MacKenzie Scott Donates $4.1 Billion To Charity #WhatDoYouThink https://t.co/yLhfNa3UsJ pic.twitter.com/YV8tCurL7x
— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 17, 2020
• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: Cosmyte is proud to present their second Ep “Pyramyte Dream Side” on Hadra AlterVision Records. From the entrails of Mâmu, half Buffalo, half Arachne, jets perpetually Parallel Worlds. Bubbles of Emptiness containing the potential of All.
Continuing our sensory exploration in this second ep, it is in the dream that we recover. This altered state of consciousness and its erratic fluidity is just as vital as its awaked buddy. Through their reunion, and the relationship woven with faith from one to the other, we discover the space that lies between things : the Interstice World!
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Barcelona, Spain:El Caganer
A fantastic Christmas tradition where defecation meets the manger.
Taking a dump for Jesus. Embiggenable. Explore at home. Shop at home.
NO DOUBT WE ARE ALL familiar with the obligatory baby Jesus in the manger scene rolled out every Christmas, but the early 18th-century inhabitants of Catalonia, Spain, and certain areas of Southern France started a different tradition that lives on to this day.
Unlike the English-speaking version of the Nativity scene, Catalonians at Christmas time actually build a large model of the city of Bethlehem. The caganer, whose origins have been lost in time, is a particular and highly popular feature of these modern interpretations.
Often tucked away into a small corner of the nativity scene, one can find a lone figure caught in the act of defecation. There are more than a handful of guesses as to how and why this tradition started ranging from the figure representing the equality of all people (everyone poops!) or that is symbolizes the idea that God will manifest himself when he is ready, without regard whether humans are ready for him. Still others believe it is a tradition grown from comic relief. …
RELATED:
In a country with only a few hundred female monks in the Theravada branch of Buddhism, the lifestyle is quietly radical.
The monks collect alms in Nakhon Pathom province. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
THE VENERABLE DHAMMAVANNA, A FORMER journalist living in Nakhon Pathom province, about 30 miles outside Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, now wakes each morning at 5:30. First, she meditates, then has a breakfast of rice. Dressed in saffron robes, she tackles her morning work—cleaning, welcoming visitors, even attending to IT snafus. She dines again at 11, and then takes classes in Buddhist teachings in the afternoon before completing community service tasks and winding down her day with chanting. She lives at Songdhammakalyani Monastery under the Venerable Dhammananda, the temple’s most senior monk.
Ven. Dhammananda, born Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, is thought to be Thailand’s first female monk—called bhikkhuni—in the Theravada branch of Buddhism, which is dominant in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. The life of a bhikkhuni is subtly radical: In a country of about 300,000 male monks, Ven. Dhammananda estimates there are fewer than 300 fully ordained female monks in Thailand. Fifteen of them, plus three novices, reside at her monastery. All were ordained abroad, often in Sri Lanka or India.
The Songdhammakalyani Monastery is in Thailand’s Nakhon Pathom province.
Ven. Dhammananda, 76, flew to Sri Lanka to be ordained in 2001, after writing several books on women’s place in Thai Buddhism and teaching at a university. “One day when I was putting on makeup, suddenly I saw this person in the mirror and I asked myself, ‘How long do I have to do this?’” she says. From there, she started a movement: Now, an increasing number of Thai Buddhist women are seeking to become full-fledged monks despite having the option to become white-clad nuns, who follow a less-strict religious regimen.
Officially, only men can become monks in Thailand: The 1928 Sangha Act forbids the ordination of women. Efforts in the past by advocates to undo the 1928 order have been ineffective. The policy has been consistently upheld by the Sangha Supreme Council, the religion’s all-male ruling body that consists of the country’s highest-ranking monks. And while the bhikkhunis have found their community generally welcoming, they have still encountered resistance across the country from those who believe female monastics are illegal. Unlike male monks, bhikkhunis don’t enjoy, among other things, free train transportation or state funding for their temple. “It looks very much like a temple,” Ven. Dhammananda says of the monastery, “but officially it’s not considered one, so we get taxed.” …
Does Joe Biden Understand the Modern GOP?
The president-elect insists he can work with Republicans. Some fellow Democrats have doubts.
The dissonance between the first and second halves of Joe Biden’s landmark speech this week encapsulates a central strategic challenge he’ll face as president.
During his victory speech on Monday, following the Electoral College vote, Biden denounced more forcefully than ever before the Republican Party’s legal maneuvers to overturn his win, arguing that they constituted an effort “to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans … a position so extreme, we’ve never seen it before.” Yet in the speech’s final sections, Biden pivoted to a more familiar message, promising to “turn the page” on these skirmishes and insisting that he’s “convinced we can work together for the good of the nation.”
The big question his remarks raise is whether the Republican Party that Biden described in the speech’s first half is truly open to the kind of cooperation and partnership he promised in the second.
The answer is already dividing centrists—who believe that Biden has no choice but to seek agreements with congressional Republicans—from progressives, who fear that he will sap his momentum and demoralize his coalition if he spends weeks on what could prove to be fruitless negotiations over COVID-19 relief and other subjects. The divide is not only ideological but generational too: Compared with Biden, who came of age in the more collegial Senate of the 1970s and ’80s, younger congressional Democrats forged by the unrelenting partisan warfare of the modern Congress—a group some Democrats think includes Vice President–elect Kamala Harris—are generally less optimistic about finding common cause with Republicans.
Biden will obviously need to be more cooperative with Republicans if the GOP maintains its Senate majority than if Democrats control the chamber by winning both of the Senate runoffs in Georgia next month. But even if Democrats achieve a narrow 50–50 majority (with Harris casting the tie-breaking vote), Biden will face ongoing questions about how much he’ll compromise his agenda in order to win the 60 votes required to pass most legislation. …
Cyber-attack is brutal reminder of the Russia problem facing Joe Biden
Analysis: new president must find a way to contain such hyper-aggressive behaviour from Moscow.
Russian hackers penetrated US departments including the commerce and treasury departments, homeland security, nuclear laboratories and the Pentagon.
It is Joe Biden’s biggest foreign policy headache. As well as confronting the Covid pandemic, the president-elect has to deal with a more familiar problem: Russia. Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election cast a shadow over US politics for four long years.
And now the Kremlin appears to have struck again. This week details emerged of an unprecedented cyber-attack against US government departments. Beginning in March, suspected Russian hackers penetrated Washington’s signature institutions.
They include the commerce and treasury departments, homeland security, nuclear laboratories and the Pentagon, as well as leading Fortune companies. For months the Russian spies roamed at will, apparently undetected. Only now are aghast officials scoping the damage.
The hacking is a brutal reminder of how Vladimir Putin and the KGB agents around him view the world. They regard the US as the glavniy protivnik or main enemy. This adversarial cold war mindset endures, regardless of whether a Trump or a Biden sits in the White House. …
How History Reacts To Kyle Rittenhouse Incidents
A controversial shooting has divided America. Innocent people were gunned down during a contentious protest, but support for the accused perpetrator is strong, and the question of whether they’ll face any justice remains to be seen. Whatever happens next, it’s clear that America is as fragile as it’s ever been. Those of you who follow the news know that I am, of course, referring to the 1970 Kent State Massacre.
As a quick refresher, days of intense protest against the expansion of the Vietnam War culminated in the National Guard opening fire on unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine others. The full story is a long one, but an eventual government commissioncalled the shootings “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable” while advising that guardsmen policing protests should no longer be issued live ammo. Hey, there’s an idea.
But the day after the shooting, Gallup found that 58% of Americans blamed … the students, for getting in the way of the poor, put-upon National Guard and their blameless bullets (it was later determined that two of the victims, one of whom was in the ROTC, weren’t even protestors, but had just been trying to get to class). Only 11% blamed the Guard themselves. Some survivors were disowned by their families, while others were told that more of them should have been shot. Two students at Jackson State were killed by police 11 days later. That report also said America was at its “most divisive” since the Civil War. It wasn’t a swell time.
Speaking of uncool times for America, Kyle Rittenhouse will face trial on homicide and illegal firearm possession charges for the death of two protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin. While there have been no formal opinion polls on the August shooting, there have been roughly eight thousand and counting opinion columns, a fundraiser for his legal defense has raised over two million dollars, and terrible screaming matches continue online to this day.
And boy, has it been ugly. Countless conservative pundits working the hot take assembly line have defended him in tones bordering on bloodthirsty, Trump liked a tweet endorsing the shooting while repeatedly refusing to condemn it, the Breitbarts of the world are working overtime to spin the story, a thousand interchangeable YouTubers all named something like Occident Unvanquished have made tedious videos about his ostensible heroism, searching Rittenhouse’s name on social media can give you permanent brain damage, and you’d better believe the conspiracy theorists are on his side. While Cracked takes the bold stance that shooting people is bad, there’s no shortage of people who disagree. …
RELATED: The Bizarre ‘Surveillance State’ Outrage Over … Elf On The Shelf
Nobody but your mom likes the Elf on the Shelf, but usually, there are normal reasons for the mild distaste. He looks a bit unsettling. Remembering to move him every night is a pain. You wouldn’t think a doll that literally just sits there could garner actual outrage, but just about every year since about 2011, someone has written an article explaining that Santa’s little helper is actually a tool of tyranny, preparing our children to accept the impending all-seeing gaze of Big Brother. Yes, really.
It started with a Washington Post article titled “CBS’s ‘Elf on the Shelf’: Unwarranted Christmas surveillance techniques” that ties the Elf into the history of the upper classes turning Christmas from an occasion for the poor to get theirs into the “modernized morality of Dickens” and concludes “‘The Elf on the Shelf’ is just another nannycam in a nanny state obsessed with penal codes.”
In 2012, the Atlantic frowned on the Elf “solicit[ing] the child’s Christmas wishes — for gifts, not for peace on earth or a cure for cancer,” as if it’s a doll’s fault that your average grade-schooler can be a little self-centered, before asking “Why inject a note of fear and suspicion into a season and a holiday that are meant to be about love, togetherness, and forgiveness?” and warning against using the elf “to bully your child into thinking that good behavior equals gifts,” having apparently forgotten that entire Santa thing.
However, things really got going in 2014, with Dr. Laura Pinto’s article for the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives and subsequent research into “‘Elf on the Shelf’ and the normalization of surveillance.” She compares the doll to 18th-century prison models, cites fucking Foucault, and gave media outlets “slow news day” material for years to come. She told HLN the same year that “What we’re hearing is that some parents are saying, ‘That doll creeps me out, and I don’t like it spying on us,'” because the Elf apparently became mandatory in Canada at some point, and clarified to the Washington Post that “It sounds humorous, but we argue that if a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted,” just in case anyone thought she was kidding. …
An Elixir From the French Alps, Frozen in Time
Only two monks know the full recipe for Chartreuse, and even in the pandemic they stuck to their Middle Ages motto: “The cross is steady while the world turns.”
The Pouring Ribbons bar in Manhattan has an enviable collection of Chartreuse bottles. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
When the world went into lockdowns this year, the monks of Chartreuse simply added another tick to their 900-year record of self-imposed isolation.
The Chartreux, also known as Carthusians, embrace a deeply ascetic existence in the western French Alps, observing customs that have barely changed since their order, one of Christianity’s oldest, was founded. They pass the days alone, praying for humanity and listening for God in the silence that surrounds them.
Frugal meals of bread, cheese, eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts and fish arrive through a cubby in their individual cells. With few exceptions, the monks do not enter one another’s quarters, and they rarely interact — save for midnight and daytime church services, where no musical instruments are allowed. And once a week, they stroll in pairs through the forests fortifying the monastery.
This internal lifestyle has survived centuries of external turmoil — avalanches, landslides, terrible fires, religious wars, pillaging, evictions and exile, military occupation, the French Revolution and, yes, plagues. Through times of earthly chaos, the Chartreux thrive in accordance with their Middle Ages-era motto: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis (“The cross is steady while the world turns”).
“This order has lasted because they know how to live beyond time, and they know how to live, also, in the present,” said Nadège Druzkowski, an artist and a journalist who spent almost five years putting together a documentary project on the monastery and its surrounding landscapes. “It’s humbling.” …
Experience: I lived as a wild turkey
My aim was to become indistinguishable from the rest of the flock, but I felt they saw me as the village idiot.
Joe Hutto: ‘I spent a lot of time in the pen. I had to be present at dusk until every one of my charges was asleep.’
I started adopting young animals while still a child myself. Many were orphaned newborns, meaning I mothered a variety of creatures – raccoon, squirrel, fox, bobcat, whatever came my way. I felt the animals preferred my company to that of members of their own species, and many even slept in my bed. At the time, I thought I’d discovered a sort of magic; but after years of studying animal behaviour, I learned of a process known as imprinting, whereby young creatures become attached to the first moving object they encounter.
I was keen to explore this phenomenon further, but it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I got the chance. In the early 90s, I was living on a large tract of land in rural Florida, working as a wildlife artist and researcher. One day, I was given a dog bowl full of wild turkey eggs by a tractor driver who had almost driven over them. I had to act fast, procuring an incubator at short notice and turning the eggs twice a day, as a turkey hen would. I would regularly “vocalise” at them, recreating the putts and purrs a wild turkey would make on its nest, in order to get the eggs accustomed to my voice. A week or so into the experiment, I started to hear peeped responses from them and the first tiny beak broke through.
Joe Hutto: ‘The first poult to emerge responded immediately to my voice, raising his wet head to look me straight in the eyes.’
The first poult to emerge responded immediately to my voice, raising his wet head to look me straight in the eyes. Then he pressed his face against mine and quickly fell asleep. Over the next few days, this process was repeated many times; though not all the chicks survived, I soon had a new family of 16 wild turkeys.
I built a large pen to protect my flock from predators, complete with upright tree limbs for them to roost; at a week and a half old, they could already fly. I spent a lot of time in the pen myself. The poults would expect Mom to be waiting when they emerged from their roosts before dawn and I had to be present at dusk until every one of my charges was asleep.
During the day we explored the surrounding countryside. I quickly became familiar with each bird’s distinctive personality: Little Friend, who always wanted to be by my side; Sweet Pea, who enjoyed nothing better than being held and stroked. They were fascinated by every new thing they encountered, but also had individual interests: Rosita was drawn to squirrels, Turkey Boy to turtles. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Copy up around the fire with our Holiday Yule log: an endless loop of Trump losing the election.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at the president and his enablers continuing their attempt to end democracy just a month ahead of the end of the Trump administration.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
子ねこのみりにぴったりな小さな箱。そしてそれが羨ましいまる。Maru wants to get into the Miri’s small box.
Video for Cats to Watch : Squirrels and Birds Extravaganza.
Ed. Another time suck to enjoy.
FINALLY . . .
The Chic Garments Made From WWII Escape Maps
These silk military artifacts have been transformed into hoodies, underwear, and a wedding dress.
A set of underwear made from a silk Royal Air Force map given to Patricia Knatchbull, third cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. Embiggenable.
ENGLISH PRINTMAKER HESTER COX KNEW she didn’t want a traditional white dress for her North Yorkshire wedding in 2016. Her now-husband agreed. So Cox chose something different: a dress made from silk maps of Scandinavia dating back to the 1940s. Working with designer Sara Jane Murray, Cox chose maps of Sweden showing a pale blue sea dotted with small islands. She based the style on a favorite sundress. The unique garment received global media attention, but it’s not as unprecedented as it may seem.
During the second World War, M19 inventor Christopher Clayton Hutton created these silk maps, which were used for escape and evasion. They became invaluable tools for Allied forces shot down or taken as prisoners of war in Europe and the Pacific. Hutton worked with Wallace Ellison, himself a POW in the First World War, to figure out how to fix ink onto the maps.
Hester Cox in her wedding dress.
As Erin McCarthy details in Mental Floss, the company that printed Hutton’s silk maps for him, John Waddington Ltd., also manufactured all of the country’s Monopoly boards. After Hutton approached them, the Waddingtons set up a secret room in their factory, where a select cadre of employees rejiggered the game boards—punching small compartments into them, hiding the tiny tools, and covering the hole with a game space decal.
The maps were durable against the outdoor elements and could be easily hidden in a jacket or boot. (And, of course, they were silent when unfolded.) Hundreds of thousands of maps produced in Great Britain and the United States aided in some 750 escapes. They also represent wartime creativity when resources are scarce. (During the same period, Maidenform made bras for carrier pigeons to keep them contained against paratroopers’ chests as they fell from the sky.)
After the war, fabric rationing continued in conflict-ravaged Europe, but a triumphant British public wanted to celebrate and experience the material frivolity of peacetime. The shortage encouraged returning soldiers to offer their maps to be transformed into clothes, often by their wives and female loved ones. Fashion historian Anna Vaughan Kett says the maps fit into the “Make Do and Mend” message disseminated by the Ministry of Information to encourage reusing and recycling clothing. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
They did in 2000, dipshit. https://t.co/GLBgrEhvyu
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) December 17, 2020
ONE MORE ONE MORE THING:
This is his second time around, he let an HIV outbreak in Indiana fester for months under his watch as Governor. Hundreds died
— Drew Curtis (@DrewCurtis) December 18, 2020
WORD OF THE DAY: Voteflake
Anyone who protests the results of the 2020 US Presidential Election without any proof or evidence and refuses to recognize Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States of America.
After over 50 cases brought before, and thrown out of, US courts, including the Supreme Court, hundreds of Trump supporters, claiming to be a million supporters, continued to cry and protest and chant outside the White House, like a bunch of voteflakes.
The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020
