After the 2012 election, Buzzfeed put together a series of electoral maps that showed what the results would have looked like if we didn’t have universal suffrage. A couple of them went viral, including this one, which depicts the election results…
["Stock Photo: A Man Who Voted Holds Up His Voting Badge Lapel Pin" on Shutterstock]
Addressing a crowd at the Pratt Institute in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, filmmaker Spike Lee unleashed an epic rant over the gentrification of predominately ethnic neighborhoods of New York City.
According to the Daily Intelligencer, Lee was asked a question about “the other side” of the gentrification debate and he took a few moments to rail about "some bullshit article in the New York Times saying ‘the good of gentrification.’” (The NYT's “Argument Over a Brownstone Neighborhood” and New York’s “Is Gentrification All Bad?”).
In a seven-minute long mf-bombing diatribe, Lee went after the lack of social services prior to the arrival of the white gentrifiers, hipsters, dogs, and "real estate motherf*ckers' changing neighborhood names.
On gentrification:
"Then comes the motherf*ckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherf*ckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherf*ckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherf*ckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherf*ckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherf*ckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the f*ck outta here!"
On renaming neighborhoods :
"People want live in Fort Greene. People wanna live in Clinton Hill. The Lower East Side, they move to Williamsburg, they can’t even afford f*ckin’, motherf*ckin’ Williamsburg now because of motherf*ckin’ hipsters. What do they call Bushwick now? What’s the word? [Audience: East Williamsburg]That’s another thing: Motherf*ckin’… These real estate motherf*ckers are changing names! Stuyvestant Heights? 110th to 125th, there’s another name for Harlem. What is it? What? What is it? No, no, not Morningside Heights. There’s a new one. [Audience: SpaHa] What the f*ck is that? How you changin’ names?"
Listen to the audio below:
[Image via Thomas Rome on FLICKR, Creative Commons licensed];
On Tuesday, actor Will Ferrell took to Facebook to encourage his followers to "get covered," only to be met by a barrage of unhinged conservative backlash.
His original post features a link to Healthcare.gov and admonishes his followers to "put some clothes on":
Some of his followers expressed their disagreement with him in a manner that was both polite and topical:
Most, however, simply disagreed:
Ferrell, it seems, has the "millions of dollars" required to sign up for Obamacare, but is also so broke that he must go, hat in hand, to the Obama Administration's Celebrity Czar and beg for handouts with a cardboard sign. But not before he does two more things:
Once Ferrell was safely ensconced on the "wrong side of History" with all of his followers' guns and a fair amount of crack, it was safe for them to be topical again:
At least for one comment. No doubt, though, Ferrell appreciated the career advice before crying many manly tears at news that someone, somewhere out there had reluctantly decided to boycott his films. Then it started getting really ugly:
The nicest thing anyone had to say about him, it seems, is that he was a "flop":
And, well, "a douche bag sheep." In case Ferrell didn't understand the implications of being "a douche bag sheep," his former follower was keen to point out that whatever else it is, it isn't "funny." Because Ferrell isn't funny, he's just stupid:
And rich. His conservative followers hate him for being -- wait, they hate him for being rich? "Makes me sick you rich think you know what's best for us middle class" sounds a lot like class warfare. Are conservatives turning the socialist corner and embracing class warfare?
If they're calling him "Mr Business Bad Man!!!" we can only assume they've come around, right?
Never mind, the world makes sense again. Besides, it's not even Ferrell who posted that image on his own Facebook wall:
It's a Photoshop job! Just look at the kerning!
We're sure his conservative followers are happy to know that they need not burn their cherished copies of A Night at the Roxbury.
The revolutionary leader strived to live up to Islamic ideals. But it was his humility that made him a hero to us
When Malcolm X split with the Nation of Islam, he traveled on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, where he was exposed to mainstream Islam – the Islam that the majority of the Muslim world practices. Historically, of course, Mecca is where Prophet Abraham established a sacred site for the worship of one God. It was there that Malcolm X first witnessed unity among different people, irrespective of their race. He wrote of his trip:
But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white … But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts …
This was typical Malcolm X: to discard false understandings in light of reality, to remain dedicated to the truth.
Today, many will remember the assassination of the revolutionary civil rights activist and reformer. Many will also undoubtedly lay claim to his legacy: his unswerving dedication to equality, unity and the truth.
For many Muslims, this is what made Malcolm X's life both inspirational and exemplary. We saw him as one of our own. We still do. He died, 49 years ago today, in a manner that we would consider to be martyrdom, because he died on the path to God.
Malcom X's life is also one that echoes the history of Islam itself. A little over 1300 years ago, the grandson of Prophet Mohammed, Hussain Ibn Ali, refused to pledge his allegiance to an unjust ruler. The ruler therefore ordered the beheading of Hussain, without so much as considering the stature or honor of the man he was about to kill. Afterward, the tyrant trapped a small band of Hussain's family and friends in the desert, denied them water for three days, and then challenged them to battle against an army of tens of thousands. Needless to say, the small army of Hussain was crushed and quickly subdued. With the exception of his very fragile son, all of Hussain's men were killed and women captured, ready to be chained and paraded in foreign lands.
But to this day, millions of people commemorate the event. In fact, the world's largest peaceful gathering occurs on the same day every single year in Karbala, Iraq, where an estimated 25 million people come together to mourn and remember Hussain Ibn Ali and his sacrifice.
Like Hussain Ibn Ali, Malcolm X's life exemplifies a dedication to truth and justice, as well as a commitment to faith. These are prime tenets to which all Muslims adhere, regardless of where they come from or what school of Islam they follow. I'd also like to think they're principles that all people – irrespective of creed or religion – can share.
Many Muslims revere Malcolm X not only for what he shares with other revolutionary figures, but also for his own special legacy. Like others, Malcolm dedicated himself to the pursuit of justice. He was always on a path of self-enrichment and he did his best to live up to Islamic ideals. But he made mistakes too, and his many imperfections have made him all the more relatable to Muslims everywhere, especially the younger generation. Malcolm's humility – his willingness to admit to his shortcomings if it led him to the truth – is arguably one of the most important lessons we, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, can draw from his life.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The recent incident at Ole Miss shouldn't lull us into thinking that racism is confined to the South. It's alive and well across the US
It's black history month, and here's how America is celebrating: another Florida jury decided that a white man who disliked "thug music" didn't commit murder when he shot an unarmed black boy to death. Members of the Ku Klux Klan turned up at a black history month presentation at the Boone County Library in Harrison, Arkansas, wearing "Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White" stickers. Campaigning in Texas for Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, rocker and gun fetishist Ted Nugent called Barack Obama a "communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel". And in the early hours of 16 February, somebody "decorated" the statue of James Meredith, the first African American admitted to the University of Mississippi, with an old Confederate flag and a noose around the neck.
In the US, we like to congratulate ourselves on how far we've come since the 1950s and 1960s. Racial prejudice is no longer enshrined in statute. The most famous scientist in the country is a black guy: astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. And 12 Years a Slave may win a slew of Oscars.
But the so-called post-racial society everybody got all excited about in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president hasn't arrived, no matter how hard we've tried to will it into being. "Things have changed in the South," said Chief Justice John G Roberts when he wrote the opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act, the most important legislation to come out of the Civil Rights Movement. As if the state legislatures of Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania (among others) weren't passing laws to impede voting by college students, women, the poor and especially people of color.
Conservatives want to believe that African Americans need to get over it and stop whining about slavery and Jim Crow and white privilege. According to the Fox News wing of the Republican Party, racism is practiced mostly by black people like Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, black people who apparently hate white people. Terrified of demographic projections showing that by 2043 non-Latino whites will be in a minority, they've convinced themselves they're already being oppressed. One form "oppression" takes is that ghastly "political correctness". They know they shouldn't email pictures of President Obama in a feather head-dress with a bone through his nose or assume that a young black guy in a hoodie is going to rob, rape or murder them. They know they can't call Martin Luther King a terrorist out loud, or make jokes in public about the black and gay football player Michael Sam.
Clearly, the pressure on white folks is immense. No wonder they need to let off a little steam by vandalizing the statue of James Meredith with the central symbol of racial violence, the noose, a reminder that in the years following the end of Reconstruction, over 3000 African Americans were lynched. Some comments in reaction to news reports insist it was just a little harmless "fun," not like back in 1962 when Meredith first set foot on the Ole Miss campus and the place exploded in days of rioting, killing two and injuring 300.
This particular strain of stupidity is not (and never has been) confined to the states of the Old Confederacy. This January at Arizona State University, a white fraternity commemorated the Martin Luther King Jr holiday by wearing basketball jerseys, sideways baseball caps and saggin' britches (you know, African American national costume), flashing what they imagined to be "gang signs" and drinking out of watermelon cups. Former top aides to Wisconsin governor (and possible 2016 presidential contender) Scott Walker have recently been caught sending racist emails. In New Jersey, the all-white state champion high school wrestling team tweeted out a photo of themselves cavorting in front of a black blow-up dummy hanging by a rope, and a private school in California got into the black history month spirit by serving students a lunch of fried chicken and watermelon (what? no chitlins?). Indeed, Ted Nugent is from Michigan.
The good news is that when there's an eruption of idiocy in the South, the brighter bulbs amongst us fight back. We're the ones with the lurid 350-year history of slavery and legal segregation, the stage on which America's racial drama plays out. We know how to articulate the problem; we know how to call for a solution. Within hours of the Meredith statue's desecration, University of Mississippi alumni ponied up a $25,000 reward for information on the perpetrators and students organized a rally.
The nickname "Ole Miss" refers not to "Old Mississippi," but the name the slaves would call the eldest white lady on the plantation. Yet the university's deep-sixed a lot of its former Old South imagery, replacing "Colonel Reb", the mascot who looks like a cartoon antebellum plantation master. They've invested in the study of the South's cultural gifts to the world: the Blues, barbecue, the writing of William Faulkner and Richard Wright.
This is not to oversell Southern enlightenment: we still vote Republican and a billboard with SECEDE in gigantic letters has just appeared in Tallahassee, the capital of Florida. It was put up by the League of the South, self-proclaimed neo-Confederates who've apparently forgotten just how well secession worked out in 1861. But despite the South's bloody and hateful history, there's hope for progressivism. The new generation, the kind of young people who surrounded the statue of James Meredith at Ole Miss, holding its bronze hands and calling for an end to hatred, will stick around – and, as the old song says, take their stand in Dixie.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The album's anthemic title song now has an elegiac patina – but the radicalism of The Times They Are a-Changin' still burns
Fifty years ago this month the 22-year-old Bob Dylan released his third album, The Times They Are a-Changin' – the acme and as it turned out the end of his "protest" period. Dylan renounced this genre so quickly, and took his fans on such a giddy journey afterwards, that there's a tendency to downplay the extraordinary achievement and impact of his work in this brief initial phase of a long career.
As a collection, the album is one of the high watermarks of political songwriting in any musical genre. These are beautifully crafted, tightly focused mini-masterpieces. And they have a radical edge, a political toughness, that one rarely finds in the folk music of the period. Abstract paeans to peace and brotherhood were not for Dylan; the songs are uncompromising in their anger and unsparing in their analysis.
The album includes the two songs Dylan had sung at the March on Washington, six months earlier. But while Martin Luther King appealed to an inclusive future, Dylan struck a very different note: When the Ship Comes In was a revenge fantasy whose joyously vindictive climax is a vision of the total destruction of the oppressors; the other song, Only a Pawn in Their Game, was written in response to the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi, in June 1963.
The subject of this song, however, is not the martyred activist, but the man who killed him. And rather than a villain or psychopath, Dylan portrayed him as the product of a system: a system that set poor white against poor black for the benefit of an elite. A South politician preaches to the poor white man / "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. / You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.It was a class analysis of white supremacy, made at a time when this was a fringe idea even within the civil rights movement – though that would soon change.
In The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll Dylan again situates an act of racist violence within a larger system of social hierarchy. It's a story told with the deliberation of constrained outrage, leading to a devastating payoff in the final verse, which reveals the complicity of the state, and society at large, in the crime. "Now," Dylan scolds us, "is the time for your tears." Unusually for the time, Dylan does not allow his audience to wallow in moral superiority. At every turn, he challenges liberal complacency.
The album's treatment of the cruelties of class is stark. In Ballad of Hollis Brown, a farmer is driven to the destruction of his family and himself by the relentless pressure of poverty. North Country Blues chronicles the fate of an iron-mining town in Minnesota when the owners shift production to "the South American towns, where the miners work almost for nothing". It's a story of de-industrialisation and globalisation, written long before those terms entered the lexicon.
With God On Our Side, a sweeping survey of American warfare from the genocide of the native population to the nuclear standoff of the cold war, is a radical revision of the authorised version of American history (decades before Howard Zinn). In this centennial year, the verse on the first world war stands out: The reason for fighting / I never got straight / But I learned to accept it / Accept it with pride / For you don't count the dead / When God's on your side.
Where did the politics come from? Woody Guthrie had been Dylan's first connection to the radicalism of the 30s, and in New York he met other veterans of the half-forgotten Popular Front era, including Pete Seeger. In the Greenwich Village folk scene he mingled with socialists, anarchists and pacifists. You wouldn't know it from the film Inside Llewyn Davis, but this was a milieu buzzing with political argument and radical ideas. But the spark was surely the upsurge in youth activism, most notably in the sit-ins in the south, where young people had engaged in a direct challenge to power and succeeded in redefining the boundaries of the politically possible. Their boldness supplied Dylan and others with the self-confidence to "speak truth to power".
The album also includes three intimate, enigmatically personal songs. Boots of Spanish Leather and One Too Many Mornings are both evocatively equivocal. Restless Farewell, the album's finale, is mainly of interest in hinting at Dylan's imminent departure from what he'd come to see as the protest-song straight-jacket. "So I'll make my stand / And remain as I am / And bid farewell and not give a damn."
As for the anthemic title song, even in its day many found its naivety and generational self-righteousness irritating. And yet, in articulating in such broad rhetorical strokes the belief that epochal change was possible and imminent, Dylan left us with a precious distillation of a historical moment. Over the decades the song has acquired an elegiac patina as the millennial hopes that produced it recede into a distant past. But just as the injustices challenged by Dylan's songs are still very much with us, so too is the need for the all-embracing emancipatory aspiration of The Times They Are a-Changin'.
• Mike Marqusee is the author of Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The only reason the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline wasn’t approved years ago is that activists, deeming it a vital proxy in the larger battle to keep the dirtiest fossil fuels in the ground, have applied relentless pressure on the Obama…
This is an actual e-mail sequence that we just had with Nick Searcy, a longtime character actor in Hollywood who is currently playing Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Art Mullen in Justified. Nick has been in movies (Fried Green Tomatoes, Castaway) and plenty of television series (Easy Money, Seven Days).
We reached out to him once we noticed what a wild Twitter feed Nick has. Below, we've collected some highlights just from the last couple of days, where he calls atheists "pussies" and generally talks like your typical unhinged Internet troll, rather than a Peabody Award-winning actor. But hey, he was endorsed by Rush Limbaugh last year, so he has that going for him.
We thought, since he was so outspoken and rained down invective on people who disagreed with him on Twitter, that Nick might be up for an interview...
RAW: Hey, Nick. I just noticed what a no-holds-barred Twitter feed you have. What a riot. I'd love to do a short piece about you. Got time for a chat?
SEARCY: Frankly, I don't think I trust your website, after looking at it.
RAW: I'm going to put up some of your tweets and let them speak for themselves. I was just curious about what it's like to be an outspoken conservative in Hollywood. It would be great to have your actual response to that.
SEARCY: Are you going to headline it "Teabagger" or "Ultra-con" or "Bigot"?
RAW: How would you describe yourself in your own words?
SEARCY: Not playing. Go back to your hit pieces on Christianity and decent Americans who disagree with you.
Ah well. That's disappointing. We'll let Nick speak for himself in a sampling of his tweets from yesterday and today...
This weekend was rough. I think I took on the entire Juvenile International Atheists Club, one shit-eater at a time. @bitmaelstrom
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014100s of years from now, classes on our Twitter feeds will be taught by leftists, who will call us "fascist."@ChrisLoesch @AdamBaldwin
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Oh well. I've got the goddamned World Asskissing 20something Atheist Buttbuddy Convention to worry about. @Todd__Kincannon @AdamBaldwin
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014What true gutless anonymous atheist pussy acts this way? Oh that's right, ALL of them. @GodlessTwat
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014I always listen when a shiteating segment in the Human Anonymous Atheist Centipede comments on my eating habits.@Scrivener3 @SunbeamTiger66
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014I am on television, and immensely googleable, you ignorant asshole. Now: WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU, anonymous internet Pussy? @lackingbelief
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Whenever I need to know more about how to be godly, I ask a shit-eating anonymous atheist ass like @lackingbelief! @SP4RT4N360 @FanOLiberty
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Do you often type "lol" after shit you type that no one on Earth would find funny? That's why I'm rich and your life sucks! @Ravens_Claws
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Talked to @FXNetworks_PR today about coming events & they said, "You get more tweets than anyone. Congrats!" @monsterhunter45 @GodlessTwat
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014There is nothing like being coached in godliness by a chickenshit anonymous atheist twitter pussy who doesn't believe in God! @DeepSearch17
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Wow, that sounds so profound. I'll bet a fat chick would really swoon if you said something like that to her. @Brimshack @DeepSearch17
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014I can't, @Atheistican, because the audience,writers,&critics all love me, &they send me big fucking checks. @efilnikcufecin7 @lackingbelief
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014You should see my house, no-lister. You would shit your envious anonymous athiest leftist pussy panties and cry. @CoolsomeXD @Atheistican
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014I go to the gun range, boxing class, spin class, &Anonymous Leftist Twitter Douchebag Slapping Class for my therapy, whiner. @RobbieGorlick
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014By the way, How many Gutless anonymous Polish internet pussies does it take to screw in a light bulb? @UltraAtheistPL @SecularSurfer
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014Actually, it is seriously, I believe, what they long for. They want to be slaves to an Almighty State. They crave asskissing. @Khornishman
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014It is not split. It is dead. A @GOP that does not full-throatedly embrace a conservative like @SenTedCruz is simply useless. @jimpook @GOP
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014ROMNEY DID NOT WIN BECAUSE HE WOULD NOT FIGHT. @jimpook @GOP @SenTedCruz
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014Let's not relive this debacle. But let's REFUSE to let the @GOP force us to accept a losing moderate in 2016. @jimpook @salpie @SAMROD2935
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014Call me a racist again! My adopted son of a different race finds that hilarious! @UltraAtheistPL @SecularSurfer
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014That's why we are shooting season 5 and guaranteed season six, LOSER. @4wardHaze @Curt_Ames @AJam3013
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014You can always tell who the liberal is. He's the one making "gay" jokes while he calls you a racist. @FraksMe @thom_roland @Curt_Ames
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014Don't need your support, fat ass! Season 6 guaranteed! YOU SHOULD SEE MY HOUSE! @Curt_Ames @pray_for_life @Markooo70 @SecuLawyer
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014That's because ignorant fat asses like you are not worth arguing with. And you're an easy target, you know, because you'e WIDE. @Curt_Ames
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014And here's a fun thing Nick did about working out. He's a card.
When we saw that the good people of Pocatello, Idaho were panicked about the prospect of a Mexican diner being turned into a local Islamic center, we knew we had to come to their aid.
“I get very fearful, because I live close to this place,” said a local resident with the unfortunate name of Rev. Jim Jones, when the people of Pocatello were given the chance to speak up.
We understand the good reverend's worry. How, for example, are the white folks of Pocatello -- who make up 90 percent of the town -- going to tell the long-suffering Mexicans among them from the new arrivals, the Muslims of various Middle East nations who are settling American towns and want places to gather like a local Islamic center?
We turned to our old friend Gustavo Arellano, editor of OC Weekly and author of the long-running column, "Ask a Mexican," to help us out.
And the first thing he pointed out is that the pale folks of potato country are going to have a very, very difficult time.
"I think it's almost impossible. The old joke is that Saddam Hussein was everybody's tío, because all of our uncles looked like Saddam. The mustache, the bushy hair. He could have been your Tío Gabriel or Tío Jesus," Gustavo told us in a telephone conversation.
It turns out there are many similarities that make it tough to decide, on sight, if a person is from Guanajuato or Riyadh.
"The hijab? My grandmother never went out of her house without a veil. That's what women used to do. Look at the Virgin Mary -- I don't think I've ever seen her hair in my life," Gustavo points out.
"And did you know 'Guadalupe' is not a Spanish word? It's mixed from Arabic and Latin. Virgen de Guadalupe literally means 'Virgin of the Wolf River.' And have you noticed that she's standing on a crescent? That's a big symbol for Islam," he adds. "Oh yeah. We're brothers from another madre, absolutely."
Even the most obvious differences seem to disappear when you look closer, Gustavo points out. "We have pork via al pastor, and they have lamb and beef via shawarma, even though it's the exact same meal."
But if Mexicans and Muslims have a lot of things in common, Americans do think of them differently.
"Americans have at least made their peace with Mexicans. They know we're taking over. But I think the only thing Americans have accepted from Muslims is hummus," he says. "Other than that we're indistinguishable. We both remain America's biggest threats."
So if Idahoans are going to have a tough time deciding if the person they meet on the street is from, say, Jordan, or from Culiacán, we asked Gustavo if there was a simple question they could ask to quickly tell the difference.
"They should ask, 'Will you eat refried beans?' Muslims won't eat it because it has lard, from pork," Gustavo answered.
That is golden. It should work every time. So, good folks of Pocatello, calm your fears, and be ready to ask your neighbors if they eat refried beans. Because there's nothing like peace of mind.
[Image: Logo for Gustavo Arellano's OC Weekly column, "Ask a Mexican."]
We are getting close to what might be called The Noah Scenario. Last month was the wettest January in Britain since records began in 1767. So far this month has been no different, and the Met Office expects the wind and rain to continue until March. Climate change may be a gradual process, but people who live on the Somerset Levels or the banks of the Thames are getting a very sudden education in the value of arks.
It's unlikely that these floods will be the last such catastrophe, or the worst. Climate scientists expect bigger and more frequent extreme weather events throughout the coming century – not just wind and rain, but droughts as well. Nor is weather the only danger: pandemic flu, nuclear weapons, antibiotic resistance, environmental catastrophe and chronic food shortages could also offer dire threats to civilisation as we know it. You might not want to panic just yet, but you might decide that it is time to join the "preppers" – people who are secretly preparing to abandon modern life when the apocalypse, in whatever form, does arrive.
When do I abandon my home?
When you have no choice. When soldiers are on your street, your neighbours have begun to steal from you and plague-sufferers are camped in your drive – or perhaps slightly before all that. Preppers have a catch-all term for this moment: the SHTF scenario, in reference to the day when the Shit finally does Hit The Fan.
"It would be the last resort for me," says Steve, a 57-year-old prepper from Essex, who runs ukpreppersguide.co.uk. "Some people seem to think it's the first thing to do. The moment something happens, they grab their rucksack and off they go and live in the wild – but if you've ever tried that, it really isn't easy. Where I am at the moment, I probably have enough provisions to survive for about nine months. That doesn't include going out and getting your own food."
When the moment comes, however, you may not have much warning, so it is important to keep what preppers call a "bug-out bag" ready at all times. Ideally, you'd leave at night, when you won't be followed. "The idea behind leaving your home is to get away from danger," Steve explains, "which means getting away from everybody and going under the radar, off-grid, so you can't be found – then just survive for however long is needed before you can come back to civilisation."
Should I move to Cumbria?
If you're worried about rain, Suffolk is Britain's driest county. But there you'll have to worry about the sea instead. Next driest is Bedfordshire, although it is also quite an expensive place to buy a house, while society still functions, so Nottinghamshire or Northamptonshire might be better if you're surviving on a budget. Be sure to have plenty of water butts in any of these places.
Alternatively, it might be simpler to live somewhere wet, but higher up. Each outbreak of catastrophic flooding brings with it a quieter outbreak of people feeling smug on hills, which never flood, and offer a good defensive position should you come under attack from hordes of wet, hungry or diseased people. Cumbria, Wales and the Western Highlands are some of the wettest parts of the UK. They are also very hilly, not too expensive, and reasonably remote from population centres, which makes them perfect for your purposes.
A quick word on the windiness of hills. This can be a good thing, allowing you to generate your own electricity if you put up a turbine. If you are worried about storm damage, however, then you will want to give thought to exactly where your house should be. "Our prevailing weather comes from the west," explains Nicola Maxey from the Met Office, "so if you're on the east side of a hill you're going to be protected from the prevailing winds." Thus located, with several months of food, electricity and water-purification supplies, your house should be a good place to wait for calamity to pass.
What should I take?
This is the most-discussed question of all among preppers, and you'll find many packing lists for bug-out bags online. Water, fire and light, hunting and survival tools, food and cooking equipment, medical supplies, maps, communications, clothing, shelter, weaponry, miscellaneous useful items and the bag itself are the major categories for consideration, which should give you an idea of how much you have to buy, pack and think about. As always, the trade-off is between having all the equipment you need and being able to carry it. If you're going alone, that makes things harder, although a group is harder to feed.
"Any bug-out bag should be equipped with at least seven days' food in the form of MREs – that's dehydrated Meals Ready to Eat," says Steve. "It's a bit like Pot Noodles, but on a more advanced level. It's very easy to take a week's supply. But along with that you're going to need methods to trap and snare animals, and potentially to shoot them. We're not allowed many firearms in this country, but even a basic catapult will help."
You'll also have to consider secrecy, which, after all, is the whole point of the exercise. For instance, you should avoid lighting fires to cook your food because they will make you visible. Instead, you are better off taking a small alcohol stove. When it comes to what you'll live in, caves are good. The trouble is there aren't enough of them, so you'll need to bring a tent, and learn to camouflage it. Over time you may want to build a larger and more comfortable shelter around that, although it is also an advantage to stay mobile.
The luxury option would be to to buy one of the many decommissioned bomb shelters or observation posts that come on to the market from time to time, or perhaps just your own bit of tunnel. Some, such as the Dartmoor observation post that sold for £17,400 in September 2012, are little more than a buried cupboard. Others, such as the Burlington Bunker in Wiltshire, are vast complexes capable of housing several thousand people. That went on sale in 2005, and was probably out of your price range. Having bought a bunker, it will of course need to be stocked up with several months' supplies, and perhaps its own bug-out bag in case you have to leave. Don't forget some boardgames and a psychiatrist.
Will I have to live in the woods?
Think carefully about where to go, and give yourself several options. You'll need a piece of land – perhaps only a few acres – where you can hide and find enough to eat and drink. In the UK, it is difficult to hide in open country, so woodland is good. "Anywhere that's secluded, that's probably the key to survival," Steve says. "Get as far away from people as possible, and stay there. Don't make yourself known. I've got two areas I go to that are less than five acres. Two forests absolutely full of wildlife, with a stream running along. If you can get near a river, you can fish."
Another thing to bear in mind is the time of year. In the winter, food may well be scarce and water more abundant; in the summer, the reverse, so you may want to prepare an option for each season. You also need to consider how you'll get there. One location may be perfect, but if you're relying on petrol and roads, in the SHTF scenario it may be inaccessible. Give yourself at least one location you can walk to.
As practice for keeping themselves hidden, or just for the buzz, some people engage in an activity called "stealth camping". Essentially this means sneaking into places they are not allowed to be, staying the night and leaving again without ever being detected. If you've bought your own bunker, obviously you don't need to bother with this. Just make sure the hatch is strong, and that you can get there.
Could I disembowel a rabbit?
Getting the equipment and supplies is one thing, but being ready to use them is another. Steve regularly visits his planned bugging-out locations without any food or water, and practises living off the land for several days. "It really is surprising what a culture shock it is to go away for a week with nothing," he says. "It's not a jolly. A lot of people are armchair preppers. They'll get the equipment and they'll read the book, but they won't go out and practise. But that really is the key to being prepared – making sure you can do what you think you can do."
Can you, for instance, shoot a rabbit, skin it, field-dress (ie disembowel) it, and cook it, perhaps in the rain, with just a pocket knife? Can you set traps for fish? Do you even know what wildlife is in your chosen area, which offers the most meat, and which is easiest to catch? Do you know how to tell whether or not water is safe to drink? If you make yourself ill by doing any of these things wrongly, are you medically skilled enough to treat yourself? Can you mend your clothes, or your radio, or your tent? Most of these skills are not difficult to master, they just need "practice, practice, practice", according to Steve.
Should I take my family (and could I eat them)?
This is tricky, because even starting the conversation is a point of no return. "One of the key elements is not telling anyone that you're a prepper," Steve says, which is why he won't share his surname. "If every man and his dog knew, and then if there was a disaster, they'd all just say: 'Don't worry. We'll go round there. Steve's got it all.'"
On the other hand, survival is much easier in a group. You can carry more, and do more. What's important, however, is that everybody shares your vision and is equally dedicated, so the team does not disintegrate. "You don't want any hangers-on," says Steve. "Someone who is skilled medically is a big plus. Someone who's mechanically minded, someone who can cook and hunt and fish – several people with different skills is ideal."
So who can you trust? If you can trust your family, take them, but perhaps make a contingency plan for which one you'll all eat first, and discuss it in secret with the others. (You might also make another plan about who'll be eaten second, and discuss this with whoever's left. If no one discusses eating anyone with you, distrust them all.) If your family includes any young children you are not prepared to eat then your chances of success are more or less zero, but you're probably accustomed to that feeling.
Remember that shared planning as a group also means shared practice. Each person should focus on their special skills, but make sure that everybody is on top of the basics. "I drag my wife with me sometimes," Steve says. "She doesn't necessarily like it, but off we go. She doesn't mind eating a nice bit of fresh rabbit, but she certainly doesn't like the idea of skinning it or anything like that."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
['Burning Globe Earth (West Hemisphere)' on Shutterstock]
On Friday, a three-day election process ended when Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted against joining the United Auto Workers (UAW) 712 to 626. Coming into the vote, both sides knew what was at stake — the union drive was a direct threat…
LaBeouf has gone from plagiariser to 'performance artist' in a matter of weeks. He's an ultimate internet and media troll
Harvard Business School should do a case study on Shia LaBeouf. He's gone from plagiariser to credible artist in a matter of weeks. The former child actor for Disney has more credibility now than in his decade-plus TV and bad action film career, and it's all thanks to his trolling spree involving the media, the internet, the entertainment industry, and now, the art world.
LaBeouf is is in the midst of a widely publicized #IAMSORRY exhibit in Los Angeles through Sunday. Wearing a paperbag on your head has never seemed so clever.
The press fascination began in December after it became known LaBeouf plagiarized a well-known graphic novel word for word and scene for scene in his directorial debut. But instead of disappearing in shame, he upped his bizarre antics – continued plagiarizing, weird tweets, skywriting, and now, paper-bag wearing act. Whether or not you buy his latest argument that this is all just "performance art", it's a winning strategy. Coverage from the likes of The Los Angeles Times and Time magazine has shifted the conversation from vilifying him for his serial plagiarism to "look at how eccentric he is!" and "Is he having a breakdown?" He's even being compared to award-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix.
It should come as a surprise to no one that his latest effort, #IAMSORRY, is not a complete LaBeouf original. It resembles Marina Abramovic's infamous 2010 MoMa exhibit "The Artist is Present". Unlike the plagiarized film HowardCantour.com, however, #IAMSORRY is more inspired than a direct copy. There are enough differences between the two that Abramovic didn't think they're related (she did call the whole #IAMSORRY spectacle "manipulative" when asked about it).
LaBeouf's version of "The Artist is Present" has him wearing tuxedo and a paper bag over his head and crying continuously in front of a single gallery-goer without making a sound. Before entering the exhibition, the viewer is allowed to pick an object significant to LaBeouf's life from a table – examples include a Transformers figure, a whip, a bowl of angry tweets directed at LaBeouf – to bring into their meeting with the actor. Lines to get into #IAMSORRY have wrapped around the block all week, with some gleefully waiting to berate the actor.
If #IAMSORRY's success is based purely on press and attendance, it's already hit that benchmark. More importantly, the performative piece itself is actually credible as a piece of art. The continued controversy surrounding LaBeouf provides a relevance and context for the show, and there's a real interactive element, with some journalists and fans literally touching LaBeouf by holding his hand as he cries or reacts. Some admit to crying with him.
As art, #IAMSORRY poses interesting questions on the nature of celebrity and what it means to be an actor. Is LaBeouf actually listening to what gallery guests have to say? Is he sincere in his crying, or is he just acting? (In one video of LaBeouf being yelled it, it looks like he is wearing beige ear plugs.) That important question didn't stop actor Keegan Allen from calling #IAMSORRY "a beautiful piece of self-reflection" on his Instagram and urging his 1.2m Twitter followers to go see it.
At its most basic, art asks the viewer to feel, which #IAMSORRY fulfills by eliciting strong emotions from those in attendance. Andrew Romano at The Daily Beast wrote about his experience alone with LaBeouf after going in a second time:
In the moment after I took that picture, I actually felt something real. Something strange and complex. Something like sympathy ... there was more going on in those few seconds than in a lot of contemporary art. LaBeouf's look-at-me internet penance ritual had become an actual moment between actual people.
A British journalist working for the Independent also went in twice because, according to New York Magazine's Vulture, he didn't think he "did it right the first time". As for the Vulture writer, he describes the experience as "surreal" and found his voice was "so tremulous" immediately after leaving LaBeouf's presence. Kate Knibbs at the Daily Dot found #IAMSORRY "genuinely disturbing", and "felt like I was further dehumanizing someone whose humanity I'd discounted". Of the long line of people waiting to get inside, Knibbs writes, "we were torturers, waiting patiently to emotionally poke a troubled man".
LaBeouf's debut art exhibit has even been parodied by another former child actor Jerry O'Connell. In this digital remix age, being parodied is an important requirement to labeling anything viral or famous, especially anything one wants to deem art. By parodying #IAMSORRY, O'Connell has further legitimized it as a work of art, and by getting in on the media frenzy, O'Connell ensures the continued publicity of the original. As O'Connell told Buzzfeed:
Everyone's talking about it, whether you want to call it art or a real apology, it's hilarious.
The real connections people think they are having with LaBeouf inside #IAMSORRY might very well be fake, but that doesn't matter because as an art piece it is working: people are actually discussing the exhibit as a bonafide work of art., which is more than you can say about pretty much everything else LaBeouf has done to date.
So kudos, Shia, you can stop wishing on a star now.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
There are 21 references to camels in the first books of the Bible, and now we know they are all made up.
Some of them are quite startlingly verisimilitudinous, such as the story of Abraham's servant finding a wife for Isaac in Genesis 24: "Then the servant left, taking with him 10 of his master's camels loaded with all kinds of good things from his master. He set out for Aram Naharaim and made his way to the town of Nahor. He made the camels kneel down near the well outside the town; it was towards evening, the time the women go out to draw water."
But these camels are made up, all 10 of them. Two Israeli archaeozoologists have sifted through a site just north of modern Eilat looking for camel bones, which can be dated by radio carbon.
None of the domesticated camel bones they found date from earlier than around 930BC – about 1,500 years after the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are supposed to have taken place. Whoever put the camels into the story of Abraham and Isaac might as well have improved the story of Little Red Riding Hood by having her ride up to Granny's in an SUV.
How can you tell whether a camel skeleton is from a wild or tamed animal? You look at the leg bones, and if they are thickened this shows they have been carrying unnaturally heavy loads, so they must have been domesticated. If you have a graveyard of camels, you can also see what proportion are males, and which are preferred for human uses because they can carry more.
All these considerations make it clear that camels were not domesticated anywhere in the region before 1000BC.
Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef, the scientists who carried out the research, point out that the domestication of camels was hugely important economically, because they made trade possible over much larger regions of the Arabian peninsula. But that is not what has provoked excitement about their claim.
Obviously it has upset fundamentalists. Everyone else has known for decades that there is even less evidence for the historical truth of the Old Testament than there is for that of the Qur'an. But the peculiarly mealy-mouthed nature of the quotes they gave the New York Times (which is not much concerned with the feelings of Christian fundamentalists) shows where the real problem is.
The history recounted in the Bible is a huge part of the mythology of modern Zionism. The idea of a promised land is based on narratives that assert with complete confidence stories that never actually happened. There are of course other ways to argue for the Zionist project, and still further arguments about the right of Israelis to live within secure boundaries now that the country exists. But although those stand logically independent of the histories invented – as far as we can tell – in Babylonian captivity during the sixth century BC, they make little emotional sense without the history. And it is emotions that drive politics.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Smiling camel looking in lens on Shutterstock]
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