Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness

Parked in front of what was originally the German American Savings Bank. Until 1915 when, in the wave of anti-German sentiment became part of the Bank of California. That xenophobia also tuned ‘morgen brot’ (morning bread) and sauerkraut into French toast and liberty cabbage.

Sure glad my homeland has outgrown that sort of silliness. /s

Once again Cracked.com takes on a serious subject and hits it out of the park.

To combat the steadily increasing militarization of local and state police forces new tactics and strategies are desperately needed. Standing Rock’s Water Protectors show how it can happen and be successful.

If you’ve only been half-following the story of Standing Rock, you might not know much beyond some snarky Twitter memes about the cops going “a little overboard” (for instance, they nearly blew a woman’s arm off with a concussion grenade). The allegations of police brutality have been serious enough that the United Nations has opened an investigation.

But the most important story from Standing Rock isn’t the police brutality, the evidence that protester’s phones were hacked, or even that this is the largest gathering of Indigenous Americans in modern history.

The most important story from Standing Rock is that it worked like motherfucking RuPaul.

Here’s the headers, you really should read the explanations.

5) “Build A Small City” Is A Solid Strategy for Civil Disobedience

4) Nonviolence Is A Must, But So Is Aggression

3) Be In It For The Long Haul

2) Protesters Will Face Increasingly Advanced Weaponry

1) They’ve Found A Way To Weaponize Hippies

A horizontal wind generator that produces power with 5mph wind.

It’s a pretty encouraging read.

Source: 5 New Tactics In Civil Disobedience, Taught By Standing Rock

I just came across these pictures of the Water Protectors celebrating:

Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time at Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Diego Rivera’s ashes in a Pre-Columbian frog vessel in Frida Kahlo’s bedroom

Pablo Picasso in a Minotaur mask

LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, presents Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time (December 4, 2016–May 7, 2017), an exhibition that examines moments of intersection in the formation of modernism both in Europe and Latin America, and asks how Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera—towering figures of the 20th century—both exchanged ideas in Paris about avant-garde paintings and later engaged with their respective ancient Mediterranean and Pre-Columbian worlds. Cocurated and conceived by Diana Magaloni, deputy director and director of the Program for the Art of the Ancient Americas at LACMA, and Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, and developed with guest curators, Juan Coronel Rivera, James Oles, and Jennifer Stager, the exhibition compares the artists’ trajectories beginning with their similar academic training to their shared investment in Cubism and their return to an engagement with antiquity from the 1920s through the 1950s.

More than 100 paintings and prints by both artists are in dialogue with one other and with dozens of ancient Greco-Roman, Iberian, and Aztec objects, Picasso and Rivera aims to advance the understanding of the artists’ practices, particularly in how their contributions were influenced by the forms, myths, and structures of the arts of antiquity. Picasso and Rivera’s radical approach to understanding ancient art was in many ways subversive: by doing that they also rewrote art history—greatly enlarging the recognition of artistic contributions of ancient civilizations. Ancient art became essential for their sense of the future, both personally and politically.

“By placing masterworks by Picasso and Rivera alongside Greco-Roman, Etruscan, and Iberian works as well as Mesoamerican sculptures and ceramic figurines, the exhibition weaves together distant geographies and worlds to blur the frontiers of time and space,” said Diana Magaloni. “Picasso and Rivera views both artists as inventors of a new visual reality in the first decades of the 20th century. Diego Rivera brought the Pre-Columbian world to the forefront by showing that the art produced by these cultures was for the Americas what traditional Greek and Roman art was for Europe.”

“LACMA thinks about art history along a continuum,” said Michael Govan. “Rather than perpetuating historical or cultural hierarchies, we seek to create dialogue, particularly given our location in a city that stands at an international crossroads with both Latin America and the Pacific Rim. This exhibition is a product of an Americas viewpoint, where our ancient indigenous heritage proposes a novel worldview that can interface with classical Western traditions, bringing both a diversity of viewpoints and a profound convergence of human and artistic values.”

Picasso and Rivera will travel to Mexico City, where it will be on view from May 31 to September 10, 2017 at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes.

This exhibition is presented in five thematic sections, highlighting the moments of interaction and divergence between the two artists.

The Academy looks at Picasso and Rivera’s training in their respective national academies—Picasso in Spain and Rivera in Mexico—which they both entered as child prodigies. They studied within the rigorous curriculum of neoclassicism, where copying of the antique and a ruthless adhesion to the principles it had come to represent were the chief means to a successful career.  

Cubsim and Paris (1908–16) examines the period between 1908 and 1916 when both artists moved to Paris and became active participants of the avant-garde movement. The two met in early 1914 when Picasso invited Rivera to his studio before camaraderie yielded to rivalry in 1915. Both artists prolifically created Cubist works, including Picasso’s The Poet (Le poète) (1912) and Rivera’s Sailor at Lunch (Marinero almorzando) (1914). This period of experimentation became critical for both artists, foreshadowing a unique approach to composition and to ancient art in their future practices. This section also provides a rare opportunity to view Picasso’s Cubism through Rivera’s eyes.

Picasso and Rivera both traveled to Italy (in 1917 and 1920, respectively) and, following the war, embraced a revalorization of the classical tradition. Return to Order and Indigenismo addresses the post-WWI desire for order and stability that permeated the Parisian avant-garde. Picasso and Rivera’s monumental paintings of the 1920s capture their reinterpretations of antiquity, be it Greco-Roman for Picasso, or ancient Mesoamerican for Rivera.

Picasso’s first monumental neoclassical painting, Three Women at the Spring (1921)—an exceptional loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)—recasts the classical group of three women, usually appearing as Graces and Fates, into sculptural forms and on a monumental scale.

Meanwhile, in Flower Day (Día de Flores) (1925), Rivera transforms figures of Mexico’s indigenous peoples into icons inspired by Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec water goddess. This gallery also includes portions of Rivera’s personal holdings of ancient Pre-Columbian ceramic and stone sculptures, a collection that has never previously traveled outside of Mexico. This will be the first time that Flower Day will be shown alongside the ancient Chalchiuhtlicue sculptures that Rivera often used for his compositions. 

The subsequent two galleries focus on the artists individually rather than in direct dialogue. Rivera and Pre-Columbian Art demonstrates how Rivera vigorously engaged with European modernism only to abandon abstraction for didactic figuration— enriched by references to Mexico’s ancient civilizations—and focusing his attention on public murals that emphasized the national and ideological above the personal. By the 1930s Rivera had already formed his own style where the ancient Mesoamerican sculptures were transformed into everyday living people, creating in this manner a representation of the idealized mestizo race in Mexico. In The Flowered Canoe (La Canoa en Florada) (1931), Rivera creates two worlds: the mestizos, influenced by Western culture, enjoy a day at Lake Xochimilco, while an oarsman, clearly an indigenous man, represents the force of tradition.

The gallery dedicated to Picasso and Mythology explores how the artist shaped the foundations of 20th century art through formal experimentation with the art of the past, creating images that were at once deeply personal and universal. In Studio with Plaster Head (Atelier avec tête et bras de plâtre) (1925), for example, Picasso summarizes his views on the dialectic relationship between ancient Greek and Roman tradition with Western painting and the beginning of modernism. Modernism was often conceived as a total break with the past; however, Picasso perceived it as part of a continuum. By showing classical figuration in the artist’s studio, Picasso implies that it is the responsibility of the artist to create something new out of tradition. In this way, he presents an artistic lineage that goes from ancient Greece to Cubism.

Situated between the final two galleries, the film Ideologías y Muralismo, commissioned by LACMA and directed by Rodrigo García, explores Rivera’s mural Pan American Unity (San Francisco City College, 1940) and Picasso’s Guernica (1937), as well as the artists’ shared engagement with monumentality and political activism.

WARNING: These pictures and the connected article are pretty hard to look at.

Ancient DNA research has revealed that Ice Age cave artists recorded a previously unknown hybrid species of bison and cattle in great detail on cave walls more than 15,000 years ago.

Research led by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, published today in Nature Communications, has revealed that the mystery hybrid species eventually became the ancestor of the modern European bison, or wisent, which survives in protected reserves such as the Białowieża forest between Poland and Belarus.

“Finding that a hybridisation event led to a completely new species was a real surprise — as this isn’t really meant to happen in mammals,” says study leader Professor Alan Cooper, ACAD Director. “The genetic signals from the ancient bison bones were very odd, but we weren’t quite sure a species really existed — so we referred to it as the Higgs Bison.”

The international team of researchers also included the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), Polish bison conservation researchers, and palaeontologists across Europe and Russia. They studied ancient DNA extracted from radiocarbon-dated bones and teeth found in caves across Europe, the Urals, and the Caucasus to trace the genetic history of the populations.

They found a distinctive genetic signal from many fossil bison bones, which was quite different from the European bison or any other known species.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the mystery species dominated the European record for thousands of years at several points, but alternated over time with the Steppe bison, which had previously been considered the only bison species present in Late Ice Age Europe.

“The dated bones revealed that our new species and the Steppe Bison swapped dominance in Europe several times, in concert with major environmental changes caused by climate change,” says lead author Dr Julien Soubrier, from the University of Adelaide. “When we asked, French cave researchers told us that there were indeed two distinct forms of bison art in Ice Age caves, and it turns out their ages match those of the different species. We’d never have guessed the cave artists had helpfully painted pictures of both species for us.”

The cave paintings depict bison with either long horns and large forequarters (more like the American bison, which is descended from the Steppe bison) or with shorter horns and small humps, more similar to modern European bison.

“Once formed, the new hybrid species seems to have successfully carved out a niche on the landscape, and kept to itself genetically,” says Professor Cooper. “It dominated during colder tundra-like periods, without warm summers, and was the largest European species to survive the megafaunal extinctions. However, the modern European bison looks genetically quite different as it went through a genetic bottleneck of only 12 individuals in the 1920s, when it almost became extinct. That’s why the ancient form looked so much like a new species.”

Professor Beth Shapiro, UCSC, first detected the mystery bison as part of her PhD research with Professor Cooper at the University of Oxford in 2001. “Fifteen years later it’s great to finally get to the full story out. It’s certainly been a long road, with a surprising number of twists,” Professor Shapiro says.

VIENNA (AFP).- One of Austria’s most important anti-Nazi films was thought lost for decades, until it was uncovered by chance last year. Now experts must race to keep from losing Die Stadt Ohne Juden/The City Without Jews again — this time from decay. Shot and screened in Vienna in 1924, the silent film proved disturbingly prophetic in its dark depiction of anti-Semitism clutching the Austrian capital in the wake of World War I.

Based on the eponymous bestseller by Austrian writer Hugo Bettauer, it tells the story of an anti-Semitic mayor who, reacting to rising social discontent, opts to expel all Jews. The decision leads the city to the brink of ruin as its economy declines and unemployment explodes. In the end, the law is repealed and the banished Jews are welcomed back. The black-and-white movie broke ground as the world’s first cinematographic work to foreshadow the horrors of the Third Reich, according to the Film Archive Austria (FAA). It would also cost Bettauer his life: the liberal author and journalist was killed by a Nazi a few months after the movie’s premiere:

Kupfertiefdruck nach Foto Weitzmann-Wien.

“‘The City Without Jews’ is much more than a film: it is an anti-Nazi manifesto”, said Nikolaus Wostry of the FAA.

The Vienna-based archive only possessed a fragmented version of the original until a French art collector stumbled across a near-complete reel at a flea market in Paris in 2015. Hitherto unknown scenes provided a much sharper articulation of the rising anti-Semitism in Vienna, which had been a prominent centre of Jewish culture at the start of the 20th century.

“This version is the missing link. We have many wonderful new takes giving an insight into the Jewish community in Vienna, but there are also scenes showing the pogroms,” Wostry said. The copy also contained the final scene, revealing a slightly altered ending — albeit still a happy one — to that in the book. Capital ‘of anti-Semitism’ However, the FAA fears that the new reel could soon once again be lost as it shows serious signs of deterioration. The institute has launched a crowd-funding appeal until December 10 to raise money for the restoration of the highly flammable nitrate film. “We have to save it and make it available to the public, not just for its historic value but also for its current message against the walls we are building and the exclusion of people,” said Wostry. The archive has so far raised €60,253 of the required €75,500.

[I just donated €25 and will receive a digital copy of the film]

“It would be fitting to show this film in Vienna, which was the capital of political anti-Semitism,” Wostry said. At the time of the movie’s release, a dangerous wind of change was already blowing across the Austrian city. Home to great minds like Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig and Gustav Mahler, Vienna in 1897 voted in the openly anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger who would stay in power for 13 years.

In 1907, Adolf Hitler, aged 18, moved to the capital. His six years spent here would prove a highly formative time and steer his political views. Hitler greatly admired Lueger and later referred to him in Mein Kampf. Observers say the anti-Semitic backlash was fuelled by a steady influx of eastern European Jews drawn to “sparkling Vienna”. “At the turn of the century, anti-Semitism is a cultural code directed against the elites, the financial circles, the press,” historian Jacques le Rider told AFP. The situation turned critical after World War I as Jewish refugees fleeing violence on the Russian front stream into the capital. “Hyper-inflation and unemployment explode in Austria, already humiliated by the loss of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Xenophobia reaches a new dimension,” le Rider said.

Bettauer, a Jew converted to Protestantism, astutely captured these changes in his novel published in 1922. “He perfectly describes the climate of anti-Semitic terror which gripped Austria at the time,” says Werner Hanak-Lettner of the Jewish Museum in Vienna. The release of the film two years later sparked huge protests and would eventually force several of its Jewish actors to emigrate. Less successful than the book, the movie vanished after a screening in Amsterdam in the 1930s.
Six decades later, a copy was found in the Netherlands Filmmuseum. Austrian experts say the emergence of the new version shows that the Dutch copy from 1991 had been edited for foreign audiences. “This seems to have been a ‘light version’ of the original, destined for export and cleared of the shock factor,” Wostry said.

Source: Austria’s race against time to save anti-Nazi film