The RCMP are setting up exclusion zones and closed roads to the public and media as officers get set to dismantle two camps on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.
“During the police enforcement operation, temporary exclusion zones and road closures will be established for police and public safety reasons,” said the news release sent out Monday morning that confirmed the RCMP will enforce a court order requested by a pipeline company trying to build a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory.
“Those areas will be clearly marked and media/public are welcome to stand at the perimeter, but no one will be allowed to enter the exclusion zones. These zones will only be maintained as long as necessary.”
The raids have been highly anticipated after a B.C. judge granted an interim injunction in December against two check points leading to the construction site for the LNG Coastal GasLink pipeline.
you know, that whole thing when a colonist militaristic police force storms a indigenous encampment, removes it’s people who live there, all for corporate interest, so we can pump more oil out, and accelerate the death of the planet.
Then once the Cops storm the place, they declare an “exclusion zone” deploy a wifi and cell blockage, AND exclude media. All so no news of it gets out.
You all need to be fucking outraged. We live in a police state, and the moment your life gets in the way of making money, you cease to matter.
Hey Americans, you know how we Canadians all shared information about Standing Rock as it was happening?
We’re having a very similar situation in Canada right now.
Now would be a good time to reciprocate.
This is happening RIGHT NOW.
Nobody on this site besides me and a few other bloggers are talking about this.
Like there are only 2 or 3 blogs in total in the #Wet’suwet’en or #Unist’ot’en or Unist’ot’en Camp hashtags from the past week.
this is happening January 7, 2019
If you’re on twitter, track these hashtags:
#Unistoten
#wetsuwetenstrong
#undrip
#thetimeisnow
Some people to follow who are sharing news about this live:
I am sorry to inform you that if you are looking for a bag full of happy endings, then you should look away immediately. This bag is full of emptiness. A word chosen here to reflect the lack of items inside the bag, but also to accentuate the very lonely and unfortunate place the bag was discovered in, as it is one of the last few items known to have been discovered in relation to the missing Baudelaire Orphans. My name is Lemony Snicket, and it is my sad duty to sell you this bag, a singular one-of-a-kind piece from Tormented Artifacts.
Measuring 9x8x3 for internal space, with card pocket, pencil pouch, and an additional 5x4x1 pouch, this bag can be worn as a backpack, hip bag, or fanny pack, and is available for private sale. DM/PM for details.
If Cthulhu can be summoned by humans who are so far beneath it, why can’t humans be summoned by ants? The answer is they should be.
Well if a bunch of ants formed a circle in my house I’d certainly notice, try to figure out where they’d all come from, and possibly wreak destruction there.
That’s why knowing and correctly pronouncing the true name is so important to the ritual. Imagine how impossible it would be to not go take a look if the circle of ants started chanting your name.
And they’re like, you can’t leave because we drew a line made of tiny crystals - now you have to do us a favor.
And you’re like, let’s just see where this goes “yup, you got me… what’s the favor?”
and usually the favor is like, “kill this one ant for us” or “give me a pile of sugar” and you’re like… okay? and you do, because why not, it isn’t hard for you and boy is this going to be a fucking story to tell, these fucking ants chanting your name and wanting a spoonful of sugar or whatever.
And SOMEtimes you get asked for things you can’t really do, one of them, she’s like, “I love this ant but she won’t pay any attention to me, make me important to her” and you’re like… um? how? So you just kill every ant in the colony except the two of them, ta-da! problem solved! and the first ant is like *horrified whisper* “what have I done”
This is the best explanation for higher powers I’ve ever really heard.
I am sorry to inform you that if you are looking for a bag full of happy endings, then you should look away immediately. This bag is full of emptiness. A word chosen here to reflect the lack of items inside the bag, but also to accentuate the very lonely and unfortunate place the bag was discovered in, as it is one of the last few items known to have been discovered in relation to the missing Baudelaire Orphans. My name is Lemony Snicket, and it is my sad duty to sell you this bag, a singular one-of-a-kind piece from Tormented Artifacts.
Measuring 9x8x3 for internal space, with card pocket, pencil pouch, and an additional 5x4x1 pouch, this bag can be worn as a backpack, hip bag, or fanny pack, and is available for private sale. DM/PM for details.
“Smart” and “Cloud” also mean data gathering. I need to have a tangent, so pardon me while I run with this…
Here’s the thing: I’m a nerd. I want to be able to automate things in our home and to have usable data. So I want smart electrical plugs that allow me to have rules and show me what’s hooving up a ton of energy. That’s useful to me, but that’s not the bargain that tech companies are willing to strike with me, because they want to be able to gather data and sell it.
What’s annoying as hell is that every currently supported thing that does this wants to be a cloud-based application that requires me to install an app on my phone.
I. Do. Not. Want. This.
I want my plugs on a network so I can flip open a browser on my laptop or phone or tablet and access them that way. I do not want them on or touching the goddamned internet. I do not want an information-gathering-and-data-leaking-phone-app.
The one thing that I’ve found that semi-reliably does this is no longer supported by the manufacturer. Every other goddamned option requires me to have it be app-controlled and I can’t control the data gathering from the manufacturer.
In this case, I am DEFINITELY an old-coot yelling at THE cloud.
Honestly, same. This is one of the few things that I’m glad to be too poor to afford the cool toys on.
Mostly I just love the term “arch-nemesis” because it implies having so many committed nemeses that a formal hierarchy has developed among them. Like, living the dream or what?
what if we accelerated both popes to a substantial fraction of lightspeed and collided them together, that would reveal valuable information about their internal structure
We could just. Cut them open.
careful, too many popes in a confined space could reach Critical Mass, causing a huge excommunication that would censure everyone in a five mile radius
Question. Surely if there are two popes in the Vatican they must be quantumly entangled, so cutting one open reveals something about the other, therefore we only need one pope
right, if one pope is a top then the other is a bottom, if one pope is charming then the other pope is strange,
Two Popes in Vatican City is simply too many at the same time. One should be relocated to Avignon immediately. I’m sure nothing bad will come of that.
I remember the season Christian was in. And he had a problem (because he was fresh out of fashion school) with understanding how to dress bigger women. And Tim Gunn, who has always been a proponent of needing to design fashion for more natural sizes, helped him to get out of that mind set by planting the seed. That growth we see is from this amazing fashion teacher!
Here’s something I wanna say real quick, while I’m feeling salty: Amazon has totally contributed to the devaluation of literature. Those prices you see, the $13 they’re asking you to pay for a hardcover book? Those are deep, DEEP discounts that they’re able to implement because they don’t collect sales tax if they can get away with it, they don’t contribute money to the communities where they have a physical presence, they have shitty labor practices, Jeff Bezos has more money than god, etc.
They’re so omnipotent at this point that they’ve normalized the discounted prices for books as the standard. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had someone come up to me and tell me what the price on Amazon is, expecting me to match it. The number of times I’ve been told, “Oh, it’s cheaper on Amazon, I’ll just get it there.” Even at author events, where book sales DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTE to whether or not that bookstore will be able to get more authors in.
So when you go into a bookstore, and you’re asked to pay $27 for a hardcover, remember: THAT IS THE COVER PRICE. Set by the publishers. The bookstore is not upcharging you. They are asking you to pay the value of the book. Amazon’s low prices come with a cost. Please, just keep that in mind.
(I made a post with options for buying books online that aren’t Amazon. Check it out!)
This is a great post, and I just want to point out: publishers aren’t upcharging you either.
The cost of the book is the advance for the author, it’s the salaries for all the people who work on it (including editors, yes, but also designers and marketers and publicists and lawyers and accountants and everyone else who makes sure publishing works). It’s the cost of printing the books and the materials to print those books on and the warehouses to store those books in.
It’s keeping the literal lights on.
No one in the book business, from the author to the publisher to the bookseller, is making themselves rich off your money. This is the cost to survive. Amazon is running at a deficit because they can make up the cost with other things they do, and because once they run everyone else out of business, they’ll be the only game in town and can charge whatever they damn well please.
And please, please do not ask a bookstore (especially an indie bookstore) if they “price match.” It’s so insulting.
Amazon routinely sells books at or *below* wholesale cost. Meaning that when you ask a bookstore to ‘price match’ Amazon, you’re literally asking them to give you the book for free, or even take a financial loss on it.
‘So how can Amazon do it?’ you ask? The answer is Amazon does not care about losing money. It sells goods at a loss continuously. (Don’t believe me? Just search “Amazon quarterly losses” and you can find article after article about this) Why? Because its goal isn’t to sell the most things, it’s goal is to be the only place where you CAN buy things. They gouge prices on goods to a point where brick and mortar retailers absolutely cannot compete and they do it with the singular goal of eliminating competition.
Things have value. They represent many people’s time and labor. For books, specifically, they represent tremendous cultural worth that extends far beyond the value of the paper they’re printed on. We have to appreciate the value of goods and be willing to pay a fair price that will support and nurture industries.
It’s ok to be upset that you can’t afford $26 for a new hardcover, but make sure that that anger is directed, not at the people whose labor makes books possible, but at the people on top (like Jeff Bezos) who have devalued your own labor such that you can’t afford it.
Starting at midnight on January 1, tens of thousands of books (as well as movies, songs, and cartoons) entered the public domain, meaning that people can download, share, or repurpose these works for free and without retribution under US copyright law.
Per the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, “corporate” creations (like Mickey Mouse) can be restricted under copyright law for 120 years. But per an amendment to the act, works published between 1923 and 1977 can enter the public domain 95 years after their creation. This means that this is the first year since 1998 that a large number of works have entered the public domain.
Basically, 2019 marks the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923 — including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost — have become legally downloadable since digital books became a thing. It’s a big deal — the Internet Archive had a party in San Francisco to celebrate. Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.
So, how do you actually download these books?
It largely depends on what site you go to, and if you can’t find a book on one site, you can probably find it on another. For instance, ReadPrint.com, as well as The Literature Network (mostly major authors), and Librivox (audio books), Authorama (all in the public domain), and over a dozen other sites all have vast selections of free ebooks.
There’s also a handful of archiving projects that are doing extensive work to digitize books, journals, music, and other forms of media. A blog post from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain listed some of the most recognizable works published in 1923, as well as links to download these books on digital archiving projects Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the Gutenberg Project. The books include:
In total HathiTrust, a massive digital archiving project, has also uploaded more than 53,000 works published in 1923 that just entered the public domain. Over 17,650 of them are books written in English. Similarly, Internet Archive has already uploaded over 15,000 works written in English that year.
If you’re interested in academic papers, Reddit user nemobis also uploaded over 1.5 million PDF files of works published in academic journals before 1923. Your best bet for actually finding something you want to read in there is to know which academic paper you’re looking for beforehand and check the paper’s DOI number. Then, search for the DOI in one of nemobis’s lists of works — one list includes works published until 1909, the other includes works published until 1923.
It’s worth noting that projects like Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg rely on volunteer efforts, so there’s going to be disparities in the number of books available for download depending on where you go. But over the next several days and weeks, it’s safe to expect many more books will become available legally and for free across the web.
The blog of one Dmitri Arbacauskas- madman artist, Dark Sorceror, and otherwise strange hermit. His works range from all manner of salubrious leatherworks, from fashion accessories to masks, to full-on suits of armor and body harnesses. He also creates a number of salacious art prints, not-so-decorative-but-certainly-functional props, and many other things that’ll leave your neighbors looking at you a bit funny. And yes, he's a bit of a geek.