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luminiferous ether

@exit-weeping-blog / exit-weeping-blog.tumblr.com

the things i do for love.
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Jamaican Sea Otter #briskcuts ™djcнrιѕѕaydιѕнoттa✊#YᐯE{ᗷᐯᑕ•ᒍᗩ}

Source: vine.co
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nativeamericanrightsmovemen-blog
nativeamericanrightsmovement.tumblr.com

The Kayapo declare war with the energy companies and government of Brazil.

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epiphany-felicity

This is everythinggg.

I will always reblog this.

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weareallmixedup

For those who don’t know.

That woman holding up the machete is Tuira Kayapó. 

She’s a respected leader for the Kayapo and has been fighting to protect the amazon for decades.

This is a really famous photo from The Altamira Gathering in 1989, where hundreds of Native Amazonians openly confronted the Brazilian government with their crimes.

- liz

Source: nativeamericanrightsmovement
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thinkmexican

Mexico Takes to the Streets for Students of Ayotzinapa

Mexicans took to the streets on Wednesday in impromptu marches in support of students from a rural teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, who were murdered and disappeared in late September. Police officers and cartel members are suspected of burying the students in mass graves, which were discovered on Saturday. The public outcry led to a call for a national march to demand justice.

More than 50 cities participated from Chiapas to Baja California.

Photos via Proceso, La Jornada

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Ohio Police Change Story and Arrest Couple During Traffic Stop

A video has gone viral of a couple being arrested for obstruction during a traffic stop in which an Ohio police officer appears to give a series of conflicting stories as to the reason for the stop.
On Wednesday, Kathryn Said, 30, of Taylor, Mich., and Andre Stockett, 34, of Huron, Ohio, were driving with their 2-week-old baby when police pulled them over and asked for Said’s license. 
Police found that Said’s information checked out, but instead of returning to her side of the vehicle, an officer approached Stockett’s side.
According to the police report viewed by the Sandusky Register, Officer Christopher Denny said that he had seen Said pick up Stockett from an apartment complex and that he believed Stockett to be Jeremy Newell, a man wanted on felony warrants.
The cellphone video shows Denny asking for Stockett’s ID and Stockett refusing, stating that he didn’t need to show ID because he hadn’t done anything wrong. The officer then asks him to step out of the car, a request that Stockett also refuses, indicating that Said was pulled over for a minor traffic violation.
Stockett asks the officer why they have been stopped, and several viewings of the video seem to provide several different answers. First the officer claims that Said was driving without her lights on, to which Stockett replies, “But it isn’t even dark.” The camera seems to clearly show the sun beaming behind the officer
"I’m not Mr. Newell … I have done nothing wrong, you have no probable cause, I’m not coming outside the car, I’m scared for my life," Stockett says. "I haven’t done anything wrong, I haven’t broken the law … I don’t have to get out the car, I don’t have to tell you who I am."
Denny then has a canine unit run around the car to sniff for narcotics. Stockett can be heard on the tape saying that he doesn’t have a right to do this, to which the officer replies that he can because of Said’s nervousness and Stockett’s refusal to show his license. The couple are upset by this, with Said heard saying that she isn’t nervous at all.
The officer claims that the dog has a “hit” on the car and that he is going to need both of them to step out of the vehicle. Stockett then informs the officer that he has a 2-week-old baby in the backseat, to which the officer replies that the baby will be given to child protective services.
The Sandusky Register has spoken with the Sandusky Police Department about the incident, and authorities are supporting the officer and believe that his claim of probable cause checks out. They point out that during the call to run Said’s license, Denny asks about the wanted man Jeremy Newell, saying that that proves the officer believed Stockett to be a person with warrants.  
Sandusky Assistant Police Chief Phil Frost told the Register that the sun that appears to be seen in the video isn’t the sun but is instead the flash from Stockett’s camera. Frost also said that the officer had probable cause to have a police dog sniff around the car because Said seemed “nervous” and Stockett refused to produce a license—and that was enough to warrant a search. 
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veryfemmeandantifascist
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Robin used to keep chickens in his backyard, and pigeons on the roof of his Park Slope, Brooklyn, brownstone. The chickens for eggs, the pigeons for sport. 

He isn’t allowed either anymore. “

“When the new people started moving into this neighborhood, buying up the buildings, they started demanding changes. They got rid of the chickens first. Then they complained about the pigeons. I was the last guy to be able to keep them. These new folks love their animals and spend crazy amounts on them, as long as it’s cats and dogs.”

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Read more »

Photo: Chris Arnade

Source: theguardian.com
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veryfemmeandantifascist
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dynastylnoire
A white Ohio woman is suing a Downers Grove-based sperm bank, alleging that the company mistakenly gave her vials from an African-American donor, a fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter in an all-white community.

…..I’m so afraid for this baby. I wonder how they are treating her considering they didn’t want a black child to begin with

…..

So…they can’t love the child, now 2 years old, because it’s Black? What have they been doing the past 2 years? Why are they not asking their neighbors, friends, and families to stop being racist shitheads to a toddler? I hope this baby gets removed from them and placed into a loving home.

white queers strike again

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veryfemmeandantifascist

BREAKING: There is a video a protestor recorded that shows the cops swung first..inciting the riot. #Ferguson

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postracialcomments-deactivated2

In Case You Missed It: Meet Ronald Ritchie, The White Man Who Lied About African-American Man John Crawford In A Walmart 911 Call, That Led To Police Murdering Crawford, Who Was Holding A BB Gun Which Was Pointed To The Ground & Then Sat On The Ground, & See How Twisted This Entire Case Is: An Explainer On The Murder of John Crawford

Sunday September 7th’s Guardian story on the Beavercreek, Ohio police murder killing of 22-year-old Wal-Mart shopper John Crawford, on August 5th, brings to light new facts about the case which should make any reader’s blood curdle.

Here’s the excerpt of the opening of the story…

Doubts cast on witness’s account of black man killed by police in Walmart

Alleged to have threatened customers, John Crawford, 22, was having a phone conversation while holding an unloaded BB gun

Jon Swaine in New York theguardian.com Sunday 7 September 2014 10.37 EDT

When Ronald Ritchie called 911 from the aisles of a Walmart in western Ohio last month to report that a black man was “walking around with a gun in the store”, he said that shoppers were coming under direct threat.

“He’s, like, pointing it at people,” Ritchie told the dispatcher. Later that evening, after John Crawford III had been shot dead by one of the police officers who hurried to the scene in Beavercreek, Ritchie repeated to reporters: “He was pointing at people. Children walking by.”

One month later, Ritchie puts it differently. “At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody,” the 24-year-old said, in an interview with the Guardian. He maintained that Crawford was “waving it around”, which attorneys for Crawford’s family deny.

Ritchie told several reporters after the 5 August shooting that he was an “ex-marine”. When confronted with his seven-week service record, however, he confirmed that he had been quickly thrown out of the US marine corps in 2008 after being declared a “fraudulent enlistment”, over what he maintains was simply a mixup over his paperwork….

And, here are just a few of the additional/primary pieces of information about the case covered later on in the story…

• After everything was said and done, “Crawford, 22, turned out to be holding an unloaded BB air rifle that he had picked up from a store shelf. After Ritchie said Crawford appeared to be ‘trying to load’ the gun, the 911 dispatcher relayed to an officer that it was believed the gunman ‘just put some bullets inside’…”

• Crawfords’ attorneys informed the Guardian that autopsy findings concluded Crawford was shot “in the back of his left arm and in his left side, supporting their claim that he was turned away from the police officer who shot him.”

• Crawford’s family has “pleaded” with Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine to release the store’s surveillance video of the shooting to the public. For all intents and purposes, it fullyundermines statements made by 911 caller Ronald Richie, who, according to the story, made the only call to the police about “the incident.” And, while DeWine is quoted stating that releasing the tape to the public “would be ‘playing with dynamite,’” someone from DeWine’s office let Ritchie review the recording (apparently, to get his fabulist story “straight”)!

• Crawford’s father notes this about the video in the article: “‘It was an execution, no doubt about it,’ alleged Crawford’s father, John Crawford II. ‘It was flat-out murder. And when you see the footage, it will illustrate that.’”

• The Crawfords’ attorneys have requested that “the department of justice…open a civil rights investigation into the Ohio incident, only the second fatal police shooting in Beavercreek’s history.”

• Aside from the reported facts dictating the greater truth that Crawford was focused upon his phone call—pretty much totally unaware that the police were approaching him with their guns drawn—it would appear that it wasn’t until after he was shot that he realized they were even speaking to him and telling him to put his gun down.

• Perhaps the most ominous new fact—and there are many, so you’ll have to read the article in its entirety to understand how truly twisted this case is—reported in this Guardian story is the following excerpt. It’s…

…only the second fatal police shooting in Beavercreek’s history. A white officer has been placed on administrative leave following Crawford’s shooting… …

…Beavercreek police and the attorney general’s office have declined to name the officer who shot Crawford. However, after Sergeant David Darkow and Officer Sean Williams were placed on leave following the incident, Darkow has returned to work but Williams has not. Williams was the officer behind the only other fatal police shooting in Beavercreek. In 2010, he shot dead Scott Brogli, a retired master sergeant in the US air force. According to Williams and a colleague, Brogli charged at them with a large knife after they went to investigate the 45-year-old’s drunken beating of his wife. A grand jury declined to bring any charges…

(Bold type is diarist’s emphasis)

The story concludes by informing readers that a Greene County grand jury “is scheduled to begin hearing evidence on 22 September.”

#            #            #

SIGN THE CHANGE.ORG PETITION TO DEMAND A FEDERAL INVESTIGATION OF THE BEAVERCREEK, OHIO POLICE KILLING OF JOHN CRAWFORD III AND TO INSIST THAT ATTORNEY GENERAL MIKE DEWINE RELEASE THE VIDEOTAPE OF THIS SHOOTING NOW!

CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION.

UPDATE (7:43 PM 9/24/2014): The grand jury has failed to indict the officers involved in John Crawford’s murder. They have also released the surveillance video of the shooting [TW: Violent Content]

UPDATE (7:46 PM 9/24/2014): The Department of Justice has announced that it is opening a federal investigation of the murder of John Crawford.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced that he is turning the investigative files over to the U.S. Department of Justice for a civil rights review. The federal government has been monitoring the case and agreed to a review.
"The Civil Rights Division, the United States Attorney’s Office, and the FBI will conduct a thorough and independent review of the evidence and take appropriate action if the evidence indicates a prosecutable violation of federal criminal civil rights statutes," said Jennifer Thornton, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. [Cincinnati Enquirer]

UPDATE (7:53 PM 9/24/2014): More information about the officers who shot John Crawford has been released.

Officer Sean Williams (left) and Sgt. David Darkow (right) were already on the scene, according to a statement released by Beavercreek Police on Aug. 6. They moved to the pet section, at the back of the store, where they confronted Crawford “holding a rifle,” the statement said.
“Officers gave verbal commands to the subject to drop the weapon,” the statement said. After he failed to comply with officers’ commands, police said, he was shot. [NBC News]

This post will be updated when new updates are available.

Source: Bob Swern for Daily Kos

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I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the trumped-up murder charges against him—or that’s what my grandfather told me, anyway. As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “Savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.” The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving? Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? “The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so” after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, “and for some regions right up to the present time.”

Quoted from the essay "1941" written by Charles C. Mann, about the major impact that Native Americans had on the Americas (ecologically and culturally) before white people invaded, bringing their diseases and shoving Christianity down the Indians’ throats and murdering them and banning their cultures.

Check out the whole piece (which is rather long). (P.S thanks to @cazalis for sending me this great link)

another excerpt:

Human history, in Crosby’s interpretation, is marked by two world-altering centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico, where Indian groups independently created nearly all of the Neolithic innovations, writing included. The Neolithic Revolution began in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. In the next few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the metal tool, and agriculture. The Sumerians eventually put these inventions together, added writing, and became the world’s first civilization. Afterward Sumeria’s heirs in Europe and Asia frantically copied one another’s happiest discoveries; innovations ricocheted from one corner of Eurasia to another, stimulating technological progress. Native Americans, who had crossed to Alaska before Sumeria, missed out on the bounty. “They had to do everything on their own,” Crosby says. Remarkably, they succeeded.
When Columbus appeared in the Caribbean, the descendants of the world’s two Neolithic civilizations collided, with overwhelming consequences for both. American Neolithic development occurred later than that of the Middle East, possibly because the Indians needed more time to build up the requisite population density. Without beasts of burden they could not capitalize on the wheel (for individual workers on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective as carts for hauling), and they never developed steel. But in agriculture they handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas.
Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the world, was a triumph with global implications. Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did spread throughout the planet. Central and Southern Europeans became particularly dependent on it; maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and Moldavia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.
Along with peanuts and manioc, maize came to Africa and transformed agriculture there, too. “The probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,” Crosby says. “Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible.” Maize conquered Africa at the time when introduced diseases were leveling Indian societies. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British were alarmed by the death rate among Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as workers. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent’s quarrelsome societies helped slave traders to siphon off millions of people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade continue without pumping the well dry.
Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world’s largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was “so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people … [that] I would rather live here than any where.”

and another excerpt:

In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.
When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like “wow” and “gosh.” Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

(via badass-bharat-deafmuslim-artista)

This barely even touches on some of the differences in agriculture and forestry practices. Where I’m from, if you don’t have people managing the undergrowth with controlled burns, etc., you basically get temperate jungle. Combine that with widespread settler deforestation in the past for timber so it’s mostly secondary growth forest, and you’ve got a difficult to use mess, lower biodiversity because some things just get choked out and other things need periodic burning to germinate, and a lot of forest fires whenever it gets dry wherever people have not been able to continue traditional forest management. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_mixed_mesophytic_forests

I was also surprised at the big deal made out of the tierra prieta “discovery”, though I probably should not have been. There are still a lot of common assumptions going that indigenous people must have been just plain stupid because they were not doing things in exactly the same ways as invading Europeans—and were obviously so inferior in general. But, people also used similar practices elsewhere to enrich soil. Where I’m from, some people still haul rich cove humus (along with ashes) to improve garden soil. I have helped my Nana with that. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cove_(Appalachian_Mountains)

In that case, you get particularly rich soil from sometimes meters-deep layers of leaf mold collecting over the years/centuries, no doubt with its own distinctive microorganism communities. It doesn’t just add more organic material to areas of clay soil, but AFAICT acts very similarly to the tierra prieta. And I am sure that’s not the only area in North America where people figured out some similar ways of enriching soil. (Besides using river bottoms full of rich silt and built-in irrigation for growing staple crops, for incredible yields. And so forth.)

Because they were not stupid.

(via clatterbane)

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