Juliania painted these lovely icons and awesomely gifted them to us.
Please talk to one another if you will; I’ve been working on a short diary, but I’ve gotten slowed down by RL. My contributions:
‘New report documents pervasive hunger in America’, wsws.org
“A report released by Feeding America on May 4 reveals that one out of every eight people, and one out of every six children, did not consistently have access to food in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available. While there has been an overall decline over the past several years in food insecurity rates, hunger and poverty levels have not declined to pre-recession levels, the report states.
The report is a further exposure of the government/media narrative that the US has recovered from the Great Recession and, as former President Barack Obama said at the end of 2015, “things are pretty great in America.” Obama, of course, was speaking for his real constituency—Wall Street and the wealthy, who monopolized an even greater share of the national wealth thanks to his right-wing policies.
Donald Trump is taking up where Obama left off, plundering the economy and enriching the financial aristocracy even more shamelessly. With profits, stock prices and the personal fortunes of the rich at record levels, the ongoing hunger crisis stands as an unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system.” (the rest is here; I reckon Feeding America’s numbers are on the low side.)
‘Revolutionary Leila Khaled Begins Hunger Strike in Solidarity With Palestinian Prisoners’, telesur english
“The prisoners on hunger strike are in direct confrontation with the enemy, but they have only the weapon of the empty stomach,” said Khaled.”
(You’ll no doubt have read of the prison guards who’d barbequed outside of the hunger strikers’ cells last week; words fail.)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Ran across this yesterday or today: Week 25: Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember.
so good to see you here, Son of Grey. the theme is alluring of the link is alluring, but i’ll have to read later.
thank you as well, THD. you are an amazing student of the best sorts of history.
i’m needing to be out for the nite. good dreams to all; i actually had a few good ones night before last. sounds hilarious, but i’d remembered some key thing that served…to stop a war. (paging uncle zigmund….) ;-)
quite a list there, greyson smythe (gads, i love your screen name; is that an historical figure i should know?). she sure seems to buy into the ‘russian hacking’ stuff. well, his administration’s ride will be a nasty one, without a doubt, how much worse than obama’s we’ll find out, but we sure won’t be able to trust the msm to keep score for us, will we? but goddess save me, i’m, still glad he beat the red queen. will people wake up in time to be seriously willing to put their bodies in the gears of the machine? kinda doubtful, but we’ll see.
others would be better equipped to say for how long the US has been on the tramping trail toward total inverted capitalism (government subservience to transnational corporations) than i, but oh, my…
hang in there the best you’re able. and which river is the banner for ‘the bruised muse’? nice photo.
Hello Wendy!
No, Greyson is made up out of whole cloth, I’m afraid. And that river? I think I made that up too!
Yes, I can not vouch for the contents of the list; I was intrigued by the idea of someone endeavoring to keep track of the continuing, accelerated devolution.
your chosen name sounds like a character in an agatha christie mystery, lol. but ack! someone’s borrowed your name! and here i’d thunk you might say the river is named Rubicon. so mebbe he was a jk rawlings character?
lists, yes. hugh, a commenter at firedoglake, used to keep a running list of obama’s crimes against the US populace, and of course…the world’s. hell, i now need post-a-note lists stuck to my forehead in order to go down cellar to fetch a few things i need up here. oh, dementia! you never disappoint me!
seems we need a bit moar har har this mornin’, though. it seems that peace prize obomba just went to boston to receive this year’s ‘profiles in courage award‘.
“However, the presentation of the award to Barack Obama Sunday evening brought the entire operation to new level of cynicism. The Kennedy Library notes on his award: “Throughout his two terms in office, President Obama upheld the highest standards of dignity, decency and integrity, serving not just as a political leader, but a moral leader, offering hope and healing to the country and providing young men and women of all backgrounds with an example they can emulate in their own lives.”
best to you and yours, greyson smythe.
My latest book recommendation:
Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts.
Richter’s previous Facing East from Indian Country looked at the Contact Period from the point of view of indigenous peoples. Before the Revolution takes a broader view and amounts to a history of the the regions around the Atlantic from Nuevo Mexico in the west to Germany in the east and chronicles the known history from 900 CE (Chaco Canyon and Dark Age Europe) to 1763 (British establishment of imperial control from the Mississippi to India through a series of wars with its European rivals).
The book is organized so that it can be read in small pieces and gives some localized understanding of how the frontier in America rolled westward and the British policies that kept is rolling until local British-American white settlers amped up the dynamic and threw off the restrictions that were trying to restrain a white planter land grab.
The details of the beginning of the whole tragic effed-up mess that became the “world’s sole superpower”. (We learned well from our Mother Country.)
Needless to say but I will, I have considerable sympathy and empathy for Wendy’s experience that is found in ‘nightmares. I too, experience the “nightmare jaunts” in that the latest is my ongoing Argumentation with Big Mama Good, the Matriarch of Universal Totality _(alas, the female version of the Christian God).
Consequently, I “feel” that I am being obligated to write either a stage play, equivalent to ‘Hamilton” or a television comedy series, and titled, “El Teatro de Los Mitoteros de Pendejadas” and where satirizing our Elected and Appointed Officials, is off-putting to me.
And given that I am grey of beard and long of tooth, the younger whippersnappers should get their “talking-to” and now, I have been struggling to find my diligent approach to “circumventing” this pending dilemma. Any Ideas?
Jaango
not having heard of the intriguing ‘Big Mama Good, the Matriarch of Universal Totality’ concept, even so…why ‘alas’? if that version of a supreme being is female, how nice. but i’d prefer a universal deity, lol. ;-) i looked up ‘hamilton’, the musical, but even so are you pinging more on aaron burr’s role in his life in aid of giving the young whippersnappers a talking to? shortest way to deliver your lecture might be to create a video on youtube; there are instructions for creating them, as there are for those great ones in you give voices to by typing their dialogues. oh, gadzukes; here it is: ‘xtranormals’. i kept adding a first ‘E’ in my search.
Would it not help a little, Jaango, to recognize that for some Christians God does indeed have a mother? We may be few in number, and some of us in far off lands swiftly eradicated, yet we persist in existing ;)
(Sorry, you did ask for an idea.)
as Dylan said, you don’t have to look too hard to see not much is really sacred
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_viewed_YouTube_videos#All-time
is anything in that 1 billion hit club worth hearing? it’s goddam children’s music. is this cuz capitalism is infantilizing or cuz we need the reassurance that comes from lullabies for retarded babies? am I being elitist to think that the purpose of the “music” is actually the advertising that precedes it? yes I am. to a degree.
all right, rant off. cuz the same “your”tube that brings us Gangnam style has this:
i get why this is so popular however
the wheels on the bus go round and round never gets old.
lol. only one i knew #80, but i do prefer the walk off the earth’ (iirc) cover better. youtube ads are a more recent creepiness, aren’t they? folks are paid to install them now? like spamming the wee café for what monetary gain? but yeah, the list is what it is, i reckon, and does reflect shallow infantilized amerrikans. glad you found the balinese one (w/o shadow play, lol); great artisan metal work, and wot a way to repurpose rock hammers! (may i confess that i only made it to minute 10 w/o being made to sit in a corner, pleeeeze? got a bit frenetic…
our internet went down during a hella hail and lightning storm (disorienting for a geezerette, esp. while trying to preview a new diary) but for now it’s on again. well duh…. but if i’m absent for any length of time, and because another wave is rolling in from the west, that may be the why of it.
today: “Nearly 4,800 workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Richland have been evacuated or told to take cover indoors after a cave-in of a tunnel containing radioactive material”, seattle times
joshua frank, may 2016: ‘Hanford’s Leaky Nuke Tanks and Sick Workers, A Never-Ending Saga’
but it’s all right ma… i’m only dyin’….
Never enough money to clean up after wars before the next war.
as boner/U2 said: you are an accident waiting to happen…a piece of cesium left there on the beach. ok, not an exact quote, but Hanford is on the west coast, so i’m good right? nothing for me to worry about is there??? and they’ve made calls to the white house, so we should all feel better right? trump is on it, it’s gonna be great, you’ll love it, you’ll see. and the earth doesn’t even rotate in that direction. it goes the opposite direction, I checked.
so just when i’m getting over the dazed anomie, ennui, and all the rest from the Chernobyl fallout and the special on fukushima fish. Pacific catch of the day: now w/all the strontium a glowing body needs. I wake up each blessed morn brimming w/confidence assured that ever-increasing levels of acceptable radiation exposure are USRDA approved. we are all about more, right? a nation of big gulps. so 750 vs 250 becquerels or millisieverts must be a good thing! merrily merrily day by day, i’m not sure how, but it must be a good thing for one’s acceptable levels of radiation exposure to go up up up. not killing us, so it must be making us all stronger.
i don’t know maybe given all this shit we are so much puddles of emotional garbage that “the wheels on the bus go round and round” is comforting?
i know you waxing satirical, not simply funny, but far too many of these gems made me smile. but yes, i do believe you have it about right, including ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and glow in the dark as well’. correct me if i’m wrong, but isn’t it said that the shortest verse in the bible is: “marie curie wept”? “wheels on the bus”: yes indeed.
allow me to add: h/t mr. wd who’d seen a poster in town today and i dug up; from grandcanyontrust.org: ‘White Mesa Ute Community Protest & Spiritual Walk’, Date: May 13 at 11:00am MDT
Support the Ute Mountain Ute community of White Mesa in its efforts to protect health, water, air, land, culture, and sacred sites near the nation’s last operating uranium mill.
“Located just three miles from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s White Mesa community, the White Mesa uranium mill processes uranium ore from mines across the Colorado Plateau as well as radioactive waste transported from toxic sites across North America.
The White Mesa Uranium Mill is the United States’ only operating conventional uranium mill, but it’s owned and operated by Energy Fuels Inc., a Canadian corporation. Currently, radon emissions from the mill exceed Clean Air Act standards; the mill is also violating a regulation that limits the number of active waste pits to two. By law, mill owners are supposed to actively clean-up sites during operations, rather than leave behind hundreds of acres of toxic land upon closure.
The White Mesa Band of the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Tribe – a community of 300 – lives a mere three miles downwind and downgradient of the mill. The surrounding towns of Blanding, Bluff, Monticello, and Moab, Utah, are also connected to the mill by air and water.”
may 7, the durango herald: ‘Cameco spilled radioactive waste on U.S. 191 near Blanding’
“Nuclear regulators are concerned that a Wyoming uranium mining company, which twice spilled nuclear waste in southeast Utah, may have a larger safety culture problem after it was issued nine violations for lax shipping practices. Cameco operates the Smith Ranch in-situ uranium mine in Converse County, Wyoming. Twice per year, they truck containers of barium sulphate, a radioactive mining byproduct, to waste containment ponds at the White Mesa Mill, located south of Blanding, Utah, on U.S. Highway 191.
The company suspended shipments in 2016 after a March 28-29 incident in which the waste leaked from a shipping container and spilled onto the highway. An Aug. 19, 2015, shipment also leaked en route to the mill.
An investigation revealed that the containers were inadequate to transport the waste material.”
Cameco will solve ‘the problem’.
No comments below it? hell, no: it’s just Induns!
kinda big here yesterday: ‘Mancos Fire’; Fire consumes the Western Excelsior manufacturing facility in Mancos. (photos and related articles), herald again mr. wd says it’s still burning (the excelsior pads) what? no fire suppression system? cripes.
https://durangoherald.com/articles/156541
‘Uranium Tailings Spill Commemoration – near Churchrock, NM
July 16, 2016:; 37 Years Since North East Church Rock – Uranium Tailings Spill That Was Never Investigated Nor Cleaned Up
“In the early morning hours on July 16, 1979, an earthen dam that held liquid uranium waste broke, releasing 1,000 tons of solid radioactive mill waste and more than 90 million gallons of acidic and radioactive liquids into the Rio Puerco. The contaminants flowed downstream through the town of Gallup, NM and across nine Navajo chapters. Residents in the area tell stories of being out herding sheep and then seeing a wave of green liquid coming their way. Some of them were covered in it while they returned home.
Several days after the spill, United Nuclear Corporation sent a handful of people out with shovels and buckets in an attempt to remediate the mess. To this day there has been no reclamation, no study to see how far the contamination went and its impacts on local water systems and people’s health. United Nuclear Corporation has not been held accountable for the spill.”
will there never be an end to the indian wars? hard to imagine, isn’t it? (kinda inappropriate graphics, but still….)
yes, THD: never enough money, but the funding is reflected by ‘failure to care’, isn’t it?
he commanded our fathers
to teach to their children…
that they should not be like their fathers,
a stubborn and rebellious generation,
a generation whose heart was not steadfast,
whose spirit was not faithful….from psalm 78
the paradox of education: how do parents teach children not to be like their parents? unfortunately, most people do not even realize this is a problem, b/c the goal of education is to ensure that kids turn out like the parents but maybe w/more financial success or formal education or whatever. it’s difficult for an achiever to admit that by acting like he/she has acted, the achievers have raped this planet. to death. tough pill to swallow.
the list of horrors, incl. all this mind-boggling, nuclear contamination, perpetuated by “successful, educated, etc.” people…the onus really should be on explaining why the next gen should not just burn all this shit to the ground & start over.
this kid I mentioned I was tutoring in the SAT’s, he’s into skateboarder culture and ergo has plenty of experience w/the capriciousness of cops. & is aware somewhat of the Fergusons et al disproportionately terrorizing minorities, esp. black youth.
and his dad & other adults around this young man want him to go off & become something “respectable.” allah be praised, it’s too late. the trick of education at this point becomes getting someone to unsee & unknow what they’ve experienced, so they can fit in. to unlearn that their parents are mostly full of shit.
did you mean to put this on the history thread instead, parental advisory? yeah, i’ve been peekin’ at, but tryin’ to ignore the site emails. gettin’ close to posting a diary i’ve been working on for parts of four days now. sloooow brain, slow fingers…
be back, tryin’ to make dinner early cuz mr. wd has a meetin’ “up at da big lake” (dammed reservoir serving the valley water plus mesa verde) conservation district; but ha ha ha: just in:
president ‘reality show’ just told james comey…”you’re fired!” (srsly)
“Avacado Hand”: Apparently numerous Usians are butchering their hands trying to halve avacados; WTF???
This is big news on the Inter-tubes; I don’t know whether to laugh or scream at this…
Are Usians really this inept?
The Unexpected PIT?
I dunno? We eat a lot of avacados here in LOS; local and about $4 per kilo (2.1 lbs). Never so much as a scratch…
Can Usian’s possibly not know about the pit???
Having one of those wakeful nights after too much walkabout that happens to me occasionally, I’m up and remembering I promised to look in on the Open Menu – ah, well, thanks wendye! I cannot of course claim these icons as ‘my own’ since they derive from the traditional models, and you have presented them as they do stand, separate from me as the paintings I do always are when I see them as old friends once more in a different setting, and with surprise in the early hours as now.
I have been reading a really beautiful account from the fifties of the Hopi communities, somewhat iconically idealistic I am sure, but restful in its praise, and after writing the above paragraph, I went to find a passage in the unread portion of the book, finding this:
‘…An old Hopi friend told me about a white man who tried to buy from him two Kachina masks which were in his keeping. “I
told him,” said my friend, “that I couldn’t sell those masks. They were entrusted to my brother and me. They didn’t belong to me. Then he said that he had seen my brother, and my brother had said that it was all right to sell them. But I told him, ‘No! My brother didn’t say that. If you saw him, he didn’t say that!’ Then he said to me, ‘Well, there are some old masks in the kiva. Nobody cares about them. You get those for me and I will pay you for them.’ I said to him, ‘Those are not my masks. I would have no right to sell them to you.’ He said, ‘They are old masks. If you get them for me, I will pay you good money.’ I told him, ‘No. They do not belong to me. Even though they are old and nobody pays any attention to them, they are not my property.’ So he gave up and went away.”‘
[“Sun in the Sky” Walter Collins O’Kane]
I live on pueblo land and ride in the bus with elderly natives of a similar culture to the Hopi. They are USians, and yet they are not USians, like me. They are the ones whose culture we unknowingly assimilate (if we are fortunate) coming to live here. And what they know about their Kachina masks is what I know also about my icon paintings. So, knowing wendye’s respect for native traditions of indigenous peoples, it’s really lovely to be greeted by ‘my’ icons here. And humbling.
Thank you, wendye.
And now, after I’ve transcribed the above, here is how the book ends:
‘My genial and able Hopi friend Ralph and I were sitting in the shade of an abandoned school. A tawny outcrop of Black Mesa rose before us, cutting deep notches in the solid blue of the October sky. No disturbing sound came to our retreat. No one broke in upon our seclusion. For an hour we had been talking idly together about whatever topic came to mind.
In some way the subject of world conflict arose – the first world war, the second one, and the march of events since that time. My companion turned to me and spoke with deep and earnest conviction.
“Our Chiefs,” he said, “have always taught us, ‘You must be humble. Whoever you are and whatever you do, you must be humble. Then you will be considerate of others, and you will be happy.’ A long time ago they told us a prophecy. We know that always the ancient Hopi prophecies have come true. This is what they said: ‘When the people forget to be humble, they quarrel. Then all the world starts to fight.’ That was the prophecy, and it has come true.”
Once more a contribution from the Hopis, whose name itself means “peaceful, happy.”
But the Hopi people are few. The world is very large.’
the icons are simply exquisite, juliania, and we treasure them. thanks for the nice hopi conversation, too. the time we spent with the hopi are some of the most memorable and awakening times in my life. we also spent a week w/ a zuni family during the time of the night dances once; the father was a painter, but also carved kachina masks, not just for himself, but for anyone who asked for his help.
this has always inspired me, so i keep it available:
“When the earth is dying there shall arise a new tribe of all colours and all creeds. This tribe shall be called The Warriors of the Rainbow and it will put its faith in actions not words.”
~ Hopi prophecy
it’s 22 degrees brrrrr here; hope it’s warmer there.
Ah, that’s where Rainbow Warrior comes from! It’s a bit warmer here, not much though.
This was another goodie:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/05/18/frickin-illegal-congressman-says-trump-has-no-authority-latest-bombing
So I posted at MoA to make that grounds for impeachment and we’ll elect Congressman Lieu in a snap election whilst the tumbrils roll.
Let the games begin!
i’d almost mentioned your admiration for the rainbow warriors. and is the earth dying enough yet? mebbe not…
i have to agree w/ bennis here, though:
“It’s important to note, Bennis added, that is violation is nothing this is nothing new when it comes to U.S. policy.
“The entire U.S. military operation in Syria is violating domestic and international law,” she explained. “Internationally, the use of military force by one nation against another country is only legal if it’s approved by the UN Security Council, which this wasn’t, or in case of immediate self-defense if an armed attack occurs, which it didn’t. Under U.S. law, the War Powers Act governs if and when a president can send troops into harms way—and that’s actually a pretty high bar. Only if Congress declares war, which they didn’t (and in fact haven’t since World War II), or if Congress authorizes the attack, which they didn’t, or in immediate response to a military attack.”
okay; president pence?
meanwhile, herr cheeto is ‘On His Way To Becoming Largest Weapons Dealer In World History’, antiwar.com
Um, “tumbrel, tumbril, [OF. tomberel, tumeril, a tipcart, fr. tomber to fall, tumble, and tumer to dance, turn somersaults]
Lots more fun than frogmarching.
thanks for the etymology, ww, that’s great, carrying passengers to the guillotine, lol. but i reckon ted lieu’s now the new tulsi gabbard librul hero. do you really know anything else about him? tulsi, of course, stood w/ the imperium on every other FP issue but assad and syria.