Fade Into You /// Mazzy Star
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The most beautiful space photo I’ve ever seen
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and near the equator. Many navigators, including Ferdinand Magellan who lends his name to the SMC, used it to help find their way across the oceans.
Modern astronomers are also interested in studying the SMC (and its cousin, the Large Magellanic Cloud), but for very different reasons. Because the SMC is so close and bright, it offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are difficult to examine in more distant galaxies.
New Chandra data of the SMC have provided one such discovery: the first detection of X-ray emission from young stars with masses similar to our Sun outside our Milky Way galaxy. The new Chandra observations of these low-mass stars were made of the region known as the “Wing” of the SMC. In this composite image of the Wing the Chandra data is shown in purple, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope is shown in red, green and blue and infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope is shown in red.via NASA
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Nestlé chairman denies that water is an essential human right
April 22, 2013The current Chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, the largest producer of food products in the world, believes that the answer to global water issues is privatization. This statement is on record from the wonderful company that has peddled junk food in the Amazon, has invested money to thwart the labeling of GMO-filled products, has a disturbing health and ethics record for its infant formula, and has deployed a cyber army to monitor Internet criticism and shape discussions in social media.
This is apparently the company we should trust to manage our water, despite the record of large bottling companies like Nestlé having a track record of creating shortages:
Large multinational beverage companies are usually given water-well privileges (and even tax breaks) over citizens because they create jobs, which is apparently more important to the local governments than water rights to other taxpaying citizens. These companies such as Coca Cola and Nestlé (which bottles suburban Michigan well-water and calls it Poland Spring) suck up millions of gallons of water, leaving the public to suffer with any shortages. (source)
But Chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, believes that “access to water is not a public right.” Nor is it a human right. So if privatization is the answer, is this the company in which the public should place its trust?
Here is just one example, among many, of his company’s concern for the public thus far:
In the small Pakistani community of Bhati Dilwan, a former village councilor says children are being sickened by filthy water. Who’s to blame? He says it’s bottled water-maker Nestlé, which dug a deep well that is depriving locals of potable water. “The water is not only very dirty, but the water level sank from 100 to 300 to 400 feet,” Dilwan says. (source)
Why? Because if the community had fresh water piped in, it would deprive Nestlé of its lucrative market in water bottled under the Pure Life brand.
In the subtitled video below, from several years back, Brabeck discusses his views on water, as well as some interesting comments concerning his view of Nature — that it is “pitiless” — and, of course, the obligatory statement that organic food is bad and GM is great. In fact, according to Brabeck, you are essentially an extremist to hold views opposite to his own. His statements are important to review as we continue to see the world around us become reshaped into a more mechanized environment in order to stave off that pitiless Nature to which he refers.
The conclusion to this segment is perhaps the most revealing about Brabeck’s worldview, as he highlights a clip of one of his factory operations. Evidently, the saviour-like role of the Nestlé Group in ensuring the health of the global population should be graciously welcomed. Are you convinced?
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The Mountain Goats - Up The Wolves
There will always be a few things, maybe several things, that you’re going to find really difficult to forgive.
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"The Average Fourth Grader Is A Better Poet Than You, (And Me Too)," Hannah Gamble
While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.
When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn’t expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students’ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.
Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:
“The life of my heart is crimson.”
[Writing about a family member’s recent death:]
“My brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.”
“Peace be a song,
silver pool of sadness”“Away went a dull winter wind
that rocked harshly, and bent you said,
‘Father, father’.”
[Writing about a terminal illness:]
“I am feeling burdened
and I taste milk……
I mumble, ‘Please,
please run away.’
But it lives where I live.”“The owls of midnight hoot like me
shutting the door to nothing.”[Writing about life as a movie:]
“The choir enters, and the director screams
‘Sing with more terror!!!’”
“I have provisions. Binary muffins.
It’s an in/out/in/out kind of universe.
We cannot help you,
this is a universe factory.
A sound of rolling symbols.
Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards.
Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.”“I, the star god,
take bones from the
underworlds of past times
to create mankind.”These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn’t been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.
Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.
Anecdote that I hope you’ll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]
So let’s look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:
Snacking on this and that
my friends and I keep the party going
even when it is over”
“Whispers of a
secret crush being unraveled”“I’m trapped in this hole that
I can’t break through”“Barack Obama in the White House.
I can feel the inspiration
Can you feel it?”“Now I feel secure with my head held high.
Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.
While the average older student’s poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer’s vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bazaar, yet true.
Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”
The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.
The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.
(source)
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thinking aloud: why i stopped calling myself poly
i am seeing a lot of my folks talking about polyamory and monogamy and i wanted to use this an opportunity to thank yall for putting out different ideas about polyamory in qpoc and immigrant communities.
i do not identify as poly. i did at one point in my life, actually for about 5 years. but i realized that my trauma and abandonment experiences makes having a partner who is dating or sleeping with other folks really difficult and spun me into bad mental health places. so i have moved away from that. but i still cringe, i feel my body recoil from people who talk about monogamous folks as oppressive or supporting oppression i will try to elaborate why.
i know that the way monogamy is modeled in todays society is fucking rough. it abusive and hella fucking codependent. i mean i grew up with parents in a loveless marriage who stayed together out of survival and sacrificed their needs for their kids. i also came to the US when i was seven and listened to shit like Shai’s song “if i ever fall in love” on repeat. i memorized this song and i remember singing “if i say that i could be your one and only/ promise that you’ll never leave me lonely” in my learning to speak english 8 year old tongue. i was surrounded by this shit and still am.I definitely needed to hear this while waking today.
I was grateful to read this.
“The only reason I’m putting myself out here and talking about anything is because there’s been so many trans* girls on Youtube or that I’ve read about that put themselves out there and made their knowledge available that I feel like I have to return the favor. You know, when I was 14 years old, if I was watching House of Style, watching a transsexual being interviewed and talking about that, then it would’ve completely changed my life, you know… I would’ve felt saved.”
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BE VAIN AND BE UNASHAMED. LOVE YOURSELF FIERCELY AND TELL ANYONE WHO DOESN’T LIKE IT TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES.
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