day, Novermber 2017. chanting “Pure Poland! White Poland!” [Whoops, guess they forgot Nazi Germany saw them as Slavs and therefore lesser? Oh right, re-writing national myth is a part of fascism.] Demonstrators were highly antisemitic, one claimed he was marching against “Jewry.” Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the Polish government seemed to praise the event: “It was a beautiful sight,” the interior minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, said. “We are proud that so many Poles have decided to take part in a celebration connected to the Independence Day holiday.”

 Late Jan 2018: Poland’s senate passes on a bill proposing a ban on phrases like “Polish death camps,” - and proposes jail time for the use of such language.  The law also seems to ban “people from accusing Poland of Holocaust atrocities committed by the Nazis,” even when complicity in atrocities is historical fact.  The text is as follows: “Whoever publicly and contrary to the facts attributes to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State responsibility or co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes committed by the German Third Reich… or for any other offenses constituting crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes, or otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of these crimes, shall be liable to a fine or deprivation of liberty for up to three years.” Discussion of ANY Polish complicity in the Holocaust is therefore also part of the proposed ban. Punishment can be jail time, fine, or “restriction of liberty.” Supporters of Polish President Andrzej Duda urge him to sign the bill regardless of strong objections from both the United States, Israel, and the academic community/Holocaust scholars. The measure passed through Parliament on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan 27th 2018. This causes Israel to postpone diplomatic meetings with Polish representatives, and both Israel and the USA voice objections to the measure. 

Immediately after this, Feb. 2nd 2018: ISRAEL’S EMBASSY IN POLAND RECEIVES WAVE OF ANTISEMITIC MESSAGES AFTER HOLOCAUST BILL

The Polish President signs said bill into law, provoking another objection from Israel, and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson releases a critical statement on the law. 

 February 6th, 2018: an article which asks an important question – Poland wants to outlaw blaming Poles for Nazi atrocities. But what about the Jedwabne massacre? To cut to the chase, in an occupied town of Poland in 1941, the Polish residents rounded up the town’s Jewish population, and then willingly (and freely) slaughtered an estimated 400-1,400 of their Jewish neighbors [numbers are estimates as the site was not fully excavated, but rather exhumed in a controlled section], as German forces looked on. The Germans had even refused to let them use firearms, and so the gentile Polish residents of Jedwabne used farm tools as their method of execution. 

Following the end of the Holocaust is another example people are worried is banned from discussion. In 1946, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Polish gentiles in Kielce held a pogrom against Holocaust survivors returning home. They murdered 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Then, as of this Shabbat (Saturday, Feb. 10th 2018), jumblr users begin to post warnings about Americans seeing these Pro-revisionism Polish videos on youtube. Others confirm Israelis have been inundated with these videos as well. Although I don’t know if it began earlier, I have noticed that people started first seeing these ads introduced on the Jewish weekly holy day/day of rest, and I do wonder if slipping them in when many Jewish people wouldn’t have noticed was intentional, which feels especially sinister. 

 Today, Feb 12th 2018, Jerusalem Post asks: WHY IS THE POLISH GOVERNMENT TARGETING ISRAELI WEB USERS? The only other article I’ve found that is also about this new propaganda campaign is on a site I am unfamiliar with called Sputnik International News: Poland Rolls Out Social Media Campaign to Justify New Holocaust Bill. 

R.M. Vaughan is a Canadian writer and video artist based in Toronto

When you are a gay man in Canada, you can’t speak certain uneasy truths to heterosexuals, even your liberal, educated straight friends – okay, especially to your liberal, educated straight friends. And No. 1 on that list is that homophobia, violent, ugly, good old-fashioned homophobia, is alive and thriving in our liberal, educated country.

Goodhearted straight people simply won’t believe you. Everybody has gay friends now. Gays are on TV. We’re so accepted, we’re no longer an en vogue minority. What fortunate days! Gay men in Canada live in a time and place where our sexuality is of so little concern that it’s actually boring. It’s just dreamy, our little bubble – and a damned lie.

Death positive, or the Death Positive Movement, is basically about accepting the inevitability of death and removing the fear and stigma that surrounds it. Everyone dies, it’s part of being human, but there’s a lot of stigma surrounding it that’s a relatively modern thing.Not even a century ago, death was just a thing that happened. People didn’t exactly want to die, but they didn’t hide it behind closed doors like we do in the modern west.Death positivity and the Good Death are also about creating a more natural experience with death, opening up discussions about it, like how you’d like your remains to be handled, and just overall making death less of a scary hidden thing.

Here’s a little link about what it means to be death positive.

And if you’re interested in learning even more I highly suggest watching Caitlin’s (the founder of The Good Death movement) Youtube channel, Ask A Mortician which is linked here! While she does discuss death and the macabre, there’s nothing explicitly gory or scary in her videos.

An excellent jumping off point for her videos is this TED talk she did! After that I just clicked around her channel until I ended up watching all her videos lmao

Death is stigmatised? <_<

Not the death itself but everything surrounding it. Up until around World War II, death was a very at home affair. The family would care for the corpse until it was time for the wake, which would be held at home, and then the corpse would be buried in the ground, sometimes in just a basic shroud or a simple wood coffin.

Since World War II however, death has become a privatized industry and partly because of that people put a sort of stigma on dying. Instead of being cared for by the family. a corpse is put behind closed doors and is cared for by a mortician. A wake or funeral service is held in a designated funeral home. The body is embalmed in chemicals to slow decomposition (and the chemicals used in embalming aren’t exactly safe). The corpse is buried in a casket (which is different than a coffin) and is encased in cement.

Read this, digest it, share it in your circles. Share it in all your leftie meme groups, share it with your white friends who need a reason to shrug off some white guilt, & your nonblack friends who think they’re close enough to blackness to use our culture.

I’ve mentioned wanting to start a collective in my city and doing some action in marginalized communities, but instead of doing that i’ve decided to start bigger. Me & other activists have banded together to start a reparations initiative after one we all benefited from was shut down.

Reparations and the importance of reparations are a hot topic in just about every political circle there is. Regardless of ideology it’s often difficult to get people to understand just how important reparations are, not only to the Black community, but to our current racial climate and the social repair that is absolutely necessary for change to happen. A change which is integral to stopping white supremacy + capitalism.

Black activists and leftists have been telling the world for years that the black community is owed reparations in the form of money as well as opportunities like job programs, higher education, and better neighborhoods. This sub-project’s goal is to eventually branch out into an initiative that’ll guarantee all that for the communities that absolutely need it most. The black + houseless, the black + uninsured, the black + otherwise hopeless.

For this subproject to be successful we need people like you to bring attention to it. No one cares about social change unless it’s got a hashtag or pink pussy hat attached to it, so it’s important that people like you get your friends talking about it! Bringing up the concept of reparations can be difficult, but the labor is paramount over all, and any true ally knows the importance of laboring for marginalized communities.

>>>>> Rightful Reparations For Black People <<<<<<< So tell your friends about this group & to join alongside you, about this project, and about how important reparations are.

Three years ago, Dr. Philip J. Cheng, a urology resident at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, nicked himself while preparing an H.I.V.-positive patient for surgery.

Following hospital protocol, he took a one-month course of Truvada, a cocktail of two anti-H.I.V. drugs, to prevent infection. Later, because he was an unattached gay man, he decided to keep taking Truvada to protect himself from getting H.I.V. through sex.

The practice — called PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis — is safe and highly effective. Several studies have shown that users who take the drug daily are at nearly zero risk of H.I.V. infection.

But when Dr. Cheng applied for disability insurance — which many young doctors do to protect a lifetime’s worth of income should they be hurt — he was told that, because he was taking Truvada, he could have only a five-year policy.

[…]

There are nearly 800 life insurers in this country, according to the American Council of Life Insurers. There are no national figures on how many of them have denied coverage to men because they take PrEP.

But insurance brokers, gay-rights advocates and staff at medical clinics said in interviews they had heard of numerous such cases. H.I.V. specialists say the denials endanger men’s lives by encouraging them to drop PrEP if they need life, disability or long-term-care insurance.

Source

Drawing ink/pencil: highly variable $-$$$. To start out with it can be quite cheap, if you’re just starting with school supplies and notebook paper. I’ve found even the higher-end paper products aren’t nearly the biggest drain, however, as when you start using the specifically artistic pens and pencils. I’d recommend sticking with basic supplies while you’re still developing your drawing skills, including using sharpies when you’re doing sketches (although these are getting a bit more expensive, too, they last quite a while even with heavy use). I also got a lot of use out of the 6-pack of varying sized Micron pens. For pencils, wooden is much preferred over mechanical, and if you can’t afford a full pack, I’ve personally gotten by fairly well just with 2B and 6B. As for colored pencils, quite honestly I’ve seen little difference in quality between expensive and cheap beyond color-choice. For charcoal, the charcoal pencils have struck me as something of a gimmick–you can do about as well just with a stick. Also, don’t neglect white charcoal; it really makes a difference and gives you a lot more options with your drawings. This is a pretty approachable craft to learn, however, even if you’re broke to begin with.

Drawing digital: highly variable $-$$$. Tablets aren’t nearly as expensive as they used to be, and there are a lot of free programs online. My experience here has been limited by my own funds, but I will say this is still an accessible hobby. For the most part, because my digital equipment is lower-end (also just due to talent), I’ve found it most useful for touching up my hand-drawn artwork after the fact by cleaning up the digital image, fixing mistakes I didn’t notice before, etc. It’s also a medium in its own right, but you’d have to get better advice elsewhere on what products would really be worth it.

Sewing: high cost $$$. Sewing machines themselves are a costly investment and pretty necessary if you’re actually making a garment, but even hand-sewing racks up, quickly. Thread, pins, and needles are fairly low-cost, but the fabric is getting ever more expensive. A proper pair of scissors can also be a bit costly; kitchen scissors are all right and will get the job done, but you will weary of their ineffectiveness. I also recommend a seam-ripper. I’ve gotten by without any of those special measuring mats or rotary cutters, but each project has its unique costs (snaps, buttons, zippers, batting, etc.). This craft is also a bit difficult to learn by yourself. Youtube tutorials can go a ways, but it’s really better to learn from someone else. If you have access to a sewing machine and a teacher already, this is a pretty useful skill to learn if you can take the time.

Oil painting: moderate to high cost $$-$$$. The costs can be fairly low if you stick with acrylics, but I don’t think much of that medium outside when you’re initially learning how to paint at all. Oil paints are pretty expensive, and you’ll need several base colors–I wouldn’t recommend trying to mix any yourself just from basic red, yellow, blue. When I started out it was in a class, and we were given 2 shades of red, 2 shades of blue, a green, 2 shades of yellow, a brown, and a violet, and even with this, getting just the right shade for the subject was a little tricky (although admittedly this was a beginner’s course). Brushes are also something you’ll want to invest in, and you’ll need several sizes. Turpentine is needed to clean the brushes, and you’ll want Gesso to prime your canvases, too. You’ll also need a flat palette, and then a razor to clean your palette. If at all possible, I recommend taking a class to learn how to do a proper oil painting and care for your equipment, and get some of your initial supplies from there.

Crocheting: low to moderate cost $-$$. I never got into knitting, but I imagine it’s much the same cost-wise. You basically only need yarn and a hook for this. Hooks come in plastic, and you can make a single size work for several weights of yarn in a pinch. The yarn is where the variability comes in. Simple acrylics won’t feel nearly as nice, but they do come pretty cheap. It’s also a very forgiving craft that you can undo and try again, over and over, so you don’t waste much. There’s plenty of online tutorials and forums, too, to help you get started.

Cross-stitch/embroidery: low cost $. Floss is fairly cheap, you can get a very wide selection of colors, and it goes quite a long way. Aida cloth is also fairly inexpensive, particularly given how long a project can take. You don’t need a frame, but they do help, and they run pretty cheap if you just get a plastic one. In terms of learning how, it’s very easy to pick up. There are also free online resources to make your own patterns. If you start adding beads and such the costs may stack up, but for the most part this is a pretty inexpensive craft.

Thank you to all survivors for sharing their Me Too stories. I see you. I celebrate you. I will continue to walk with you and stand behind you on this.

I’m calling this a “Men’s Me Too” #mensmetoo because I want reciprocate by owning the ways in which I have contributed to the cycle of violence that women receive the lion’s share of in our world. My wish is for other men, specifically cis-men, to do the same*. It’s an opportunity to be brave, build awareness, and to prove that another world is possible.

*Trigger warning: sexual assault themes and verbal abuse

When I was 16, I was almost successful at pushing my girlfriend into having sex she didn’t want. She didn’t say “no” but I could feel it from her body — as any jackass with half a brain can in these situations. When I finally got a hold of myself and stopped. right before the act. She cried. I went silent. We parted ways without saying much more.

I’ve never thrown a punch at another human, but in my 20’s I used a raised voice to ventilate pure rage towards partners with fair regularity. Whiskey and cocaine were always involved, but that’s no excuse. These substances only opened the door to a deep anger and hurt that were already there and had nothing to do with my partners — except for the fact that I, a lifelong pacifist, subconsciously sensed that I would face no retaliation from my partners given how intimidating I knew I could be.

On one occasion the cops were called and my roommate was randomly assaulted by the officers in our home when they arrived.

Though to a much, much lesser degree, angry outbursts played a role in my last serious relationship.

These are things I can’t and won’t forgive myself for. Not yet at least. Remorse is a powerful thing that has helped me to right wrongs and grow (remorse being very different than guilt).

So here’s where I’m at and what I understand today, if you are so inclined to keep reading. I am open to feedback:

I’m still in therapy after so so many years of spiritual practice and tirelessly working on myself in so many ways. I am actually quite hesitant to enter a relationship now until I know I have excised this completely. The deep coal of anger that I have in the past unleashed in partnered situations has a root: trauma. Part of that root is my experiences growing up as an “effeminate” male in a conservative community - and all the ridicule, humiliation, and physical assault that came with it, including at the hands of my own father. Unearthing and healing that root is incredibly difficult and tedious because the atmosphere of subtle and not so subtle violence I grew up in was the very air that I breathed in the most tender years of my life.

Unconsciously, I have spent most of my life caught in a cycle of violence that is not only perpetuated in our society, but is embraced and promoted. I believe this to be true for every single one of us.

This is mostly for my fellow men:

Every male is shamed and hurt in some way for not being able to perform dominance in the way that we’re supposed to. No matter what, at some point we don’t measure up. Every male lives in a secret fear of being outed as inadequate in some way. It’s a game we learn to play, to perform, when we’re so young, and the only way to play correctly is to shut down empathy and emotion. Yet, emotions that are shut down don’t die. Those emotions, rather, look for a safe place to be expressed. And when someone is vulnerable to you, that is a technically safe place. This is the basic cycle. The tip of the iceberg, really. This is no way to live.

It’s important for me to clarify that I share about being on the receiving end of gendered abuse not to compare and not to say “hey, men suffer, too.” While it is true (and unspeakably disgusting) that men are assaulted physically and sexually in our society at growing rates, an important variable remains true in our situation — we are granted the privileges and power that come with living in male bodies (especially white male bodies), and such are scientifically confirmed to mitigate the effects of trauma and bolster resilience. A man who is sexually assaulted, for example, will not have to suffer the pain of that while being catcalled on the street multiple times a day and then hear their own president condone this and worse violent acts. That will never happen.

Issues around race, able bodiedness, sexual preference, gender identity, and so on do complicate this basic point. I suppose I am assume I am writing to predominantly white men and white-passing men here. I own that this is myopic in nature.

While I am terrified of posting this right now, I know that I know that I know what I am admitting to is nearly universal for men. I challenge more men to come out and own their shit, too.

Because honesty, awareness, and courage are the seeds of change.

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!?!

I’d trade my own life for a world without nazis. Fuck my phone. Fuck going to the moon. Human life should not be the cost of societal and technological progress.

to white supremacist minds. Ok. So the Nazis were all about physics … as long as it was with things you could see & touch. Rockets, improved motors, even radio tech (which gives tangible audio and/or visual results) were awesome and very good careers for good German boys. Theoretical physics, on the other hand, was viewed as made-up Jewish bullshit. The German scientific old guard did NOT like little punks like Einstein. Who did they think they were, running around with their “time is relative” and “the interstellar ether doesn’t exist” and who the shit even cares what’s INSIDE an atom, Albert, it’s not like the INSIDE does anything. JESUS. The Nazis saw modern physics as being the same thing as Freud’s psychology, Klimt’s modern art, and Kafka’s stories: a decadent waste of time, way too Jewish, and definitely not cool or manly. So to combat uncool Jewish science, pro-Nazi German scientists founded an actual movement– “Deutsche Physik/Aryan Physics”– all about real stuff like engines and bombs and it was gonna serve the SHIT out of the fatherland. No Jews allowed.

“Ugh, GROSS.” -Nazis Jewish nerds who wanted to study physics & engineering had to settle for theoretical physics. And boy did they ever. Niels Bohr, Hermann Minkowski, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Epstein, James Franck, Rudolf Kompfner, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf , Eugene Wigner, Frank and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and some dude named Albert Einstein among others were all turning their lemons into sweet, sticky theoretical physics lemonade in 1920s Germany. Every single one of them, and more, emigrated to the US in the 1930s. Jewish colleagues from Axis Italy, like Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi– aka the guy who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, and married to a Jewish woman– joined the brain drain as Europe hemorrhaged nuclear physicists right into America’s warm, heaving, bloodthirsty bosom. 

*artist’s rendition 

Albert Einstein’s application to become a US citizen. Dated Jan 18th, 1936. The few Gentile nuclear physicists Germany had managed to produce– Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Arnold Sommerfeld– were persecuted just for being into Jewish stuff. Like, “were called out in the official SS newspaper for being ‘White Jews’” and “Heisenberg’s mom called Himmler’s mom and told her to tell Himmler to make the Nazis stop being mean to her boy”-level persecuted. That’s right, these badass Reich science dudes couldn’t even do their job without their moms running interference. THAT’s how fucking great the Nazis were at science. Meanwhile the bright lights over in Deutsche Physik were talking about how there’s actually been a bunch of moons and when of the last ones fell down it buried Atlantis and also the sun’s gravity suddenly stops at 3x the orbital radius of Neptune. Like… thank God for those Nazi scientific advances, amirite?

Nationalist German scientists cheerfully joined the persecution of their Jewish colleagues, because Nazi scientists just really wanted Jewish physicists’ jobs. But the bummer was, the Nazi scientists couldn’t handle the mathematics that made relativity work. They were too dumb to do that science. Look– we’ve all been there. But the nationalist German scientists’ approach was– instead of leveling up their game, just discredit everything their rivals did. Declare it dumb, and made-up, and all the good parts of this stuff we just said was dumb and made-up were already invented by Aryans anyway, so why keep Jewish scientists around? Just forget about this atomic physics crap and keep giving us money to talk shit about Neptune, it’ll be great.

“Hahaha wut?” -Nazis Eventually the Third Reich figured out that atom bombs were a thing and they should probably make one. They put Heisenberg– who, if you’ll recall, just had to have his mom call in an anti-bullying PSA to the Fuhrer’s secretary three short paragraphs ago– in charge. With every single other person who knew about nuclear fission having left Germany years ago, Heisenberg was pretty much on his own. The Nazi bomb project went nowhere. A Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons would been able to do whatever the fuck they wanted. The only thing that stood in their way? Their own. goddamn. antisemitism.

An increasing number of Indigenous communities are becoming partners in renewable energy projects in Canada and creating thousands of jobs as they do it.

A new national survey shows nearly one fifth of the country’s power is provided by facilities fully or partly owned and run by Indigenous communities.

It represents a dramatic increase in the last decade in renewable energy projects like hydro, wind and solar power.

The author of the report, Chris Henderson, says the real surprise for him is the amount of employment that clean power is creating — 15,300 direct jobs for Indigenous workers who have earned $842 million in employment income in the last eight years.

“That is a huge number, because if you have a job you are contributing to the economy, it’s a real job, it’s honest work,” he said in an interview with CBC News. “The number of jobs created is the story of how our country is changing and how Indigenous people are part of a clean energy future.”

There are now 152 medium to large renewable energy projects with Indigenous involvement. That’s up from approximately 20 projects in 2008.