• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
This Seattle Arts Building Was Once an Immigrant Detention Center
Inscape Arts takes its name from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS.
The building has been a gold-weighing station, an immigration detention center, and an arts center.
WHEN JAYASHREE KRISHNAN WAS 21 years old, she walked through the doors of an imposing government building in Seattle’s Chinatown, hoping to become a citizen of the United States. The Immigration and Naturalization Service building had bars on its windows; it determined the fates of countless people, issuing green cards and passports while also detaining and deporting thousands. “The first time I was here, it felt very impersonal and cold,” Krishnan says.
The building now stands transformed. What was once a hybrid government office and immigration jail—and before that, a gold-weighing and assay station dating back to the gold rush—is known as the Inscape Arts and Cultural Center. When the INS building closed in 2004, the Department of Homeland Security moved detainees to a privately run detention center. A few years after the move, the city sponsored a loan to purchase and develop Inscape, and today the hulking structure is filled with artist studios.
Krishnan, who originally came to the U.S. on a spousal visa from Bangalore, India, has the unusual distinction of maintaining a studio in the same building where she interviewed for citizenship. She received a green card in 1994 and citizenship in 1999. In 2015, Krishnan became a full-time artist.
Paintings in Krishnan’s studio (left); two painted handprints mark the spot where immigrants were searched (right).
Krishnan’s neighbors at Inscape include printers, tarot readers, theater companies, and the Tibetan Nuns Project. The building houses the workspaces of such high-profile Seattle creatives as Lindy West, author of Shrill, and Nate Gowdy, a photographer known for his images of 2016 Presidential candidates. Just a block or two from CenturyLink Field and the landmark Uwajimaya market in Chinatown, these artists can rent studios starting at $1.10 per square foot. …
No, Donald Trump, Americans are not dying to work – work may cause them to die
The president, the Republican party and their Fox News cheerleaders care only for corporate profit.
Donald Trump looks through a face shield at Ford’s Rawsonville Components Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
The pandemic is still with us. After the first tentative steps to ease the lockdown in Germany – the most successful large European country in halting the spread of the virus, thanks to massive testing – the disease has shown signs of spreading faster.
At least Germany is opening slowly and carefully, as is the rest of the EU.
By contrast, the US – with the highest number of deaths and most haphazard response to Covid-19 of any advanced nation – is opening chaotically, each state on its own. Some are lifting restrictions overnight.
Researchers expect the reopenings to cause thousands of additional deaths.
Two weeks after Texas’ governor, Greg Abbott, began reopening, the state experienced the single-highest rise in cases since the beginning of the pandemic. Since Nebraska reopened on 4 May, Covid-19 cases in Colfax county alone surged 1,390%.
Experts warn that Dallas, Houston, Florida’s Gold Coast, the entire state of Alabama and several other places in the south that have rapidly reopened their economies are in danger of a second wave of coronavirus infections over the next four weeks. …
RELATED: Donald Trump press secretary inadvertently reveals president’s bank details
Kayleigh McEnany appears to accidentally show private details while displaying Trump donation to fight coronavirus pandemic.
Efforts to highlight Donald Trump’s largesse during his time in office have backfired after his press secretary appeared to display the US president’s personal bank details to the world.
At a press conference on Friday, Kayleigh McEnany announced that Trump would donate his quarterly pay cheque to the Department of Health and Human Services to “support the efforts being undertaken to confront, contain and combat the coronavirus”. So far, so laudable.
However, when she held up the $100,000 cheque for White House reporters to see, it came complete with all Trump’s banking details.
An administration official told the New York Times mock cheques were never used in the briefing, with a White House statement saying, “Today his salary went to help advance new therapies to treat this virus, but leave it to the media to find a shameful reason not to simply report the facts, focusing instead on whether the check is real or not.” …
HACKERS: You now know your next target.
Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions
The psychologist shares his thoughts on the pandemic, polarization, and politics.
OVER THE PSST DECADE, no one has added more to my understanding of how we think about, discuss, and debate politics and religion than Jonathan Haidt.
I first connected with Haidt in 2012, after I wrote a blog post for Commentary based on an interview in which Haidt discussed his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. “It’s extremely easy to spot the weak arguments, hypocrisy, and double standards of those with whom I disagree,” I wrote. “It’s much harder to see them in myself.” I then posed a series of questions: How open are we to persuasion, to new evidence, and to holding up our views to refinement and revision? How do we react when our arguments seem to be falling apart? And what steps can we take to ensure that we don’t insulate ourselves to the point that we are indifferent to facts that challenge our worldview?
Those questions were right in the wheelhouse of Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He wrote me an encouraging note after my article was published; two years later, we met in person for the first time.
Haidt’s writing and interviews, and our conversations, have clarified for me why we are so tempted to surround ourselves with only like-minded people and caricature those with whom we disagree. He has helped me understand why intellectual honesty is so elusive, why our divisions run so deep, and what steps we need to take to overcome the antipathy that characterizes so much of modern politics. He is also a model of what it means to be a public intellectual.
Over the years, our acquaintance has grown into a friendship, and I trust Haidt to make sense of the times in which we live. So in the midst of this deeply unsettled moment in American life, when we’re dealing with both polarization and a pandemic, I reached out to him. …
RELATED: COVID-19 Is a Perfect Storm for Vaccine Skepticism
Even as vaccines for the disease are being held up as the last hope for a return to normalcy, misinformation about them is spreading.
In March, when a woman in Seattle volunteered for a COVID-19 vaccine trial, rumors immediately began circulating that she was a crisis actor who had received a fake vaccine. She is, in fact, real, and so is the prospective vaccine she got, as the Associated Press asserted in a follow-up story. In Oxford, England, another volunteer for a separate COVID-19 vaccine trial became the subject of a fake news story that purported she had died after a shot. She too was forced to clarify the situation: She is very much alive.
There is no COVID-19 vaccine, but there are already COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies. Even as vaccines for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 are being held up as the last hope for a return to normalcy, misinformation about them is spreading. A more fraught scenario for science communication is hard to imagine: a novel vaccine, probably fast-tracked, in the middle of a highly politicized and badly mishandled pandemic.
“I was initially optimistic that, when people felt the need for a COVID-19 vaccine, the anti-vaccination movement would undergo a period of retreat,” says Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, who has himself become a frequent target of vaccine skeptics. “It’s actually had the effect of reinvigorating the anti-vaccine movement.” …
Bizarro Tales Of Incredible Customer Service
Although you’d be forgiven for thinking that customer service standards have slipped in the last couple of years, there are still those that go above and beyond. Then there are those that go ABOVE AND BEYOND above and beyond to help …
4. A Tech Support Rep Helped a Group of Marines Fix a Sniper Rifle (In the Middle of a Warzone)
You know Murphy’s Law; that rule about how if something can go wrong, it will? Well, we’d like to propose a variation where if something can go wrong, it won’t just go wrong — it’ll go wrong at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way. We’re talking about those times when your car runs reliably for years … only for your engine to die while you’re driving to an interview. We’re talking about those times when you need to send an important email … and a blackout hits your neighborhood. We’re talking about those times when you’re getting shot at by a group of insurgents … and your gun decides to break.
Okay, that last one admittedly doesn’t happen to most people. Still, it sure as hell happened to a group of Marines who discovered in the middle of a firefight, that their unit’s Godkiller weapon — a .50 caliber Barrett M107 — had decided to hell with war and abruptly retired from turning enemy combatants into clouds of pink mist. Being resourceful types, however, they didn’t take this laying down and channeling their inner soccer mom, decided to speak to the gun’s manager — by which we mean, they called tech support.
As luck would have it, the unit’s call was transferred to Don Cook — warranty manager, rifle expert, veteran, and all-round ass-kicker — who after talking through the problem, diagnosed the fault as being due to a faulty part in the lower receiver. He then, knowing that they likely didn’t have any tools, talked them through an improvisational fix, which got the gun working within less than a minute.
They then hung up, although Cook clearly didn’t take it too personally, considering that he later described the call as being “one of the biggest highlights [of] my life.” We hope they sent him a fruit basket — or at least gave him five stars on the post-call survey. …
RELATED: In Mel Gibson’s Hurricane Maria Movie, Root For The Bad Guys
Let’s check on how the Mel Gibson Hollywood rehabilitation tour is going, shall we? For the past few years, the hatemonger from down under has been deftly sneaking back into the movie industry, leaning into his “I know I’m a deadbeat dad, but how about that game of catch” vibe to star in raunchy B-comedies and indie action flicks. But when times are tough, and the alimony payments start piling up, sometimes you got to lean on what you know. And what Mel Gibson knows is how to be the shittiest white guy in the room.
Force of Nature is an upcoming hurricane action movie trying to ride the current wave of confusion about which VOD releases are theater quality and which were always destined to be a bargain bin disappointment. It’s definitely the latter, the trailer awash with bad cinematography, one-liners fished out of Steven Seagal’s paper wastebasket and performances so lackluster they couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag.
The movie stars Mel Gibson, Emile Hirsch, and Kate Bosworth as three Puerto Ricans stuck in a Hurricane Maria-like disaster because Gibson’s retired detective has watched too much Fox News and refuses to evacuate. But plans change when they discover a group of criminals is using the calamity as a cover to orchestrate a heist. Now trapped in the tenement tower, it’s up to the rookie cop, doctor daughter, and Gibson’s fish-out-of-water (and slurring on alcohol) cop to sneak around and save the day — yippee-ki-yay. Yup, it’s Die Hard in bad weather. …
RELATED: A Michigan Dam Burst, Can We Finally Tackle Infrastructure Now?
Earlier this week, the Edenville and Sanford Dams, just a couple hours’ drive north of Detroit, had what the National Weather Service called “catastrophic failures.” To put it kindly, it’s a beaver’s worst nightmare.
The morning after Edenville dam breach (drone view) Edenville Michigan #edenvilledam pic.twitter.com/p6sRBy3GHs
— Timothy Wenzel (@ttwenzel) May 20, 2020
It’s literally a record-breaking flood in terms of water height, which isn’t good. 10,000 people are being evacuated, and water levels are still slowly rising.
What sucks, in particular, is that this was preventable. Edenville lost its hydroelectric production privileges in 2018, and the owner, Lee Mueller, had been warned that this dam was unsafe. He had a record of noncompliance, and even nicely laid-out recommendations on what to do to get the dam back to being safe were just ignored. How do you just ignore warnings that your dam is going to burst? That’s like ignoring warnings that a dog shat in your shoes and then putting them on anyway. …
Scratching the surface: drones cast new light on mystery of Nazca Lines
An aerial search in the Peruvian desert has revealed intriguing figures of humans and animals that predate the nearby Unesco world heritage site.
Johny Isla, chief archaeologist for the Nazca and Palpa Lines for Peru’s ministry of culture.
A faded decades-old black-and-white photograph was the only lead Johny Isla had when he set out on the trail of a sea monster.
The Peruvian archaeologist spotted the image at a 2014 exhibition in Germany about the Nazca Lines, the vast and intricate desert images which attract tens of thousands of tourists every year.
The photograph taken in the early 1970s showed a mysterious killer whale deity carved in an arid hillside. The figure bore some resemblance to others he knew but he had never seen this one before.
Isla, now Peru’s chief archaeologist for the lines, spent hours poring through archives, before returning to Peru – armed with a drone and a lifetime of local field experience – to find it.
After several false starts, it took just two weeks to find the 25-by-65-metre image which had been hiding in plain sight in the hills of Palpa, about 30 miles north of Nazca, in a huge expanse of desert in southern Peru.
The design carved into the hillside depicts a terrifying mythological beast, part orca but with a human arm holding a trophy head and several more heads inside its body. …
The Netflix Show The Pentagon Can’t Stop Talking About
The U.S. Space Force is about to be eclipsed by Netflix’s upcoming parody—and that might be a good thing.
The United States Space Force can’t catch a break. The newest branch of the American military, first championed by President Donald Trump two years ago, tried to generate some serious headlines this month with its first recruiting commercial, an otherworldly 30-second spot summoning volunteers “to plan for the possible while it’s still impossible.”
Instead, it was ambushed by the trailer for Steve Carell’s much-awaited Netflix series “Space Force,” which came out just hours earlier (the recruiting ad racked up 17,000 likes on Twitter compared with the trailer’s 48,000).
In a country stuck at home watching TV, starved for new content, the absurd comedy is one of the more exciting cultural events of the season, a “The Office”-style lampooning stuffed with big names—Carell, Lisa Kudrow, John Malkovich, Jane Lynch, Noah Emmerich and Jimmy O. Yang of “Silicon Valley.” It’s fair to say that the first new military branch in 73 years is at serious risk of being eclipsed entirely by a workplace parody.
It might seem like the real Space Force, which has already been the target of more than its share of memes and jokes, would groan and dismiss it, but no: The show is already the watercooler chatter of the year among Pentagon brass and at the far-flung bases where the real Space Force is being carved out of the Air Force. Watch parties are being planned, and the real head of the Space Force recently even had some advice for the show, mainly that Carell should get a haircut.
“The Office” was known for lacerating humor, its knives perfectly sharpened around the absurdities of daily work life, bumbling management and awkward co-workers. When it comes to a newborn military branch, how deep can a parody cut? Based on the first season of 10 episodes, which POLITICO binged-watched in advance of the May 29 release, the show is goofy, funny, wildly unrealistic in some ways—and also gets some big stuff totally right. …
Longmont sugar factory: A look at its history, and at hopes and concerns for its future
Boulder County Sheriff’s Deputies Kelly Boden, left, and Steve Kruise, talk about some of the calls they have had at the old Western Sugar Factory site outside Longmont on March 18, 2020. Cmdr. Deputies patrol the sugar factory once or twice a day.
What’s the cost of preserving history?
It’s a question that has plagued the sugar factory, just east of Longmont. For the past 120 years, the towering smokestack, cluster of brick buildings, and large metal shed have been part of the local skyline. As the property sits, it has continued to draw the interest of those who grew up hearing tales of what it was like to explore the unlit twists and turns of the once-prosperous 110,000-square-foot factory, left dank and crumbling.
The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office warns that the decrepit buildings — visible from the well-traveled Colo. 119 — are a serious hazard to those who enter, with holes in floors and the numerous air-born health concerns from asbestos to small-animal feces.
Not long after the factory shuttered in 1977, self-employed broker Dick Thomas of Denver bought the property from Great Western Sugar Company in 1980 under the name Clean Energy LLC. Thomas said he bought it for roughly $1.7 million. It includes 11 buildings on roughly 40 acres of property, according to county records. Thomas said he liked the factory’s brick architecture and its ties to Longmont history.
While Thomas said there are “no specific plans” to re-purpose the buildings in the near future, there has been interest from developers. Thomas said he hopes the storied factory can be preserved. Others, however, contend that it’s time to knock the old facility to the ground.
The Great Western Sugar Factory outside of Longmont is pictured around 1905.
…
Ed. The smokestack is an interesting backdrop for my back yard, but I’m glad I don’t have to look at the belch.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
VICE News Tonight examines how ICE has likely contributed to spreading COVID-19 within the detention system.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
This week’s good news: priests are using squirt guns, Chuck E. Cheese is at the center of a pizza conspiracy, and NASA may have discovered a parallel universe.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
まる１３歳！ 13 years old! 誕生日記念動画。まるの1年間（2019）。Maru’s 13th birthday commemoration video. Maru’s 2019.
FINALLY . . .
The Museum of Youth Culture Wants Your Teenage Memories
Your awkward, rebellious stage, it turns out, is history.
Members of the 59 Club, a motorcycling group founded in London.
BARS, PARKS, AND SCHOOLS ARE closed until further notice, but one British museum is making sure that we remember what it means to be young.
With millions stuck at home, within close reach of old photo albums, the United Kingdom’s Museum of Youth Culture (MOYC) has issued a call for submissions: The museum wants your childhood, adolescent, and teenage photos—in all their adorable, rebellious, or just plain awkward glory. The submissions will join the museum’s growing archive of looks, attitudes, and pastimes that have galvanized young people since the 1920s. In other words, this is your chance to claim that your old mullet was a legitimate historical document.
The Museum of Youth Culture, appropriately enough, has always been a purely digital operation. Even before the COVID-19 lockdown, its archive has existed exclusively online, and the team had been hoping to open a physical location in London sometime in 2023. (Those plans are still in place.) Recently, however, the museum has turned to crowdsourcing to bolster that archive. Previously, the curators had pulled from the collections of professional photographers who had documented youth scenes, from mod to punk to grime and beyond. But that was no longer going to cut it, as the museum realized that it has a veritable world of once-and-current youths on call—with time on its hands.
A participant named Debbie Graves shows off her goth look.
“We wanted the story we’re telling to be as representative as possible,” says Lisa der Weduwe, of the museum’s Cultural Projects team. When the museum made the decision to open for submissions from the general public, the idea was to travel to 20 towns across the United Kingdom and gather submissions through in-person engagement and events. There’s no telling when that tour may begin, but MOYC has prepared a variety of materials to help potential remote participants generate ideas. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
