we’re making the same faceunrelated: i have

via http://ift.tt/2ArVVyG:

we’re making the same face

unrelated: i have trained her to answer to “baby” as if it were her name
(Your picture was not posted)

Honduras: police refuse to obey government as post-election chaos deepens

via http://ift.tt/2nu7oIU:

Honduras: police refuse to obey government as post-election chaos deepens:

chamerionwrites:

Honduran police have announced they will refuse to obey orders from the government of the incumbent president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, and will remain in their barracks until a political crisis triggered by last Sunday’s contested presidential election has been resolved.

All national police – including elite US-trained units – in the capital, Tegucigalpa, would refuse to enforce a curfew ordered by the government after days of deadly violence triggered by allegations of electoral fraud, a spokesman said on Monday night.

“We want peace, and we will not follow government orders – we’re tired of this,” said the spokesman outside the national police headquarters.

“We aren’t with a political ideology. We can’t keep confronting people, and we don’t want to repress and violate the rights of the Honduran people.”

Crowds of anti-government protestors greeted the announcement with cheers and chanted: “The people united will never be defeated!”

Earlier a member of the Cobras anti-riot squad said: “This is not a strike, this not about salaries or money. It’s that we have family. We are tired. And our job is to give peace and security to the Honduran people, not repress them. We want all Hondurans to be safe.”

The announcement marked a dramatic twist in a week-long electoral debacle that has plunged the volatile country into its worst political crisis since a coup in 2009.
(Your picture was not posted)

Exporting Deportation

via http://ift.tt/2klu3pD:

Exporting Deportation:

chamerionwrites:

Despite anti-Mexico rhetoric or diplomatic flare-ups between Enrique Peña Nieto and Trump, Mexico is a stalwart ally against asylum-seekers headed for the United States. The rise of right-wing parties in Europe, along with Trump’s election, teach us one lesson about global political trends. Our partnership with Mexico to deter asylum-seekers from Central America teaches us another.

In early 2014, Central American children crossed the US border by the tens of thousands. They traveled atop the cruel and deadly trains known collectively as la bestia (“the beast”), braved punishing deserts, and evaded, as best they could, robbery, rape, and death at the hands of human traffickers.

Once they arrived in the United States, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) kept them in concrete pens cold enough to turn lips and fingers blue. In the hieleras (coolers), as these rooms became known, children huddled together on metal benches and cement floors, and slept under heat-reflective Mylar “space-blankets.” The Obama administration was simultaneously beset by nativist demands to seal the border, liberal outrage at the mistreatment of children, and legal action by non-governmental organizations.

By the summer, as the crisis began to fade from the headlines, Mexico announced Frontera Sur, a program billed as a partnership between Mexico and Guatemala to foster economic development and the human rights of migrants crossing Mexico’s southern border. As one might expect, Frontera Sur is a militarized security program created at the behest of the United States as part of a vigorous “layered enforcement” strategy intended to stop migrants from seeking asylum north of the Rio Grande.

In 2012, former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official and border czar Alan Bersin said that “the Guatemalan border with Chiapas, Mexico, is now our southern border.” Through Frontera Sur, the United States has given Mexico hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as training from CBP, biometric technology, x-ray vans, and helicopters; the United States Northern and Southern Commands of the combined US military forces, or NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM, jointly sponsor periodic working-group meetings with the police agencies and militaries of Central American countries.

Unjust and illegal practices that won the ire of non-governmental organizations in the United States, like detaining children in abysmal conditions and failing to inform migrants of their right to apply for asylum, also took hold in Mexico. According to documents obtained by the Washington Office on Latin America, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) even maintains a presence at Siglo XXI, a detention center in Tapachula, Mexico that houses child migrants.

Last year, Andrés Manuel Luis Obrador, leader of the left-wing Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena) Party and candidate for president in next year’s election, accused the current government of carrying out the “dirty work” of the US government, violating human rights, and doing the very things in Chiapas for which they criticized then-candidate Trump.

According to José Antonio Domínguez, consul of El Salvador in Arriaga, Mexico, the approach toward migrants has moved from “a certain tolerance of the migrant to total control.” In other words, Mexico built a wall and the US paid for it.

Frontera Sur succeeded in pushing most of the refugee crisis beyond the practical reach and attention of the most powerful US-based nongovernmental organizations and, perhaps more importantly, beyond the headlines. Central American migrants are increasingly choosing to stay in Mexico rather than fight for asylum in Trump’s America.

After 3,400 applications for asylum in 2015, Mexican civil society groups are anticipating 20,000 this year. Naturally, the increased enforcement has done nothing to address the reasons Central Americans choose to leave their homes in the first place; it has simply made the trip more violent and expensive by creating lucrative opportunities for criminal organizations and corrupt Mexican officials.

Asylum seekers that do make it to the US border find themselves thwarted not by US immigration agents, but Mexican ones.

Grupos Beta, the humanitarian branch of the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Migración that assists migrants transiting through Mexico, has established an “appointment” system with CBP. Migrants who don’t have an appointment are referred by CBP to Grupos Beta. However, Grupos Beta then regularly refuses to give them an appointment. Human Rights First has called the appointment system a “charade.”

John Kelly, the new secretary of DHS, has rightly been portrayed as a villain for defending Trump’s Muslim ban and his more recent suggestion that he would split mothers from their children in order to deter people from seeking asylum in the United States. As the former leader of SOUTHCOM, we should also expect him to further back a militarized approach to migration beyond US soil.

According to a source speaking to the Military Times, Kelly has “better relationships in Latin America than the State Department does.” In a questionnaire filled out prior to his Senate confirmation hearings, Kelly promised to establish a Plan Colombia–like strategy in Central America to counter drug trafficking and migration.

The US approach is strikingly similar to the one employed by the European Union against asylum-seekers arriving at its shores. Spain offers training, equipment, and, of course, money to local police along the coasts of Mauritania, Morocco, and Senegal to repel refugees. In March of last year, the European Union signed a deal with Turkey to crack down on migration spurred by the crisis in Syria in exchange for three billion euros, an acceleration of accession talks, and visa liberalization for Turkish citizens. The European Union has long offered financial support to Ukraine to stop EU-bound refugees, despite reports that Ukrainian officials subject them to lengthy imprisonment and torture.

Liberals were outraged when Trump referred to refugees held by Australia in Nauru as “illegal immigrants.” But few made any noise as the Obama administration said the very same thing about Central American children. As the liberal order across the globe collapses more completely and the freedom of movement for all come under threat, the distinction will become even less meaningful, if it continues to exist at all.
(Your picture was not posted)

My favorite fucking thing, which I’ve ranted

via http://ift.tt/2nw5SWI:

My favorite fucking thing, which I’ve ranted about before, just happened again.

We’re a camera store and we do photoshop work and printing and digitizing and stuff. We often have to call people about their orders– usually either to give a quote, tell them it’s done, ask them for further information to complete the order, stuff like that.

The store has several phones, all wired to the same number. When the phone rings, usually the clerks answer it, because mostly it’s for them, but if they’re busy, the online people (us) will pick up. (Or if we see on the caller ID display that it’s someone from out of town, or our other store or something.)

Phone rings. Clerks don’t grab it, so my coworker, the other online guy, picks up. 

The woman who just called us demands to know who this is. “Uh,” he says, and repeats his greeting, that he’d answered the phone with.

“I got a call from this number,” she says. 

“Okay?” he says. 

“They left me a message,” she says. 

“Well,” he says, “what did the message say?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Can you tell me why you called me?”

“Well,” he says, “I didn’t call you. One of the other clerks probably did. The message they left you probably explains why they called you, but I don’t know it. Might it be that you’re having some work done with us and they wanted information about your order?”

“I did drop some stuff off,” the woman finally admits. “I wonder what they need from me.”

“Well,” he says again, “the message probably said, but let me ask around. Who are you, so I can see if anyone here knows why we called you?”

She gives her name, and he goes out onto the sales floor, and sure enough, the clerk who called her is right there, and gets on the line to repeat exactly what he said in the message, but– 

Like, I’m shitty at phones, I don’t ever pick up, but if I give my number to a store that’s doing work for me, I at least listen to their message after I don’t answer their call, so I can maybe get the person’s name when I call back.

So, I don’t care how shit you are at cellphones, please what the fuck is wrong with you don’t call a business and say “I GOT A CALL FROM THIS NUMBER WHAT”. Businesses often have more than one person working there. I, I don’t even know how to state this. Don’t be a jerk?? Don’t assume people are psychics?? Don’t assume you’re the only person in the world?? 

I don’t know. I just, I don’t know.

And I know I’ve ranted about this before, so. But. Anyway. 
(Your picture was not posted)

Berta Cáceres and the U.S. Elections: Weaponizing

via http://ift.tt/2B0X80M:

Berta Cáceres and the U.S. Elections: Weaponizing the Other:

chamerionwrites:

April 8th, 2016

Last month, Berta Cáceres, an Indigenous woman from Honduras, was assassinated for her role in the resistance movement against a multinationally-funded project aimed at building a dam on a river that her community, the Lenca, have inhabited, tended to, and fished for hundreds of years. Because Cáceres was an internationally-respected activist and because the murder took place during the U.S. primary season, coverage in the media and outcry from the progressive left has been uncharacteristically intense. Activists, especially Black and Indigenous activists, are threatened or killed in Honduras and throughout Latin America on a regular basis, so what made the Cáceres case any different?

Cáceres’ story has resonated with many on the left, especially those who support senator Bernie Sanders, because it can be directly linked to the Democratic party’s frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. In 2009, a coup in Honduras ousted left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya, a complicated and less-than-model leader, but one with an agenda that jeopardized U.S. business interests in a country it has long exploited and fashioned into the paradigm of a “banana republic.” Drawing a direct line between the subsequent instability in Honduras and the violent repression of activists in Honduras, many in the U.S. are rightfully demanding that then Secretary of State Clinton be held accountable for her role in back-channelling support for a coup in Honduras. Berta Cáceres, just months before her death, implicated Clinton, making the connection all the more transparent.

But that progressives chose this moment to care loudly about the goings on in a region ravaged by decades of U.S. foreign policy is itself violence. The truth is, at its core they primarily seek to weaponize a marginalized group, targets of a 600-year war against Indigenous people, as an anti-Clinton bludgeon. That they can incorporate the death of a Honduran activist into the American electoral discussion is itself a self-serving acquiescence of U.S. neo-imperialism.

A recent report indicates that Latin America is the most dangerous region for environmental activists, with Honduras being the most precarious of all. Activists in the region routinely resist land grabs by multinational logging, mining, and agricultural firms, and in doing so, many of them risk death. The report indicates that almost 75% of the environmental or land activists murdered in 2014 were killed in Latin America, and 40% of those were Indigenous people. For the communities that resist those corporations that come to exploit resources and labor from Latin America, the battle is literally one of life and death.

From Berta Cáceres and the Lenca in the south, to the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna community’s resistance to displacement on the coast, the struggle in Honduras and throughout Latin America takes many forms, but is always dangerous. Such conditions serve the economic interests of Latin American elites who facilitate policies that disproportionately benefit U.S. corporations by providing raw materials, food crops, and crushingly cheap labor. This violence is manifest in the U.S. through commodities like low-cost clothing, year round access to tropical fruits at affordable prices, and a national addiction to coffee. These arrangements are not new; U.S. neo-imperalism in Latin America dates back at least a century to the Spanish-American war.

We should note that Cáceres’ story and those of countless activists killed by state forces, death squads, or gangs throughout Latin America, relates to the U.S. election in much larger way than Hillary Clinton’s involvement. The oppression of Latin America’s most marginalized people, like that of others around the world, buttresses the standard of living in the United States. These conditions are the price of American comforts furnished by a global system of savagely unequal distribution of wealth and resources. Moreover, there isn’t a single candidate running for the nomination from either party that can or will dismantle this system. This includes Sanders, who despite his condemnation of U.S. meddling in Latin American affairs, is also beholden to the fruits of U.S. hegemony. Sanders’ politics are not transformative, rather they represent a return to the golden era of the welfare state, which was largely fortified by higher taxation rates and a global system of exploitations.

As it stands, the current choices articulated in the guise of representative democracy and electoral politics are between hard neo-imperialism and soft neo-imperialism; all that separates the two is the language of reform. But both iterations will build dams, will dry up rivers, will consume whole forests, and will displace communities.

To move beyond these limitations, we must reevaluate our conceptions of fairness and engage our personal investments in neo-imperialism. Because power operates not only by the oppression of some, but also by investment in others, so much so, that they cannot imagine a world in which they are not the dominant force.

Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration should be held accountable, but the buck doesn’t stop there. When the election has long since been decided, will you forget Berta Cáceres? Will Honduras fade from your mind once it no longer serves an American purpose?

If we truly care for Berta’s struggle, it important that we honor others like her and we must do so by treating their communities as fully human and their causes as timelessly relevant. We must not romanticize their struggle, nor decenter their narratives by repurposing the corpses of their fallen into battering rams for our political theater.
(Your picture was not posted)

Sometimes You Need A W

via http://ift.tt/2nsDNzA:

So I have half a dozen within-my-capabilities-but-I’ve-never-done-them-before projects I’m aiming to get done by Christmas, to give as gifts to my family etc. And I’m sort of paralyzed and procrastinating on all of them because it’s hard to know where to start and I’m extremely easy to stymie. (There’s something on my sewing chair. I put the zipper I need into a bag and don’t know which bag. No, finding another zipper isn’t right, I need that same one. I have to cut the fabric to size and I don’t like to measure.)

So today I banged out an utterly ridiculous one that I’m not even sure anyone I know will want. 

I found this shirt on clearance at Tractor Supply when I was there buying castration kits. (Yes really, that long ago.) It’s a men’s M, and I actually don’t know any men who wear M. So I figured, I know several women about that size. I’ll cut the neck out and re-hem it with embroidery floss.

So I did that. And then I painted over part of the design with metallic paint, so that the shirt is now blingy but materially unaltered.

(all the bright highlights on the fur are pearl metallic now. The beige lettering is gold. the neckline is blanket-stitched gold embroidery floss.)

It’s an unironic wolfscape shirt. 

I might give it to my oldest sister, who is literally the last person in the world anyone would describe as a ‘lone wolf’, but who might find it funny and wear it to go running. Or I might give it to Z’s older sister, who has handmade me beautiful things in the past, and whose last name is a different spelling of the above animal’s name. She has so much Ironic Wolf Shit, but she might appreciate more, or at least will think it is hilarious. I don’t know if she’ll like my sloppy embroidery aesthetic, though; I don’t really do small even stitches, I like my handmade shit to look handmade. It’s a little wild and loopy. IDK. But, for a joke, maybe?

Anyway. This doesn’t really solve my problems of procrastinating on all my important projects, but it was amusing.

And, as Dude pointed out, sometimes you just need a win. You don’t have to do something perfect or difficult, you just need to pick something you know you can succeed at, and do it. Like dunking a basketball… in a little kid’s hoop that you can reach down to. Or whatever it takes. (Don’t hurt the kid’s feelings, maybe let them win next time, but at least just once, go ahead and dunk. It’s dumb but it feels good and sets you up so you can pretend to lose a bunch more times.)
(Your picture was not posted)