Tag Archives: gotham

Natural history museum to host anti-natural honoree Jair Bolsonaro

by JoannaLipscombe Posted on April 12, 2019

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, known for his strong anti-environmental policies and intention to open up the Amazon rainforest to increased deforestation, will be one of the guests of honor next month at a gala at, wait for it, the American Museum of Natural History.

On May 14th, the New York museum, whose permanent collections include the hall of biodiversity and the hall of North American forests, is scheduled to house the black-tie event, put on by the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce. Each year, the organization honors two “persons of the year” — one Brazilian, one American– who have advanced economic ties between the two countries. While the American honoree has not yet been announced, Bolsonaro is slated to take the Brazilian slot, Gothamist reports.

But the irony of lauding a man who has repeatedly aired racist, homophobic and misogynist views all the while rolling back environmental protections in the Amazon at a venue dedicated to the natural world has not been lost on advocates or fans of the museum.

“The fact that American Museum of Natural History would accept an event for something so counter to their own values, they should be ashamed themselves,” Priscila Neri, a Brazilian activist with the New York City-based human rights organization WITNESS, told Gothamist. “In a moment when there’s been a rise of authoritarianism around the world, they’re giving a positive nod to a man who is rolling back human rights protections and scientific knowledge.”

Bolsonaro, dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” has undertaken an aggressive campaign of deforestation and mining that indigenous groups have likened to an “institutionalization of genocide in Brazil.”

The Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce has close ties to the Bolsonaro regime. Earlier this week, Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Ted Helms struck a $9 billion deal with Bolsonaro’s government to sell oil production rights, and the organization’s president and board chairman, Alexandre Bettamio, was reportedly one of Bolsonaro’s choices to run the country’s state-run bank.

To be fair to the American Museum of Natural History, the pro-Bolsonaro event is external, meaning the Museum is only acting as a venue; the event was also booked at the before the honoree was announced.

Roberto Lebron, a spokesperson for the museum, told Gothamist that the event “does not in any way reflect the Museum’s position that there is an urgent need to conserve the Amazon Rainforest, which has such profound implications for biological diversity, indigenous communities, climate change, and the future health of our planet.”

Museum representatives also tweeted that they are “deeply concerned” and are exploring their options.

Credit – 

Natural history museum to host anti-natural honoree Jair Bolsonaro

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A love letter to Scott Pruitt

by JeannieHeberlin Posted on July 5, 2018

The EPA lost its top grifter Thursday afternoon, as Scott Pruitt tendered his resignation to President Donald Trump. We don’t know, right now, which straw broke the camel’s back — it could’ve been the tens of thousands of dollars he spent on first class flights, the secret calendar he used for private meetings with industry representatives, or maybe he just couldn’t take getting yelled at in a restaurant by a woman and her bemused toddler. (Trump told reporters on Air Force One there was “no final straw.”)

Whatever led to Pruitt quitting, that boy is gone. BOY. BYE.

Scott Pruitt was likely the most scandal-ridden, brown-nosing, oil-loving, climate-denying administrator to ever walk the halls of the EPA. Here’s the thing, though: We’re gonna miss him. Before you get mad and bring your toddlers to Grist HQ, hear us out.

Most of the time, the things that go on in the federal government, however consequential they may be, seem to bore Americans to tears. (Just look at voter turnout stats for midterm elections.) Whether you liked it or not, Scott Pruitt made the public pay attention. Fancy lotions, tactical pants, Chick-Fil-A? That’s drama. Secret phone booths? A 24/7 security detail? That’s intrigue. Getting your aides to pay for your hotel rooms? That’s petty. Pruitt was a veritable scandal-factory of his own making, and the wrongdoings were so juicy we literally couldn’t look away! I mean, the dude spent over 1,500 taxpayer dollars on a dozen fountain pens. Pens!

As time went on, it began to seem like Pruitt didn’t actually care about how many bridges he burned, how many federal investigations were launched, or even whether other members of the GOP were calling for his resignation. But we cared! The scandals were so egregious, so bizarre, so shallow and grasping, that people kept digging and digging to see what else the guy was up to. And each ethical misdeed focused attention on the work he led: dismantling decades of environmental regulations, cutting EPA staffing numbers to below Reagan-era levels, and striking mentions of climate change from the agency’s website.

People got mad! They marched, wrote letters, signed petitions, and sent the EPA multiple copies of Global Warming for Dummies.

No wonder the administration rails against “fake news.” Real journalism was able to take down a Trump loyalist.

Now, someone else wears the tactical pants at the EPA. His name is Andrew Wheeler. He’s been the agency’s deputy administrator since April, and we haven’t heard a peep out of him. Under his leadership, we’re probably in for far less scandal. But you can bet he’ll keep rolling back regulations.

Wheeler is a former coal lobbyist who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from Murray Energy — a company owned by that guy who sued John Oliver for libel after the comedian called him a “geriatric Dr. Evil” on his HBO show. Wheeler also worked for Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming isn’t real.

The fact of the matter is that the new EPA chief could very well be worse for the environment than Pruitt. And with an administrator who doesn’t have a taste for grifting at the helm, some of those assaults on the environment, coated in propriety and due process, might slide by under the media’s radar.

So, yeah. Thanks, Pruitt. Thanks for stepping in it so many times, for sparking more than a dozen ethics investigations, for creating so many distractions you ended up drawing attention to the environment. (Hey, that’s our job!) Thanks for making people get mad. Here’s to hoping they stay mad.

Originally posted here:  

A love letter to Scott Pruitt

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7 Fascinating Facts About Bats

by Reinaldo97I Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Silhouetted against an orange harvest moon, fluttering out of a haunted house, or circling Count Dracula’s cape: We often think of bats as creepy, especially this time of year.

But actually, these maligned creatures are crucial to many ecosystems—and our economy. What’s more, they’re in trouble. A few important facts to know about our winged, insect-munching friends:

Bats flying at sunset Umkehrer/Shutterstock

Bats save us billions of dollars a year. Bats eat their bodyweight in insects every night. In 2011, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville used modeling techniques to calculate how much bats’ amazing insect-eating abilities are worth to US farmers. The estimates included the value of prevented crop damage from pests that bats eat, as well as the amount of money farmers would have to spend on pesticides to do the same job. They came up with a wide—but staggering—range: between $3 billion and $53 billion dollars a year.

A few years later, Josiah Maine, then a graduate student at Southern Illinois University’s Cooperative Wildlife Research lab, decided to test out those estimates on the most important American crop: corn. Maine’s team set up enclosures around corn fields that let in insects but prevented bats from entering and foraging, and then measured how that corn fared compared with corn in fields where bats could eat insects to their hearts’ desire—and found 50 percent more fungal growth and crop damage in the enclosed corn. They then estimated the cost of damage per acre and extrapolated it across all the acres of corn grown in the world. The total price tag? More than $1 billion per year, not including the cost of downstream environmental damage caused by increased pesticide use.

Long-eared bats eat insects that damage crops. De Meester/ZUMAPRESS

Bats prevent disease. A common misconception is that most bats carry rabies and other diseases. In fact, the vast majority of bats don’t have rabies, and out of more than 1,300 species of bats, only three suck the blood of other animals (and only one of other mammals). On the other hand, bats eat insects that spread diseases we really should be worried about. According to David Blehert, who leads the US Geological Survey’s Wildlife Disease Diagnostics Lab, bats play an important role controlling the spread of West Nile virus.

Without bats, there would be no tequila. Many species of bats pollinate plants. After they use their insanely long tongues to feast on the sweet nectar of flowers, pollen collects on their muzzles, which they spread from the male part of the flower to the female part of the flower.

More than 300 species of plants depend on bats to survive in many tropical and desert ecosystems. These include plants that humans eat, like the agave used to make tequila, as well as banana, peach, and mango trees.

Bats help save forests. Fruit-eating bats also play a crucial role in rejuvenating clear-cut rainforests. After a rainforest ecosystem is decimated, the first step toward rebuilding is the spreading of seeds by the poop of fruit-eating birds, bats, and other animals. But bats, which cover large distances to forage for fruit at night, do the best job at spreading “pioneer” plants, the flora that first begin to grow after clear cutting.

In North America, bats are in big trouble. Bats are dying in unprecedented numbers in the eastern United States and Canada, thanks to a terrifying fungal disease. Nearly 6 millions bats have perished in the past decade, including more than 90 percent of the populations of some species.

The recent bat troubles began about a decade ago, when a nasty fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) found its way into caves full of hibernating bats in upstate New York. Unlike bacteria and other pathogens, this fungus thrives in cold temperatures and finds an ideal host in the sleeping bats. It creeps onto their muzzles and spreads on the skin covering their wings, irritating them and causing them to wake and move before they are supposed to. This disrupts their energy conservation and fat storage, causing bats to die before hibernation is over or leave their caves too early and starve outside.

Perhaps most frightening of all, the fungus has spread very quickly: Since 2006 when wildlife biologists first identified it in New York, it has appeared in 26 states and five Canadian provinces. Just last month it arrived in yet another state, Wyoming, although it has yet to claim bat lives there. (Bats don’t start dying until a year or more after the fungus arrives in their caves.) White-nose syndrome has affected half of the 47 bat species in the United States, including the once ubiquitous little brown bat and the northern long-eared bat, which is now a threatened species.

A little brown bat affected by white-nose syndrome US Fish and Wildlife Service

Scientists test the wings of a little brown bat for white-nose syndrome in Tennessee. Amy Smotherman Burgess/ZUMAPRESS

Some researchers are trying are trying to save bats by manipulating their microbiomes. Blehert says scientists have started to make progress preventing white-nose syndrome’s spread. They discovered that once the fungus enters a cave’s soil it persists for long periods of time, allowing it to travel on the shoe of a spelunker or on the wing of a bat. Scientists and recreational cavers have begun to take precautionary measures to decontaminate clothes and equipment.

Researchers are also looking into more dramatic ways to fight the disease, including innovative vaccination efforts and cutting-edge biological control methods that manipulate the microbes on a bat’s skin so its microbiome develops a resistance to the pathogen. Researchers have found that bats’ immune systems, which largely shut down during hibernation, do not notice to the invasion of Pd fungus, allowing the pathogen to easily out-compete the microbes on bats’ skin that normally fight off germs. Scientists are trying to introduce new organisms to bats’ microbiome that could resist the fungus.

Because of white-nose syndrome, the northern long-eared bat is now a threatened species. Bruno Manunza/ZUMAPRESS

The US government is starting to care about bats. The kind of research needed to counteract white-nose syndrome can be extremely complicated and often costly. Organizations like the Nature Conservancy and bat expert Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation International have made funding available to study white-nose syndrome, but the disease is not going away anytime soon and there is always a worry about how sustainable such funding will be.

Luckily, the US government has also stepped in. At the end of last month, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it was giving another $2.5 million in grants for white-nose syndrome research. Since 2008, the agency has donated nearly $24 million to federal, state, and nongovernmental organizations to study and prevent the disease.

Researchers like Blehert and Maine also hope the new findings showing bats’ economic value will encourage support from spheres outside of wildlife conservation. “It’s not only ethical, but there is an economic incentive to conserve bats too,” Maine told me. “For a lot of people, this latter argument is really persuasive.”

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7 Fascinating Facts About Bats

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Police Kill Black Women Too—and We Don’t Talk About It Enough

by ArnoldoRobillar Posted on June 11, 2015

Mother Jones

During protests that shook Baltimore in April, Freddie Gray’s name became a rallying cry in calls for criminal justice reform nationwide. But how many of us have heard of Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old unarmed black woman who was fatally shot by a police detective in Chicago back in 2012? Just five days before demonstrations erupted for Gray in Maryland and then across the country, a judge acquitted the Chicago detective who killed Boyd, despite finding that he had acted in a manner that was “beyond reckless”.

Read “What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?“—Charlie LeDuff’s examination of what one tragedy can teach us about the unraveling of America’s middle class.

Last month, activists in about 17 cities rallied to highlight Boyd’s name—and the names of other black women who have lost their lives to police violence, such as Yvette Smith, Shereese Francis, and Tanisha Anderson. In New York, activists carried a coffin through the streets; in San Francisco, some protesters bared their breasts, borrowing from traditions of resistance in Liberia and other African nations. Others took to Twitter with the hashtag #SayHerName, in conjunction with the African American Policy Forum’s launch of a report by the same title, which called on policymakers and the media to include women’s experiences in conversations about police brutality.

“Black women and women of color can no longer be expected to lead movements challenging police brutality but be silent about our own experiences,” wrote co-author Andrea Ritchie in an introduction to the report. Ritchie, a police misconduct attorney in New York, has fought against inappropriate policing of black women and LGBT citizens for two decades. She co-wrote a book on the subject, Queer (In)Justice, and has testified before the UN Committee Against Torture and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Two weeks after the report dropped, I caught up with Ritchie, who’s now a fellow at the Open Society Foundations, to talk about why some disturbing videos of excessive force never went mainstream and how her years of activism are paying off.

Andrea Ritchie

Mother Jones: We’ve been hearing much more lately about police violence against black men. To what extent is the media to blame for framing the issue in a narrow way?

Andrea Ritchie: I’ve been doing a workshop for maybe 10 years now where I start with a pop quiz, asking, ‘What’s the first image that comes to mind when I say police brutality?’ and ‘What’s the first image that comes to mind when I say violence against women?’. No matter who I’m talking to, the first name that comes to mind is always that of a man—either Rodney King, Oscar Grant, or Eric Garner or Michael Brown. It’s generational. And the image is always of a shooting or a beating. For violence against women, the image is very much one of private violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault, but not physical violence by police officers or sexual violence by police officers.

When I ask folks why they think that is, the media is the number one answer—they say, ‘That’s what we hear about, that’s the story we’re told.’ Even when a case comes up involving a black woman, it’s framed as an anomaly, or shoved into a narrative that makes black men the primary target. In Rekia Boyd’s case, for instance, they said she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, next to a bunch of black men the police were targeting. There’s a story that state violence affects men and that interpersonal violence affects women, but what this ends up doing is erasing men who experience interpersonal violence and women who experience state violence. We need to pick apart that narrative.

MJ: Is part of the problem that violence against women hasn’t been caught on camera, like the killing of Eric Garner in New York was, for example?

AR: I don’t think that’s the case. An example is Duanna Johnson, a black trans woman who they arrested for loitering for the purposes of prostitution. She was in the precinct being processed, and the police officer called her over to be fingerprinted using slurs—she didn’t answer to the slurs. He walked over, grabbed metal handcuffs around his knuckles, and proceeded to start pounding her in the face while another officer held her down, and the security camera from the police facility recorded the whole thing. She was on the floor, they pepper sprayed her face. Again, it got some coverage locally, but that didn’t become the video that sparked uprisings around the nation. And it did not become the image that comes to mind when we think about police beatings.

Several weeks after Eric Garner was killed, a pregnant black women was placed in a chokehold by police officers. Now, thankfully she did not die—she and her baby were fine—but the video was there, and again, that wasn’t the thing that sparked outrage.

MJ: There seems to be a common belief in the US that black men fare worse than any other group, particularly in the criminal justice system. They are known for being locked up at higher rates and fatally shot by police officers. Do you think this notion of “black male exceptionalism” contributes to the exclusion of women’s experiences from conversations about criminal justice?

AR: I hate thinking about who is experiencing oppression the most because in black communities we’re all experiencing racial oppression and anti-black racism in different ways. But this notion that black women aren’t experiencing the same kinds of racial disparities is not borne out by the numbers available. In 2013, black women were stopped by police cars more than black men, white women, and white men in Ferguson, Missouri. Black girls have a higher rate of school suspensions relative to white girls than black boys do relative to white boys, and that’s much worse if they’re gender nonconforming, if they’re trans, or if they are queer, but that’s not part of the conversation about the state of black youth in the United States. For almost three decades, black and brown women were the fastest growing prison population, but somehow that didn’t feature in the conversation around the ‘new Jim Crow’ or mass incarceration. The rate of poverty for black women is growing and it is high, the rate of homelessness for black women is high, and black women are marginalized economically on many fronts.

MJ: It’s tough to get data on police violence broken down by both gender and race. A recent Guardian investigation found that 5 percent of people killed by cops so far this year have been women, including seven black women. But as your report makes clear, black women also experience many other forms of state violence that often aren’t included in the narrative of police brutality.

AR: You need to look beyond beatings and shootings to sexual violence, to police responses to domestic violence, their treatment of pregnant and mothering women, and their treatment of LGBT folks. If a police officer responds differently to a black woman survivor of domestic violence, by shooting or beating her, for instance, than they do to a white woman under identical circumstances, I don’t understand how that’s not considered racial profiling—making a decision about whether someone is a victim or threat based on race.

MJ: Can you talk more about the problem of sexual harassment by police officers?

AR: Sexual assault and harassment is the most frequently reported form of police misconduct after the use of force. And despite a 2011 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police that identified the problem and called out departments across the country to enact policies to prevent and address it, very few departments actually have policies to prevent, detect, and hold officers accountable for sexual harassment and assault of members of the public. They have that for officers interacting with each other, because that’s part of federal law, but they don’t have anything specifically targeting sexual harassment and assault of members of the public by police.

MJ: It seems there’s more momentum now behind the #SayHerName movement, with the launch of your report and the demonstrations last month. What comes next?

AR: It feels like we’ve turned a corner. Now the challenge is to get the president to start talking about this issue. The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing just made a bunch of recommendations that are very specific to women and LGBT folks’ experiences, including that departments should adopt comprehensive profiling bans that prohibit profiling based on gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation alongside race, religion, and ethnicity. Those things are happening now, but nobody is talking about them. So on the one hand, the floodgates are open; on the other, there are a few more that need to be opened before we can really start having the kind of conversations we need to be having to keep all of our communities safe.

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Police Kill Black Women Too—and We Don’t Talk About It Enough

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Watch Sepp Blatter Lash Out Against FIFA’s Critics in 2013

by Jill Tsai Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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In October 2013, at the Oxford Union, FIFA president Sepp Blatter took aim at critics who viewed soccer’s international governing body as “a faceless machine printing money at the expense of the beautiful game.” (He also mocked Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo for how much he spends on his hair.) Blatter told the crowd:

There are those who will tell you that football is just a heartless, money-spinning game or just a pointless kick about on the grass. There are those who will tell you that FIFA is just a conspiracy, a scam, accountable to nobody and too powerful for anyone to resist. There are those who will tell you of the supposed sordid secrets that lie deep in our Bond villain headquarters in the hills above Zurich, where we apparently plot to exploit the unfortunate and the weak. They would have you believe that I sit in my office with a sinister grin, gently stroking the chin of an expensive, white Persian cat as my terrible sidekicks scour the earth to force countries to host the World Cup and to hand over all of their money. You might laugh. It is strange how fantasy so easily becomes confused with fact. And it feels almost absurd to have to say this. But that is not who we are. Not FIFA. Not me.

(You can watch the whole speech below—It’s very long! He talks very slowly!—but the key bits are in the video up top.)

These words resonate now, as Blatter sets his sights on a fifth term at the head of the organization amid pressure and criticism following a series of corruption-related charges on senior FIFA officials that have roiled the sport.

But remember that “Bond villain headquarters in the hills above Zurich” Blatter was talking about? Well, Swiss photographer Luca Zanier snapped a photo of FIFA executive committee’s boardroom in Zurich, and it looks villain-esque. John Oliver even likened it to the war room in Dr. Strangelove.

Here is Blatter’s full speech, courtesy of the Oxford Union:

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Watch Sepp Blatter Lash Out Against FIFA’s Critics in 2013

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Texas Wants Its Own Fort Knox

by GeoffrePutilin Posted on May 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Texas independence—or paranoia—strikes again. In recent years, some Lone Star officials, including former Gov. Rick Perry, have flirted with secession. Last month the new Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, asked the state national guard to monitor a US military exercise that some residents fear is cover for a federal takeover of the state that will use Walmarts as staging areas. And now the state is on the verge of seizing the gold owned by the state that is stored in New York City and building a massive bunker to hoard this booty.

Per the Houston Chronicle:

AUSTIN — Texas could get its own version of Fort Knox, the impenetrable depository for gold bullion, if the Legislature gets its way.

Under House Bill 483, approved unanimously on Tuesday by the state Senate, Comptroller Glenn Hegar would be authorized to establish and administer the state’s first bullion depository at a site not yet determined.

No other state has its own state bullion depository, officials said.

The state government has about $1 billion in gold bullion stored outside the state, mostly in the basement of the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan. The gold has been there for years—because it’s so annoying to move, it’s easier to keep everyone’s gold in the same place, and the financial center of the world is the most obvious place. When bullion changes hands, it’s mostly on paper. So why does Texas now need to grab all its gold? Is it just because Texans don’t trust New Yorkers? Is it really that simple?

Yes:

“New York will hate this,” state sen. Lois Kolkhorst said of the bill that now goes to Gov. Greg Abbott to be signed into law. “To me, that and the fact that it will save Texas money makes it a golden idea.”

The cost-cutting bit refers to the storage fees Texas has to pay to keep its gold offsite, although Texas would still have to shell out money for upkeep and security if it went the DIY route. Incidentally, Perry supported the Texas Bullion Depository when it was first proposed in 2013, telling Glenn Beck, “If we own it, I will suggest to you that that’s not someone else’s determination whether we can take possession of it back or not.”

But building a giant vault to house all the state’s gold will be the easy part. The tough task? Safely and securely moving 57,000 pounds of gold from Gotham to Texas. Perhaps we now know the plot for the eighth Fast and Furious movie.

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Texas Wants Its Own Fort Knox

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"I Pay Taxes Out My Ass But They Still Harrass Me": 11 Amazing Songs About Police Brutality

by HalleySapp Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last Friday, just days after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, 29-year-old North Carolina rapper J. Cole uploaded the stirring tribute “Be Free” to his SoundCloud, dedicating it to “every young black man murdered in America.” The song promptly went viral.

Protests against the shooting, and police brutality more broadly, already had been gaining steam as the police launched a highly militarized crackdown, and Cole’s timely reaction—in visceral, heartfelt form—struck a chord among people who know what it’s like to be profiled or harassed by law enforcement. As Cole writes in a blog post introducing the track, “That coulda been me, easily. That could have been my best friend.”

Cole is hardly the only one speaking out: Artists as far and wide as Frank Ocean, Big Boi, Moby, John Legend, and Young Jeezy have taken to Twitter and the airwaves in recent days to express their dissent, and Cole is part of a long tradition of musicians who have done so in song. Here are eleven other amazing tracks on the topic of police brutality in America:

1. “Oxford Town,” by Bob Dylan: Dylan wrote this tune in 1962 in response to a magazine solicitation for songs about the admission of James Meredith into the University of Mississippi, its first black student. Covered here by Richie Havens, it makes terse observations about a racist police force that don’t seem too far off today: “Guns and clubs followed him down / All because his face was brown / Better get away from Oxford Town.”

2. “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker),” by The Rolling Stones: “You’re a heartbreaker / With your .44,” Mick Jagger sings of the New York police in this symphonic 1973 double-ballad from the album Goats Head Soup.

3. “Who Got the Camera?” by Ice Cube: Released on the heels of the Los Angeles riots provoked by the beating of Rodney King, Ice Cube narrates the experience of being a black motorist harassed by law enforcement. “Police gettin badder,” he raps. But “if I had a camera, the shit wouldn’t matter.”

4. “Sound of Da Police,” by KRS-ONE: “Whoop, whoop! That’s the sound of the police!” goes the memorable hook off KRS-One’s 1993 debut solo album, Return of the Boom Bap. “After 400 years, I’ve got no choices,” he raps, noting the continuity between slavery and racist policing. “The overseer rode around the plantation,” he raps, while “the officer is off patrolling all the nation.”

5. “The Beast,” by The Fugees: “Warn the town, the beast is loose,” the Fugees sing over police sirens in this 1996 classic. Lauryn Hill, Pras Michel, and Wyclef Jean spit old-school rhymes from gritty “ghetto Gotham,” where “I pay taxes out my ass but they still harrass me.”

6. “American Skin (41 Shots),” by Bruce Springsteen: “41 shots,” goes the chorus to Springsteen’s 2000 tribute to 23-year-old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, shot at that many times by four NYPD officers who killed him outside his Bronx apartment in February 1999. “Well, is it a gun? Is it a knife? / Is it a wallet? This is your life,” he sings, referencing the cops’ purported rationale for the barrage, which began when Diallo reached for his wallet. Backed by the E Street Band, Springsteen mournfully reminds us that “You can get killed just for living in your American skin.”

7. “Made You Die,” by Dead Prez, Yasiin Bey, and mikeflo: Dead Prez’s stic.man, consistently one of hip-hop’s sharpest social commentators, opens this Trayvon Martin tribute with his characteristic community-mindedness: “Now let’s put it all in perspective / Before the outrage burns out misdirected / What can we do so our community’s protected?” The three other MCs join in to flow on what Bey calls a “young black world in a struggle for a survival.”

8. “Don’t Die,” by Killer Mike: Killer Mike has long protested the corrosive effects of racist policing on black communities in his native Atlanta, where his own father was a cop. In this song off his 2012 release R.A.P. Music, Mike works through the nuances of that personal history, acknowledging that while police are often honest, working-class individuals, their institutional role can be insidious. “‘Fuck tha police’ is still all I gotta say,” he concludes, paying homage to the NWA hit from the dawn of gangsta rap.

9. “Stand Your Ground,” by Pharoahe Monch: Here Monch repurposes the name of the Florida law used to justify George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin into a slogan for community organizers rallying in the killing’s aftermath. “Get involved, get involved, get involved,” the Queens rapper urges over roaring guitar riffs, soliciting support for the Martin family foundation in its effort to repeal the statutes.

10. “Amerika,” by Lil Wayne: Lil Wayne is a rapper far better known for punch lines than political analysis, but he leaves the puns behind (mostly) in this somber single from last summer. In the video, riot police stand glaring in front of a flag whose stars “are never shining.” Wayne’s “Amerika” is a blighted landscape of foreclosed homes and teargas for which he modifies the patriotic anthem: “My country ’tis of thee / Sweet land of kill ’em all and let ’em die.”

11. “Remove Ya,” by Ratking: In this dance-y, grime-influenced track, the young rap experimentalists reflect on their daily experiences with cops in today’s New York. The song is a upbeat call for community against adversity, featuring rapper Wiki playing off the well-circulated Nation recording of an NYPD officer’s stopping and frisking a guy (“for being a fucking mutt“): “I’m a mutt, you a mutt, yeah, we some mutts.” His companion Hak chimes in with memories of being arbitrarily stopped by an officer: “Hear the ‘whoop whoop whoop whoop, stop don’t move’ / ‘Hands on the hood, you gave me that look, wearing your hood.'”

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"I Pay Taxes Out My Ass But They Still Harrass Me": 11 Amazing Songs About Police Brutality

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PETA’s Five Most Tone-Deaf Stunts

by ADZMargievjv Posted on July 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Proving once again PETA is unfamiliar with how to a deliver meaningful publicity campaign, the animal rights group is now looking to score a win off poor people’s thirst.

Some background: The bankrupt city of Detroit has been shutting off its tap water to thousands of poor residents in order to force them to pay for nearly $90 million in overdue water bills. Advocates have slammed the move, calling out the city for eliminating a basic human right. The NAACP recently filed a lawsuit calling the shut down discriminatory, as most of Detroit’s low-income residents are overwhelmingly black.

It takes a certain type of callousness to look at this situation and see anything other than misfortune. PETA saw an opportunity! The animal rights group has made an offer to poor Detroit residents: Be one of 10 families to denounce meat and they’ll put an end to your family’s thirst. PETA will even throw in a basket of vegetables for the effort.

“Vegan meals take far less of a toll on the Earth’s resources,” PETA wrote in a recent press release. “It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce just a pound of meat but only about 155 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat.”

This seems like as good a time as any to look back on PETA’s misguided and often times exploitative PR campaigns of the past:

1. “Boyfriend went vegan and knocked the bottom out of me.” (2012)

Enhance your sex life by encouraging your boyfriend to go vegan. He’ll transform into a “tantric porn star,” breaking your neck and causing your body to go limp. The sex will be so mind-blowing, in fact, you’ll wander aimlessly in just a bra, as you reflect on the violent sex you had the pleasure of subjecting yourself to the evening prior.

2. “Holocaust on your plate.” (2003)

Here the group matches photos of factory farms with Holocaust inmates. The display was promptly banned in Germany—a move PETA found absurd considering a Jewish PETA member happened to fund the campaign.

3. Too fat for Plan B? Try “Plan V.” (2013)

Jumping on news Plan B may not work as well for women over 165 pounds, PETA urges women to shed a few pounds by going vegan.

4. Dog breeding is for Nazis. (2014)

Again conjuring up the atrocities of the Holocaust, which lets keep in mind systematically killed 11 million people, the group equates dog breeding to Hitler’s plan to bring about a pure Aryan race.

5. Don a fur coat and you’ll be beaten. (2007)

The disturbing video above even seems to justify senseless violence.

Detroit has already severed off the tap water supply to nearly 125,000 people, with thousands more likely to have their resources shut down in weeks to come. And anyone with a remote interest in current events understands most Detroiters are low-income residents, many of whom could not afford to have a vegan diet.

Nice going, PETA.

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PETA’s Five Most Tone-Deaf Stunts

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Hurricane Arthur Nears U.S. Coast on Eve of Holiday Weekend

by Myrna Posted on July 3, 2014

Arthur, positioned off North Carolina, is expected to remain just offshore but could snarl the plans of thousands over the July 4 holiday. Continue reading here:  Hurricane Arthur Nears U.S. Coast on Eve of Holiday Weekend ; ;Related ArticlesNASA Launching Satellite to Track CarbonU.S. Catfish Program Could Stymie Pacific Trade Pact, 10 Nations SayArchive Dive: When Halibut Was Plentiful ;

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Hurricane Arthur Nears U.S. Coast on Eve of Holiday Weekend

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New York Might Never Top the 1949 Rockefeller Center Tree

by saadsdecd Posted on December 5, 2013

Image: LIFE

Every year, the giant tree in Rockefeller Center is unveiled to some fanfare. But no tree is likely to top the tree that the city had in 1949. After years in which war-time trees stood stoically without lights, New Yorkers got a tree to remember. The Bowery Boys describe the spectacle:

Perhaps knowing the mild temperatures that awaited that season — it would only snow two inches between November 1949 and January 1950 — the Rockefeller Center holiday designers decided to spray paint the gigantic 75-foot tree in hundreds of gallons of whimsical silver paint.  It was then engulfed in 7,500 electric lights in pastel colors — pink, blue, yellow, green and orange, described as “plucked from a sky in fairyland.”

Not only was the tree covered in silver paint and lights, the walkway leading up to it was lined with 576 snowflakes that whirled dizzily. In fact, the display was so bright and wild that it caused one of the worst traffic jams the New York Times had seen in years. Cars were reportedly trapped between 72nd Street and 41st Street for hours.

Although this years tree has far more lights (45,000 in total) and induce plenty of traffic, it won’t be quite the silver, spinning whirlwind of 1949.

More from Smithsonian.com:

“Holidays on Display” at American History Museum
Dreaming of a Green Christmas

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New York Might Never Top the 1949 Rockefeller Center Tree

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