'Jeffrey Goldberg Dismissing Yemeni Deaths Is Why He Was in the Group Chat to Begin With'

My death row meal would be a lobster taco that I ate in Puerto Nuevo, Baja California

- Santiago Lastra 

 Page at the Whitney for their Ruth Asawa 'Through Line' exhibition last autumn through early 2024

2019 interview with Kiki Smith

Charlotte Mayer at Pangolin London

'The facts of the joint Anglo-Saudi assault on Yemen are beyond question.'

 OF COURSE IT'S NURSE LED WHO ELSE WOULD DO IT PROPERLY

We Albanians are just the latest scapegoats for Britain's failing ideological project

Lea Ypi

"...and brain drain is an open wound" additionally, evoked, specifically Filipino healthcare workers, immediately, at this end, for [gestures] reasons.

And, more obviously threaded through the above's opening, Kadare's Linda B.

YMMV etc (there's the rub)

Very impressive speech from Sunak, sober, serious, everything Truss was not.
Most importantly, the grim look on his face - refusing rightly to smile - underlined a new approach.

— Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) October 25, 2022

Court journalism.

'By 2030, about 250 million people may experience high water stress in Africa, with up to 700 million people displaced as a result'

Fuck the Police by Mona Eltahawy

 Horace's chickpea, lagane and leek soup

 climate (in)justice in Madagascar

RIP Dawn Foster

My family are Mununjali, from Beaudesert, part of the Yugambeh language group of the Scenic Rim and Gold Coast. South East Queensland is my home.

Today’s featured work is another self-portrait, this time by the 17th century Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, Salvator Rosa.

Philosophy, about 1645

Salvator Rosa, 1615-1673

Oil on canvas, 116.3 x 94cm

Presented by the 6th Marquis of Lansdowne in memory of his father, 1933

© The National Gallery, London

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose deliberately mixed messages. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose encircling individual politicians whilst being careful to shore up the wider Tory-liberal project. Choose waving away a decade of austerity. Choose your friends. Choose "counting is an inexact science". Choose precarity. Choose blaming the public. Choose divide and rule. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future.

Siri what is a cold chain?

Of the many things it might be nice to brand on the foreheads of U.K. legacy media names, some public figures and various politicians etc. at the moment, our first submission is Stephanie Brittain:

The drivers and impacts of hunting and consumption of wild meat are not homogenous, and should not be treated as such
[link]

Ingar Solty synthesises some aspects of coronavirus foregrounding here.

The claim that Spain and Italy are EU-peripherally analogous to the particularly stricken Greece seems off but given the forensics on what Cindi Katz might note as 'broad retreats from the social wage', his Engels from The Housing Question is quite the summary

Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure of creating epidemic diseases among the working class with impunity...

(Thank you Hannah Black.)

Privilege

Into this sky which has
more airplanes
than other skies
I look and see half a dozen
small whitenesses passing
like tired stars
through the blue. I watch them
instead of watching
the woman swimming
in an oversized T-shirt that clings
to her body like slime, instead of
seeing the child splashing
in his inflatable sleeves
while his parents puff on
elaborate e-cigarettes.
Instead of speaking,
I lie back in my chair that's
turned to face the sun's full strength
and try to become browner.
In this sky, planes fly
low and heavy, back and
forth from the base,
practicing war. I'm afraid
I'm finally all right
knowing good things
in me have died.

- Elly Bookman

an inland sea

living in the sea

Beira.

I study decision-making in violent contexts, and I was struck by Paul Bloom’s assertion that perpetrators of violence don’t dehumanize their victims but, rather, see them as humans and intentionally choose to harm them as such (Books, November 27th). Bloom seems to assume that one’s reasons for acting violently are consistent over time, and that the physical and mental responses to harming someone are the same for one’s fiftieth violent act as for one’s first. In my research on the Holocaust and on the Rwandan genocide, I have found that the first time a human kills another human the experience is horrific: perpetrators describe reactions that include vomiting, shaking, recurrent nightmares, and profound trauma—much like the trauma of military veterans, who, arguably, are better trained than civilian perpetrators of genocide to deal with the consequences of killing. But, over time, the physical and emotional horror at participating in violence subsides. This, then, is when the moralizing rationale that draws on dehumanizing propaganda comes into play. How does one adapt to participation in violence? By calling on culturally available repertoires that frame violence as the morally right thing to do.

Letter to the New Yorker (Dec 11, 2017) from Aliza Luft, assistant professor of sociology, UCLA

shout to someone who does more for me than they will ever know - probably the most of anyone ever bar well i'll stop now

(also double-bind of white privilege here in casually using the below, and yet still)

Miss Theenie stood watching. One by one, her children had left her and gone up north. Sam and Cleve to Ohio. Josie to Syracuse. Irene to Milwaukee. Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away, too. Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter's family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car.
"May the Lord be the first one in the car," she prayed, "and the last out."

When the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law's truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae's husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland.

(Wilkerson, 2010, p.4).

'in Lafcadio Hearn's travel narrative Two Years in the French West Indies in 1889. Hearn keeps asking what the Creole word means: he is told, variously, that it is a three-legged horse, a hanged man, a five-foot tall dog, or a fourteen-foot tall woman.'

Roger Luckhurst (2015).

Nasreen gathered the food quickly, but she, too, noticed a series of odd smells carried into the house by the wind. 'At first, it smelled bad, like garbage,' she said. 'And then it was a good smell, like sweet apples. Then like eggs.' Before she went downstairs, she happened to check on a caged partridge that her father kept in the house. 'The bird was dying,' she said. 'It was on its side.' She looked out the window. 'It was very quiet, but the animals were dying. The sheep and goats were dying.' Nasreen ran to the cellar. 'I told everybody there was something wrong. There was something wrong with the air.'

from here

Social grants are, in many senses, the glue holding families and communities together

Chris Webb on the social grants crisis in South Africa

oceans atop bus shelters

great plains on lamp posts

"Making Kaşar in Kars"

coins a statement of power indeed

I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord, but before he leaves that point will he at the next stage of the Bill bring forward some evidence from satisfied pubco tenants about how wonderful their relationship is with Enterprise Inns or Punch Taverns?

- Lord Snape* with a deserved burn for Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, pubco chum

Lords Hansard, 2nd December 2014, column 1289

* cash for influence yes

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognise 'how it really was'. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

- Walter Benjamin, 'On the Concept of History'

Sandeep Parmar recording at The Poetry Archive

Now Cod fishing
In the winter time
Is very cold work.
In a Crabboat
I have known times
When it has been blowing
And snowing and freezing
And all the time my Father
Has been rowing the Boat
Up to the lines.

John Craske

260 million passengers per year the slated end figure for the burgeoning Dubai World Central - Al Maktoum International Airport.

Mark Featherstone on Naomi Klein

link to the .pdf '"When Did the Swiss Get so Rich?" Comparing Living Standards in Switzerland and Europe, 1800-1913' by Roman Studer (Journal of European Economic History, 2008)

Karajan making his players wear wigs on this documentary.

'in the middle of nowhere'

Much contemporary public art in Britain is simple-minded, preoccupied with gigantism and populism, and intended to overshadow the more pressing social needs of the artwork's immediate locale. Hans Haacke's skeletal horse in Trafalgar Square is possibly an exception.

Given the context and that Haacke's work is based on the skeleton of a horse (hollowing out the heroic chargers ridden by the bronze and marble military men that line Whitehall), and given that almost all public art - created as it is by committee - is terrible, I'd say Haacke's Gift Horse is really quite noble.

Professor Scott King, chair of visual communications, University of the Arts, London

- letter to the London Evening Standard, 9th March 2015

The drone to me has the visual power to suggest a form of knowledge that invades.

- Dinh Q. Lê

likes of AFRICA IS A COUNTRY been on this for years but from back in the summer or so here's someone kindly put up as a .pdf Adam Haupt's 2012 article from Safundi, 'Is Die Antwoord Blackface?'

(some citations for the author.)

given this, i want to re-share Shawn Wen

We can, I promise you, bear much more than we predict

measurements on here and writing about that which is not your own are nagging somewhat (the wonderful Hannah Giorgis on the audacity of whiteness in writing with contempt and expertise springs up)

- 'white men saving brown women from brown men'

Spivak

a bunch of us went on a stag do to Cork earlier this month and since then the chorus of The Boys of the Old Brigade will not leave me.

Where are the lads that stood with me
When history was made?
A ghrá mo chroí, I long to see
The boys of the old brigade.

the bod shouting SINN FEIN out in the middle as a pub all chorused it tickled me, frankly. Us Englishmen had to sing for our supper with You'll Never Walk Alone. i've had quieter pints.

Something a mate said over java in Brixton about a passage describing a woman's eyes and hair or etc. in Laurie Lee recalled twitter user actual mango tree riffing on white writers and literature's constant representation, and another mate reminded me of similar over beers in Hammersmith or St Pancras or such last week. among other things, this reply was caught

@sailornegro Her eyes were the shape of almonds, the color of burnt caramel, and the texture of a third othering food item.

— Glenn (@justabloodygame) May 25, 2015

First Nations leaders acknowledge that violence is a problem on the reserves – which are beset with poverty, drug abuse and unemployment. But only 40% of the country’s indigenous people actually live on reserves, and activists and analysts say the abuse and murder visited on Canada’s indigenous women reflects a broader history of marginalization and abuse.

That view is shared by the United Nations, which has repeatedly called for a national inquiry into violence against First Nations women, similar to the investigation launched into the murder of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico.

The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw) concluded last year that the Harper government’s refusal to investigate the violence was “a grave violation” of indigenous women’s rights.

“The victimisation of native women is partly the legacy of colonial heritage where gender-based violence is linked to the lack of realization of their economic, social, political and cultural rights,” said the authors of the report, Niklas Bruun and Barbara Bailey in an email.

more here

The approach is customised depending on the market and the media in question.

boy better know

The most I’ve been stopped is three times in one day. About a year ago. The first time was at the Épeule Montesquieu metro stop in Roubaix in the early afternoon. That was the BAC. There were two or three of them, a normal stop. The second time was at the Porte des Postes metro stop around 6pm. That was the National Police. I told them I’d been stopped by their colleagues and they searched me anyway. They didn’t give me an explanation. The third time was in the street, and it was the CRS. That time I was really drunk.

from here

In focusing on Sudan with the insistent counterpoint of New York, I have tried to make clear that the increasingly globalized expression of capitalist relations of production, the tenor of neoliberal global economic restructuring, and the broad retreats from the social wage...have common local and regional effects

- Cindi Katz (2004: 259)

never not bodies, never not here for Tim Finney on funky.

always always

Migration illustrates...malice by proxy

Petrol. Meat. Industrial farming. Where have the tributaries gone? I forget. Optics too.

on the roads
they drag crosses

Garissa

Re: this recent welcome news from Paris

French authorities on Tuesday honored a Mali-born employee who saved lives at the kosher supermarket attacked by terrorists as a hero and granted him French citizenship.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve praised Muslim Lassana Bathily, 24, for his "courage" and "heroism" during a ceremony in the presence of Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

these

@sanaa_cue so gross - serve the state and its "values" and be rewarded with non-deportation and slightly less precarious labour

— Peter Ely (@asickrose) January 15, 2015

News that the 2014 summer war in Gaza resulted in the deaths of 539 Palestinian children, approaching 3,000 injured Palestinian children and now about 35 or 40% of Gaza's million or so kids are reported shell-shocked.

(via Priyanka Boghani [PBS staff page].)

In B.C. "Colonization, long-standing inequality, and discrimination as root causes" of violence against Indigenous women and girls.

'Yes, the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls are a ‘sociological phenomenon’.'

This .pdf contains rolling up to date information listing current humanitarian aid projects for Nigeria, with funding status of each project.

(edited to reflect date accuracy.)

In west London, the last words of Jimmy Mubenga (killed by outsourced security personnel, carrying out British state routines) were reportedly "I can't breathe".

Meanwhile in Ohio the Cleveland police union are justifying their homicide of a child whilst expressing outrage that a gridiron player wore a t-shirt.

Reihan Salam unpacks what white privilege means (via Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brad DeLong).

'Race, class, and gender: Intersectionality between social reality and political limits' by Houria Bouteldja (via Justin LS of TMP).

Wow.

[side-note: Bouteldja's navigating through and under etc. different patriarchies reminded a little bit of Deniz Kandiyoti's patriarchal bargains*, in that case just wrt treatments of different patriarchies as a starting point, something since revised by Kandiyoti herself granted

* this may well be a whitesplaining/mansplaining** addition I realise, but just really wanted to rep Kandiyoti, pretty much apropos of nowt, to be honest

**without wanting to dilute a genuinely valuable term]

Lying is easy.

St. Louis police chief says "only criminals" were teargassed in #Ferguson, using the new definition which includes moms, kids, journalists

— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) November 17, 2014

Indigenous over-representation in custody (%)

	Indigenous persons as a percentage of total population	Indigenous persons as a percentage of total juvenile detention population	Indigenous persons as a percentage of total adult prison population
New South Wales	2.3	48.6	22.1
Victoria	0.7	10.8	6.3
Queensland	3.6	52.9	30.0
Western Australia	3.3	68.0	38.5
South Australia	1.9	41.0	23.9
Tasmania	4.0	20.0	12.4
Northern Territory	30.3	96.9	82.3
Australian Capital Territory	1.3	47.6	16.2
Australia	2.5	46.2	26.1

(source: Australian Institute of Criminology, May 2013)

When they were asked why the wall of tower blocks were to be built by Burgess Park but not by Dulwich Park, they answered "Dulwich is completely different". Yes,  Dulwich is completely different because it is full of very rich powerful people who would never allow their community to be bulldozed or their park to be destroyed like this

- Donnachadh McCarthy, Southwark News, Thursday 11 September 2014

Jessica Valenti on the actress Jennifer Lawrence, who reacted with 'absolutely justified anger' to the recent leaking of private images. There's also a eye-opening aside about the Disney Corporation and their terrible response to a similar situation that occurred several years ago, involving the actress Vanessa Hudgens.

'What one book do you wish that you had written?'

Beloved by Toni Morrison.

- Southwark council interview with Andrea Stuart, autumn 2014.


from the same piece: "Plantation life was a kind of intimate terrorism" (on the sugar slave trade in the Caribbean).

Grateful to Annabel (The Call Out podcast, with Henna) for giving me pause on my crass and wrong Talk like a pirate offerings below.

a straight consideration, mind you...

the policing/colonisation of language and what this affords bodies and their identities. What was it Hannah Black said about trauma? A stupid word for parts of yourself becoming inaccessible?

Tiyang pinten wonten kapal punika? ("How many men are on this ship?", Javanese)

Jangan lihat saya. Lihat lurus ke depan. Coba berlutut. Taruh tangan anda di belakang kepala! ("Don't look at me. Look forward. Kneel. Hands behind your head!", Bahasa)

Di mana senjata-senjata itu? ("Where are the weapons?", Malay)
- A straight consideration of Talk Like a Pirate Day

Enter RUMOUR, painted full of tongues

Rumour. Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace while covert enmity,
Under the smile of safety, wounds the world;
And who but Rumour, who but only I,
Make fearful musters and prepar'd defence,
Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief,
Is thought with child by the stern tyrant war,
And no such matter? Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wav'ring multitude,
Can play upon it. But what need I thus
My well-known body to anatomise
Among my household? Why is Rumour here?
I run before King Harry's victory,
Who, in a bloody field by Shrewsbury,
Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops,
Quenching the flame of bold rebellion
Even with the rebels' blood. But what mean I
To speak so true at first? My office is
To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell
Under the wrath of noble Hotspur's sword,
And that the King before the Douglas' rage
Stoop'd his anointed head as low as death.
This have I rumour'd through the peasant towns
Between that royal field of Shrewsbury
And this worm-eaten hold of ragged stone,
Where Hotspur's father, old Northumberland,
Lies crafty-sick. The posts come tiring on,
And not a man of them brings other news
Than they have learnt of me. From Rumour's tongues
They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs.

Plenty of fine responses to the recent, woeful Economist slavery review. Will B. Mackintosh goes hard here.

Will has a interesting point.

'Why write a review that’s basically guaranteed to piss off the whole world and then waste it on quibbling over a relative detail?...And that’s why they don’t like Baptist’s book: it demonstrates unequivocally that modern capitalism was born in blood. Let me say that again: whatever else you might say about capitalism, it took on its characteristic modern forms of capital accumulation and labor “management” in the context of American slavery. For a group of journalists with a deep, largely unarticulated commitment to modern capitalism’s fundamental benevolence, this is an uncomfortable truth indeed.'

2008 archive piece from Vincent Munié concerning the CAR and "France's long hand"

What Do The Birders Know?

'Resistance'

(there's a great point about Bangladeshi garment workers in here too.)

Jayati Ghosh's latest for the Guardian, arguing that "Asia’s ‘success’ in reducing poverty uses a flawed system for measuring income and ignores food insecurity".

'BANGKOK, 3 September 2014 (IRIN) - Activists warn of a harmful regression in the World Bank's safeguard policies, claiming that proposed changes being considered this autumn could weaken the rights of indigenous people, and others in danger of displacement and abuse as a result of Bank-funded development projects.' here

Teju Cole's seven short stories about drones: here

(via JC.)

Jamilah King at Colorlines flags up a forthcoming HBO show about Brazilian sex workers.

Don't think HBO will get any joy from Latino Rebels, then. cough

re-up from last summer re: 'mysterious' Bronze Age Cretan language, Linear B

'The Celebrity Photo Hacker’s Message To All Women', by Jessica Goldstein

(via EWF)

on Limits to Growth

It seems unlikely that the quest for ever-increasing growth can continue unchecked to 2100 without causing serious negative effects – and those effects might come sooner than we think.

here

'finite planet'

Much has been said — and much more should follow — about the militarization of the police in American cities. The images coming out of Ferguson, MO these past weeks testify to the distribution of military-grade hardware, gear, guns, and vehicles to your everyday police officer.

Here I’d like to focus on just one small part of this distribution of military-grade equipment: the uniform.

here

[h/t: EWF]