Ruined Afternoon Swim

sigh.

A Trans Woman and Her Friends Were Violently Assaulted at an Austin Swimming Hole

The incident is being investigated by police as a possible hate crime.

A transgender woman and several friends were harassed and assaulted in Austin, Texas last weekend, and one bystander who stepped in to defend them was hospitalized, in an incident police are investigating as a possible hate crime.

On July 26, the trans woman — who has requested anonymity during the ongoing investigation — and several friends visited Barton Springs, a public swimming hole in Austin’s Zilker Park, as Chron reported Wednesday. During their visit, three men they didn’t know flirted heavily with members of the group, the woman told Chron, but soon began harassing and pointing at her, making remarks about not “support[ing] that lifestyle.”

The three men then reportedly began shoving members of the group and poking the women “near their breasts,” according to a Reddit user who posted about the incident on Monday, claiming to be a friend of one of the victims. At that point, a bystander — identified as Jarod — intervened, and was attacked himself.

“The three men then proceeded to get violent and aggressive, yelling at us and getting in our faces until one of them decided to start swinging and punched Jarod in the jaw, knocking him unconscious,” the anonymous trans woman told Chron. “I quickly ran over to him in an attempt to help Jarod out but was then punched in the face by the assailant in the orange shorts.” The men then shoved another of the women to the ground and left the scene soon after, according to video footage of the incident posted to social media.

The Austin Police Department (APD) released a statement on Tuesday stating that the alleged assault was under investigation and could be declared a hate crime by the city’s Hate Crime Review Committee. “APD remains unwavering in its commitment to fostering a secure and inclusive Austin community,” the department stated. (Community leaders called for APD to be investigated for excessive force in March this year, after videos circulated online that appeared to show officers throwing a trans woman onto the ground during an arrest.)

Austin-area drag performer Brigitte Bandit posted about the assault on Instagram Monday, asking locals for help identifying the attackers. In a follow-up post the next day, Bandit stated that the men had been identified and the information had been shared privately with the victims. “I will not be posting their information without consent of the people involved in the attack,” Bandit wrote, adding, “[l]et’s let them decide which routes they decide [are] best.” (snip-MORE. Also embedded tweet. Then, if you click through, you’ll see they’ve gotten the suspects ID’d.)

I get tired

Hello All;

Scottie asked me a bit ago why I’ve not been posting much. Well, I don’t have a lot of time, and – well, maybe I don’t have a lot of time for some of the crap I find myself having to make time to accomodate.

A ‘for example’ is that I’ve grown weary of having to justify my very existence to people who feel so self-righteous declaring my very life an abomination. That a man and woman would come together in love to bring about a new life is fantastic and magical, but it isn’t the conception of the new life that is amazing to me – it is the true love.

Then I hear people, perhaps those who seek popularity through any means available, say that marriage is only for people who can conceive, and if the individuals are men then they can’t conceive and therefore their love and marriage are invalid. I can only assume that they conflate the ability to make a baby with love, though many rape victims can tell us that isn’t accurate. I would speculate that such people don’t understand love. Perhaps the reason such people can’t understand the difference between an abomination and love is because they go into a room of strangers they call brothers and sisters and fear that who and what they find most attractive and fulfilling will be ridiculed by others.

Perhaps dressed in their “Sunday Best” they focus overmuch on the show they are putting on for each-other. Perhaps they are too fond of the judgement of others and too afraid of the sincerity and honesty of themselves.

Truly, I am finding myself tired of having to demonstrate that life is not so simple as the script they have written only for others to follow.

I am truly tired of having to demonstrate understanding to ignorance, patience to racism, peace to violence and love to spite. I’m tired of having to express myself in private for fear of offending sensibilities that are insensible and hurting the morality of those whose morality is first tested by convenience. I’m tired of fearing the “love” of the “Christ-like”.

Hugs.

ICE is thugs targetting brown people who are US citizens, detaining them, taking their ID and not returning it, assaulting them, then making up charges against them.

https://www.tumblr.com/reagan-was-a-horrible-president/790723408167092224

David Bruce, Laurie McBride, 13,000 PATCO Members, & More, In Peace & Justice History for 8/3

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august3

Clay Jones

Stolen Women by Clay Jones

Trump thinks women are property…his property Read on Substack

If you are aware of a pedophile, and you enable that pedophile, then you’re as bad as a pedophile. So, what did Trump know? What did Trump do?

There is a video of Trump seeing a young girl going up an escalator in 1992, maybe she was a preteen, and he comments that he’ll be “dating” her someday. It’s creepy. It’s creepy like when he said he’d be dating his own daughter if they weren’t related. On another occasion, he said what he and Ivanka have in common is their love for sex. I just shivered.

I know relationships are different, but what father wants to talk to his daughter about his or her sex life? Ew. The most I ever talked to my mother about sex was shortly after my separation from my wife, and she said she hoped I wouldn’t fall in love with the first woman I slept with. I told my mother, “I haven’t fallen in love with either of them.” And she said, “TWO? TWO? I’m so ashamed and proud of you.” Unfortunately, my father wouldn’t shut up about his past exploits.

Trump is a creeper. When he endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate, he already knew about allegations of pedophilia against Moore. Trump’s defense was, “He said he didn’t do it.” That’s the same defense he used for Putin’s election meddling.

Whenever it’s a he-said-she-said situation, Trump will always go with he-said. (snip-MORE)

It’s August 1st! Peace&Justice History For Friday, 8/1

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august1

And In Not What It Initially Appears To Be,

Charlotte Clymer with another interesting story about rightwingers.

Why Sydney Sweeney Needs to Be Canceled by Charlotte Clymer

Her career needs to end. Read on Substack

Actually, this has nothing to do with Sydney Sweeney.

I’ve seen some of her movies and shows. She’s a good actor. She seems nice. I have no real opinion of her beyond that.

The rightwing media ecosystem is currently obsessed with Ms. Sweeney, and per their usual outrage machine schtick, they’ve made her their latest vehicle for claiming Democrats are out-of-touch with America.

This week, Fox News and various other conservative outlets have spent considerable time claiming that Democrats are furious over a jeans advertisement featuring Ms. Sweeney—the details of their supposed outrage are too absurd to get into here, and I’d rather not insult your intelligence by pretending you should care.

But I figure tens of millions of Trump supporters are feverishly googling “Democrats” and “Sydney Sweeney” for that sweet, sweet hit of outrage to feed their addiction, and it occurred to me that a provocative headline could be a great opportunity to get them here and offer a read-out on what Democrats and progressives are currently, actually, passionately discussing.

I’m in approximately ~5,000 group chats with fellow Democrats (heavy sigh), give or take a few, and Sydney Sweeney has not come up once in any of them. Not a single one.

Here’s what we’ve really been talking about this week:

We’re pretty horrified by the ongoing horror in Gaza. Children there are starving-to-death, and the Israeli military has brutally slaughtered more than 1,000 innocent civilians attempting to get food assistance, almost all of which is being blocked by Netanyahu’s government.

All of our allies—including the United Kingdom—have been urgently pleading with Netanyahu to end the blockade and feed starving people in Gaza and please, oh please, stop shooting at them.

We’re wondering why Republican Christians in Congress would disregard Christ’s clear teachings on this matter. Pope Leo XIV condemned “the very grave humanitarian situation in Gaza, where the civilian population is crushed by hunger and remains exposed to violence and death.”

But hey, what the hell does he know?

We’re disgusted by the cover-up over the Epstein files, and it’s fairly obvious to everyone that Donald Trump is desperately attempting to conceal and distract from his involvement in a massive sex trafficking operation that targeted children.

Remember when the Republican Party pretended to care about pedophiles and sex trafficking and the so-called “Deep State” and Trump pandered to them for votes by claiming he would released the Epstein files and then he didn’t?

We’ve been talking all month about the fall-out of Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill and the fact that upwards of 17 million Americans will lose their health care coverage and millions will lose food assistance and a ton of rural hospitals are about to close down.

We have no idea how we’re going to help all these people when that legislation is fully implemented, and in discussing how to get medical treatment for the sick and food for the hungry, we don’t really care who these vulnerable folks voted for last year.

We’re considerably worried about the country’s total unpreparedness for natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis and flooding and earthquakes because Donald Trump and the Republican Party have gutted the NOAA and the National Weather Service and FEMA.

We imagine a lot of people are going to needlessly die in flood waters and devastating cyclones because of Republican incompetence and cruelty, and again: we have no idea how we’re going to help these folks when that happens.

We’ve been talking a lot about the accelerating erosion of constitutional protections and the Trump administration openly forcing colleges and corporations to pay him a bribe in order to avoid being targeted by his dictatorial madness.

We’ve been talking about Trump’s efforts to silence Stephen Colbert and his other most prominent critics in pop culture, except, of course, when he’s too chickenshit to take on the creators of South Park.

We wonder how the Constitution will survive this era. We wonder how the courts can resist threats of violence. We wonder how democracy can endure when even the most concerned Republicans, like Sen. Lisa Murkowski, have largely given up on their oaths.

Sydney Sweeney and which endorsements she’s landed and what ads she’s appearing in and what products she’s hawking to the public — none of that matters to us.

If anything, in regards to Ms. Sweeney, we’re embarrassed for the shamelessness of Republicans who are attempting to exploit her as a distraction from the death and destruction they’re causing and enabling.

Maybe if we got a hungry or sick child in a rural part of the country to record a video talking shit about Ms. Sweeney, that would be enough for Trump and Republicans to pay attention to their suffering. (snip)

Goon Is As Good A Term As Any

Goons of Justice by Clay Jones

Trump puts another loyalist goon on a federal bench for life Read on Substack

Oops! I forgot to put satire in this cartoon.

I do that sometimes. I’ll draw a cartoon that illustrates exactly what happened. What happened here is that Republicans confirmed Emil Bove as a federal appeals court judge, which is a lifetime appointment.

They confirmed Bove despite him serving as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the hush money case that found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts. The appeals court is one level below the Supreme Court. A Trump loyalist will be on the court for life. He has more loyalty to Trump than to the Constitution.

He will serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Bove will be as crooked as the judge in Florida who dismissed his stolen document case.

After Trump reentered the White House in January, he quickly made Bove a top official in the Justice Department where he worked on the dismissal of the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and the investigation of everyone who investigated department officials who were involved in the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Bove has accused FBI officials of “insubordination” for refusing to hand over the names of agents who investigated the attack and ordered the firing of a group of prosecutors involved in those Jan. 6 criminal cases.

It was bad enough to put a supporter of Trump’s white nationalist terrorists in the DOJ, but now he’s going to be a federal judge.

The whistleblowers provided evidence to the Senate that Bove lied during his testimony, and that he suggested the department should ignore court orders when it came to Trump’s illegal deportations. There’s an audio recording of Bove making statements about the Adams case that contradict his testimony, saying that whoever signed onto the dismissal would be rewarded.

Chuck Schumer said, “It’s unfathomable that just over four years after the insurrection at the Capitol, when rioters smashed windows, ransacked offices, desecrated this chamber, Senate Republicans are willingly putting someone on the bench who shielded these rioters from facing justice, who said their prosecution was a grave national injustice.”

Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were the only two Republicans to vote against Bove’s confirmation, with Collins saying, “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”

Collins isn’t always right, like the time she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, believing him when he said he wouldn’t overturn Roe. (snip-MORE, and it’s good)

(Note from A: I’m adding this photo, because Emil Bove reminds me of the photo)

A Positive Way To Take Back Identity:

Black Indigenous Chefs Are Reclaiming Identity Through Food — One Dish at a Time by Michael Harriot

Black Native food workers are passing down culinary traditions, restoring lost connections and feeding body and soul. Read on Substack

Crystal Wahpepah (Photo courtesy of Crystal Wahpepah)

The Indigenous food movement has seen a renaissance in North America, with restaurant openings, cookbook releases and community initiatives that announce the presence, expertise and heritage of Indigenous food workers. Amidst this moment, Black Native food workers have seen both the beauty and the harshness of living at the intersection of Blackness and Indigeneity, as the dominant settler colonial culture of the United States often tries to erase or flatten all parts of their identities.

But those attempts at erasure have also provided moments of reflection and insight, and a realization that the mission of Black Indigenous food workers is profoundly spiritual and political healing work. For Stephan Oak, a Black and Lakota forager and woodworker who lives in Detroit, the threads of connection that Black Indigenous people hold in their family stories that are “steeped in violence, but also steeped in love and resistance” are also guides that allow them to connect in the past, present, and future — a shared cosmology.

Crystal Wahpepah, who is Black and Kickapoo and the executive chef and owner of Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, Calif., says that often, through representation and education, Black Native people in the food industry come to a deeper peace about their identity and heritage. At Wahpepah’s Kitchen, over cornbread dishes from the Ute and Kickapoo people, wild rice from the Great Lakes tribes and bison from the Great Plains, people often find themselves.

“I meet so many people who are Black and Native but never felt connected to their Indigenous side, and when they meet me, they start talking about it, about culture, about those things that have been lost,” she says. Wahpepah is also opening a new restaurant, A Feather and a Fork, which is also the title of her upcoming cookbook.

That loss is something felt in both Black and Indigenous communities and can often feel pronounced because of family separation through residential schools, land expulsions, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trade that broke up Black families across the country. “Because of colonial violence, there’s a fractured relationship to home or your connection to your ancestors,” says Oak. “The intent of the colonizer is to stop you from looking … to accept the identity of the conditions they’ve placed on you.”

Food is one of the ways Oak and others are reclaiming autonomy over their identities, especially as governments use food as a weapon by depriving communities of affordable, culturally relevant food. Oak points out that even amidst food deserts on reservations and urban Black communities, people find ways to be more self-sufficient and connect back to the land, which helps them reconnect with the essence of who they are. (snip-MORE; lots more but not too long)