Utah has offered grants to art and cultural nonprofits since the 1970s, however the amount allocated for these grants hasn't significantly grown in 30+ years. This is about to change and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the arts and humanities.
The legislature holds the power of the purse and are the stewards of taxpayer dollars. This year they are considering a $6million ongoing increase to the grants budget of Utah Division of Arts & Museums. Ongoing means that the $6million amount is in the grants budget every year.
Utah's humanities and arts need YOU to contact certain legislators and express support for these grants. The legislature considers appropriations (how their $ is distributed), in three steps. First it is prioritized by one of eight appropriations sub-committees, next executive appropriations decide what to fund and how much money to allocate, and finally the entire legislature votes on the budget in what is called the "bill of bills."
The grants increase will be considered first by members of the Business, Economic Development, and Labor Appropriations Sub-committee (BEDL) and next by the Executive Appropriations Committee (EAC). Here's your assignment:
My staff and I are happy to review your letters before you send. Just email them cyo@utculture.org or kylie@utculture.org and one of us will reply.
To make this homework assignment easy, download a spreadsheet with contact info here; it has tabs for the relevant committees. Be awesome and don't add these emails to your mass email list. :)
UCA members can access legislative intern contact info as well here (this is a members-only benefit and you must be logged in as member to get it). Not a member? Join here! Thank you for strengthening our voice with your membership.
Thank you for being such a strong advocate of the arts and humanities. We at Utah Cultural Alliance appreciate everything you do for us. If you'd like to do even more for the cultural sector, here are a number of bills that positively impact the sector. We invite you to contact your legislators in support. Talking points are also here.
Best wishes,
Crystal
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Crystal Young-Otterstrom
Executive Director // Utah Cultural Alliance
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OCEAN GROVE
RETURNS WITH NEW SINGLE
February 6, 2019 - Ocean Grove are kicking off a new chapter of their musical journey today with the release of "Ask For The Anthem." The track, which was produced by drummer Sam Bassal and co-written with studio member Running Touch, premiered on triple j radio earlier this week with fans being treated to a quirky and captivating visual today. Fans can watch "Ask For The Anthem" HERE.
The video, directed and edited by the band's longtime collaborator Thomas Elliott, features Ocean Grove at their creative best. "We pushed our own limits of experimentation on this track," says Dale. "It is by far the most time and energy we have invested into any one song. Just so you know, this is not a song about being cool and getting the girl. Look closer."
The band has also announced today that Twiggy Hunter is their new bass player with Dale Tanner becoming the full-time frontman of the group.
While the band toured in the US recently with metal core giants August Burns Red, fans in Australia will be lucky to catch the first live performances of "Ask For The Anthem" later this month when they hit the road with Hands Like Houses. A full list of upcoming tour dates can be found at http://www.unfdcentral.com/music/ocean-grove/.
Hailing from Melbourne, Ocean Grove have quickly ascended to the top of Australia's heavy music scene in recent years, with their debut album 'The Rhapsody Tapes' in 2017 debuting at #5 on the ARIA charts and landing triple j feature album prior to its release. The group have toured globally with the likes of Limp Bizkit, Northlane, and Crossfaith, as well as mainstage festival appearances at Splendour In The Grass and Australia's inaugural Download Festival, and show no signs of slowing down in 2019.
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For More Information:
http://www.unfdcentral.com/music/ocean-grove/
Follow Ocean Grove
https://www.facebook.com/oceangrovemelbourne/
https://twitter.com/oceangrovemelb
https://www.instagram.com/oceangrovemelb/
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THE ULTIMATE HUMAN IDIOCY
By James A. Haught
644 words
What’s the ultimate form of human idiocy? I nominate religious suicide bombings, in which fanatics kill themselves to murder “infidels” of rival faiths or no faith.
What type of insanity makes some fervent believers think they’re serving God by slaughtering defenseless strangers who did them no harm? Are these killers totally devoid of human compassion? Can they look at surrounding people and families with no reaction except a desire to murder them? Do they really think that God wants massacres, and will reward them with virgins in paradise after they sacrifice their own lives?
It’s lunacy – yet it’s a daily reality of modern times, perhaps the single worst source of bloodshed since the Cold War ended. It’s so absurd that it couldn’t possibly happen – but it happens almost every day.
On Jan. 27, two explosions at a Catholic cathedral in the southern Philippines killed 27 worshipers at Sunday mass and wounded more than 100 others. The Islamic State terror group claimed credit, saying “two knights of martyrdom” gave their lives to attack a “crusader temple.” President Rodrigo Duterte announced that the attack was committed by husband-and-wife suicide volunteers. The wife, disguised by wearing a large cross, detonated her concealed explosive vest among worshiping Catholics, then the husband triggered a second blast outside the cathedral door as survivors fled, he said.
(Some military sources gave conflicting reports, saying the killers used remote devices to explode planted bombs. Confusion is common after such carnage.)
Actually, the Philippine attack was smallish, compared to many that occur. The worst, of course, was the historic atrocity of Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 al-Qaida suicide volunteers hijacked airliners and crashed them into U.S. landmarks, killing 3,000 Americans. It was the most horrifying day in the memory of most U.S. residents.
The 9/11 holy killers left behind a testament they had shared among themselves, saying they were doing it for God: "Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty," they assured each other, "and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out, 'Come hither, friend of God.' They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing."
It's sickening to realize that 3,000 unsuspecting Americans died because of this adolescent male fantasy.
A few years ago, researchers counted 17,000 Muslim terror attacks since the 9/11 horror, with a total body count beyond 60,000 victims. The phenomenon averaged five murder missions per day, so many that news media ignore smaller assaults.
The Islamic “cult of death” has diminished to about one suicide attack per day now. The Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv gives these figures: 452 massacres in 2015 – 469 in 2016 –348 in 2017 –293 in 2018. Last year, 2,845 victims were killed and 5,160 wounded. Many attacks involved two or more “martyrs.” Surprisingly, the number of women suicide volunteers has grown until they now constitute about one-fifth of the killers.
For years, I wished that the available supply of suicide volunteers would kill themselves off and the phenomenon would cease. But there seems to be an endless parade of new zealots eager to become “martyrs.”
Various experts attribute the “cult of death” to political, sociological, economic or psychological causes. Maybe they’re partly correct – but the glaring fact remains that religion underlies the ghastly, incomprehensible, maddening mess.
Pundit Anthony Lewis wrote: "There is no way to reason with people who think they will go directly to heaven if they kill Americans." Columnist William Safire said the volunteers do it because their "normal survival instinct is replaced with a pseudo-religious fantasy of a killer's self-martyrdom leading to an eternity in paradise surrounded by adoring virgins." Columnist David Brooks wrote that the bizarre phenomenon is "about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness."
Normal people cannot understand why some fanatics kill themselves to commit atrocities. But, understandable or not, it's a deadly daily reality.
–end–
James Haught, syndicated by PeaceVoice,is editor emeritus of West Virginia’s largest newspaper, The Charleston Gazette-Mail.
Understand the disease to cure it
by Tom H. Hastings
1160 words
Two days ago, on February 4, 2019, the bodies of a handsome apparently successful husband and beautiful successful wife—Denise and Kenneth Bartone--were found in New Jersey, a possible murder-suicide. These tragedies are on the increase. Unlike the New Jersey case—a husband likely stabbed his wife and then leapt off a bridge—most of the murder-suicides are gun-related, with another high correlate to opioid addiction, but in the case of the apparent increase in elderly homicide-suicide, it is, according to one analyst, most often a controlling husband shoots his ill wife and then turns the gun on himself.
We might agree that another factor is simple mental health, often eroded into illness by a combination of factors, including various social structural conditions so far beyond our control that a person can snap.
I think this can be the case for all types of murder-suicides, from an old man with a gun seeing no hope for him and his suffering wife, to the megalomaniac who killed more than 900 in Jonestown to somehow take them with him as he faced his own cancer and chose suicide-mass murder instead, to an impoverished Syrian who chooses to take ISIS up on their offer to make a big payout to a family when a member becomes a “self-sacrificing” bomber, a “martyr.” The terrorists operating today do so in a special global environment.
Disclaimer: While I earned a doctorate (in education, specializing in conflict transformation), I’m not a medical doctor. I operate with words and heal with compassionate communication on my best days. I may not “bury my mistakes,” but when I make them I am haunted by them.
With all those caveats, I need to ask you to dig as deeply as you can to peer into the psychological, emotional miasma that envelops the phenomenon of suicide attacks. They are always the acts of indescribably desperate people, even when they are done in war, most honorably directed against combatants, and they are never done by people who believe the world is just or fair. They are always framed on their side as works of altruism, self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Understanding the practice and philosophy of suicide attacks is the baby first step toward mitigating and eventually eliminating these atrocious episodes.
How could a young Japanese pilot decide to load his small plane with a dual synergistic payload of fuel and explosives and launch toward an American warship? Right down the smokestack—an early smart weapon.
Well, it wasn’t in his biological or mental imperative--he didn’t do it before October 1944 and not after July 1945. That’s because in mid-fall, in 1944, the Japanese war machine was losing, was exhausted, was out of fuel, was out of expensive fighter planes, was out of highly trained pilots, was out of sophisticated ordnance, and was in the Hail Mary phase of utter last hope desperation. Indeed, since the US had cracked all Japanese codes and knew that, by December 1944 it could have obtained a conditional surrender, it was only the obdurate fanaticism of a handful of irrational warlords who resorted to the kamikaze attacks.
When US President Truman learned from his intelligence that Japan was informing its diplomats worldwide that “the Japs” were ready to negotiate terms of surrender, he ignored it. Why? Because the Manhattan Project scientists were telling him this new bomb would work, this atomic bomb. So he held out, claiming to his confidantes that the American people deserved an unconditional surrender.
Holding this up to the harsh light of history, we can reasonably conclude that every single American life lost in the Pacific from December 1944 until nine months later, when the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic attacks led to unconditional surrender, was lost in order to serve Truman’s folly of the unconditional surrender. Folly? Yes, because when General McArthur accepted the surrender on the USS Missouri, he allowed the Japanese to keep their figurehead emperor, a condition that only kept the Japanese feeling less that utterly humiliated and a condition that could have been enough to initiate a ceasefire nine months previous.
Do I seem to be taking this personally? Maybe, since my father was in the US Navy in the Philippines at that time. His survival was my good luck, no thanks to Truman, and the deaths of other American servicepeople killed in that period I will lay at his feet of Truman’s memory.
So it was this period of back-against-the-wall existential threat that produced the kamikaze and the related shinpu, the little submarines with analogous capacities and intentions. They were loaded up with explosives and enough fuel for that one-way trip to extinguish an American warship, as many combat troops as possible, and, by the way, the lone Japanese submariner.
Some 3,800 of these suicide troops were used up to death, and left more than 7,000 American troops dead. Even so, only 19 percent of the attacks were successful, probably primarily because they were a part of actual battle, not the later sort of suicide attacks on civilians.
Of course, like the new wave of post 9-11-01 Muslim suicide bombers, a fake culture of honor and reward needed to be created in order to convince the gullible and the desperat to undertake these odious and hopeless attacks. The poetic glorification of the young Japanese pilots seems to have given them the psychological shielding so necessary to such a perverted, unnatural act as intentionally crashing into an object 100 percent certain to kill you. I mean, the very term kamikaze means “divine wind,” revealing such sacralization.
Of course we see that with the Islamic virgins beckoning from paradise. Pure hooey for the willfully, blissfully, fatally ignorant and a justification to next of kin. In the name of religion, they commit blasphemy.
Are we so very sure nothing will trigger us to do these sorts of low, evil acts? War seems to bring it out, leading hopeless charges, parachuting in behind the lines, and generally acting in profoundly unnatural ways. In Vietnam, children strapped with explosive belts would wander up to groups of American GIs detonate, little sappers.
The Vietnamese did not do such things before we got there and haven’t done such things since. Could it be that when the mightiest army invades and occupies, the littlest ones, the most vulnerable, become literally cannon fodder? While the Japanese emphatically started World War II in the Pacific, they were ultimately up against the mightiest military in human history and reduced themselves to valorizing suicide attacks.
Some days, it feels like a portion of the Muslim world believes that is right where they are. Can we fix this? Can we in fact withdraw from their lands and lives and hope for the peace of the generations from them? Murder-suicide should prompt us to examine the conditions, here and abroad, that tend to drive up the rates of such travesties and engage in public discourse about solutions that can help.
—30—
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is PeaceVoice Director and on occasion an expert witness for the defense in court.
