So, this work is by Jeff Campana. You see those lovely, flowing lines, there? He throws his vessels in porcelain and then he CUTS THEM INTO PIECES before reassembling them. I had to do deep breathing both before and after cutting my first steeks into knitting. HIS chill knows no bounds. Either that or he’s a heavy drinker.
This is a piece about the new “policy” of separating parents from their children after they are picked up crossing the border. I put in the scare quotes because this is not a policy. It’s atrocity. It is a massive human rights violation being carried out every day in this country and it is ongoing because, I must assume, too many Americans think it matters that the people this is happening to are “illegals.” It does not matter. These are people who have fled their own countries because they are afraid their children will be killed there, and who come to the US to apply for asylum only to have their children taken from them. Then, they are pressured into pleading guilty to entering the country illegally, in hopes that they will then be reunited with their children. It is not clear that that’s what’s actually happening. Here’s a photo of one of the court proceedings at which this happens:
Caption:
A mass immigration trial in April at the Lucius D. Bunton federal courthouse in Pecos, Texas. (Obtained by Debbie Nathan for the Intercept)
This is not due process. This is not how any nation calling itself a democracy or claiming to be living under the rule of law should handle any court proceeding.
As with a lot of these pieces, the focus is on the agony the parents go through over the separation and the uncertainty. This practice would certainly be an atrocity for that reason and that reason alone. I mean do I have to explain that this is, in itself, torture? Even if you don’t have children, can you imagine? Here in the US we are conditioned as parents not to even let our kids walk down the street to buy a sandwich without us and we are, ROUTINELY, taking children away from their their parents at the border, incarcerating the parents, and letting them just wonder when or whether they will ever see their children again.
What nobody is talking about yet, for legitimate reasons in a way since some of this is in the future and some of it is probably already happening but can’t be verified yet, it that this will almost certainly lead to the neglect, abuse, and death of some of these children.
Because history has shown that when you put a large number of children into a facility run by adults who know that they will never be held accountable for what they do, and when on top of that you prevent those children’s parents or families from finding out what’s happening to them, that is what you always get. Neglect, abuse, and when one or both has gone on too long or been pushed too far, death.
This happens in all kinds of institutions, throughout history, all over the world. If it not already happening in the facilities where these children are now being held, well, it will. This policy will kill children. Nobody seems comfortable saying that in the mainstream media, but I do not see how this can go on for long without that consequence.
There is no need to do this. Nobody in Buttercup’s administration is pretending that there is. Sessions has been quite clear about the fact that this is supposed to be a ‘deterrent,’ which means that it is intentionally punitive. There is no stated objective to this so-called ‘policy’ apart from punishing the parents. They don’t seem to want to talk as much about how this is punishing the children–except for Buttercup, who is happy to call them all MS-13 gang members. But it is. And it will get worse.
– was an incredible chef and writer beloved by so many
– very open about his struggles with drug use and abuse as well as depression, and in testimonials from fans used to encourage people he met in their struggles to get clean
– an outspoken and passionate advocate for the “me too” movement, to the point where he penned an essay highlighting the horrible treatment of women in the food industry and his own failings and regrets in that regard for not speaking out against it sooner
– frequently challenged western views on the countries and places he visited; one of the clearest examples i can think of was an episode of parts unknown set in iran where the highlight was the normalcy of the lives of people who live there – he went bowling with them, for example, and spent an hour calling out the bizarre westernized views of iran and it’s people as tragic, war-torn and oppressed.
– spent so much time focusing on the people in the places he visited. he ate at their homes, in their backyards, anywhere they would like him to, as much (if not more) as he did at fine dining restaurants. he was generous and kind, and the show was never about “poverty porn” but rather about showing that these are real people, with real lives just like ours, and treated them with respect and graciousness.
– was an outspoken trump-hater particularly when it came to immigration rights, discussing the impact that mexican immigrants had on his love of cooking and his desire to be a chef.
– someone asked what tony would cook for trump & kim jong un if he was asked to cater their meeting and he said “hemlock”.
– a friend of obama’s, having dined with him many times before; when someone asked if he would do the same with trump tony said: “Absolutely f—ing not. I’ve been a New Yorker most of my life… I would give the same answer that I would have given 10 years ago, when he was just as loathsome.”
in short he was a beautiful and inspirational person and i sincerely hope this side of him is remembered just as much as the tragedy of his passing.
I can’t say that I have more than a passing familiarity with Anthony Bourdain and his work, but I’ve been caught unaware by how bereft I am at his death. The world seems like an ugly place sometimes, and more so now than before.
And thus the court is required to invalidate the whole ACA.
Bagely writes:
What the case does, instead, is force the Trump administration to decide whether it will defend the ACA from constitutional attack. The Justice Department has an entrenched, longstanding, and bipartisan commitment to defending congressional statutes if reasonable arguments can be made in their defense. It’s a bedrock convention of our constitutional structure, one that prevents the executive branch from using litigation strategy to undo Congress’s handiwork.
“In a brief filed in a Texas federal court and an accompanying letter to the House and Senate leaders of both parties, the Justice Department agrees in large part with the 20 Republican-led states that brought the suit. They contend that the ACA provision requiring most Americans to carry health insurance soon will no longer be constitutional and that, as a result, consumer insurance protections under the law will not be valid, either.
protection against refusal to provide insurance because of pre-existing conditions
control over premium increases
an end to lifetime and yearly limits on coverage
an end to insurance companies canceling your health insurance because you get sick
coverage of young adults under 25
guaranteed right to appeal your plan’s denial of payment
and end to denial of coverage for emergency care outside your health plan’s network
birth control coverage
~*~
Bagley writes,
But declining to defend the ACA could have implications for whether the Trump administration chooses to enforce it. That’s a question that has become urgent with Idaho’s decision to flout the law. Unless HHS intervenes, other states will likely follow its lead. It’d be much harder for HHS to step in if the Justice Department takes the position that the whole law is unconstitutional.
Kristen Hawkes is an anthropologist at the University of Utah. She tries to figure out our past by studying modern hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, who likely have lived in the area that is now northern Tanzania for thousands of years. Groups like this are about as close as we can get to seeing how our early human ancestors might have lived.
Over many extended field visits, Hawkes and her colleagues kept track of how much food a wide sample of Hadza community members were bringing home. She says that when they tracked the success rates of individual men, “they almost always failed to get a big animal.” They found that the average hunter went out pretty much every day and was successful on exactly 3.4 percent of those excursions. Which meant that, in this society at least, the hunting hypothesis seemed way off the mark. If people here were depending on wild meat to survive, they would starve.
So if dad wasn’t bringing home the bacon, who was? After spending a lot of time with the women on their daily foraging trips, the researchers were surprised to discover that the women, both young and old, were providing the majority of calories to their families and group-mates.
Mostly, they were digging tubers – which are deeply buried and hard to extract. The success of a mother at gathering these tubers correlated with the growth of her child. But something else surprising happened once mom had a second baby: That original relationship went away and a new correlation emerged with the amount of food their grandmother was gathering.
She describes this finding as “mind-blowing.” In this foraging society, it turns out, grandmothers were more important to child survival than fathers. Mom and grandma were keeping the kids fed. Not Man the Hunter.
This finding led Hawkes to completely re-evaluate what she thought she knew about human evolution. Grandmothers were crucial in this environment to childhood survival. So maybe it wasn’t an accident that humans are the only great ape species in which women live so long past reproductive age. If having a helpful grandmother increased a kid’s chances of survival, natural selection may well have started selecting for older and older women. (This endowment would have passed also to human men.)
Just had a thought for an action hero thing: 30-something woman hero is doing her ass-kicking thing. One day, her boss shows up at her door, and tells her she has to stand down, or there will be consequences. “Honey, it’s not that you’re too old. It’s just the public don’t like to see a woman of your age saving the day. It feels emasculating”.
So woman is stripped of her support team, fellow agents, and is pretty much put on the shelf. She tries to do heroing, but keeps getting cockblocked by younger women or superhero men she used to work alongside.
Just when she’s hitting rock bottom (and sitting in her house wearing pyjamas and eating ice cream), there’s a knock at the door. Judi Dench is standing there, and our heroine assumes it’s a charity collection.
“Oh no, dear,” Dench says, smiling. “We’ve come to recruit you.”
“Recruit me? For what?”
“To do what we do best: save the bloody world.”
And all at once she’s part of a covert ops team made of all the older women who have been retired and who currently are holding the reins of managing the world.
Of course, a few older women heroes and vigilantes don’t take the offer. Some are too embittered by the rejection they’ve faced and decide to show the world exactly why they’re still to be feared.
Enter Judi Dench’s arch-nemesis, Dame Helen Mirren.
Hearseeno 