Because they care more, think more, and aren't desperately insecure.https://t.co/T4ecwvv3v1
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) June 12, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
Hello, Everyone.
I made the sound of the library in the forest. It’s drizzling outside the window. 
I once took a walk in the woods on a rainy day. At that time, I walked there and imagined, “What if there was a small library like this?” The library is full of books that have a strong smell of dirt, wood, and wind from the rain. Also, a lot of people who are studying are listening to the Winter Whale channel. I wanted to create an atmosphere of studying in a different place.
I hope you have a good time at the library in the forest today. Take care of your health, everyone. Thank you.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
How D.C.’s Museums Plan to Preserve the New Era of Protest
The effort to document Black Lives Matter and more—in real time.
In June, the fence around Lafayette Square became a gallery. Now curators are working to collect some of the signs when they come down. Embiggenable.
ON THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 2020, AFTER RAIN spattered down on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., curators from the Smithsonian went to check on things. The area, which is close to the White House, has been a flashpoint in recent weeks. At the end of May, the park was full of people protesting the death of George Floyd, killed by a Minneapolis police officer, who has since been charged with murder and manslaughter. It’s the place where U.S. Park Police used chemical agents to flush out protesters for a presidential photo op. Soon, a black fence, reinforced with concrete supports, was erected around the area. The fence soon became a magnet for signs—memorials to Floyd, calls to end police brutality, references to past atrocities. Now the fence is coming down, and museum curators are setting out to collect some of the objects that will help tell the story of this turbulent time.
The rain didn’t seem to threaten the signs that still hang nearby too much, says Tsione Wolde-Michael, a civil justice curator in the division of political and military history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, who is working on a coalition to document and preserve materials from Lafayette Square, along with the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Anacostia Community Museum. (The former is also inviting the general public to hold onto and describe items that might be useful additions to the collection.) At Lafayette Square, “The good news is that it looks good,” Wolde-Michael says. “We’ll be going again tomorrow, because it has rained again today, to check in, continue to talk to folks who are out there, and make sure that they know who we are, what our intentions are, and learn more about them and hear their stories.”
Atlas Obscura spoke with Wolde-Michael about collecting in real time, and the objects that will help future museumgoers understand the spring and summer of 2020.
The fence, seen here on June 10, 2020, is in front of the White House. Embiggenable.
When did the team start saying, “Hey, we ought to be collecting some of these items?”
The interest in rapid collecting is something that museum professionals are used to. But this particular moment is something that’s very special. And we want to make sure that we are able to document this history in real-time, when it is safe to do so. …
James ‘Juju’ Scurlock: why you should say his name, too
A 22 year old black man was shot and killed by a white bar owner after a fight broke out during a protest in Omaha – the shooter has claimed self-defense.
A collection of photos of James ‘Juju’ Scurlock.
Six years ago, when James Scurlock asked his 16-year-old son James Reginald, AKA Juju Da Fu, aka Little James, to attend a rally in Omaha following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Juju shrugged it off.
“I’m not into that,” he told his dad. “When I get older, maybe.”
But last November, everything changed.
“She looks just like him,” his older brother Nick Harden says. “Hella chill and always smiling.”
Her name is Jewels, and she’s seven months old. Juju once jokingly said he wanted 18 kids, but now, with his daughter cradled in his arms, he was wholly absorbed by just the one. Suddenly the world seemed bigger, the future longer, the politics more personal.
“He started worrying more about what was going on in the world today,” his father says. “I think it started to weigh in on him like, whoa, this is really what’s out here? He was like, ‘Dad, I’m gonna have to have the black talk with her, huh?” …
A Solution to the Confederate-Monument Problem
Destroying the statues won’t erase the past. Why not let them deteriorate in a public space instead?
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Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced his intention to remove his state’s most prominent statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which has presided regally over Richmond since 1890.* On the subject of whether to topple a statue of Lee, my opinion is predictable. I grew up partly in the American South, but in a mixed-race Canadian-immigrant family to whom racist white southerners knew better than to proselytize. I therefore grew up baffled and bemused by the existence of Lee veneration, which made about as much sense as Ireland building a shrine to honor the mold that destroyed all of its potatoes. Was I missing something? Lee was a bastard. Of course the statues should come down.
Once they are down, must they go straight to the smelter? Certain charmless totalitarian ideologues have enjoyed obliterating evidence of their predecessors—think of Wahhabi grave-leveling, the denuding of churches by Protestant zealots, the erasure of enemies of Stalin. Not wanting to be like Stalin is good. Certain hemming-and-hawing, bien-pensant types have proposed that we “put them in a museum.” The problem is that museums are also sometimes sites of veneration, and in a museum Lee could retain his dignity, unless he is perhaps used as a coat rack, or put on a mechanically rocking pedestal so children can ride him if they insert a quarter (U.S. currency only, please).
In his announcement, Northam quoted Lee, who said he didn’t want any statues anyway. But why should Lee get the last word?
I would propose a lesson from postwar Germany, whose Nazi predecessors built monuments to themselves so large and ambitious that nothing short of aerial bombing could destroy them. We obliged in some cases. But one of the grandest Nazi dreams—the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, site of the patriotic reverie Triumph of the Will—is still there, undisturbed. It is about five times the size of Monaco, and near downtown Nuremberg. You can visit it anytime you like.
It is not, however, lovingly maintained. There are no ticket-takers, and no guards in sight. Large portions are overgrown. Chain-link fences make it difficult to reach the central grandstand. On the structures, weeds grow up through cracks between the stones, and almost no signage notes that where you are standing, the Reichsführer and his deputies once inspected zeppelins and Hitlerjugend. You can take out your phone, find out where Hitler sat, and go spit or fart in that exact spot. No one cares. The experience of being in the presence of evil may still be emotional, but it is nothing like Dachau or Auschwitz. You could easily forget where you are, and imagine that you are in the ruins of Phoenicia or Nabataea, civilizations that would be missed only by a few archaeologists if the deserts were to swallow up their last remnants. The rally grounds are preserved not in amber but in pathos. …
RELATED: The Myth of the Kindly General Lee
The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.
The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.
Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.
The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.
But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as the historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.” …
Nature Is Returning — To F Us Up
With our streets and Applebee’s abandoned during lockdowns, it was only a matter of time before Mother Nature started filling our vacuum with other fauna. And we’ve seen plenty of packs of animals venture beyond their “landscape of fear” and take trips down our empty lanes, like the fluffy Kashmiri mountain goats traipsing through the quaint Welsh village of Llandudno, lounging on its lawns and munching on its well-manicured hedges.
But not all animals are just content to enjoy the irony, to freely roam and gawk through the windows at all the self-imprisoned humans like a particularly on the nose episode of The Twilight Zone. Some more ambitious species have seen this as the opportunity to take over, like rats, monkeys, and, of course, humanity’s clucking contenders for supremacy: chickens.
Long before the viral outbreak brushed New Zealand, the villagers of the Titirangi had another plague to contend with. Over the past decade, hundreds of feral chickens started to appear in their midst, forming roving gangs of brooding baddies. But before this existential threat could be completely wiped out, the lockdown occurred. From inside their two-bedroom bunkers, “like in a Stephen King novel,” Titirangians were powerless against the renegade roosts of feral fowl taking over, unable to stop them as they “wrecked” the town with their pecking and woke everyone at the break of dawn with their battle cries.
As if the days weren’t long enough already.
…
RELATED: What To Do With ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’
I love Brooklyn Nine-Nine. You can drag your hand across the table to knock every cop show onto the floor, and I wouldn’t pick up a single one of them. But I will pick up Brooklyn Nine-Nine, dust it off, gingerly put it back on the table, then put up a little sign that says Do Not Touch. It’s got that magical combination of comedy and comfort that makes it endlessly watchable.
All that said, since it began, the show’s left me with a nagging feeling that I’ve never been able to shake. It took a while, but I think I’ve finally pinpointed what’s been bothering me all these years. The current instances of police brutality have only highlighted it: the show is afraid to deeply explore its own setting because it’s scared that the truths it’ll find will render the show unfunny.
It’s always taken jabs at the broader ethical and sociological issues of police work but then pulls back, never really laying into the issues, always maintaining distance. It doesn’t commit to making itself about those problems, which it’s in a perfect position to do. It’s clear the NYPD police precinct is just a setting, more of an excuse really, to just have fun. Saying something important about the nature of police officers in the United States in the year 2020 takes a backseat to be watching a perfect cast of comedic actors just do their thing. When it occasionally wades into the waters of police corruption, systemic racism, and police brutality, it handles the topics well enough while still being entertaining (thanks to some heavy lifting done from irreverent B-plots that keep things light). Those individual episodes tend to be outliers that get swallowed whole by the sheer volume of other episodes depicting cops just kind of fucking around in ways that bounce between innocent, but still concerning behavior for police officers who get paid with taxpayer money (the Jimmy Jab Games episodes), and deeply troubling (Amy and Jake competing to see who can arrest the most people, which is a big yikes). …
What voting by mail looks like when it works
A voter drops off a ballot in a ballot box on Tuesday in Nevada.
Voting by mail will be new to millions of Americans this summer and fall as more states make moves to allow people to vote absentee rather than in person amid a pandemic.
President Trump has been adding to the sense of uncertainty about voting by alleging that vote-by-mail could lead to “massive fraud and abuse.” A recent Washington Post analysis found only a minuscule number of potentially fraudulent mailed ballots in elections in 2016 and 2018.
But several states that have held primaries in the past few weeks with increased mail voting have struggled. In Georgia on Tuesday, numerous voters said they didn’t receive an absentee ballot after applying for one, sending them into long lines to vote on problematic voting machines. In D.C., Maryland and Rhode Island earlier this month, some voters said they didn’t receive their ballots. In Wisconsin in April, there was a messy, dramatic court fight about how to vote that led to massive confusion about whose ballots would be counted. …
Training Police to Step In and Prevent Another George Floyd
Police officers knelt with protesters who took over the elevated Interstate 10 in New Orleans. Officers in New Orleans are trained to intervene when fellow officers act inappropriately.
George Floyd did not die in an instant. He suffocated to a slow death, pleading “I can’t breathe,” as a Minneapolis police officer pinned his knee to Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.
What haunts Paul Noel, the deputy superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, is that three other officers watched it happen.
“That’s what I can’t get past,” Noel said. “This was preventable.”
The New Orleans Police Department, which has been under a federal consent decree since 2012 for widespread misconduct following Hurricane Katrina seven years earlier, is now a national leader in peer intervention training. Many experts, civil rights lawyers and law enforcement leaders believe such training might have prevented Floyd’s death. But only a handful of departments use it.
Peer intervention training instills the idea that officers have a duty to act as a check on their fellow officers’ misconduct, such as using excessive force, planting evidence or lying in official reports. They are legally obligated, the training teaches, to quickly stop an officer from committing an act of improper policing before it leads to firings, criminal charges or death. …
Four Years Embedded With the Alt-Right
What I learned about the seductive power of hate from making the documentary White Noise.
White nationalists have always been able to find one another in America, but the recent resurgence of the white-nationalist movement—and the extent to which its ideas have seeped into the mainstream alongside Donald Trump’s political ascent—is stunning.
In November 2016, I captured footage of Trump supporters throwing Nazi salutes in celebration of his presidential victory, a moment that became an explosive story in the days that followed, and set the tone for the Trump presidency. In the nearly four years since then, I have focused all of my journalistic energy on the “alt-right,” documenting the figures leading a swelling, and splintering, movement that centers around racism and hate. I saw far-right rhetoric rising on college campuses and in mainstream American politics, and white nationalists reaching millions online. I found my way into the heart of the movement, witnessing violent protests and wild parties, and sitting in the rooms where populist and racist ideologies were refined and weaponized. Through it all, I wanted to understand: What made white-power ideology so intoxicating, especially among my generation?
This question is deeply personal. Both of my grandmothers are Holocaust survivors. My father’s mother, Shulamit Lombroso, fled Nuremberg in 1939 with the Kindertransport, a rescue effort that saved 10,000 German Jews. She left with only one photo album, never to see her parents again. My mother’s mother, Nina Gottlieb, spent World War II hiding in Poland, losing her sister to the war. Six million Jews, two-thirds of Europe’s total, were killed at the hands of Nazism, an ideology consumed by a belief in the supremacy of whiteness. What began with inflamed rhetoric and scapegoating soon turned into industrialized slaughter.
Shulamit Lombroso, second from left, in Nuremberg with her parents and her sister, who soon perished.
Meaningful journalism begins with bearing witness. Over four years, I visited 12 states and five countries, and spent hundreds of hours with conspiracy theorists, far-right influencers, and politicians sympathetic to white nationalism. My goal was to understand the movement’s most prominent extremists—those who already had followings in the millions and were shaping the public conversation. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
VICE News was in Houston for the funeral of George Floyd and we speak to Gregory Lamont Dotson, a lifelong friend of Floyd, who couldn’t attend the service because he is locked up. Here is what he has to say.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
America’s police need a revamp. We’re talking about what they can do.
Conversation begins at about 7:30
Confederate monuments and flags are coming down as the nation reckons with its racial past, but Trump refuses to rename military bases named after Confederate figureheads.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Police unions protect members in ways that make it virtually impossible to hold bad cops accountable. Roy Wood Jr. has a plan to fight back.
When video evidence of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police surfaced, millions of people witnessed the horrifying truth about police brutality in America. But it’s important to remember that police brutality exists even when there isn’t an iPhone camera to catch it.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Sam sat down with fearless leader and Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley to discuss how to make the rest of America feel as safe and secure without police as the suburbs do!
Despite the recent wave of support for police reforms, many changes already in place are woefully ineffective. The good news is that there IS an effective movement we can back: #DefundThePolice. Go to www.samanthabee.com/takeaction for more info on how to support this movement!
Seth takes a closer look at President Trump pinning his hopes of a political comeback on whining about polls and sticking up for the confederacy.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that the following video may contain images and voices of people who have died. [In regards to the Rabbit Proof Fence footage at 7 mins 15 seconds]. Thanks for watching everyone and keep being legends. I understand lots of folks already have their minds made up on this issue. None the less, if you’re at least open minded and happy to chat I’ve put materials and sources below that are worth a click-through. Lots of them are Aussie-based links for now. Have a good one. Cheers ya legends! 
EDIT: Thanks to me USA fans for pointing out the bloke in the picture with the tatts renounces them. This is good to find out: https://www.ocala-news.com/2020/06/03…
Ed. Click that last link if only needing to discover why these messed up idiots don’t get laid.
新しいブラシでブラッシングされるまるとはな。I brush Maru&Hana with the new brush.
FINALLY . . .
The Utilitarian Pleasures of Playing Board Games By Yourself
It’s a movement made for the moment.
“Settlers of Catan” got the modern game ball rolling in 1995.
BRANDON WAITE WAS PACKING UP after an evening playing board games with his friends when he noticed “1 to 4 players” written on the side of one of the boxes. Just like that, he stumbled onto the idea of playing games by himself.
“I had just never heard of that before, or I thought I hadn’t,” he recalls. “But of course, most of us have played [card] solitaire at some point.”
Since the release of “Settlers of Catan,” in 1995, the popularity of hobby board games has soared. Last year thousands of new titles were released, and millions of people are playing them. At a time when so much of our work and entertainment takes place on a screen, old-fashioned board games offer a chance to disconnect and engage with something tangible, which many players say is the primary appeal.
And now, a small but growing fraction of these hobbyists are choosing to play by themselves. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Yes, the Confederate flag is a symbol of slavery, racism and oppression, but it’s also a symbol of losers getting their ass kicked.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) June 10, 2020
