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depsidase

mikeo56

Mandami vs Trump

It would have been a TKO, 30 seconds into the first round..

except most of us noticed Trump was already unconscious

jkottke

JD Vance is skiing at a Vermont resort this weekend. The resort’s snow reporter took the opportunity to make some good trouble, sending out a message of resistance against an administration “threatening our democracy, our livelihoods, our land”.

probablyasocialecologist

“GDP growth is primarily a measure of the aggregate quantity of commodified goods and services produced by the economy each year, as valued in terms of market prices. There is no automatic relationship between growth and human well-being, or social progress. What actually matters when it comes to human well-being is what we are producing, whether people have access to essential goods, and how income is distributed. This explains why dozens of countries outperform the US with only a fraction of the GDP per capita. Spain, for instance, has a GDP per capita that is 55 per cent less than the US, but delivers a life expectancy that is five years longer. Portugal outperforms the US with 65 per cent less. The good news is that we know it is empirically possible to meet human needs at a high standard with much less energy and resources than rich countries presently use, and much less commodity production.”

— Jason Hickel, A New Political Economy for a Healthy Planet

stoweboyd

The Witch | Elizabeth Willis

A witch can charm milk from an ax handle. A witch bewitches a man’s shoe. A witch sleeps naked. “Witch ointment” on the back will allow you to fly through the air. A witch carries the four of clubs in her sleeve. A witch may be sickened at the scent of roasting meat. A witch will neither sink nor swim. When crushed, a witch’s bones will make a fine glue. A witch will pretend not to be looking at her own image in a window. A witch will gaze wistfully at the glitter of a clear night. A witch may take the form of a cat in order to sneak into a good man’s chamber. A witch’s breasts will be pointed rather than round, as discovered in the trials of the 1950s. A powerful witch may cause a storm at sea. With a glance, she will make rancid the fresh butter of her righteous neighbor. Even our fastest dogs cannot catch a witch-hare. A witch has been known to cry out while her husband places inside her the image of a child. A witch may be burned for tying knots in a marriage bed. A witch may produce no child for years at a time. A witch may speak a foreign language to no one in particular. She may appear to frown when she believes she is smiling. If her husband dies unexpectedly, she may refuse to marry his brother. A witch has been known to weep at the sight of her own child. She may appear to be acting in a silent film whose placards are missing In Hollywood the sky is made of tin. A witch makes her world of air, then fire, then the planets. Of cardboard, then ink, then a compass. A witch desires to walk rather than be carried or pushed in a cart. When walking a witch will turn suddenly and pretend to look at something very small. The happiness of an entire house maybe ruined by witch hair touching a metal cross. The devil does not speak to a witch. He only moves his tongue. An executioner may find the body of a witch insensitive to an iron spike. An unrepentant witch may be converted with a frttle lead in the eye. Enchanting witchpowder may be hidden in a girl’s hair. When a witch is hungry, she can make a soup by stirring water with her hand. I have heard of a poor woman changing herself into a pigeon. At times a witch will seem to struggle against an unknown force stronger than herself. She will know things she has not seen with her eyes. She will have opinions about distant cities. A witch may cry out sharply at the sight of a known criminal dying of thirst. She finds it difficult to overcome the sadness of the last war. A nightmare is witchwork. The witch elm is sometimes referred to as “all heart.” As in, “she was thrown into a common chest of witch elm.” When a witch desires something that is not hers, she will slip it into her glove. An overwhelming power compels her to take something from a rich man’s shelf. I have personally known a nervous young woman who often walked in her sleep. Isn’t there something witchlike about a sleepwalker who wanders through the house with matches? The skin of a real witch makes a delicate binding for a book of common prayer. When all the witches in your town have been set on fire, their smoke will fill your mouth. It will teach you new words. It will tell you what you’ve done.

lovespreadsroses

https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/im-broke-and-friendless-and-ive-wasted-my-whole-life.html

wejustvibing

took 1 (one) ILLEGITIMATE win for a white man to earn as much as a 7xWDC lewis hamilton

wildlife-nature-photo-deactivat

Black-Backed Jackal (Canis mesomelas) in full flight at Etosha National Park in Namibia

witchesversuspatriarchy

Rattlesnake rights NOW

Woke up this morning with

a terrific urge to lie in bed all day

and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.

And gave over. Put myself entirely

in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?

Make the same unforgivable mistakes?

Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

—Raymond Carver, “Rain"

protoslacker

“Pentagon spending has totaled over $14 trillion since the start of the war in Afghanistan, with one-third to one-half of the total going to military contractors. A large portion of these contracts – one-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years – have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. The $75 billion in Pentagon contracts received by Lockheed Martin in fiscal year 2020 is well over one and one-half times the entire budget for the State Department and Agency for International Development for that year, which totaled $44 billion. Weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years. That is more than one for every member of Congress. Numerous companies took advantage of wartime conditions—which require speed of delivery and often involve less rigorous oversight—to overcharge the government or engage in outright fraud. In 2011, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that waste, fraud and abuse had totaled between $31 billion and $60 billion.”

— PROFITS OF WAR: CORPORATE BENEFICIARIES OF THE POST-9/11 PENTAGON SPENDING SURGE

Clara

#shipoo #vermont

etirabys

This post is my attempt to simplify what I learned from Who We Are And How We Got Here into a timeline I have a shot of remembering for years, with some padding from Wikipedia where I thought it would help me.

—

As a backdrop to the specifics that follow: humans and human cousins have been sort of ambling out of Africa and back in waves of migration and interbreeding and extinction, for the past two million years.

Around 650K years ago, humans split from the group that will further split 200K years later into Neanderthals and Denisovans. These are the two ‘archaic human’ populations that contributed some genetic material to modern humans, whose DNA we got our hands on. This is also maybe the divergence point of humans and another archaic population in Africa that later mixed back into humans, that we don’t have DNA evidence for.

200K years ago, zoom in on the ambling in and out of Africa, because now some of the ambling groups are what we’d call anatomically modern humans – that is, their phenotypes fit within existing human populations. At this point, the split between the San population (the most different-from-everyone-else population alive today, whose descendants currently live in South Africa) and the rest of living humanity begins.

50K years ago, a period of great interest. We see behavioral modernity starting hereish, at the beginning of a period (lasting ~40K years) we call the Upper Paleolithic. The rate of stone toolmaking innovation speeds up from ‘glacial’ to ‘every few thousand years’. (If that seem like an odd setting change, I agree.) We see the first known jewelry and representational art. Likely we’ll never have a satisfactory explanation of what exactly changed. We almost certainly had language by this point.

Human colonization of Australia and New Guinea happens, while ocean levels are low. This is part of a radiation of a hunter-gatherer lineage spreading out all over Asia. Some of them will eventually go to Siberia and the Americas. Some of them will become the Yangtze River population and some the Yellow River population, who will later mix to produce the majority of mainland East Asians.

40K years ago. After several thousands of years of contact with modern humans, Neanderthals and some other branches more closely related to modern humans go extinct. There’s an Italian supervolcano eruption nowabouts whose climate disruptions in Europe may have intensified competition.

One thing this book has taught me is that it’s misleading to talk about ‘population splits’ outside of the Americas, because lineages diverged and met again many times, but insofar as it’s meaningful to talk about when the European and East Asian lineages diverged, it’s now.

30K years ago. The archaic humans in Africa mix back with humans and contribute 2% of ancestry to some modern African populations.

Around this time, there exists a population called Ancient North Eurasians. Some of them go east, and contribute to the population that will give rise to Native Americans (who are ~1/3 Ancient North Eurasian, ~2/3 ancestors-of-East-Asians). Some of the rest will remain and contribute ancestry to various Eurasian hunter gatherers, as well half the ancestry of the Yamnaya people of the Eurasian steppe, who will later invent horse-and-wagon way of life and become massively successful in Europe.

15K years ago, there are two migrations to America over the Bering land bridge: (1) The First Americans (the Ancient North Eurasian - East Asian group) account for the majority of Native American ancestry. These newcomers quickly zoom through the Americas. They also may have had a startlingly small effective population size – like 250. (2) A mysterious population that contributes some ancestry to a handful of groups in the Amazon, a population whose closest known descendants today are, intriguingly, Australasian. We don’t know much about them.

10K years ago, agriculture arises in the Middle East. Some Anatolian farmers spread out into Europe. Some Iranian farmers spread out to India. A thousand years later, agriculture also begins in China, in the Yangtze River and Yellow River populations.

5K years ago. The horse-and-wagon Yamnaya sweep from the eastern European steppe into northern Europe and largely replace the population there, and account for 25~45% of current European ancestry. The Yamnaya culture is the strongest candidate for the source of the Proto-Indo-European language (which has an elaborate shared vocabulary for wagon-parts). A large part of their success may have been that they were relatively immune to diseases that the rest of Europe was not – they brought plague with them, heretofore unknown to Europe. With the Yamnaya, the Bronze Age; we have evidence of much more social inequality than ever seen before, evident both from archeology and genetics, which tell us that the highest-reproducing individual men starting now are more reproductively successful than ever before.

Around the same time, there’s another wave of migration from Asia to North America – the Paleo-Eskimo lineage – that leaves a ~30% imprint in some parts of North America. The Paleo-Eskimos will be displaced 4K years later by a final wave from Asia, the Neo-Eskimos, who are the ancestors of modern day Inuits.

The Yangtze and Yellow River populations are also spreading out nowish. Their collision produces much of modern East Asians. The Yellow River people are associated with the Han, and the Tibetans. The Yangtze population, where they spread south, provides much of modern Southeast Asian ancestry.

4K years ago, the Indus Valley civilization is hit by a wave of migration for Europeish, by a steppe people who bring Proto-Indo-European culture and language. These steppe people are about half Yamnaya-related, and half ‘the Iranian farmer related populations the steppe people encountered on their way south’. The natives are about three quarters local hunter-gatherers, and one quarter Iranian farmers who mingled in ~2K years earlier. The natives and Yamnaya-ish migrants mix over the next 2K years to form a modern Indian population that’s a mixture of the two, ranging from 80% Yamnaya-ish (especially in the north, and in higher-caste groups) to 20%.

Around now, the first of four great migrations and mixing events of Africa starts – most significant among them is the Bantu migration south, out of Nigeria and into west-central Africa. Most of the present-day population structure of Africa is shaped by these relatively recent expansions, making it hard to tease out ancient splits.

itscolossal

A Clip in Extreme Slow Motion Shows Every Detail of Simone Biles’s Amazing Triple-Double

Young athletes are expected to answer the most intimate questions in a cynical and often predatory environment

Emily Ames,

3/29/21

No Matter Where We Are

I stumbled up out of the mattress and wobbled through the little NYC apartment into the kitchen. I felt the warmth of an immense yellow ball of hydrogen fusing into helium and smelled freshly brewed coffee before making out the sun’s rays resting gently on her figure. At the end of the long rectangular kitchen and inches from the square window she sat. Supported by a wooden chair with her back resting on an ancient grey pillow and her legs up on a stool, she studied the morning paper.

After circling an important point about climate change, my grandmother passed the paper to my mom and instructed her to read it thoroughly. Then, with determination, she unwound her legs and carefully placed her feet on the floor. It was time for us to make my grandmother’s signature granola for our breakfast. The stainless steel bowl sat waiting for me as I opened the lower cabinet and reached my short arm into the dark space. I plunged my chubby fingers into the glass jar of raisins that she had brought down for me from the upper cabinet. Two cups of oats and one cup of oil were poured into the bowl by her gnarled but steady hand. I licked the honey off of my fingers from squeezing globs of honey into the mixture. I felt like a professional chef as I sprinkled a handful of sesame seeds into the bowl. She gave me a big spoon, and I used all my strength to stir the concoction. Before adding the last and most important ingredient - sweet and spicy chunks of candied ginger - we each popped a chunk into our mouths. The granola was ready to cook, and we scooped it onto a flat pan. Stepping back a few steps from the low oven, I watched with fear as she assuredly popped the granola into the searing heat.

I sat at the mini kitchen table where my colored pencils and white paper were kept. Eating a red apple she had cut up for me, I reflected on the day before. My grandmother and I had gone to the Frick Museum and wandered through the halls for hours and hours gaping at paintings. We had concurred that William Beechey’s, “Elizabeth Sophia Baillie (née de Vismes)” was superior due to the perfect strokes of paint which formed her ruffled silk dress. A smile crept across my rosy face, and I began to wonder what adventure my grandmother and I would go on this day.

It wasn’t long before the kitchen filled with the delicious smell of browning oats infused with raisins and candied ginger. I brought my grandmother the oven mitts twice the size of my hands and breathlessly watched as she took the granola out of the blisteringly hot oven.

We assembled our breakfast bowls; my granola with milk and my grandmother’s with cream. A silver spoon was lifted delicately by her fingers painted with blue veins and sun spots. She drew out a hefty spoonful of cream and granola. A sparkle from the sun glinting off of her ruby ring surrounded by diamonds caught my eye as it lay round her ring finger seeming as though it had framed her hand since birth.

We began to chat about museums. “You know which museum is my favorite, Emily? The Frick! Have you ever been? Would you like to go today?” her tone changed from happy reflection to excitement. After a second of confusion, I glanced at my mother and then confirmed in an uneasy voice that I had never been to the Frick. “Great, let’s finish our breakfast quickly so we can get out the door. I can’t wait to show you!”

Bellies full and hearts ready, we traversed the few steps to the creaky doorway. My mother helped my grandmother and me with our coats and shoes and sent us out the door and into the elevator. I held my grandmother’s hand as the big metal box ground from the 11th floor down to the 1st floor. The door slowly opened to the peek of grandeur. A expanse of black and white marble floor stretched far in front of me. To the right was a sitting area in which my brothers and I were never allowed to sit; to the left was a mysterious stairway, and straight ahead was the front desk.

Standing behind the immense white marble desk with a telephone wire twisted around his arm as he conversed with a tenant, René tossed my grandmother and me a big smile. We both gave back our biggest grins and strode into the entryway. Swinging open the heavy front doors and opening the portal to the street, the doorman Angel wished us a happy day.

We strode along the streets of the Big Apple at a quick pace, my fingers intertwined with hers. It smelled of 8.4 million people’s trash and 6 hundred thousand dogs’ poo, and yet my nose didn’t sting with disgust; it breathed as freely as a chickadee in a New England forest. I felt extremely comfortable with my grandmother by my side and skyscrapers towering over me from all sides. The siren of an ambulance - closely followed by a police car with flashing rocket pop colored lights - practically deafened me as it whirled past, yet somehow I hardly noticed.

Hundreds of people raced passed us; each face was so dissimilar and unique whilst being shockingly cold and hostile. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the smell of a half puffed cigarette. I scanned for the puffer and was quick to spy a trail of smoke emerging from the tall man trudging ahead of us. Quickly plugging my nose, I put on the ugliest frown I could muster. As we dashed past, I made sure to glare back at the man for a second or two.

Carefully stepping over the cracks in the asphalt sidewalk, I hardly noticed the city blocks passing by. It didn’t take long to get to 71st Street, and before I knew it it was time to cross Madison Ave onto the Frick’s block. But my grandmother didn’t turn onto the right crosswalk, she headed straight. I held tightly to her hand and tried to stop her from stepping off the sidewalk into the road. Fear rushing through me, I gasped, “The Frick is to the right! Towards the park… Look! You can see its limestone walls from here!” She stopped in her tracks, and her face contorted with disorientation. I tried to hide my shock and reaffirmed that we had to cross Madison Ave to reach the mansion. After a few seconds, she confidently led us onto the right crosswalk as if nothing had happened.

We made it to the mansion, and I breathed a sigh of relief. My grandmother and I tramped up the four steps to the entrance. Clutching her light brown shoulder bag and carefully placing each white sneaker clad foot in front of the other, she quietly held onto my small hand for balance. The sixteen foot heavy wooden door loomed above my grandmother and me. With difficulty, we heaved it open and entered Henry Frick’s home.

A short hallway led us into the inner garden courtyard. The ceiling of glass let the sun’s midday light pour into the little green paradise. I longed to sit at the perfect marble fountain in the middle of the garden but knew - from her reaction to my request the day before - that my grandmother would never even think of that as an option. We were here strictly to admire the old master paintings and magnificent European sculptures and decorative arts. I tucked the hope behind me and followed her into the first hallway on the left.

“I’m so happy to be finally showing you the Frick, Emily!” my grandmother sighed with a big smile on her face. Following the identical route from the day before, we explored the marvelous hallways and studied each painting carefully. On passing William Beechey’s, “Elizabeth Sophia Baillie (née de Vismes)”, my grandmother pointed at the perfect strokes of paint which formed Elizabeth’s ruffled silk dress, just as I had the day before. A few hours passed, and we came upon a painting I hadn’t given much attention to the day before. On this day, my grandmother and I both were surprised by it’s beauty and stopped short in front of it.

Together we stood there, fingers still intertwined, mesmerized by the crashing waves and encapsulating clouds which seemed to be engulfing us. Turner’s “Van Goyen Looking out for a Subject” was more than just a painting. I stared at the tall ships and imagined my grandmother and me at the helm, steering through the foaming ocean. No matter where we were or what adventure we were on, I knew there was no place I’d rather be but there, holding hands with her.

Emily Ames

10/10/20

Woman

She’s the strongest woman I know

She’s my role model

I wish she didn’t have to go through what she went through

She’s my grandmother

She was used as an object

She was taken advantage of

She had no power

She couldn’t stop it

He didn’t listen to no

How many people don’t listen to no?

Why does it happen so often?

I am strong and yet I am not as strong as a man

Am I weak?

I am smart, perhaps smarter than a man

Why isn’t that strong?

I was a little girl but I couldn’t play roughly in sports

I played hockey

Why did I have to apologize for knocking someone over?

That’s what hockey is about isn’t it?

He was belittled and shamed when he didn’t knock someone over

If he apologized for knocking someone over, he was laughed at

She was targeted

She was the weak one

The parents of the boys on the opposing team

What did they say?

“Go get her, take advantage of her”

You could never get an A in the class

He was destined to get an A without making an effort

He flirted with the women teachers

They liked it

He spent his time walking in the hallways making vulgar comments about the girls walking by

What did he learn in school?

That it’s okay to sexualize a girl if her shoulders aren’t covered?

If she dresses in a certain way she is asking for it?

She had it coming?

She is a bitch?

Then I am a bitch

All of us women are

We must fight for our rights

I want to choose what happens to my body

Maybe pink isn’t my color

Maybe I like to wear buttoned up shirts

I like men

I am somewhat accepted for who I am

If I liked women, would I still be accepted?

If I was a black woman would I still be accepted?

If I was a trans woman would I still be accepted?

Would they respect that I was a true woman?

I heard a group of boys talking about how they wanted to sexually assault a girl who used to bully me

Why didn’t I tell the principal of the school?

Because she used to bully me?

Because the principal was a man?

Because I was afraid?

Maybe those boys would decide to punish me and do horrible things to me instead of her because I was a tattle tale

A bitch for telling on them

Maybe because the president called this “locker room talk”

He thought it was okay

I love being a woman

I love how I look

I love all my sisters

I should have called out those boys for that girl

She bullied me

Still one of my sisters

But I was afraid

I am scared when my mother gets cat-called by construction workers

She is my protector

Yet she gets disrespected

She can’t control the situation

I shouldn’t be friends with boys

That makes me a whore

Why?

I love my friends

I like having conversations with them

My mother told me about being a woman as I grew up

It was painful

She told me I would be viewed as an object

A sexual object

A housewife

I can’t walk alone at night

I can’t trust anyone to respect me

I can’t trust anyone to not hurt me

They will advantage of my womanhood

It could be my brother, my father, my uncle

“Don’t let him kiss you if you don’t like it”

But he expects it

I’m afraid of his reaction

Of course my niece 10 years of age should kiss me

On the side of the lips

Why?

I will always be talked over

Interrupted

Not taken seriously

I must do extensive research to make sure I’m right before I speak

Yet he spits things off his tongue and everyone believes him

He isn’t right, I’ve done research

“No no, he must be right”

Because he’s a man?

Don’t stop on your drive to go to the bathroom

You never know who might grab you

Tuck your car key in between your index and pointer finger

Make sure you have something you can use as a weapon

You are taught to be polite

That politeness is used by bad people to take advantage of you

Why isn’t God a woman?

Why is the word “woman” an extension of the word “man”?

Why hasn’t there been a woman president?

Are we too emotional?

Many men say yes,

Research shows that we are less emotional than men

My sisters are strong

Some go through childbirth

Most go through monthly menstrual cycles

“Moody bitch”

Give me a break

Ruth Bader Ginsberg died

My grandmother is on her way out

It’s terrifying to lose other women who helped me throughout my life

They showed me it is possible to heal

To take control of the situation

To keep saying no

To believe that I am smart

Beautiful

Strong

I have a voice worth listening to

Never give up

I’m 16

I have many more decades of womanhood

To enjoy

To be thankful for

To grow in

To help my sisters

My fellow citizens of womanhood

To fight

To do my best

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azspot

“In fact the whole Republican Party, since long before Trump, has committed itself to the antidemocratic project of trying to create a narrower electorate rather than win a wider vote. They have invested in voter suppression as a key tactic to win, and the votes they try to suppress are those of Black voters and other voters of color. That is a brutally corrupt refusal to allow those citizens the rights guaranteed to them by law. Having failed to prevent enough Black people from voting in the recent election, they are striving mightily to discard their votes after the fact. What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.”

— On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway

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