Tag Archives: OddBox

Kamala Harris Is the Best Storyteller on the Democratic Stage

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The California senator Kamala Harris’s narrative instinct enabled her to frame the most powerful moment of the debate, Katy Waldman writes.

hot takes on AOC saying that the United States government is operating concentration camps:

joshua-rush:

WARNING: This post contains references to gruesome human rights violations. It is not for everyone.

76 people in a cell designed for 12.

155 people in a cell designed for 35.

41 in a cell for 8.

Don’t look away.

900 people total, or or more than seven times the 125-person capacity of the El Paso Del Norte immigration processing center.

If it weren’t for the white boxes shielding the faces of dozens of men and women stuffed into the overcrowded cell, it would be difficult to count the people in the photograph, since their overlapping limbs make it impossible to see where one body ends and another begins.

Standing room only cells, where people are held for weeks. Limited access to showers and clean clothes, resulting in those held wearing soiled clothing “for days or weeks.”

People standing on toilets just to find air to breathe. 24 deaths while in ICE custody.

Johana Mediana Léon, 25 years old. Transgender. Passed away four days after release from custody after complaining of chest pains.

Mergensana Amar, 40 years old. Removed from life support after committing suicide in custody.

Efrain De La Rosa, 40 years old. Committed suicide in custody by self-inflicted strangulation.

Roxana Hernandez, 33 years old. Transgender. Passed away in custody after experiencing cardiac arrest.

300,000-500,000 individuals per year in custody. Acting ICE director Mark Morgan’s response? Plans to increase large scale raids.

Don’t look away.

They’re not “centers.” They’re not “facilities.” They’re not “processing areas.” Let’s call them what they are.

The United States government is operating concentration camps. And we must act.

Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

Two weeks ago, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

Don’t look away.

It’s certainly been helpful for the Trump Administration that nobody has called them concentration camps until this week, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came under great fire for doing so.

It may well be a testament to the media machine that is the Trump administration. Look away! He wore an ill-fitting tuxedo to meet the Queen! Look away! He won’t acknowledge that the Central Park Five are exonerated! Look away! He fired pollsters for giving him numbers that he didn’t like!

Don’t look away.

It’s helpful to the President that the media covers these human rights abuses intermittently instead of as what they actually are: proof of a racist administration, unchecked by the law. It’s helpful that there’s so much else to look at right now. But more than anything else, it’s helpful that the places where these people are being tortured and left to die are hidden. They’re locked away from the eyes of journalists and concerned members of the public. They’re misleadingly named.

That’s what a concentration camp is. And the immediate outrage to AOC calling them that is the right response. Hearing that the government is running concentration camps is something one should feel scrupulous towards. A concentration camp isn’t the same as a death camp. We don’t have those yet. But when Hitler ran his, they started as the former, extending to the latter.

Don’t look away.

Hannah Arendt, imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote about the levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.” All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

Is that not what we were doing?

I hesitate to speak for my own ancestry, for my family members killed at Neuengamme camp along with more than 43,000 others. But I can’t hesitate long enough to sway my thinking away from confirming what AOC already said.

It’s easy to think of the Holocaust only in terms of the final outcome. But there was a beginning.

Don’t look away. It started with fear mongering. It started with ghettoization. It started with hidden camps. Then, the pogroms. Then, the extermination camps.

Mass detention isn’t new. But this president has made it a centerpiece of his rhetoric and his agenda. He’s perfected the extreme language that dehumanizes immigrants. At a rally in Florida last month, Trump was bemoaning migrants’ legal protections when someone in the audience suggested they should be shot. The president laughed and made a joke.

Through overcrowding and dehumanization, concentration camps became self-fulfilling prophecies. The culture of abuse leads to frustration and violence, thus “justifying” their incarceration after the fact. Other citizens become desensitized to the dehumanization of a group of people and thus implicitly give approval for concentration camps by our lack of pushback.

Do you see it?

It’s happening now.

Don’t look away.

Siwa Oasis Dates

To coax sugary dates from the sand, Siwa’s farmers must first reclaim the desert. An oasis in western Egypt just 30 miles from the Libyan border, Siwa has been home to humans for around two million years. Since pharaonic times, the oasis has hosted farms producing some of the most prized dates in Egypt. In that time, Siwa’s farmers have perfected the art of growing tall, spiny date palm trees in scorching heat. Date trees are hardy, thriving on the oasis’s brackish water—filled with the region’s famous salt—and local farmers coax more than 25,000 tons of dates from 280,000 trees per year. Despite this abundance, over the past century, many of the traditional local date varieties, folk cultivars nurtured by the region’s Berber tribes, have disappeared, with several others at risk. 

Siwan farmers’ traditional agricultural knowledge has been recognized as a United Nations Globally Important Agriculture Heritage System for their incredible ability to coax life from the desert. The Siwa oasis contains a rich latticework of agricultural patches, where date palms, olive trees, and herbs grow in tiered harmony, the crops intermingling in complex gardens. To cultivate a new patch of land, farmers first remove the top soil and replace it with a mixture of manure and sand, which they then flush with fresh water. The first crops are always medicinal herbs. Then, farmers plant date palm and olive trees. It takes 10 years for a new date palm to mature, but once it does, the tree yields generous fruit: around 110 pounds of dates per year, each picked with the skilled hands of a farmer scaling the trees using nothing more than a woven belt.  

The dates are eaten fresh, or are desiccated in 160-degree ovens until dry, their dense flesh sweet and caramel-sticky, their skin slightly crisp with a frost of crystallized sugar. Every part of the date palm is significant in Siwa, from fronds woven into beds and boxes to trunks used to make homes. And then, of course, there’s the fruit itself. The dates can be cooked with goat meat to a luscious musky-sweet or mixed with eggs and olive oil for breakfast. They can also be mixed with flour, water, and olive oil, and boiled slowly, patient cooks ever-stirring, until the mixture reduces to tagilla, a local dessert.

Up until the 19th century, local Berbers cultivated dozens of unique date varieties, which their camels carried to Cairo by the ton. Today, however, six major cultivars remain—and of those, three have become exceptionally rare.  Most common are the Siwi, Frehi, and Azzawi varieties. The Ghazaal, which has a medium-soft texture, is seriously endangered, as is the Amnzou. The Takdat, its flesh soft, is also at risk. At the same time, the 1985 construction of a road from Siwa to the Mediterranean port city of Marsa Matruh has brought cars, imported produce, and tourists to the oasis, making the survival of local agricultural tradition even more tenuous. In the past few years, the local Siwa Community Development Environmental Conservation group, consisting of representatives from the 13 villages and 10 different tribes of the oasis, has been collaborating with the U.N. to protect this ancient heritage. With any luck, the dates that have graced Egyptian tables since ancient times will continue fruiting in the desert.

The Stephanopoulos Interview Is Another Fine Mess for Trump

Making believe everyone is as slimy and traitorous as he is. Mucu of the GOP is sliming itself by not saying NO!. Traitor is as traitor does.

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John Cassidy writes about the repercussions of President Donald Trump’s interview with George Stephanopoulous of ABC News, in which the President appeared to suggest that he would accept opposition research from foreign entities during the 2020 Presidential campaign without informing the F.B.I.

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony saying climate change could be ‘possibly catastrophic’

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony saying climate change could be ‘possibly catastrophic’:

seandotpolitics:

White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.” The move came after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific findings on climate change.

The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump administration is debating how best to challenge the fact that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. Senior military and intelligence officials have continued to warn climate change could undermine America’s national security — a position President Trump rejects.

Officials from the White House’s Office of Legislative Affairs, Office of Management and Budget, and National Security Council all raised objections to parts of the testimony that Rod Schoonover, who works in the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues, prepared to present on the bureau’s behalf for a hearing Wednesday.

The document lays out in stark detail the implications of what the administration faces in light of rising carbon emissions that the world has not curbed.

“Absent extensive mitigating factors or events, we see few plausible future scenarios where significant — possibly catastrophic — harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change,” the document said.

Frida Kahlo’s Only Known Voice Recording May Have Been Found

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I once went to a grad school costume party with three different Frida Kahlos and can’t remember the last time I visited a museum gift shop without seeing her self-portraits printed on coffee mugs alongside those of Van Gogh. But while her paintings are some of the most famous and recognizable in the art world, perhaps…

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The Harriet Tubman $20 Bill Was Nearly Done, Then Trump Happened

Racism pure and too simple in America and especially in
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When Steven Mnuchin announced that the redesigned $20 featuring Harriet Tubman would be delayed until 2028, he claimed the setback was beyond his control—a buffer to work out anti-counterfeiting measures. But a new report from the New York Times calls bullshit, showing that the Treasury had already hammered out a…

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Hear What’s Likely the Only Known Recording of Frida Kahlo’s Voice (1954)

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Perhaps no artist in modern history, save Andy Warhol, has been so well documented, and self-documented, as Frida Kahlo, or has used documentary methods, surrealist and otherwise, to so unflinchingly confront ideas about disability, gender, sexuality, national identity, and relationships. These qualities make her the perfect celebrity artist for our times, but unlike the average 21st century star making art out of self-presentation, Kahlo’s voice has never been heard, though she lived in a time almost as saturated with mass media—of the radio, TV, and film variety—as our own.

That is, perhaps, until now, with the unearthing of what the National Sound Library of Mexico believes to be a recording of her voice, “taken from a pilot episode of 1955 radio show El Bachiller [“The Bachelor”],” writes Steph Harmon at The Guardian. The show “aired after her death in 1954,” likely the following year. Though the program does not introduce her by name, the presenter does refer to her as recently deceased, and she does read an essay about her husband Diego Rivera, which happens to be written by Frida Kahlo. The case seems fairly conclusive.

Previously the little evidence of what she sounded like came from written descriptions, such as French photographer Gisèle Freund’s characterization of her voice as “melodious and warm.” Hear for yourself what is very likely the recorded voice of Frida Kahlo in the audio above. In her typically florid yet unsparing style she paints a verbal portrait of Rivera full of unflattering physical detail and layers of emotion and admiration. In one English translation, she calls him “a huge, immense child, with a friendly face and a sad gaze.

Rivera’s “high, dark, extremely intelligent and big eyes rarely hold still. They almost pop out of their sockets because of their swollen and protuberant eyelids—like a toad’s.” His huge eyes seem “built especially for a painter of spaces and crowds.” The Mexican muralist, she says is like “an inscrutable monster.” These are the words of a writer, we must remember, who was passionately in love with her subject, but who did not pretend to ignore his physical oddities. As she had practiced loving herself, she loved and admired Rivera because of his unique appearance, not in spite of it.

Researchers are making continuing efforts to verify that the voice on the recoding is Kahlo and searching through about 1,300 other episodes of the show, recorded for Televisa Radio, to find out if there are any more recordings of her. Given Frida’s flamboyant persona and minor art stardom in her lifetime, it’s hard to imagine we won’t hear more of her, if this is in fact her, as other archives reveal their secrets.

Related Content:

Frida Kahlo’s Passionate Love Letters to Diego Rivera

Discover Frida Kahlo’s Wildly-Illustrated Diary: It Chronicled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

A Brief Animated Introduction to the Life and Work of Frida Kahlo

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Hear What’s Likely the Only Known Recording of Frida Kahlo’s Voice (1954) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.