Title: Growing Down Universe:Yuugen Jikkou Sisters Shushutorian Prompt:Power Rangers Ninja Steel: S24E03 - Live and Learn Character(s): Yamabuki Yukiko, Yamambuki Tsukiko, Yamabuki Hanako, OC Rating: U Warnings: N/A Summary: At first, she did not recognise the three girls standing at her door in the hallway. She thought there was something familiar about them, something she recognised in others, in members of her family even, but she did not know them for who they were. Three girls, descending in age: 16, 14, 12. Slowly, realisation dawned. She lifted a hand to cover her mouth. Length: 784 words Author's Notes: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TANAKA NORIKO!! đđđ°đđ also: external link.
The culprits were found guilty of criminal damage in May 2025; in July, a judge sentenced them each to more than four years in prison, noting that the two men were responsible for âa sense of loss and confusion across the world.â One of the defendants expressed disbelief at the public outcry. âIt was just a tree,â he said. â[I]t was almost as if someone had been murdered.â Yet, the outcry wasnât merely grief for a squandered natural wonder but a reflection of the deep-rooted symbolic power trees hold in our cultural memory.
For millennia, trees have stood as emblems of the profound interconnectedness of all living things, central to the universeâs structural integrity and humanityâs moral compass. A recurring archetype across world mythologies is the Tree of Life (alternately described as a world tree or cosmic tree), described by biologist J. Andrew McDonald as representing âthe metaphysical principles of cosmogenesis, natural creation, eternal recurrence, and/or human hopes for everlasting life in the hereafter.â Such trees are spiritual barometers, their fate intertwined with the morality of the worlds to which they connect. In Norse mythology, the ash tree known as Yggdrasill binds together all nine worlds, from the underworld of Niflheim to the realm of the gods, Asgard. Its appearance and condition reflects the actions of the worldsâ inhabitants. As described in the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse narrative poems, during times of peace and divine harmony, the tree is âever green,â but in times of disorder, it âsuffers anguish more than mortal has ever known.â Its roots are gnawed at endlessly by the dragon NĂĂ°höggr, who is said in some interpretations of the poem VöluspĂĄ to burst free during Ragnarök, the end of the world, carrying the bodies of men on his wings.
Similarly, in Greek mythology, the tale of King Erysichthon asserts that the felling of a tree is an indicator of moral failure, which invites divine retribution. In Ovidâs version of the story, after cutting down a sacred oak, Erysichthon is cursed with insatiable hunger by the dryad nymph who inhabited it. Still unable to satiate his appetite after selling his daughter into slavery for food, he eats himself to death.
This deep connection between trees and morality is further evidenced in a trope of Western literature in which humans are transformed into trees, sometimes as an embodiment of sin. Philosopher and literary critic Tzachi Zamir observes these metamorphoses as denoting âmorally relevant transformations in a personâs relation to inhabited space.â One such example can be found in the Latin mythological text Fabulae, in which the sisters of Phaethon are transformed into poplar trees as punishment for yoking his chariot without their fatherâs permission. In other versions, this transformation is framed as a result of their intense grief consuming their bodies. The motif of losing oneâs human body and becoming a vegetative entity, Zamir argues, is a moral contribution; as oneâs inner self âerupts onto the surface, controls one’s body, and is transformed into an ungovernable entity,â weâre prompted to empathetically connect with anotherâs experience, as it prompts us to âdeepen and redefine what acknowledging others might mean.â
In the modern city of Tokyo, mature forests and trees form a spiritual bridge between past and present.
Trees constituting the moral fabric of humanity recur in modern mythopoeia, particularly in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Drawing inspiration from Norse and other mythologies, the trees of Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings series are sacred beings, whose treatment stands as a moral litmus test. Mistreat a tree, and youâll find yourself among the bad guys of Tolkienâs universe. Mordor, the realm of the dark lord Sauron, is depicted as a barren wasteland devoid of vegetation, as is Isengard, where armies of orcs felled trees and transformed the land into a hellscape of industrial horrors. Meanwhile, the virtuous, near-immortal elves of LothlĂłrien are depicted living peacefully in a realm of lush flora and elaborate tree-houses.
Writer Claudia Riiff Finseth credits Tolkienâs Catholic upbringing and interest in Anglo-Saxon literature to his appreciation of the treeâs rich symbolism. Some Christian legends, Finseth observes, refer to the âQuaking Aspen,â a tree that trembled upon realizing that it would be carved into the cross upon which Christ was destined to be crucified. The cross, a symbol that wards off evil, is mirrored in Tolkienâs use of the mallorn, described as a cross-shaped tree, as a place of refuge and protection. Recalling the English folk motif of the tree as possessing healing powers, a clump of soil dug up from an orchard in LothlĂłrien is used to replenish the scoured Shire. The deep, booming voice of Treebeard, the tree-giant of Fangorn who leads a rebellion of trees to flood Isengard, was said to be inspired by that of C. S. Lewis, Tolkienâs friend and literary rival.
Lewisâs own fantasy epic, The Chronicles of Narnia, aligns with Tolkienâs tree-loving sentiments. In the final novel of the series, The Last Battle, the destruction of trees and dryads in Lantern Waste, a place tied to the creation of Narnia itself, is one of many portentous omens signalling the end of the world. By locating this cruel act at the site of Narniaâs origin, Lewis recalls the core principle of the cosmic tree, as tied to the birth and death of the world and contingent upon the moral actions of its inhabitants.
Sycamore Gap on Hadrianâs Wall, 2022. Getty
We can understand the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree through this complex lens of mythological, literary, and religious resonance. It was an act of vandalism not just toward the tree itself, but toward the cultural heritage and folkloric narratives it carried. As Robert Bringhurst writes, âstories are epiphytes: organisms that grow on other organisms, in much the same way staghorn ferns and tree-dwelling lichens…grow on trees.â To destroy a revered tree is to metaphorically sever a limb from the body of our cultural memory. As such, it has been the case throughout history that public outrage regarding the destruction of an important tree is underscored by a recapitulation of its folkloric and symbolic meaning.
In other cases, tree-fellings have conjured up folkloric history to fuel conservationist movements. In 1853, a giant sequoia in California’s Sierra Nevada, dubbed the âMother of the Forest,â was brought down, its bark torn and sent away to be exhibited. The resulting anger directed at lumber companies sparked the beginnings of the conservation movement, paving the way for the founding of Yellowstone, the first national park. Its name is key here: It evokes the typical empathetic personification of Mother Nature, but it also predates what would later become a core principle in the tree conservation movement, the idea of networked âmother trees,â popularized by the research of forestry scientist Suzanne Simard. Vital to the ecosystems of forests, mother trees nurture the development of seedlings via fungal networks.
These events reveal a recurring truth: trees are never âjust trees.â Theyâre living monuments to morality, resilience, and connection, whose destruction marks a betrayal of those treasured virtues. The grief felt over the Sycamore Gap tree wasnât disproportionate; it was a deeply human reaction rooted in thousands of years of cultural and folkloric significance. The sycamore species itself carries symbolic weight in world mythologies, linked to Hera, queen of the Greek gods; the World Tree in Celtic tradition; and Hathor, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of love and beauty. In Christian lore, the sycamore also symbolizes repentance, humility, and forgiveness of oneâs sins, evoked by the story of the tax collector Zacchaeus, who climbed one to see Jesus. Fittingly, the remaining stump of the Sycamore Gap tree has begun to sprout seedlings, perhaps a quiet echo of the spirit of redemption. Yet, as the estate manager of the Woodland Trust, Mark Feather, states, it will take anywhere from 150 to 200 years for it to come âanywhere close to what we have lost.â With this, a question emerges: will our moral obligation to trees endure 200 years from now, or will we, like NĂĂ°höggr, continue to gnaw at the roots until it’s too late?
If youâve ever worked as a freelance creator, you might understand the importance of constructing your material to meet your clientâs tastes. It was no different in the early seventeenth century.
In 1601, James VI of Scotland traveled to England to claim the throne as James I of England, following the childless Elizabeth Iâs death. James brought with him a wife, three children, a court of Scots, and a lot of eccentricities. One of those eccentricities was Jamesâs obsessive fixation on witches. Star playwright William Shakespeare saw a golden opportunity to get into the kingâs good graces and wrote a play with witches as a main plot driver.
The dark, starkly political story of the tragedy Macbethwouldnât go anywhere without the three spooky witches, as Shakespeare scholar George Walton Williams outlines. The witches predict Macbethâs ascension to the Scottish throne and launch him on a campaign of treachery and bloodshed, though they donât help him perform his evil deeds. This was Shakespeareâs unique take on witches, who were usually cast in literature as more active villains. From Shakespeareâs perspective, an individualâs own decisions determine their destiny, not necessarily the interference of black magic.
Williams draws on the research of other drama critics to expand on this, proposing that
we must listen to the prophecy: the witches prophesied that Macbeth should be king hereafter. There is nothing here that indicates, as the late Professor Harbage has well said, that in order to be king hereafter Macbeth must be murderer first.
Shakespeare presented Macbeth to a superstitious king who feared magic and tended to blame witches for many of the ills that fell upon both his home and adopted country. Macbeth, also an unstable Scottish king, blames the witches for the ills caused by his own murderous decisions. According to historian Howell V. Calhoun,James I spent his own literary career defaming witches and accusing them of supposed crimes.
In the 16th-18th centuries, vessels filled with nails, thorns, hair, and other materials, were used as a form of ritual protection against witches.
âJames had firsthand experience with the malign activity of witches, and he left a careful record of it in his pamphlet Newes From Scotland declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian, a notable Sorcerer, which appeared in 1591,â Calhoun documents. âThe whole affair hinged about the evil activities of Dr. Fian (alias John Cunningham), Agnis Sampson, and the North Berwick witches, in their attempt to destroy the ship on which James was returning from Denmark with his bride [Anne of Denmark].â Jamesâs collection of âevidenceâ led to the violent persecution of accused party.
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And then there was James Iâs three-book treatise Daemonologie, his magnum opus. As Calhoun summarizes, the first part
takes up the subject of magic and necromancy, the second treats of witchcraft and sorcery, and the third discourses of all kinds of spirits and specters. The kingâs intention in this work was to prove two things, âthe one, that such diuelish artes haue bene and are,â and the other, âwhat exact trial and seuere punishment they merite.â
Though Shakespeare certainly appealed to Jamesâs interests with the Scottish play, the two men held divergent views on what witches did and not do. If James I of England had written Macbeth, the three witches would have met a rather grisly end. Shakespeare, however, leaves their fates unknown.
In her last promotional picture in 2017, Oshima Ryoka looks a lot like Watanabe Mayu. Not, I think, that they are similar in appearance, but around this time, wardrobe and makeup were eager to smooth out all members into this sort of comparative Sakamachi series appearance, a hope that they might reverse engineer some of the increasing popularity of Sony's rival group. Rest assured, she really doesn't really look like that in her brief appearance in 2014's Sailor Zombie drama.
Ryo-chan passed the auditions for AKB on the cusp of the group's big change and at the peak of their popularity. For a year, she numbered amongst the kenkyuusei, and then, in the big shuffle at Tokyo Dome in 2012 that comes up so much in these entries, as Maeda Atsuko bowed out from Team A, Ryo-chan joined their ranks, the team now under the captainship of Shinoda Mariko.
For a year, she remained with them, appearing in a campaign for JR East's Yokohama Line as part of the promotional unit, Team Kanagawa, alongside Okada Nana and Kawaei Rina, before eventually being transferred to Kuramochi Asuka's Team B at the next big shake-up at Zepp DiverCity in 2014. Later that year, Ryo-chan appeared in the senbatsu for the first time, standing alongside formerly graduated members, again with Kawaei Rina, for Kibouteki Refrain, which is a moment I've been thinking about a lot since oh my pumpkin! released.
By 2015, Ryo-chan had her first solo concert under her belt and had been appointed as co-captain of Team B, taking over from Oya Shizuka, and was one of the members to appear in Central Park in New York before 5,000 people as part of AKB's return to the city for the Japan Day celebrations. I can't imagine what it must have been like to stand on that stage; I can't even imagine what it must have been like to be in that crowd! Later in the year, she appeared one last time with Kawaei for the last single before the other girl graduated, the slightly overwrought Bokutachi wa Tatakawanai, the MV for which feels like Heisei era Kamen Rider and also marks the last appearance with AKB of Matsui Rena and Ikoma Rina. An interesting aside, but apparently Iriyama Anna was offered a role in the senbatsu for this single but she refused, possibly fearful of what attention it might bring after the attack on her and Kawaei in 2014. By this point, AKB was so big that the senbatsu for singles was functionally meaningless, an extra layer now added to the dynamic, the "media senbatsu", meaning that you could be in the line-up for the single and still not get the increased attention when it came to promoting it. Such was the case with Ryo-chan alas.
2016 was a quiet year, with Ryo-chan averaging an appearance in the senbatsu once a year. Tsubasa wa Iranai is very much indictive of the AKB of that era, Mukaichi Mion in centre position, Iriyama Anna returning once more to stand alongside Okada Nana and Kato Rena, AKS's first misguided push of NGT members. It feels a sad note to end mention of Ryo-chan's activities.
Growing up alongside Aigasa Moe, pretending to be AKB members in middle school before both girls made became part of the thirteenth generation, Ryo-chan and her peers made AKB what it was in that moment. We kind of gloss over these years now, thinking of the era of the Kami 7, and then the explosion of Team 8, and eventually, where we are now, the Oguri Yui era, but in writing these entries, I hope I can preserve a little of the AKB we too readily forget.
The Legend of Strongheart (Smithsonian Magazine)
by Eliza McGraw
Long before Lassie or Benji, Strongheart the German shepherd was a star of the silent screenâat a time when stardom as we know it was just beginning. His fame continued after his death as he became an icon of Spiritualism.
What Micrometeorites Can Teach Us (Eos)
by Katherine Kornei
Tiny bits of rock are falling from space onto Earth all the time. Looking at some of the ones that fell millions of years ago can provide clues to what life on our planet was like back then.
How Green Will China Get? (Yale Environment 360)
by Jeremy Deaton
In recent years, China has fought electricity shortages by rapidly bringing both coal plants and renewable power sources online. Now itâs reaching a decision point about which strategy to pursue.
Thinking about Consciousness in the Telegraph Era (Big Think)
by Thomas Moynihan
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosophers questioned whether machines could think, whether greater-than-human consciousnesses had arisen on other planets, and if it might be possible for the entire cosmos to develop into a much greater kind of self-aware being.
Is There a Future for Sacred Spaces? (Noema Magazine)
by John Last
Religious architecture, from Paleolithic caves to Orthodox churches, is designed to instill a sense of awe and even prompt spiritual visions. In a modern world of big-box churches and digital gathering places, what can sacred places look like?
Got a hot tip about a well-researched story that belongs on this list? Email us here.Â
Among other many cultural impacts, the musical Hamilton, which officially debuted on Broadway a decade ago, gave us the often-repeated phrase âimmigrants, they get the job done.â The show made Alexander Hamilton an avatar for generations of people from around the world âcominâ up from the bottomâ who contributed to making the United States a better nation. But, as historian Phillip W. Magness writes, the real story of Hamiltonâs relationship with foreignness is considerably more complicated.
First of all, Magness writes, Hamilton wasnât technically an immigrant at all. Born inside the British Empire on the Caribbean island of Nevis, his journey to the British colony of New York made him an internal migrant within the empire.
At one point in his political career, Hamilton did support liberal immigration policies. As Secretary of the Treasury in 1791, he proposed actively recruiting artists and manufacturers and generally trying to increase the countryâs population through immigration.
But, over time, his Federalist Party took an increasingly xenophobic stance. They lashed out at Jeffersonians who supported the French Revolution and alleged that foreign-born people represented a security threat. In 1798, the Federalist-dominated Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, whichâin addition to allowing the censorship of critics of the John Adams administrationâcurtailed the rights of immigrants. It increased the waiting time for new US residents to become citizens to fourteen years and allowed for the imprisonment or deportation of noncitizens from a country at war with the USâor those deemed âhostileâ to the nation.
The biography of Hamilton by Ron Chernow that formed the source material for the musical suggests that Hamilton was a reluctant supporter of the Alien and Sedition Acts. However, Magness argues that Hamilton pushed for the anti-immigrant measures and, after they were passed, complained that not enough deportations were taking place. In one letter, Hamilton wrote of his desire to see two foreign-born anti-Federalist newspaper editors expelled from the country. (One was the Scotsman James T. Calendar, who had publicized Hamiltonâs affair with Maria Reynolds.)
The handsome Founding Father has always had a robust fandomâeven before the ten-dollar bill, or a certain musical.
Hamilton also lashed out at political enemies who were foreign-born, suggesting that they lacked loyalty to their adopted country. Some of them pointed to the hypocrisy here, given his own origins.
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In the first years of the 1800s, Hamilton argued for the maintenance of limits to immigration, claiming that, while immigration had benefited the nation in earlier decades, there were now enough Americans. In an 1801 pseudonymous newspaper editorial, he argued that the âexperience of all agesâ warns against âadmitting foreigners to an immediate and unreserved participation in the right of suffrage.â He even attributed the fall of Rome to the extension of Roman citizenship to other Italians.
As it turned out, the restrictions were reversed and US immigration laws remained quite permissive until the anti-Chinese legislation of the 1870s. But it was no thanks to Hamilton.
âBy the end of his life, his political beliefs actually placed him among the leading advocates of immigration restrictions in the Founding generation,â Magness writes.
Economic inequality rose dramatically beginning in the 1970s. At the same time, the percentage of private-sector workers in unions went into steady decline. Some scholars have argued that the two trends were both products of market forces that rewarded highly skilled and highly educated workers, but the decline of organized labor didnât itself contribute significantly to inequality. Sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, though, made the case in a 2011 analysis that declining labor power contributed to rising economic inequality not only for union members but for all workers between 1973 and 2007.
The shifts in both economic inequality and union membership over those years were dramatic: Menâs wage inequality increased by 40 percent and women’s by nearly 50 percent. Private-sector union membership dropped from 34 percent for men in 1973 to 8 percent in 2007 and from 16 to 6 percent for women over the same period.
Strong unions can theoretically reduce inequality in multiple ways. They can reduce the gap between more- and less-educated workers by raising wages for the latter. They can increase pay within a heavily unionized industry as even nonunion employers seek to keep pace or avert union organizing efforts. And they can advocate for public policy such as, for instance, a higher minimum wage. Western and Rosenfeld argue that unions have more broadly contributed to a âmoral economy,â promoting ânorms of equity that claimed the fairness of a standard rate for low-pay workers and the injustice of unchecked earnings for managers and owners.â
Analyzing data from the Current Population Survey, Western and Rosenfeld find that declining union membership accounts for a fifth of the 40 percent increase in menâs wage inequality if only individual union membership is taken into account. Looking more broadly at the effect of unions on nonunion pay, the effect goes up, with the decline in union membership explaining a third of the total increase in wage inequality for men. For women, declining individual union membership doesnât increase wage inequality, but the link between union strength and nonunion wages accounts for a fifth of the rise in inequality.
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People who point to education as a factor in growing wage inequality aren’t wrong: Education explains a substantial fraction of the shift. But overall, âthe decline of the US labor movement has added as much to men’s wage inequality as has the relative increase in pay for college graduates.â For women, union decline has had half the effect on wage inequality as education. Education, then, doesn’t replace lower rates of unionization as an explanation for inequality. The two coexist.
The man who introduced mesmerism to the US was a slave-owner from Guadeloupe, where planters were experimenting with âmagnetizingâ their enslaved people.
âThese results,â Western and Rosenfeld write, âsuggest unions are a normative presence that help sustain the labor market as a social institution, in which norms of equity shape the allocation of wages outside the union sector.â Between 1973 and 2007, those norms of equity broke down and, without the âalternative to an unbridled market logicâ unions had provided, economic inequality soared.
Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.
There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.
ăŸăăăăä»ćčŽăăăźè”€çœćžœăăăă䌌ćăă§ăăïŒ ăȘăăăćžœćăèą«ăăšéĄăźć€§ăăăäœèšă«éç«ăĄăŸăăă éĄăźäž»ćŒ”ăćŒ·ăăšèšăăŸăăăććšæăăăăă§ăïŒ Hey Maru, the red cap looks great […]
A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.
The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.
In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.
The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.
Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.
Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.
In 1899, the southern part of Los Angeles County seceded into a new entity, Orange County, which would develop into a bastion of conservatism through the twentieth century. Both the Old and the New Rights found a home in the suburbanized, racially exclusive, white-Midwesterner-settled county.
Richard M. Nixon was born and raised there. Itâs where Mendez v. Westminster, the stateâs historical school desegregation case, was fought in the late 1940s. In 1979, the regional airport was named after actor John Wayne, an action that has since become controversial. In the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections, county residents delivered the stateâs highest percentages of votes for Ronald Reagan.
Historian Amanda Marie Martinez locates Orange County at the âforefront of a wave of conservatismâ that culminated in the presidency of Reagan, a former actor turned politician. The conservative backlash was echoed in the county (and the country) by the great popularity of country music, âby then a symbol of whiteness,â and the ââurban cowboyâ craze,â Martinez writes.
So, Orange County in the late 1970s and early 1980s seems a peculiarly unlikely place to have a hardcore punk rock scene. But it was precisely because of the countyâs âdominating characterâ of conservative, middle-aged, white suburbanites in clean cowboy hats that local white youth rebelled by turning to punk music. As the biggest stronghold of cowboy culture outside of Texas, Orange County was, in the words of one local punk band member quoted by Martinez, just âso redneck.â âSafe and sterileâ beach towns, as another punk put it, like Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach, and Long Beach, became spawning grounds for rebellious noise.
On the 85th anniversary of the first xerographic print, a collection of punk flyers from Cornell University provides an object lesson on (anti-)art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
The countyâs leading punk venue, the Cuckooâs Nest, was situated right across a parking lot from a major country music venue, Zubieâs, in the city of Costa Mesa. The twain did not meet well.
âTwo uniquely suburban and Southern California sounds collided,â writes Martinez about the resulting violent clashes, âat a significant point of transition in American policies and cultureâat heart, it revealed a conflict over the merits of suburban life.â
Punk originated in New York and the UK in the mid-1970s with the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and the Clash. It arrived in Los Angeles around 1977, sparking bands like X and the Germs as the music, both local and otherwise, spread out to the âburbs via KROQ. (Penelope Spheerisâs 1981 Decline of Western Civilization, available on various streaming services, is a vivid documentary of the regional scene.) When the Hollywood-centered punk scene âfizzledâ out in 1979, Orange County bands âlike Black Flag, the Adolescents, and Social Distortion coalesced with a harsh sound and fashion, accompanied by the rise of slam dancing at local shows.â
Unlike explicitly working-class British punk, OC punk âlacked a cohesive political agenda,â Martinez notes, but it sure had enemies: âRonald Reagan, local cops, ârednecks,â jocks, and suburban cowboys.â
As she writes, the punk musicians of Orange County
intended to shock local orderliness with loud and angry sounds, nontraditional hair colors, and intentionally distressed clothing. Not only did such fashion choices reject local politics of respectability, but they also defied conservative, heteronormative gender expectations.
Social Distortion, formed in 1978 in Fullerton, articulated something of a manifesto: âI just wanna give you the creeps.â They were successful.
âBeing punk came with serious risks to personal safety,â writes Martinez. The violence began âwith attacks on punks, though violence also existed among punks themselves.â After police âinexplicably beat and arrested several punks at a show in Los Angelesâ on St. Patrickâs Day, 1979, there was a regional punk scare as fears of violence by punks (not the instigating police) spread. Huntington Beach police started labeling punk bands as âgangs.â
The Cuckooâs Nest/Zubieâs parking lot in Costa Mesa became ground zero for clashes between punks and cowboys. The city council responded by shutting the Nest down, although the state Supreme Court overturned that ordinance. Costa Mesa finally succeed in closing the Nest at the end of 1981 because the club didnât have, and couldnât get, a dance permit.
âIn Costa Mesa, joint efforts by country music fans, local police, and city leaders to quash the punk rock scene foreshadowed a broader cultural clash within popular music,â writes Martinez, noting the subsequent rise of music censorship organizations like Parents Music Resource Center, formed in 1985. The resulting reactionary war on culture turned out to be much bigger than antagonism against punk.
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Ironically, the end of the Cuckooâs Nest saw the beginning of the mainstream success for OC punk, with the rise of a local label and recognition outside Southern California. Social Distortion becoming the first OC band to sign with a major label. (Speaking of irony, hereâs their cover of a Johnny Cash classic.)
What some have called the âOrange Curtainâ between Orange and Los Angeles Counties isnât what it used to be. All seven of the Congressional seats in Orange County went Democratic for the first time during the midterm elections of 2018. Ronald Reagan, buried in Ventura County, might be spinning in his graveâif not moshing in the pit.
Title: Even if I canât fly, I can still walk Universe: AKB48 Prompt:Power Rangers Dino Fury: S28E03 - Lost Signal Character(s): Kashiwagi Yuki/Mukaichi Mion Rating: U Warnings: N/A Summary: Again, she caught sight of her reflection, the peak of her baseball cap, the N interwoven with the Y. If she were to write fanfiction about Mion, where would she start? Length: 1094 words Author's Notes: I sort of made Yukirin a dork. More of a dork, I mean. Many thanks to Misa-chan for translation of the lyrics to Tsubasa wa Iranai. also: external link.
ä»ćčŽă蔀çœćžœćăèŻăă䌌ćăăȘăŸăăăăăăĄăăăăŻăȘăżăăïŒ That red cap suits Maru very well this year too. Of course, it suited Hana& […]
Did you know that you can "bee" a helpful hobbit and help the bees? Pollinators get thirsty just like we do, but it is often risky for them to drink from large bodies of water. Hobbits know a thing or two about the dangers of the "big" world, so why not lend a helping hand by making a safe place for them to rest and hydrate? Bee baths are simple to make and so rewarding once they (finally) start bee-ing used! (Okay, I'll stop with the puns now!)
This effort is not entirely altruistic. Without pollinators, our food security collapses, and that is a thought that should terrify everyone, not just hobbits! So click on the video below to join Kili as she shows you how easy it is to make an insect-friendly watering hole.
https://youtu.be/guk9kEijguw
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In both regions, the authors write, colonial powers provided liquor to Indigenous groups as part of the fur trade. The SĂĄmi had been selling the hides of beaver, reindeer, fox, and other animals to traders for centuries, and by the 1590s one of the products they received in return was Swedish and Finnish liquor. Around that same time, English merchants began offering Caribbean rum to the Shawnee and other Native groups as part of the trade in deerskins and beaver pelts.
Both Indigenous groups adopted alcohol for social and ritual purposes, drinking with visitors and at celebrations and ceremonies.
The SĂĄmi and Shawnee often viewed their relationship with the outside powers differently from how the colonizers saw things. For example, the British metaphorically described the king as the father of North American societies, which they viewed as vassal states, receiving gifts of liquor as part of a relationship in which they owed him loyalty and tribute. The Shawnee turned this around, demanding generous treatment by symbolically identifying rum as the milk of the royal parent. In 1795, two Shawnee leaders argued that the kingâs âbreastsâ should be âfull of milkâ for their people.
Of course, alcohol is often a controversial thing. Some Swedish leaders soon began arguing for the regulation of SĂĄmisâ drinking as part of a larger kingdom-wide debate over the moral and economic dangers of excessive alcohol use. Some SĂĄmi responded by insisting that alcohol was a necessary medicine and crossing the border to Norway, which had less regulation, to obtain it.
The extermination campaigns against the Yuki people, sparked by the California Gold Rush and statehood, werenât termed genocide until the mid 1970s.
In contrast, it was Shawnee leaders who first proposed regulation of alcohol in their communities, viewing it as contributing to violence and leaving people vulnerable to being cheated by European trading partners.
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Some British colonial leaders objected to curbing alcohol sales, arguing that they were crucial to the fur trade and to keeping Native people dependent on the British Empire, since they didnât have much need for a continued supply of other European products. Even when colonial authorities passed laws against selling alcohol to Native Americans, they often claimed they were impossible to enforce. The authors note that this reflected a specific view of âIndian countryââthat it was the sovereign possession of Britain; British subjects there didnât fall under the control of Indigenous law, yet British law also couldnât control their actions.
Ultimately, the colonizersâ different approaches reflected a deeper difference: While Sweden wanted to incorporate the SĂĄmi as Christianized, taxpaying citizens, the Britishâand later Anglo-Americansâtried to keep the Shawnee and other Native Americans at a distance.
The first Monday in September is celebrated as Labor Day in the United States. A day for honoring workers was first proposed by union leaders in the nineteenth century, and by the late 1880s, several states had adopted the holiday. Following the Pullman railroad strike in Illinois, it became a federal holiday in 1894, signed into law by President Grover Cleveland.
To mark the occasion, weâve collected our favorite JSTOR Daily stories on workersâ rights, labor unions, and related issues. All the articles below include free links to the supporting academic research.
âExcept as punishment for a crime,â reads the constitutional exception to abolition. In prison plantations across the United States, slavery thrives.
A violent confrontation between the IWW and the American Legion put organized labor on trial, but a hostile federal government didnât stop the IWW from growing.
The COVID-19 pandemic put food workers in danger of contracting infections, with few, if any, consequences for the industries' failures to protect them.
The man who introduced mesmerism to the US was a slave-owner from Guadeloupe, where planters were experimenting with âmagnetizingâ their enslaved people.
Animation workers took to the streets, carrying signs with bleakly humorous slogans. One read: âI make millions laugh but the real joke is our salaries.â
To mark the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, activist Crystal Eastman described the path to full freedom for American women.
In 1963, more than thirty Mexican guest workers died in a terrible accident in California. The fallout helped turn farmworkersâ rights into a national cause.
The peach industry represented a new, scientifically driven economy for Georgia, but it also depended on the rhythms and racial stereotypes of cotton farming.
Current attempts to correct historical discrimination by local and regional offices of the USDA have been met with charges of "reverse discrimination."
Abraham Lincoln was no Marxist, but his ideas about the relationship of labor and capital mirrored Marxâs in some waysâalbeit with a rural American flavor.
Vacations in the Soviet Union were hardly idylls spent with oneâs dearest. Everything about themâfrom whom you traveled with to what you ateâwas state determined.
Ice harvesters once made a living from frozen lakes and ponds, and the international ice industry was a booming business. Then refrigeration came along.
Resisting Western conceptualizations of time and productivity, the Lakota peoples have maintained a task-oriented economy based on kinship and relationships.
In fascist Italy, childbirth, breastfeeding and motherhood were given a hybrid structure of industrial management and eugenicist biological essentialism.
In 1909, Kathlyn Oliver called for the creation of a servants' trade union that was âas important to the community as the worker[s] in any other sphere."
The UKâs National Union of Women Teachers went from splinter group to union in its own right, winning on equal payâas The Woman Teacher shows first-hand.
Few fruits carry as many contradictions as the Punica granatum, better known as the pomegranate. Itâs played the role of culprit, imprisoning a beloved goddess; an emblem of lovers and the underworld; a vessel for divine mystery; and a cure.
This versatility becomes even more interesting in light of humoral theory, which explains illness as an imbalance of hot, cold, wet, or dry qualities in the body, treated through plants of the opposite nature. However, across herbals throughout history, the pomegranate was used in seemingly contradictory ways. Dioscorides (40â90 CE), in his De Materia Medica, marked the sweet pomegranateâs ability to produce heat around the stomach and warned against using it to treat a fever, a belief which continued into the early modern period. On the other hand, the sixteenth-century herbalist, Rembert Dodoens, lauded the cooling effects of its juice on the stomach.
A pomegranate resembling the human jaw, a jaw-bone, and teeth. Colored ink drawing, c. 1923, after G. B. Della Porta.
On the island of Cyprus stands tall a pomegranate tree, holy and unique. In Deipnosophistae, Athenaeus records a dialogue on the pomegranate, noting that âVenus [Greek: Aphrodite] did herself plant this the parent tree on Cyprus.â Because it was the only tree that the goddess cared to plant, the pomegranate became closely linked to beauty and love, which she represents.
In the Homeric âHymn to Demeter,â written in about the seventh century BCE, Hades kidnaps Persephone with Zeusâs permission (or at his behest) and flees with her to the underworld. Demeter, Persephoneâs mother and the goddess of agriculture, is consequently struck by a deep grief and leaves the fields barren, making that year a âmost terrible one for mortals, all over the Earth.â Zeus decides to intervene and let Persephone return to her mother on the condition that she hadnât eaten anything from the underworld. Hermes is sent to inform Hades and Persephone of this decision. As he hears that Persephone would be allowed back, Hades gives her the seeds of a pomegranate, and, in tasting the honey-sweet fruit, Persephone unknowingly binds herself to him as his wife in the underworld.
The seeds seal Persephoneâs fate as one who must spend part of every year with Hades among the dead. As she describes this damning moment to Demeter, Persephone says that Hades âput into my hand the berry of the pomegranate, that honey-sweet food, and he compelled me by biÄ [force] to eat of it.â In this telling, the ruby-red seeds become synonymous with imprisonment. Despite this, itâs difficult to separate the fruit from its previous symbolic associations with love and marriage through Aphrodite and Hera.
What does a violent, ancient Greek myth reveal about our modern addiction to technology and the enduring power of stories?
A close reading of the account reveals that the seeds of the pomegranate were âstealthilyâ given to Persephone but not forced on her. When paired with the enticing epithet âhoney-sweet,â one must reconsider Persephoneâs agency and perhaps regard the fruit not only as imprisonment but also as temptation. Analyzing the word choice around Hades in the broader context of the Homeric tradition, John L. Myres, in âPersephone and the Pomegranate,â suggests that Hades might have used the pomegranate as a love charm, drawing Persephone to himself. When Persephone partakes of the fruit, she begins to be attracted to her husband and feel love for him. In the layered interpretation of such myths, the fruit encapsulates love and beauty through enticement, the sanctity of marriage through consecration, and the idea of imprisonment, manipulation, and the underworld.
The Pomegranate in the Abrahamic Tradition
When the fruit appears in the Abrahamic tradition, it remains in conversation with its ancient pagan connotations. In the Song of Songs (sometimes referred to as the Song of Solomon or the Canticle of Canticles), a poem in the Hebrew Bible about two lovers, the fruit remains connected to beauty, love, and enticement.
The Christ Child Holding a Pomegranate, 16th century
âYour temples behind your veil are like the halves of a pomegranate,â reads Song of Songs 4:3. Significantly, the lovers question whether pomegranate trees are in bloom as they talk of their love. Here, the maturing of the fruit implicitly symbolizes the possibility of their love being realized, suggesting marriage or a loss of chastity and recalling the function of the fruit in Persephoneâs story. However, to better understand the fruitâs role in this story, one must remain open to other conversations and how their meanings imbue the fruit.
Asaph Goor suggests that the pomegranate is unique, because unlike other biblical plants, its main role is an aesthetic one. However, its aesthetics go beyond simple beauty; its use in religious imagery throughout the Bible suggests the presence of a resonant symbolic association related to its form. For instance, the fruitâs holiness is signaled in the Pentateuch. It appears in Exodus 28:33â35, which calls for the ornamentation of an ephod (a priestâs robe) with pomegranates stitched in blue, purple, and scarlet along the garment’s hem. The pomegranate appears again in the decorations of the bronze capitals in 1 Kings 7:17â21.
Moses de LeĂłn, in his thirteenth-century cabalistic text Sefer Ha-Rimmon (The Book of the Pomegranate), characterizes the pomegranate as a sign of the Shekhinah, or the presence of God. The pomegranate contains all the commandments of God in its seeds; the divine inhabits it. In this realization of sanctity and wisdom, de LeĂłn establishes a link to the Song of Songs and suggests that even those who are empty are filled with the commandments, like the pomegranate. This connection between the fruit and inherent holiness adds new meaning to the Song of Songs, where the love between two people can unknowingly be a divine revelation.
The Pomegranate in Art
The pomegranate has appeared in art across millennia, writes Hope Johnston. In sixteenth-century England, it ornamented royal charters, illuminated manuscripts, and book bindings. Its inclusion in the badge of Catherine of Aragon (1485â1536) referred âspecifically to her upbringing in Spain,â notes Johnston, where the granada (pomegranate) was seen as an emblem of the victory of âCatholic monarchsâ over the Moors. Even though she became queen of England when she married Henry VIII, Catherine retained the pomegranate as her personal emblem, marking her as a Spanish princess in perpetuity.
Madonna of the Pomegranate by Sandro Botticelli, 1487 via Wikimedia Commons
When the fruit shows up in art of the Italian Renaissance in the same period, it proves again to be a multi-dimensional symbol. This is the case one encounters in Sandro Botticelliâs Madonna della Melagrana (Madonna of the Pomegranate), which depicts a recurring motif in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian art. At the center of the tondo, the Virgin Mary holds both a pomegranate and an infant Jesus Christ. The title that has become attached to the painting over time curiously characterizes the Virgin Mary by the fruit, perhaps in recognition of her chastity, especially when considered in the context of Persephoneâs myth. Yet, the fruit carries a broader meaning as well, as the Christ child also intimately interacts with it, grasping and contemplating it.
Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate attributed to Lorenzo di Credi, 1475â1480 via Wikimedia Commons
To unpack this symbolism William Suida analyses the Dreyfus Madonna, a painting sometimes attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sometimes to Lorenzo de Credi. Though the figures are disposed differently than in Botticelliâs painting, the motif is similar, showing Mary holding an open pomegranate in one hand while propping up the baby Jesus with the other. Here, however, the child offers a kernel to his mother. Suida suggests that Christâs interest in the seeds was rooted in Pope Gregory Iâs invocation of a simile in which a pomegranate is used to express the unity of the Church. On the other hand, James Hall, tracking the history of the pomegranate as a symbol, proposes that it represents the Resurrection of Christ. This latter interpretation recalls Persephoneâs yearly return from the underworld or another myth in which a pomegranate sprouts from drops of Dionysusâs blood after his death, heralding his resurrection.
Thus, Botticelliâs Jesus, who stares at the fruit in deep thought, perhaps prophesies his own death and return, as opposed to the child in the Dreyfus Madonna, who proudly shows the unity of his church to his mother. Yet as she faces the kernels and feels the rind of the fruitâin both paintingsâthe Virgin Mary is forced to contemplate her motherhood and her chastity.
The pomegranate, used heavily in early medicine and at times for opposing aims, can resolve this contradiction by having a balancing quality. To consider the plantâs symbolic associations as separate or opposing is misleading, however; through the plant, different myths, religions, and art traditions can coexist, making the pomegranate one of the most complex cultural symbols one can study.
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